Political and ethical philosophy

Ian Welsh is almost always politically on point, and the politics in his post, Rationality Is Not A Way Out Of Group Action Problems like Climate Change and Covid, is a good example. Solutions to problems of public goods just do not emerge from the politics of individualism and individualistic "rationality".

Welsh's position has some precedent. Hume writes that it is "not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger," and Mel Brooks puts the sentiment  mordantly: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." And the first lesson of game theory is the Prisoner's Dilemma, where the "rational" choice leads to the least desirable outcome for everyone.

In theory, we could (maybe) get optimal outcomes by making everything a private good in a pure free market economy, but in the real world, the Arrow-Debreu model fails on the same computation problem that kills the omniscient central planner problem. It's not particularly helpful to declare, however correctly, that everything works perfectly in a perfect world.

But Welsh is mistaken at a fundamental level by arguing that virtue ethics is preferable to utilitarianism and instrumentalism. According to Welsh, our poor reasoning abilities undermine utilitarianism: we cannot act to improve the world if we cannot accurately predict the consequences of our actions.

He's definitely correct that utilitarianism can easily degenerate into justifying apparently horrible actions for the supposed "greater good." (I've been reading a lot of trash superhero/supervillain fiction lately, and the trope of the supervillain perpetrating horrible actions for the greater good" trope is ubiquitous; indeed the "antagonist is just pure evil" trope has entirely ceased to be entertaining.)

Welsh constructs virtue ethics to mean that there are actions that are intrinsically bad, and these bad actions are absolutely unjustifiable, regardless of even the actual outcome, much less the supposed outcome. Moreover, we know these action are intrinsically bad directly without mediation:

We know that being greedy, or selfish, or cowardly, or sadistic are bad. We know that rape is always bad. We know that killing people is bad. We know that beating people is bad.We know that hunger is bad. We know that homelessness is terrible. We know lack of water kills. When the IMF removes food subsidies we KNOW more people will go hungry. When we sell bombs to Israel and Saudi Arabia, we know they’ll be used to murder innocents.

I definitely agree with Welsh: I think that "being greedy, selfish, cowardly, or sadistic are bad;" however, I just don't think my opinion is true. I don't know that they're intrinsically bad; all I know is just that I don't like them.

The problem with utilitarianism, that doing utilitarianism stupidly will fail, is not a problem with utilitarianism per se; stupidity and poor reasoning is a problem with human beings. Literally anything can be done stupidly to bad effect.

If we have to reason out what is virtuous, then virtue ethics is susceptible to the same problem: we can stupidly or fallaciously come up with the wrong virtues. Welsh just handwaves around the problem, supposing that we have some sort of mystical knowledge about what really constitutes virtue. At some level, unvirtuous people don't disagree about virtue; instead, they ignore their intrinsic knowledge of true virtue. But we can just handwave around the problem for utilitarianism: people who do horrible things supposedly for the greater good are just ignoring what they mystically know is the true greater good for the same reason a person might ignore what they know is true virtue.

Welsh speculates without evidence that a fundamental social problem is that the elites have used utilitarianism to rationalize behavior they know is unvirtuous. I don't want to disparage Welsh for speculating, but we could just as easily speculate that our elites have failed because they have a different conception of virtue than Welsh and I both have. The elites might well see themselves as paragons of virtue and the suffering of the common people as not a result of elite's actions but rather a consequence of the common people's lack of virtue.

We can say that rape and murder are across the red line. Fine, but what do we do about it? What do we do about the person who will rape unless they are killed or imprisoned? Are killing or imprisonment (and imprisonment is torture), across the bright line or not? What do we do about millions of people who demand to keep slaves and will die before they free their slaves? Do we force them to release their slaves under threat of death, torture, or impoverishment? Virtue ethics, I think, suffers from the same sort of sophistry as I've long accused Libertarianism of. Immoral actions are only immoral when we don't agree with the end.

I think the latter theory has more support. Corey Robin's The Conservative Mind, Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians, or really anything in the present conservative media. Conservatives and authoritarians fundamentally justify their position by appeal to virtue and only secondarily by an appeal to utilitarianism.

Remember, to many conservatives, the fundamental argument against homosexuality is that homosexuality is just as intrinsically wrong as rape or murder. They know so with exactly the same conviction and sincerity that Welsh claims to know that rape and murder are wrong. The fundamental argument against helping poor people is that they deserve their poverty as a result of their vice, and it is just as much a vice to alleviate poverty as it would be to procure new victims for a rapist. The poor should suffer as much for their poverty as rapists should suffer prison for their crimes.

Utilitarianism, instrumentalism, and pragmatism does not have the same fundamental flaw. Again, I concede that utilitarianism done stupidly will have bad effect, but, again, anything done stupidly can have bad effect, and (absent magical knowledge) virtue ethics can be done just as stupidly. However, I claim that utilitarianism can be done intelligently and that virtue ethics cannot be done intelligently, unless we construct our virtues on utilitarian grounds.

It's not the automation

 Kind of a cute premise by Frisco Uplink.

Step 1, invoke Star Trek, the Next Generation episode, "The Measure of a Man" (S02E09), where Picard argues that Data should be considered sentient, because holding him non-sentient risks creating a permanent underclass of disposable exploitable labor.

Step 2, argue that non-sentient supervisory software a la Uber goes the other direction: the supervisory software allows us to treat gig workers such as Uber drivers as disposable exploitable labor. According to the author, "Gig workers are precarious not only because they lack benefits, but also because the everyday bedrock of their work is determined by a black box algorithm designed to extract maximum profit for a distant corporation. . . . Software perfectly shields the humans profiting from this one-sided equation from confronting the personal toll it takes" on their disposable workers.

The author puts too much weight on the means, and the inversion fails. Indeed, TNG gets it exactly right. The decision to classify some beings as non-sentient is the critical act. Once we have decided that some beings are non-sentient, we'll find some means or another — lords of the manor, colonial administrators, overseers, supervisors, software — to efficiently exploit them. 

The bosses have always shielded themselves from the human consequences of their exploitation, and this alienation long preceded capitalism, although capitalism has refined alienation to its purest state (at least so far).

Love among the mantises

I often reflect upon the word “morality,” the most troublesome and confusing word of all. There is no single or supreme morality; there are many, each defining the mode by which a system of entities optimally interacts. The eminent entomologist Fabre, observing a mantis in the act of devouring its mate, exclaimed: “What an abominable custom!” The ordinary man, during a day’s time, may be obliged to act by the terms of a half dozen different moralities. Some of these acts, appropriate at one moment, may the next moment be considered obscene or opprobrious in terms of another morality. The person who, let us say, expects generosity from a bank, efficient flexibility from a government agency, open-mindedness from a religious institution will be disappointed. In each purview the notions represent immorality. The poor fool might as quickly discover love among the mantises.

-- Jack Vance, The Book of Dreams

Socialism and moral philosophy

Disclaimer: There is no such thing as "socialism". What follows are my own ideas about socialism.

The outrage against children receiving "participation trophies" and related practices such as not keeping score in sportsball, is a common enough trope. But why? I'm no expert in childhood education (I'm in adult education), so why should I or any other non-expert have strong feelings about how teachers teach children? The answer is that people who object to these practices see them as breaking an important moral norm, exactly as if educators were encouraging children to fight or lie. The objection is not to a method but to an outcome, which is a legitimate concern of non-experts. The outcome, the moral norm, is that invidious norms are of considerable importance.

Invidious norms draw distinctions within society. Contrast invidious norms with universal norms, such as the norm against killing. People who violate the universal norm against killing are cut off from ordinary society, either in prison or criminal gangs, or in the insulated and alienated communities of soldiers and police. The distinction is not really between "good" and "bad": people who kill others are not so much "bad" as alien, and people who don't kill others are not really "good", they are just ordinary.

In contrast, invidious norms really do divide people into superior and inferior, without alienating the inferior from society. For example, I consider generosity morally superior to selfishness. I think generous people are morally better than selfish people. But selfish people are still part of society; they are not cut off in the same sense that those who kill are cut off. There's nothing wrong with invidious norms per se, but as with any other element of society, we should think clearly and deeply about them.

