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.

Pragmatism

Lord Keynes (not to be confused, presumably, with the late John Maynard Keynes) has a good overview of ethical philosophy. Lord Keynes supposes that

a serious ethical theory must pass three tests:

(1) it must not commit the “appeal to nature” fallacy;

(2) it must explain how it overcomes or is consistent with G. E. Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy,” and

(3) it must explain how it overcomes or is consistent with Hume’s “is–ought” problem (sometimes called Hume’s Law and Hume's Guillotine). [Links original]

Lord Keynes has a good starting point, but he* omits some important considerations.

*I'm presuming that "Lord" is meant in a gendered sense.

First of all, a naturalist such as myself must first ask: what facts does the theory try to explain? This question lies, I think, the core of the opposition to G.E. Moore's non-naturalism. Although I haven't made a detailed study of Moore's ethics, he(and ethical non-naturalism in general) seems to assert that ethics by definition cannot simply be an explanation of some facts. Instead, ethics is the study not of how the objective* world actually is; ethics is the study of how the world ought to be and therefore is actually not. By definition, we cannot differentiate naturally between all the different ways the world is not. There is no natural, scientific truth about how the world objectively ought to be, i.e. one preferable way (or a definable subset of ways) the objective world is not, because there are no observable facts about different ways the world is not that a scientific theory could explain.

*I mean "objective" here in the sense of including only the world outside our minds.

Although there's no metaphysical basis for believing that natural science has a monopoly on truth or knowledge, we should not blithely assume that even if we eliminate science a priori that there is a non-scientific truth to be found. Assuming arguendo that science does give us truth*, my first response to someone placing a domain of discourse outside the bounds of scientific truth is to then ask why we should conclude there is any truth at all in that domain. If science is ruled out, why should we then believe there is any such thing as non-scientific ethical truth? Even if we have some intuition that there really are ethical truths, we already know our intuition is a fallible guide; we need a more rigorous demonstration that there really is something out there to be found in some nonscientific, non-naturalistic way.

*Denying this assumption does not immediately help the case for alternative kinds of truth or knowledge.

The case for non-naturalistic ethics seems similar to a particular apologetic strategy of placing God outside the bounds of natural knowledge, and then assuming the existence of a God. The response is similar: to place God, or anything else, outside the bounds of scientific knowledge makes the assertion of its existence, and even meaning, suspect.

If you were paying attention, you saw me sneak in a subtle bias above, when I talked about objective reality, i.e. the world outside our minds. But, of course, the subjective is also real, and we have ample natural, scientific, observational evidence to conclude that minds really do exist, and enough evidence to conclude that our minds are an emergent physical property of physical brains*. And, it seems, there are some interesting facts to explain about minds, facts that seem to bear a striking resemblance to the sorts of things philosophers label as "ethics."

*Like all scientific theories, this conclusion is provisional, and does not exclude the possibility that we might have evidence in the future to radically revise our understanding of minds.

There are some observable facts about our minds: human beings have preferences, we live socially, and our societies are the result of dialectical processes, the most notable of which are the dialectics between selfishness and altruism (both terms broadly construed) and between social norms and individual desires. And indeed, ethical philosophy concerns itself with these dialectics. Some ethical philosophies take a more reductive view and simply declare either selfishness or altruism, or either social norms or individual desires, irrelevant, impossible, or evil; most nuanced philosophies acknowledge these dialectics at least as tensions, and usually try to resolve the tensions analytically.

Ethics takes its normative character from the fact that human beings are not merely passive, sphexish objects moved around by social reality, but rather actors, beings that act on both the physical and social world to satisfy their preferences and achieve their goals. Furthermore, society presents tensions and dialectics: we cannot satisfy many of our preferences without a society, but society actively frustrates our preferences (see e.g. Freud's The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents.) Fundamentally, then, the study of ethics in the purely descriptive sense consists of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and, to some extent, political science and economics. How have people historically worked out the dialectic between selfishness and altruism, and between social norms and individual desires? But as noted before, people are not just passive objects, they are actors, operating in the present. So we can talk — still scientifically, still naturally, because people and their minds actually exist — about all the different things people want now, and how we can negotiate to decide some reasonably coherent set of goals for the future, and set about achieving them.

Looked at in this way, most of the confusion about ethics seems to disappear. The relevant facts are precisely those subjective facts about how human beings want to change both the physical and social world. The constraints are first how the physical world actually is, and how our actions effect it, and second, how our physical and cultural evolutionary history interacts with our preferences.

I tend to call this view pragmatism: the nontrivial study of how human beings can most effectively change the physical and social world so as to satisfy our preferences and goals. Pragmatism is a fundamentally consequentialist, i.e. concerned primarily with outcomes. Pragmatism is also, in a loose* sense utilitarian, concerned with the promotion of human "happiness" and the reduction of "suffering." (Note that pragmatism should not be confused with expediency or populism, both of which select out some features of normative standards, either immediate effect or majority opinion, as definitive and exclusively authoritative. Pragmatism holds that all the consequence, for all people, are relevant, even though sometimes the immediately useful or the majority opinion might be the pragmatically best option.)

*i.e. without the Benthamite commitment to a strictly linear notion of suffering/happiness and a strictly additive notion of aggregate happiness, which seems like a technical flaw in Benthamite utilitarianism, not a fundamental flaw.