Capitalism establishes an invidious norm: the superior should be economically rewarded, and the inferior should be not just not rewarded but economically deprived. This norm, however, is circular: there is no judgment of superior and inferior independent to economic reward: those who are economically rewarded are superior just by virtue of their reward; those who are deprived are inferior just by virtue of their deprivation. Thus, any attempts to reward the deprived is immoral, just as it is immoral to give the gold medal, indeed any medal at all, to the last-place athlete.

Of course, capitalist apologists deny circularity: poor people are inferior not because they are poor; they are poor because they are inferior, i.e. lazy, improvident, and impatient. Rich people are rich because they are superior, i.e. industrious, thrifty, and patient. But ask the apologist how they know that poor people are lazy, and they will answer that if the poor were industrious, they wouldn't be poor. And even if we could independently determine laziness, we cannot be sure that poor people are lazy because they are poor. (See especially recent criticism of the "marshmallow" test.) Just that Donald Trump, for example, is both rich (well, richer than me) and President of the United States is evidence enough that the connection in our capitalist society between merit and reward is completely broken.

A related norm that precedes capitalism is the norm that people do not want to be virtuous; they must be forced to be virtuous. It is the moral duty of the superior to force the inferior to be good. (See Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind and Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians.) It is not the virtue of the superior that makes them superior, it is their power to force the inferior to virtue. Hence we routinely forgive the powerful for their sins, so long as they retain the power to force the powerless to virtue. That no one has the power to force the powerful to be virtuous is a regrettable consequence, but if it were true that virtue must be forced, that consequence would be inescapable.

Hence the inferior must, as mentioned above, be deprived. Partly just because of simple human perversity — it is not enough that I succeed, others must fail — but there's more. It is not sufficient that the superior have more if the inferior still have enough. Only conditions of deprivation place the inferior under the power of the superior. The superior must have that which the inferior desperately need. The subordination of the inferior to the superior is constant across social systems; capitalism is unique in that the mode of this subordination is wage labor.

The moral progress of previous generations has been to refine and distill relations of subordination; hence Marx speaks of society coalescing into two classes: bourgeoisie and proletariat. Capitalism strips the relations of subordination of previous eras of superstition and ignorance. If we commit ourselves to the project of separating the superior from the inferior and placing the inferior in the power of the superior, I can think of no better way of doing so than capitalism. Simply trying to change who is superior and who is inferior must be a step backward into superstition and bullshit.

We have reached the pinnacle of relations of subordination. The only way forward, then, is to eliminate relations of subordination. We must directly acknowledge and confront the underlying idea that it is a moral good to divide people into the superior and inferior, and that it is a moral wrong to reward the inferior at the expense of the superior. No small task, and a task, I think, that no would-be socialist society has successfully confronted.

Socialism and morality

Socialism is the notion that the material well-being of each member of society is the collective responsibility of all the members. We collectively see to people's material needs because we must.

In this sense, even a thoroughly capitalist society such as the United States can be partly socialist: to the extent that we take some responsibility for some material needs of some people, we are partly socialistic. So, yes, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, etc. are socialistic.

The opposite of socialism is autonomism, i.e. that no member of society has a responsibility for the material well-being of any other member of society. Autonomists can certainly be charitable, but individual acts of charity are voluntary, not a matter of duty.

There's no objective truth as to whether a society should be socialistic or autonomism, or to what degree. It's a matter of what the members of a society want, with the understanding that peoples' desires and social institutions are in a dialectical relationship — each shapes the other — and all are historically contingent. So, in addition to person-to-person persuasion, autonomists try to shape social institutions to encourage people to want autonomism, and socialists try to shape social institutions to encourage socialism. Additionally, there is always reality to contend with: neither socialism nor autonomism are objectively true, but both have objective consequences, and people have preferences about those consequences.

Marx argued not only that capitalism would have disastrous economic consequences, but that capitalist autonomism would have disastrous effects — which he labeled as alienation — on people's personal, social, and moral psychology.

People have been making moral distinctions since the beginning of time; most social mammals (and perhaps birds) probably make moral distinctions. And, while I'm not an anthropologist, there are some hints that even pre-agricultural human societies struggled with a dialectic between moral distinctions and wealth (in the broadest sense of economic power). When there was no storable surplus, reality imposed strong constraints on the connection, and my very cursory studies suggest that the need for collective solidarity entailed that moral worth and wealth were only weakly connected if at all.

Regardless of what happened ten thousand years ago, it is true today that moral worth and wealth are strongly connected: poor means bad, not-poor means good, and rich means awesome. Capitalism did not invent this connection. Adam Smith saw it even at the dawn of capitalism:

To superficial minds, the vices of the great seem at all times agreeable. They connect them, not only with the splendour of fortune, but with many superior virtues, which they ascribe to their superiors; with the spirit of freedom and independency, with frankness, generosity, humanity, and politeness. The virtues of the inferior ranks of people, on the contrary, their parsimonious frugality, their painful industry, and rigid adherence to rules, seem to them mean and disagreeable. They connect them, both with the meanness of the station to which those qualities commonly belong, and with many great vices, which, they suppose, usually accompany them; such as an abject, cowardly, ill-natured, lying, pilfering disposition.

Smith would probably be aghast that his name is connected to a political system that is today so contrary to his morality.

If people believe that that poverty is vice and wealth is virtue, then it is of course completely absurd to adopt a collective responsibility for the material well-being of the poor. To take from the rich and give to the poor is to punish virtue and reward vice. The concept is not merely nonsense, it undermines the very foundation of morality.

Although the connection between wealth and morality is strong, our actual moral beliefs are not so simplistic. When wealth and other notions of virtue and vice are no longer connected, when the possession of wealth is not seen as legitimately connected with virtue, and the lack of wealth is no longer seen as legitimately connected to vice, then social instability inevitably follows. And that is the current situation.

Never mind the electoral college and Republican gerrymandering; in a politically stable society, Donald Trump would never have gotten close enough for these technicalities to matter. What does matter is the connection between wealth and virtue has become disconnected. Specifically, Trump voters, I think, hold four important beliefs:

1. People who are wealthy because of business are virtuous. Hence, despite his egregious vices, Donald Trump, wealthy because of business, is fundamentally virtuous.
2. The white, non-urban working class believes itself virtuous, and yet has become poor.
3. The white, non-urban working class believes that they have become poor because the vicious urban poor is stealing its wealth.
4. The professional-managerial class is not virtuous, and deserves neither wealth nor political power, precisely because they are stealing the wealth of the white non-urban working class and giving it to the vicious urban poor.

These beliefs have traction because of the class struggle between the capitalist class and the professional-managerial class, and in no small part because the professional class threw away all its advantages: they did not have the will to destroy the capitalist class as a class. (The history of the last 80 years decisively proves that a dialect between the capitalist and professional classes cannot stabilize.) Enough capitalists want the kind of absolute power they had in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (that gave us two world wars and the Great Depression), and the capitalists who see the theoretical value of the professional class have rightly abandoned the professional class because in practice the professionals are incompetent. And, of course, the professional class must be incompetent; to be competent, they would have to destroy the capitalist class, and they will not and cannot.

Donald Trump has finished what Ronald Reagan started: the utter destruction of the professional-managerial class as a ruling class, even as a ruling class wholly subservient to the capitalist classes. (In a truly brilliant exercise of propaganda, the capitalists have completely discredited the professionals by observing that the professionals are subservient to the capitalists. It worked because people don't like weakness.)

Getting back around to the main topic: the "good" capitalist/professionalist solution is to get wealth correlated to non-wealth perceptions of virtue. But trying to correlate wealth to virtue is, as history has shown, very difficult. Wealth always begets more wealth, and if some non-virtuous person manages to acquire wealth, he both lends his vices the imprimatur of wealth as virtue, and also acquires the power to gain more wealth.

As difficult as the task might be, socialists must transform the moral connection between wealth and virtue, at least to the extent that having more wealth than one's neighbor becomes as morally reprehensible as a person hoarding oxygen while his neighbor suffocates.

Monty Hall Trolley Problem

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Sorry Zach, but I enjoyed this joke twice: as an philosopher and as a statistician!

Economics and moral philosophy

I'm on record as not liking market socialism. To clarify a bit, market socialism is probably a barely tolerable transitional stopgap in the move away from capitalism, but we should push quickly for an alternative. Furthermore, I do not think "central planning" — even if such a concept were coherent, which it's not, as I will discuss later — is the only alternative to markets. But before I talk about alternatives, Let me digress and talk about moral philosophy.

Markets are as much a moral social construction as they are a technical economic social construction; indeed the supposed pragmatic technical benefits are a post hoc rationalization; markets really rest on a moral foundation. And the morality of markets is clear: there are people who are industrious, thrifty, clever, people who take initiative, people who conform to corporate culture, people who follow certain rules (and break others): these people are good, and society should reward them just because* rewarding is what we do for good people. Similarly, there are people who are indolent, profligate, dull, etc.: these people are bad, and society should punish them just because punishing is what we do for bad people.

*i.e. we do not reward them to encourage people to be good; if rewards do act as incentives, that's all well and good, but the moral function of reward is not as an incentive, but as something intrinsic to goodness.

As Corey Robin has often argued, there is also the moral status of power. People do not want to be good (else there would be no difference between the desirable and the good), so they must be forced to be good. Since ordinary people must be forced to virtue, there must be a ruling class of people who do the forcing. This class is comprised not necessarily of people who are themselves good (although they might be good), but rather those who are energetic and effective at forcing virtue on the general population. Indeed, although the ruling class will often judge its own members (often on arbitrary or sometimes sadistic standards), the ruling class must be above the judgment of the people. If we hold that the desirable and the good are fundamentally in conflict, then it is difficult to imagine a different social organization to promote virtue and discourage vice.

Markets entail both of these moral views. Among the people, those who are industrious, thrifty, etc., i.e. good, are economically rewarded, while those who are indolent, profligate, etc., i.e. bad, are economically punished with poverty and deprivation. Moreover, entry into the ruling class is possible for a person with the forceful and effective personality necessary to gain great wealth, and exit from the ruling class is possible for those who fail to maintain their monetary or economic wealth, especially from the depredations of their peers.

I will go so far as to argue that if we are going to hold these two ideas, that we should reward virtue and punish vice, again just because that's what we do about virtue and vice, and that virtue and desire are fundamentally in conflict, capitalism, not only the market but the private ownership of the means of production, is the best way of having a virtuous society.

Thus there are two broad classes of arguments against capitalism: first to controvert the previous paragraph and say that while we should reward virtue and punish vice, and that there must be a de facto ruling class to compel virtue, but that capitalism is not the best way to do that. As noted above, I don't buy that argument, but if you want to make it, good luck to you; I'd love to hear it.

The second class is to reject these ideas, that we should not reward virtue and punish vice or that desirability and virtue are not fundamentally in conflict, that the most virtuous society is also the most desirable, and thus people do not have to be fundamentally forced to be good.

Such a view necessarily entails that we hold ideas like "lazy people deserve as much of the social product as industrious people," and like "people are 'naturally'* good." This is a big philosophical bullet to bite, but I think we must bite it.

*Before you get your knickers in a knot, please note the scare quotes around 'naturally'.

Power and Political Correctness

The always excellent Arthur Chu has a good column in Salon: Don’t blame me for Donald Trump: The liberal “p.c. police” didn’t make this monster, a response to How the P.C. Police Propelled Donald Trump by Tom Nichols. Chu is spot on; Nichols is completely full of shit.

There is a standard in academia sometimes labeled as "wallowing in complexity." (Google will give more examples.) All well and good; it's our job to wallow in complexity, to bend over backwards to find as many different perspectives on a question as possible, and treat them all as fairly serious.

The whole point of academic discourse (even the physical sciences) is to actively avoid making a shared decision. Every now and again we have to make a shared decision — we rightly can't hit on the undergraduates any more — but we try to avoid it as long as possible. This philosophy underlies the notion of academic freedom: that professional academics can resist almost any position, however widely held, without losing their jobs. Everyone has a personal bias, and the norms of academic discourse (well, the good ones) exist not to eliminate bias but to make bias more transparent and try to overcome it.

And its fine. That's what we do. Someone has to look at things from every possible angle, and explore every topic until we're sick to death of the "complexity."

Academic discourse is fine in academia, but it's not at all a universal norm, and academic discourse actively poisons real-world politics. Academic discourse is about not changing anything until we absolutely must; in the real world, politics is about changing things right now, not by intellectual exhaustion but by the exercise of power. Indeed, absent politics, academic discourse would rarely change anything in society: there is always more complexity to wallow in.

(The physical sciences tend to move a little more quickly than the social sciences, because protons and electrons, and even organisms and ecosystems, are orders of magnitude less complicated than human society. Even then, scientists typically take a generation to change paradigms.)

All societies, from hunter-gatherers to modern industrial capitalist "democratic" republics, are characterized by power relationships. I don't think there ever was a single power relationship that was ever overturned by intellectual argument or moral suasion. Chu offers an excellent example in slavery: all that argument and suasion ever did was make the slavers double down on their own intellectual and moral justifications for slavery. It took a literal war and the deaths of more than a half million soldiers (2 percent of the population) just to move from literal chattel slavery to Jim Crow, wage slavery, political oppression, and economic hyper-exploitation, and the South still hasn't dug itself out of the moral hole it dug itself into before the Civil War.

People can and do overturn social, political, cultural, and economic power relationships without actual war and killing. But these efforts still require power; argument and moral suasion are useful for gaining power, but only the use of power, the ability to inflict suffering on opponents, can actually change the social power relationship.

We must remember that existing power relationships exercise actual power, including violence and killing, to employ and preserve that power. Oppose segregation and the oppression of black people, and the police will arrest, imprison, torture, and kill you. Try to build a union and use it to secure rights already guaranteed by law, and the company will fire and blacklist you, and the national guard will massacre you. Even observe (adhering to the most rarefied standards of academic discourse) that video games often depict female characters ways that marginalize and subordinate women and you will receive fatwahs that would make Salman Rusdie paranoid. Those who hold power actually use it with no moral restraint, but only the restraint forced upon them by the power of their victims.

I'm still reading Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism. Based on a quick skim, part of the work seems like a justification of specific measures Lenin's ruling Communist Party and Trotsky's Red Army used to actually implement communism under extremely difficult circumstances including the violent hostility of the West, which I might or might not agree with. But I absolutely agree with the fundamental message. The bourgeois state uses every means at its disposal, including violence and "terrorism" (which Trotsky uses to generally denote the violent exercise of state power), thus there is no moral justification to deny those same means to those overturning the bourgeois state. There are always pragmatic considerations — the point of any revolution is to establish and maintain legitimacy, and revolutionaries should avoid means that legitimize their opponents or undermine their own legitimacy — but the only moral consideration is the ends.

If you approve of the bourgeois state, then it is morally coherent to approve whatever means are necessary to maintain the bourgeois state; if you disapprove, then it is morally coherent to approve whatever means are necessary to overthrow it. It is morally incoherent to condemn the bourgeois state and approve its efforts to maintain itself and condemn efforts to overthrow it. In other words, we cannot separate the judgment of the ends from the means that must be used to achieve those ends. To approve the ends but condemn the means is simply to appear sentimental while maintaining one's own power and privilege.

What is true of revolution is just as true of reform. I personally have zero confidence that substantive long-term reforms are possible under capitalism, but I might be (and hope I am) wrong, and even if I'm right, even failed attempts at substantive reform undermine capitalism. But even the tiniest reform requires the exercise of power: not asking, not even demanding, but making people change and punishing people who refuse to change. The punishment need not be violent — loss of social status is an extremely effective punishment — but it needs to be forceful.

To argue otherwise is simply to protect your own privilege behind the shield of sentimentality.

Decency

Decency, like all moral words, has a fundamentally subjective and socially constructed meaning. Decency is we think it is, and what we think it is is a product of social interaction. But just because its meaning is subjective and socially constructed doesn't mean it has no meaning. It does mean something: although we might disagree about the specifics, we can tell what is decent and what is not decent.

I think, for example, that people have to live with no home is not decent. That they have to beg for food is not decent. That they are not permitted to work — when there is manifestly much work undone — is not decent. That we are killing black people in our own country and brown people in the Middle East is not decent.

Others might think, for example, that we take from those who produce more and give to those who produce less is not decent. I disagree,

No matter: the point is not what specifically is or is not decent, the point is that the word decency does actual work in drawing distinctions about the world.

Decency is more fluid than good. I've written earlier that "I shouldn't, but ..." is incoherent. Shouldn't means don't. If someone actually does something, then they necessarily think they should do it. If they say they shouldn't but they do, then they are lying, bullshitting, confused, or so neurotic that they need the services of a psychologist, not a philosopher. Decency, in contrast, is not so rigid. Should and shouldn't come after we weigh the reasons; considerations of decency come before.

We can say, "This is not decent, but reasons." And the reasons might (or might not) be good reasons. It was certainly indecent to kill Nazis by the millions, because mass murder is, I think, uncontroversially indecent, but hey, they were Nazis. (And, I think, the analysis is symmetric: I think the Nazis and Germans believed that murdering millions of Jews, Gypsies, communists, homosexuals, and Slavs was indecent, but hey, reasons.) Similarly, whether or not someone thinks the economic constraints justify the indecency, it seems relatively uncontroversial that the way we treat food animals is clearly indecent.

The goal of civilization, I think, is or should be that we create a society where we can not just always act rightly but always act decently. A goal of universal decency might be asymptotic, but we should always at least be moving closer, to make our necessary indecency always rarer and always more fraught.

What I meant in my previous post, then is not to argue some specific concept of decency, but to talk about an attitude towards how we construct and implement not only our notions of decency but also when we make exceptions to decency. Hence, even when I completely agree with some religious people's specific constructions of decency, I profoundly disagree with how they construct that notion: that thus and such is decent or indecent not because we happen to subjectively feel it is so, but because God has so informed. Similarly with a monarchy, oligarchy, or even a republic: even if I agree, thus and such is decent (or we should make an exception to decency) because the king, or the bourgeoisie, or our elected representatives have so informed us... based, of course, on information only they can see.

As I noted, the specific institutions of a democracy are important, but democracy is more than just a set of institutions: indeed, no set of institutions, however carefully crafted, can be democratic if the people do not have democratic consciousness: the consciousness that the people themselves decide what is decent and when we must act indecently. Not the king, not the elite, not the trustees (and not the Party): the people themselves.

Religion and democracy

A couple of interesting articles: In Why the Left Needs Religion, Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig argues that religion as religion (not just people who happen to be religious) is an essential component to left organizing, citing Christian religious doctrines and practices that are frankly Marxian. In Not God’s Politics, Susan Jacoby disagrees with Bruenig, citing the... diversity... of religious ideology on the right and left, and the propensity of Christians to impose their religion on everyone, including non-Christians. Naturally I much prefer Jacoby, and while I know many Christians I'm happy to have as allies, it is because of their politics, not their religion. But I think there's a larger point that's deserves highlighting.

We on the left should not, I think, be too focused on implementing a particular political-economic regime, e.g. welfare capitalism, social democracy, democratic socialism, or communism. The regime does matter, a lot, but the regime is not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is to change how people see the world and each other, to change our political and social psychology. A particular political-economic regime might be the consequence of that change, or might be a means to effect that change, but a change in "human nature" must be the fundamental goal of the left. I don't mean to say we shouldn't think carefully about political and economic issue at the deepest level (I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the economics and finance of communism), but these issues are not at the deepest level.

The fundamental struggle of the left is to inculcate the social psychology of democracy. We really like the word here in the United States; we are perhaps not quite so enthusiastic about the actual practice. Democracy is not about holding periodic elections, even with a comprehensive franchise and open candidacy. Democracy is not about letting people vote, it is about the people ruling. Elections are about people "choosing" our rulers; democracy is about people ruling themselves. Again, I want to say that although economic and political democracy is a regime, and requires specific kinds of political and economic institutions, the regime is not the fundamental, deepest, point; the deepest point is our social, cultural, political, and economic psychology, our consciousness.

Having sampled the Christian scriptures, the character of Jesus seems to me like a decent fellow.* But that's alarming right there: I have a favorable opinion of Jesus without believing for a second that the character or the narrative in which he appears has any sort of divine imprimatur. If you think Jesus is a decent character, why is that not enough to emulate him? What work does apotheosizing him do?

*I have much less familiarity with Islamic scripture. I wouldn't be surprised if apart from his egregious pedophilia, Muhammed (the man or the character of the narrator), given his time and place, was also rather decent. My point, though, is not the decency of the characters but the nature of religion.

The point of democracy, as an element of consciousness, is to act decently because we are decent; if we are not decent, we want to become decent.* If we act decently because some god demands we do so is to miss the fundamental point of democracy. More importantly, if we demand that others act decently not because they are decent, but because some god demands they do so, we don't just miss but actively undermine the whole point of democracy.

*What do I mean by "decent"? Good question. It's a vague word for a vague and complicated idea. I'll write more on this topic later.

One might argue that to persuade their readers to become decent is the Gospels authors' whole point, their real project. Perhaps so, but if that is their point, after almost two thousand years, they have decisively failed. And, I would argue, they have failed precisely because they have located the impetus to decency in the divine, rather than the human. I'm sorry, racist white European authoritarian neoliberal capitalism has captured a substantial fraction of nominal Christians, Christians who have in their homes an actual copy of the writings about the brown Middle-Eastern democratic communist, who say that what this brown Middle-Eastern democratic communist (supposedly) said is literally the most important thing in the world. If people actually believed what Jesus says, they would have greeted the writings of Marx with a collective, "Well, duh!" No, that's wrong: if people really believed Jesus, Christians never would have invented capitalism, and Marx would be known for his literary criticism. The fault is not in the content, so the fault must be in the location in the divine, not the human.

Democracy and communism are not about income equality or inequality. They are not about the Ministry of Planning or nationalizing the banks. Democracy and communism are about power, with the people taking power away from this or that self-selected elite, hereditary, economic, or theocratic, and wielding it themselves. Indeed, democracy is about abjuring power over others and privileging each person's individual power over him- or herself. By its very nature, no religion can ever give us that.

Do the rich deserve their wealth?

Do the rich deserve their wealth? Greg Mankiw believes they do. But Mankiw is asking the wrong question. Suppose everyone had as much wealth as today's 1 percent. Undoubtedly, some would not "deserve" such wealth. But so what? Everyone's rich; let's just enjoy our wealth, right?

A better question would be, do the poor "deserve" their poverty?

Much depends on what we mean by "deserve." Like most moral language, "deserve" and related words are equivocal. We often use "deserve" in a utilitarian sense. When we say, for example, "The rich deserve their wealth," we might mean that the everyone is better off with what wealth and income inequality we have. Arthur Okun makes an implicitly utilitarian argument in his "leaky bucket" theory. Okun argued transferring wealth from the rich to the poor always involved some inefficiency; we might become more equal after a transfer, but we have less stuff overall. Whether or not Okun was correct, and whether or not the utility of equality outweighs the overall loss of stuff, Okun is making a utilitarian argument. Similarly, when we say that criminals "deserve" punishment, we often mean that punishing criminals deters others from committing crimes, thus making the world better off. That the criminal himself suffers is the price we must pay, and because the whole problem arises because of the criminal's choices, we are less troubled by his own suffering. We use this sense of "deserve," with its utilitarian implications, all over the place, mostly unproblematically.

But Mankiw spends considerable ink denying the utilitarian argument. His argument against utilitarianism is not very good, but that's not my concern for today; what matters is that Mankiw argues that the rich "deserve" their wealth on grounds other than utilitarianism. It is inherently wrong, regardless of effects on utility, to confiscate the wealth of rich people, precisely because they "deserve" it. But if that's true, if we reject utilitarianism, then if (most) rich people deserve their wealth, then (most) poor people deserve their poverty.

It is therefore equally wrong, regardless of the utilitarian consequences, to give money to poor people. Not only must this money be taken from rich people, violating their rights, but the overall argument is that people should get what they deserve, and giving them something other than what they deserve, whether they deserve wealth or poverty, is inherently wrong.

If we take Mankiw's argument to its logical conclusion, then a society with tremendous economic inequality is not merely tolerable, it is mandatory. The highest moral imperative is that people must get what they deserve. If the poor deserve poverty and misery, it is immoral to alleviate their misery, even if we could do so without diminishing anyone else's happiness. (Which would blatantly contradict economists' usual endorsement of Pareto efficiency.)

Mankiw he probably does not, at least consciously, intend this interpretation: he admits the utility of some transfers. But without this interpretation, the argument is pointless. The claim that it is immoral to be rich — that no one should ever be rich, regardless of our economic circumstances — almost by definition is immune to an argument from positive deservingness. No one would argue, for example, that anyone deserves to murder, rape, or steal. Even apologists for murder, rape, and theft don't argue that doing so is a reward for merit; they argue that the victims deserve to be killed, raped, and expropriated by force. Arguments from deservingness always work to justify the lack of a privilege or right.

I think a democratic communist must fundamentally reject the concept of deservingness, except in the trivial sense that everyone "deserves" to be happy, and no one "deserves" to suffer. That everyone cannot all be happy, and that some will in fact suffer becomes a practical problem rather than a fundamental problem. Notwithstanding the enormous practical problems, the fundamental role of all our social systems should be to make as many people as we can as happy as we can. To do otherwise is simply to dress the legitimate grievances against capitalism in robes of red rather than green.

The economist's dilemma

A capitalist in socialist's clothing

The problem, I think, is that Miya Tokumitsu does everything she can to avoid criticizing capitalism (a charge I think the author would vehemently deny). Capitalism makes all virtues, however we loosely define "virtue", about profit (and if it can't make a virtue profitable, it makes it a vice). "Do what you love" (DWYL) is no exception. Instead of a criticism of how capitalism has corrupted what is arguably the defining virtue of humanity, the emotional and social power of labor, Tokumitsu sees DWYL as the defining characteristic of capitalism, and therefore not a human construct. Her interview, Why ‘Do What You Love’ Is Pernicious Advice, carries on this theme.

The fundamental point of the interview comes near the end: "[O]ne of the things I want to do is celebrate the job that just pays the rent." But just paying the rent, not DWYL, is the fundamental capitalist virtue. It is the essence of alienated labor, a concept Marx writes quite a bit about. When you work just to pay the rent (and notice "rent", paying the parasitic landlord class), your labor is literally alienated, cut off, detached, made external. Working just to pay the rent reduces our work to the "cash nexus". I see nothing at all wrong with Marx's goal, to make labor "not only a means of life but life's prime want." All of us should be doing what we love; the fact that we cannot is a failure of capitalism; it is not that doing what we love is itself disreputable.

Of course, capitalism does try to digest every virtue and make it about cash, and DWYL is no exception. Tokumitsu talks about how capitalism tries to corrupt DWYL: the corporate PR fakery, standards that employees should always look like they're happy, the want-ad insistence that candidates be "passionate" about janitorial work, the idea that if you're doing what you love, you should not expect to be paid in actual money. But Tokumitsu draws the wrong conclusion from these attempts: capitalism is trying to assimilate, corrupt, and ultimately destroy the fundamental virtue of socialism. Socialists can certainly resist the corruption of this virtue, and critics can certainly argue that corrupting the virtue of DWYL produces more, not fewer, contradictions, but arguing that we should do away with the virtue entirely, and accept absolutely alienated labor as the ultimate standard of good would do nothing but hand capitalism an unearned victory.

Socialist theoreticians should, of course, valorize the proletariat, whose labor is absolutely alienated. But we should valorize the proletariat and the alienation of their labor not because alienated labor is the best form of labor. Instead, we should valorize the proletariat because the absolute alienation of their labor is, as Marx argues, the fundamental contradiction the resolution (sublation, aufheben) of which produces revolutionary consciousness.

See also: In defense of "Do What You Love"

Peter Singer's sham altruism

Philosopher Peter Singer has a long article about altruism: The Logic of Effective Altruism (h/t to 3 Quarks Daily). In the article, Singer argues that individuals should use a substantial portion of their resources to help other individuals. Singer also implies that although there's no obligation, it's at least better to accumulate enough resources as possible so as to have more to give.

Singer's paradigmatic case is of Matt Wage. As Singer recounts, Wage, a promising philosophy student, decided to forego a career as a professor; instead, Wage worked on Wall Street in finance, so he could give a substantial amount to charity: according to Singer, Wage donated "a six-figure sum—roughly half his annual earnings" after his first year working.

Now, I'm an altruistic guy. I have enough to live simply and comfortably, and I spend a lot of my time as an educator (tutor/TA) helping others. But there's something about Singer's article that goes thud instead of ding. I can't help but think that Singer is missing something important.

What bothers me most about Singer's article is its focus on the individual. Singer rarely mentions and never judges the larger institutions and structures of our society. Singer seems to take the international neoliberal capitalist structure as a force of nature. But capitalism is not a force of nature; it is a human invention. And capitalism is the cause of most of the suffering that Singer calls on people to altruistically ameliorate. Children are starving and dying from malaria in Africa because of colonialism, and the African people cannot lift themselves out of poverty because capitalism denies them not just capital but agency and autonomy.

Singer's altruism is also insufferably elitist. The vast majority of people in the world do not have the resources to engage in altruism at Wage's level. And what has Wage himself actually contributed to the world? Financiers, especially those on Wall Street, do not contribute anything at all to society: they are simply parasites. Wage has merely expropriated others' labor, kept half (at least thirty times the 2012 global per capita median income, probably more, and four or five times more than I live on), and "altruistically" given the other half away, given it away to those who are suffering because of the system that Wage supports and maintains. What Wage has done is acquire power over others, exercising

Furthermore, Singer's altruism is not reciprocal: it is the powerful and superior giving to the powerless and inferior, reinforcing the superiority of the powerful. Singer's altruism is, I suppose, a better way to establish and reinforce superiority than punishment and torture, but being less bad than Orwell's Inner Party is not a particularly high bar. Singer's altruism always has strings attached: it is given to those whom the powerful consider "deserving", the meek supplicants, not the revolutionary fighting to change the unjust system from which Wage handsomely profits.

It's notable too that Singer concentrates his exhortations to altruism on the safest and most removed of recipients. Singer ignores the minimum wage worker, living in grinding poverty in the midst of the wealthiest nation in the world, begging the bosses for a bathroom break. Singer does not mention the black people in our society, suffering daily from the most direct and brutal oppression, an oppression that breaks through our willful complacency only when young black men, women, and children are shot down like dogs. Singer closes his eyes to women, still in the 20th century living in a rape culture. Where is the altruism of the wealthy? Are they altruistic enough to attack the foundation of their own privilege and power? I think not.

Reciprocity is a more fundamental value than the amelioration of suffering. I would rather suffer as a free person than prosper as a slave, however "altruistic" my master. (Of course, I would much rather prosper as a free person; and the whole point of freedom is that in the aggregate, freedom creates more prosperity than slavery.)

There is another kind of altruism that is profoundly better than Singer's: the invisible reciprocal altruism we take for granted in human society, an invisible altruism against which capitalism has since its inception centuries ago exhibited absolute and implacable hostility.

As Singer recounts, Wage thought, "Suppose you see a burning building, and you run through the flames and kick a door open, and let one hundred people out. That would be the greatest moment in your life. And I could do as much good as that!" But Wage is just indulging in an adolescent power fantasy. To belabor the metaphor, the real heroes are the civil engineers who make buildings that don't catch fire in the first place, and the bureaucrats who ensure that the landlords build correctly despite their greed.

No, Singer's vision is not exciting. It is just a sop to the capitalist elite, that they can return a little of the labor they have expropriated and pat themselves on the back for their sham generosity.

Singer's altruism is nothing but the acquisition of power, and the exercise of power to shape the world as the powerful see fit, treating their recipients as infantile subjects.

I don't want Singer's altruism. I want justice.

Analysis of "Schlosser"

Regarding my recent post, "Professorial whining"...

In one sense, I have a little sympathy for "Schlosser." Using academic employment as a lever is, I think, a Bad Thing. Academia needs tenure. However, that the capitalist class is using students' complaints to erode tenure is not the fault of the complaining students, but the fault of the capitalist class for joining complaints to hiring and firing, and for moving from a tenure-track faculty model to a non-tenure track adjunct model. The cause, I assert, is firmly in the capitalist class; students' complaints just makes a handy tool for dismantling academic tenure and job security.

I blame academia itself too, as part of the professional-managerial class, for handing over its power to the capitalists. I will post more on this subject soon.

There's another sense, however, where I have zero sympathy for "Schlosser." When anyone increases their power vs. anyone else, we should expect that the newly more powerful will use their power in ways that the the newly less powerful will find uncomfortable, and contrary to their own ethical beliefs. Students, being closer to the proletariat, should have more power over their education. "Schlosser's" fundamental position, that students should have zero power, is absolute bullshit. With regard to the specific complaints, professors should have obligations to respect students' emotional needs. I'm not saying that that professors must unconditionally submit to those needs, but, per Thucydides, there needs to be a negotiation between parties more equal in power.

The need for equal negotiation is especially sharp when we're talking about topics and tools used to violently repress women, people of color, LBGTQ people, [ETA other historically oppressed groups,] and, of course, the proletariat. For example, the objections noted above to the Oxford debate above have merit. Abortion is not just some abstract question of ethics: restricting abortion is about the oppression of women. As mentioned above, I think having any sort of debate about abortion is as offensive to civilized decency as a debate about the chattel slavery of black people. Having two men conduct the debate just adds insult to injury.

Academia is not an institution devoted to abstract, disinterested intellectual inquiry. Academia has, from its medieval origins, ben an institution that establishes legitimacy, using particular kinds of intellectual inquiry as tools. As academics, our work is always connected to legitimacy. The underlying question is not whether some topics are too disturbing to discuss, but how how the discussion legitimizes or delegitimizes certain topics. It is legitimate (in a meta sense) to argue that the way a professor discusses, for example, rape, legitimizes rape as a tool of violent coercion against women. It's not that we cannot discuss Ovid; it is that when we're talking about Ovid's work that includes rape, not just his language but his subject matter demands critical inquiry. To blithely dismiss the subject matter of rape without critical inquiry has not Ovid (immune from our disapproval) but the professor himself legitimizing rape. In much the same sense, we can talk about Huckleberry Finn, but we have to deal critically with the slavery depicted in the book, as well as the language. How we do so legitimizes or delegitimizes not just slavery but modern racism, and it is a valid position to use one's power to ensure that our inquiry delegitimizes racism.

"Schlosser" completely ignores the role of academia in social legitimization. This omission, not just his that he actually has to take students seriously, even when he disagrees with them, is is most serious intellectual sin.

Culinary modernism and reflections on aesthetics and virtue

A Plea for Culinary Modernism

Modern, fast, processed food is a disaster. That, at least, is the message conveyed by newspapers and magazines, on television cooking programs, and in prizewinning cookbooks. . . .

[But...] As an historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by Culinary Luddism, a past sharply divided between good and bad, between the sunny rural days of yore and the gray industrial present. . . .

[M]ost men were born to a life of labor in the fields, most women to a life of grinding, chopping, and cooking. “Servitude,” said my mother as she prepared home­cooked breakfast, dinner, and tea for eight to ten people three hundred and sixty five days a year. . . .

For all, Culinary Modernism had provided what was wanted: food that was processed, preservable, industrial, novel, and fast, the food of the elite at a price everyone could afford. Where modern food became available, populations grew taller, stronger, had fewer diseases, and lived longer. Men had choices other than hard agricultural labor, women other than kneeling at the metate five hours a day.

We have to remember, every second of every day, that we have more than seven billion people to feed, and not a single one of those seven billion is expendable. There is a reason why Whole Foods is mockingly referred to as Whole Paycheck. Luddite, artisanal, non-industrial food is expensive: to consume such food exclusively is to consume more of the labor of others than one could ever replace or repay. Only a privileged few can afford to forego industrial food.

It is one of the arguments of every elite that they are the guardians of (expensive and rare) beauty. David Mura expresses the point eloquently: "There is simply no way, when power has acquired the trappings of beauty, to avoid the spiritual wonder and humility such beauty provides." To destroy the elites is to destroy the beauty only they can embody.

Every egalitarian society is portrayed in fiction and nonfiction as dull and dreary, gray, monotonous, devoid of beauty. More importantly, an egalitarian society must necessarily be devoid of virtue; beauty and virtue are not only closely connected, but actually identical, two apparently different ways of talking about the same thing. Elitism is beautiful, therefore virtuous; egalitarianism is ugly, therefore vicious.

Beauty and virtue are dichotomies. There cannot be beauty without ugliness; there cannot be virtue without vice. Beauty and virtue must be rare: only the exceptional, never the common, can be beautiful or virtuous. An egalitarian society thus can be neither beautiful nor virtuous. Egalitarianism does not (cannot, should not) eliminate exceptionalism (while I admire Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron is an absurd fantasy), but an egalitarian society must resolutely disconnect both beauty and virtue from exceptionalism.

(The connection between exceptionalism and beauty and virtue is, of course, more complicated. The exceptional is not always beautiful and virtuous, but the beautiful and virtuous must always be exceptional.)

It would be a mistake, I think, even as a tactic, to simply reverse the dichotomy, to construct our social reality such that only the common could be beautiful and virtuous. Somehow, these concepts must (should) simply be disconnected. Common or exceptional, the beautiful and virtuous are what make people happy; the ugly and the vicious are what make people suffer.

In a sense too, everyone is, I think, exceptional. And everyone is common, "normal." Everyone is different in some ways, the same in others. It is only the underlying aesthetic and moral distinctions that raise some differences to exceptions.

Discrimination and freedom of association

I'll let y'all check the original post Response to a Distressed Libertarian Reader about Discrimination, my reply, and Andrew's response.

Are we all up to speed now? Because I can't comment there right now (comments may be closed for the post), I'll reply to Andrew here.

I really don't care if your conscience is offended by having to serve gay people as part of a public accommodation. Yes, your freedom of association is being infringed. Tough. Too bad for your freedom of association. The people have decided that if you want to open a business to the public, you have to serve all the public. If your conscience is offended, too bad for you.

Could the government force us to compromise our freedom of association (or any other freedom) in unacceptable ways? In one sense, yes of course: the government has all the guns, and they can use these guns "justly" or "unjustly." In another sense, no: a truly democratic government cannot compromise a freedom in a way that the majority objects to: if they were to try, they would be voted out, and the compromise reversed. (Are we actually a democracy? Of course not. But in this case, the government is acting democratically.)

If this is a problem for you, if you believe that your conscience should never be infringed, would you extend the same right to those who believe, in all good conscience, that your stuff belongs to them? That it is an offense against their conscience that you have a nice car and they do not? I doubt it. Andrew just wants the right of conscience to extend only to his own conscience and those he agrees with, and not that of others.

Utilitarianism and physics

trivialknot has an excellent post, Utilitarianism to deontology. In it, he succinctly describes how the appearance of deontology might emerge from utilitarianism.

Before I continue, I want to briefly describe utilitarianism. Utilitarianism first rests on four more-or-less scientific principles:

1. People directly experience "happiness" and "suffering"; they're hard to define precisely, but we know them when we feel them. Happiness is intrinsically good, and suffering is intrinsically bad.
2. People are goal-seeking, which differs from other possible high-level cognitive strategies such as rule-following; (what Daniel Dennett calls sphexishness).
3. People generally create and act on the goal of maximizing their own happiness and minimizing their own suffering.
4. People have evolved to be social, and we have evolved the tendency to feel our own happiness when (some) others are happy, and feel our own suffering when (some) others suffer.

None of these scientific principles entail any particular ethical system. Utilitarianism thus must add an ethical ideology to these principles. There are two fundamental principles:

1. Ideally, we should act so as to maximize happiness and minimize suffering, aggregated over every person, to the end of time.
2. No individual's happiness and suffering is a priori more or less important than anyone else's; there is no privilege or oppression

Thus, utilitarianism is by definition consequential (we always look at the consequences of an action on happiness and suffering), and universal.

The second principle is important: it rebuts the objection that utilitarianism requires that each person sacrifices his life so that his organs could save the lives of more than one other. However, if everyone did so, we would obviously not maximize happiness; if only some did so, those some would be oppressed. If we drew lots, we would have to evaluate the total effect: does drawing lots to sacrifice healthy individuals for organ transplants increase or decrease happiness and suffering vs. letting individuals take their chances. When the answer in certain circumstances is that drawing lots does increase overall happiness and/or decrease overall happiness, such as a draft lottery in wartime, then we actually do it.

Ideally, we want to maximize happiness and suffering for everyone to the end of time. Obviously, we cannot actually determine the effect on any action for the 7 billion people presently existing, and however many will exist until the end of time. Thus, we operate under both risk and uncertainty, i.e. known and unknown probabilistic distribution of possible outcomes, respectively. TK has an excellent and succinct explanation in his post on the effects of risk and uncertainty on utilitarianism, so I will simply quote:

One appealing resolution is to say that these two problems solve each other. It is true that a naive utilitarianism does not account for uncertainty. But when we do account for uncertainty, then we will reproduce most of our moral intuitions. Although perhaps we will not reproduce every moral intuition, and so this provides a useful way to distinguish between intuitions which are correct and intuitions which are incorrect.

For example, whenever we make decisions, we are more certain of the consequences to ourselves than we are of consequences to people far away. In the face of uncertainty, consequences tend to be a wash, so it is good to prioritize ourselves.

Another example. Whenever we drop a brick off the roof of a building, we cannot distinguish beforehand the cases where the brick will hit someone and the cases where it won't do anything. Therefore, we must judge all brick-dropping the same way. We must make a rule against the action of dropping bricks in random places. This reproduces deontological ethics, which makes rules about particular actions based on the qualities of those actions.

This also neatly solves one of the problems with deontological ethics, which is that there isn't a clear way to generate new rules about actions. This framework suggests that the correct way to generate new rules is to consider the probabilistic consequences of a class of actions.

TK's main point is to note some differences between physics and ethics.

First, he asserts that both physics and utilitarianism are reductionist, i.e. you can (in theory) calculate higher-order phenomena from the behavior lower-order phenomena. However, physics purports to describe how the universe actually is, whereas TK is unclear on whether utilitarianism even purports (much less actually does) describe how the world is.

This is an easy one. Utilitarianism does not describe how the world actually is. It is a framework that people chooses or does not choose to evaluate their actions. The "reductionism" just happens to be part of the theory; as a proponent of utilitarianism, I would not say that utilitarianism is true because it is reductionist. (Indeed, I would not say that utilitarianism is true. Full stop.) Reductionism just serves to make the theory easier to use.

The idea, however, that we know physics is true, that it really describes the world, because it is reductionist is very philosophically problematic. There's no denying that reductionism is a really useful tool in physics, but the connection between reductionism and truth seems very hard to justify. So I don't known that physics and utilitarianism are really very different on this criterion.

Second, TK notes that increasing the precision of our moral calculations do not just allow us to know the moral status of actions with more precision, it can actually radically change the moral status. TK's example is particularly trenchant:

If we discover with certainty that dropping a brick at a particular time won't hurt anyone, and will instead kill a butterfly and stop a hurricane in a hundred years, then that action literally goes from unacceptable to acceptable.

Indeed: and not just acceptable, but compulsory.

But again, is this sensitivity to precision all that different from physics? Do we not have Chaos theory and Three-body problem? I don't actually see much difference here between physics and utilitarianism.

Finally, TK makes a legitimate argument from ignorance: he doesn't know how utilitarianism reproduces such basic, intuitive things as rights, so he cannot effectively use it. I have two responses. First, TK could in fact become an expert in utilitarianism: he's a smart guy, and I think I've made at least the prima facie case that utilitarianism is worthy of study. However, I suspect that the world is better off if TK puts more of his time and effort into the study of physics and as an advocate for social justice. So my second response is that most people's naive intuition about how to act is already utilitarian: you don't have to be an expert in utilitarianism to act as a good utilitarian. Most "nice" people usually act on the following rules/guidelines:

1. If I can clearly benefit myself without hurting anyone else, then I should.
2. If I can clearly benefit someone else without hurting myself (much), then I should.
3. If I can clearly prevent great suffering, even if it harms me, or risks harming me substantially, I should.
4. Most social rules handle the general cases where the outcome is not immediately clear: I should act according to social rules in uncertain situations.
5. If a social rule seems like it causes more harm than benefit, I should subject that social rule to heightened scrutiny, and consider changing it.

Really, that's 99.999% of utilitarianism. The 0.001% comes in how we should examine apparently problematic social rules. Even then, the "experts", who have the training to look deeply into that 0.001%, have the task of justifying their analysis to the rest of the "lay" population.

I will try to write a more detailed analysis of how rights come from utilitarianism.

A category error in subjectivism

Reviewing some old posts, I stumbled across a comment from a professional philosopher (whose pseudonymous identity is no longer active, so he will remain anonymous) asked a question, which I will paraphrase from memory. Suppose some society did (some horrible thing) that everyone in that society subjectively approved of. Would I be all right with that?

The question though, makes a category error. The whole point of subjectivism is that the subjective is prior to a moral evaluation. And that goes as much for my own subjective opinion as for the subjective opinions of the members of that society. So, no, I would not be all right: the "(some horrible thing)" refers to something I would have a very negative opinion about, and my opinion is prior to and independent of the opinions of the members of that society. The fact that subjective opinions differ is of no more moment than that the acceleration due to gravity is different on different planets and moons.

The real question is, given that the members of some society approve of some horrible thing, and I disapprove of it (perhaps strongly), what should I do about that fact. Obviously, I have a motive to change the horrible thing; this motive is an identity, not an entailment: disapproval is a motive. But precisely what I actually do is dependent on a lot of other contingent factors, and can range from shutting up and minding my own damn business to making war on the people doing the horrible thing to force them to stop.

Subjectivism does not mean that if I subjectively disapprove of something, then that something is objectively wrong. That position is, I think, more accurately labeled as intuitionism, and is an epistemic theory. It's also so obviously contradictory, because people do have different subjective feelings about things, but an objective property of a thing must necessarily be singular, that only a philosopher could hold that position. Subjectivism, is an ontological theory: things simply do not have objective moral properties to be singular: moral properties are relational, not intrinsic. In much the same sense, the property of "to the left of" is relational, both of the object's relation to another object, and the speaker's relation to the objects.

Another way of looking at it is to consider people who disapprove of things that I (and hopefully you, gentle right-minded reader) approve of. For example, suppose Alice feels profound moral disgust at homosexuality, the exact same moral disgust that you and I might have for exploiting the proletariat or subordinating women and Black people. And, of course, you and I do not feel any moral disgust for others' homosexuality.

As a subjectivist, I cannot say that it is morally wrong that Alice finds homosexuality morally disgusting. Alice's subjective feelings are prior to moral evaluation, not derived from it. The question is not to morally evaluate Alice's feelings, but to figure out what we should do given a difference in our feelings. Given different underlying moral feelings, the question, I assert, moves from ethical philosophy to the realm of politics, in the sense that politics is what people do when they disagree about justice. We negotiate. We persuade. We can move the discussion to the meta-level: perhaps Alice would agree that her own unique sexuality should not be regulated by society, even if a majority of her fellow citizens were to find it disgusting, and then we would have subjective agreement at the meta-level. But these are political questions, not philosophical questions: we are not trying to get at the truth, because there's no truth to get at.

The utilitarianism of ridicule

I think it's good to ridicule religion.

Ridicule is complicated from a utilitarian perspective. By design, ridicule is immediately harmful: it makes its target feel bad. So, in a consequentialist utilitarian framework, we can justify ridicule only by concluding first that we can know, directly or indirectly, that the overall effects of ridicule promote more happiness and less suffering in the long run to offset the immediate suffering. Second, we have to know that there is no alternative means that is less immediately harmful.

The idea of doing something bad in the short run for a good in the long run is incredibly problematic. We have a lot more knowledge about the short run than we do about the long run. That's the whole point of ethical principles: ethical principles encapsulate our social knowledge (as well as social prejudice, confusion, ignorance, and delusion) about the expected long run effects of short run actions. I strongly suspect that, for instance, people don't like flipping the switch in the Trolley Problem* precisely because we are socially conditioned that uncertainty** about the indirect and long term effects prohibit actively killing a person. We also must consider the meta-problem: when we justify doing a short-run harm for a long-run good, we have to also ask: who will be making those decisions, under what constraints, and to fulfill which ends? But saying that causing immediate, local harm now for a long-run, global good is problematic is not to say that it cannot possibly be justified.


*See also Can Bad Men Make Good Brains do Bad Things?

**The assumption of certainty made in the presentation of the problem just doesn't help: our intuition about the world is both unconscious and deeply conditioned (usually) about how the world actually is; it's difficult or impossible for us to consciously adjust our intuition to conform to alternative physics. It's hard enough to adjust our intuition to true but non-obvious physics.

The justification for ridicule, then, must address what the long-run effects of ridicule will be, how we know what those effects are, whether they outweigh the short-run harm, whether less harmful methods exist, and how we socially decide whom to ridicule and when. I think we can justify ridiculing religion on these grounds.

The expected long-term effects of ridicule are change of behavior. When we ridicule some people, or actions, or ideas, we are saying that these people, or people who do or think these things should change. Hence, ridiculing people for unchangeable characteristics — race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, height, and, to some extent weight — cannot effect any long-term change in behavior; therefore, the immediate harm cannot be outweighed by the impossible to achieve long-term effects. If you ridicule someone for being Black, you're just being mean.

Second, since individuals are the best judge of what is harmful, it doesn't make sense to ridicule people only for harming themselves. Even if fat people could change their weight (and there's a lot of science that shows that losing weight is incredibly difficult, and often impossible), they harm no one but themselves. Presumably, they are rational people, and have decided that even if losing weight were possible for them, the short-term pain outweighs the long-term benefits, and they, not I, are the experts on their own utility functions.

However, we can reasonably expect long-term positive effects of ridiculing religion. We want people to stop using religion to hurt other people. We know how religion harms people: people use religion to justify and perpetuate sexism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, national chauvinism, and a host of other obvious ills. We know that people use religion to perpetuate subordination, exploitation, and in some cases outright victimization. And we know that the underlying justification — some people know what God wants, and what God wants overrides anything that mere human beings might want — is utterly without merit.

(I want to take a brief sidebar and address the argument: I'm (this or that religion), and I don't think that God wants us to be sexist, racist, exploitative, etc. The fundamental problem with religion is not content but methodology. You don't know any better than the sexists, racists, etc. about what God does or does not want. You have to appeal either to personal revelation or to scripture. If you appeal to revelation, then the charisma and rhetorical skill of those who claim revelation becomes more ethically persuasive than the content of the revelation. If you appeal to scripture, then, well, scripture is equivocal enough that it's certainly possible to read most anything into it, but you're still relying on the charisma and rhetoric of the interpreter, rather than the content of the interpretation, for ethical persuasion. If you want to argue on the basis of content, then you don't need God in the first place: we can just look at the content directly.)

We won't stop all sexism, misogyny, racism, etc. ad nauseam by convincing people to stop being religious (or just stop being such assholes about their religion), but I think we could put a real dent in these social ills. And whatever positive effects religion might have, if we can tell that that effects are positive without appeal to religion, then we can find non-religious ways of gaining the effects.

We also have to look at the potential negative effects. First, ridicule might be ineffective. Ridicule often enough is effective, but it's not always effective. But the immediate short-run effects are relatively small: some people have their feelings hurt. Just having a small negative effect is not a justification by itself — a small harm is still a harm — but it does say that the risk of ineffectuality is relatively low.

More importantly, when individuals of a particular religion are generally subjugated in some context, ridicule can perpetuate and justify that subjugation. For example, one argument against Charlie Hebdo is that because Muslims are generally subjugated in France, ridiculing Islam perpetuates and justifies that subjugation. This argument has some merit but I think there are some good counter-arguments.

First, Muslims in France are not subjugated because they are Muslims (much less because Charlie Hebdo ridiculed them). I'm no expert in French sociology, but as a communist, I tend to see the underlying cause of subjugation and exploitation as capitalism, not religion. If Muslims really are subjugated in France, it's because capitalism requires that somebody be subjugated, and the Muslims (perhaps among others) just got the shitty end of the stick: if it weren't the Muslims, then it would be someone else. I obviously don't think that people should be subjugated because of their religion (or race, or gender, or any other ineluctable characteristic), but I also don't think that we should distribute subjugation "fairly": we shouldn't subjugate anyone.

But not everyone believes that capitalism is the underlying problem, or that capitalism requires subjugation, or that subjugation is necessarily bad. I would disagree with the position overall, but I do think the argument has at least some merit that the subjugation of Muslims in French society is at least in part due to their resistance to assimilation. Just being religious, just going to the Mosque on Friday instead of Church on Sunday (or no Church at all), is no barrier to assimilation, but insisting on private standards of justice, such as the permission of the subjugation of women, or restrictions on others' free speech, can be barriers to assimilation.

The position of Muslim immigrants to France is very different from the position of Black people in the United States: Black Americans were forcibly brought to the United States and forced into literal chattel slavery (along with genocide and wars of aggression, one of the Unforgivable Curses). Their presence in the United States is 100% the result of and the responsibility of White Americans. Black Americans have zero duty to "assimilate" to a culture that forced their inclusion; White Americans have at the very least (and we have a lot more duties) a duty to simply take Black Americans as they are, and change ourselves to include them fully in American society. In contrast, Muslim immigrants to France came there, presumably, because they thought French society was better than their original society. And French colonialism was not slavery; decolonization is obviously justified, but non-assimilative immigration seems more difficult to justify.

Assimilation and acculturation are obviously complicated issues: immigrants, by virtue of acceptance into a culture, are entitled to participate in the social construction and evolution of that culture. But, frankly, ridicule (on both sides) is a part of the process of social construction. Even native-born members of a culture have a duty of enculturation; as a native-born White American, I cannot simply say that I am who I am, and everyone else has to unconditionally adjust around me. And if were I try to say that, I would subject myself to ridicule.

The point is: Unlike Black Americans, French Muslims did not start out as completely powerless. They chose to came (and the French chose to accept them), so they are part of the process. Immigrants have the right to argue, by any appropriate and effective means, for whatever cultural change they want; unlike White Americans, the French also have the right to argue back. They should avoid perpetuating subjugation, but unless Muslims were almost completely powerless, just because they are exploited to some extent in France does not mean they are immune to criticism. And if ridicule is legitimately part of that argument back, that criticism, then so be it.

(In contrast, the only "argument" White Americans have is, "I'm sorry. What happened to you and what is happening now is completely inexcusable. I can't change the past, but I will do today whatever you think is reasonable or moderate to fix the problem.")

We next have to ask: is there a better alternative to ridicule? Obviously, rational persuasion is always better. But rational persuasion is singularly ineffective when it comes to changing most people's religious beliefs. (Rational persuasion does work on some individuals, and in general having a rational basis for any position is valuable.) When rational persuasion fails to correct harmful behavior, we must resort to stronger measures. I am not a lets-hold-hands-and-sing-Kumbaya mushy liberal; I will not give up just because a harm requires stronger methods to correct. I think ridicule is a stronger method than rational persuasion, but it is milder than outright coercion. The most puerile, immature, scatalogical, and even misguided ridicule might sting, but I'll take it any day over the policeman's baton or the soldier's bayonet. Furthermore, a lot of religious people are just as offended, have their feelings just as hurt, just by people saying they disagree with them, much less offering rational criticism. So I think that the harm done by ridicule is often no worse than rational criticism, and substantially less worse than outright violent coercion. And ridicule is very different from, and less bad than, threats, harassment, or near-incitement.

Finally, we socialize ridicule by letting anyone do it. Ridiculing other people is a right, not a privilege. It's not even a privilege of the rich; it doesn't take that much wealth to print a magazine, and almost no wealth to ridicule people on the internet. No one, I think, can legitimately argue that unlike, for example, the Koch brothers, Charlie Hebdo used their immense wealth to magnify the impact of their speech; before the attacks, the magazine had been flying six inches from the ground for years, with a circulation in the tens of thousands (compared to the ~64 million just in Metropolitan France). I'm not saying that White (or non-Muslim) privilege is non-existent, but it's hard to tie any kind of privilege to Charlie Hebdo. (If France had actually tried to shut down any satirical publications because they were Islamic, that might be different, but I've seen no evidence of that. Even then, the response would not be to condemn Charlie Hebdo for using its privilege, but to condemn the French for creating the privilege.)

We can always argue that some instance of ridicule is misguided, mistaken, unwarranted, or otherwise defective. But we can always argue that any position, expressed in any form, from a scientific paper to a casual remark, is somehow defective. It is never wrong to criticize any speech for its content. But if we disapprove of ridicule itself just because it hurts people's feelings, then to be consistent, I think we have to disapprove of a lot of things, like criticism and simple disagreement, that also hurt people's feelings. If we want to disapprove of specific kinds of ridicule, then we have to justify why those specific kinds of ridicule are wrong, but not others.

I have not yet seen a compelling argument that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists did anything more wrong than does anyone else who expresses strong opinions about socially important issues. They made some mistakes — as does everyone — and may have missed their intended targets — as does everyone — but I think they both intended to and actually were making the world a better place. Their deaths are not just an offense against the general prohibition against killing, but a real loss for the world.