There are, of course, objections to pragmatism. First pragmatism is well, not something other than pragmatism. If one is committed a priori to non-naturalism, then pragmatism is, by virtue of its naturalism, unacceptable. If one is committed to deonticism, pragmatism is, by virtue of its consequentialism, unacceptable. If one is committed to objectivism, then pragmatism is, by virtue of its inherent subjectivism, unacceptable. Pragmatism is what it is, however, and to simply say that it's wrong because it's not an alternative theory is to beg the question at some level or another.

Sometimes these objections are subtly disguised. For example, one might argue, for example, that if the vast majority of people wanted slavery, and very few people objected to it, then pragmatism would condone slavery. The pragmatic response is that the vast majority of people don't want slavery and most do object to it. The opponent believes here that slavery is objectively wrong. But what is the basis for this conclusion? If it is the present unpopularity of slavery, then the evidentiary basis for both our theories would be contradicted by nature. If the opponent believes slavery is objectively wrong for some other reasons than present unpopularity, then she has the burden of explicating those reasons in a non-question-begging way.

Another objective to pragmatism is that it does not provide any guide as to what we should prefer; pragmatism takes our existing preferences, as well as the mutability of those preferences, as facts about the world. But this objection again begs the question: why should an ethical theory tell us what we should prefer, instead of giving us guidance on how we can negotiate and achieve our preferences in a social context? Simply that one prefers than an ethical theory guide our preferences is committing the same "sin" of taking his preferences for granted that he ascribes to pragmatism.

Fundamentally, pragmatism at least satisfies Lord Keynes requirements. It does not commit the "appeal to nature" fallacy, nor does it commit the "is-ought" fallacy, because it does not take the natural world, the world as it is, as the ethical ideal: it recognizes that people want to change the world. It makes an end-run around Moore's naturalistic fallacy, by simply declaring Moore's meta-ethics as incoherent; pragmatism is naturalistic, but takes as its primary domain the subjective, not the objective world.

Thus, I am a pragmatist.

HH on Pragmatism

In a comment on the running debate on Pragmatism, HH asks:

What would your opinion be to the idea that deontological ethics may simply be the result of a long forgotten pragmatism. Where the pragmatic was the initial impetus but over time the pragmatic justifications fall away, perhaps once understood by everyone, and become the ethical rules or moral duties that people inherit. Even our moral/ethical instincts, it could be argued, are the result of the pragmatism required for survival.

Remember, a justification can be different from a causal history.

I suspect the causal history of our moral beliefs is more evolutionary than intentional. There is some sort of heritable variation, and some sort of selection process (which could be group selection, because ideas don't have the "filling the pool" barrier that genes do), and what we see in our actual cultural ideas is the result of that selection. I don't know how one would go about scientifically proving that's what actually happened, or precisely how we are where we are today, but conceptually, the idea of cultural and moral evolution seems straightforward.

Morality is, of course, a phenomenon of learning beings, and human intelligence is just soup-up learning, so it's likely that some of our moral beliefs are intentionally constructed, and we might have, for some of those, subsequently lost intentionality. But others may never have been intentional ever: they arose by chance, were inherited, and not yet selected against.

But the question is not how did we get the moral beliefs we have today. Instead, s what beliefs do we want preserve into tomorrow?

HH quotes the post:

That pragmatism says that sometimes people have preferences for outcomes that most other people would consider bad, it's doing the job that any meta-ethical system must do.

and asks:

I think I understand what you are saying but unless you are suggesting that popularity be the metric of how ethical a pragmatic solution is, you still have the problem of why any proposed outcome is more ethical than alternatives. Could deonto-ethics just be the initial position that violation of X core moral principles is a worse pragmatic outcome than other outcomes. Does pragmatism need to fiat assume what outcomes are better or worse before actions can be evaluated?

I avoid saying things like "popularity be the metric of how ethical a pragmatic solution is." It assumes there is some quality "ethicalness", which is ontologically distinct from but is hypothesized to be causally linked to another quality, "popularity." Because we can measure popularity, if the causal linkage were true, then popularity would serve as a proxy for ethicalness.

However, I start by saying I have no idea what "ethicalness" might mean, as an inherent property of actions or conditions, independent of our beliefs about those actions and conditions. Thus, the best I can say about popularity is that when making a social decision, c.p. the society will make the more popular decision.

What would you say is ,at least for you, the ultimate objective of ethics? Why be ethical?

I don't really worry about ultimate objectives. I'm just trying to make the world a better place, i.e. one that I would approve of more than I approve of the world we have. I'll let God worry about ultimate objectives.

theObserver on Do the ends justify the means?

In Do the ends justify the means? theObserver replies to my earlier post of the same name. See my post for our earlier comments.

theObserver begins with a concise, accurate summary of my position:

Larry explains that although all three constructions are problematic, he has come down in favor of the pragmatic view. Deontic ethics suffer from unsolvable epistemic problems while a mixed view only introduces the weakness of both deontic and pragmatic ethics without resolving either. Pragmatism on the other hand offers the possibility of making justifiable decisions through analyzing the outcomes and learning through our knowledge of cultural evolution. Furthermore the meta-ethics of pragmatism contains less ontological entities making analysis more straightforward and consistent.

Note that I typically use pragmatism as a rough synonym for consequentialism. I want to differentiate my ideas from deonticism or essentialism (an actions has an intrinsic moral value independent of its effects) on the one side and expediency on the other (an action can be judged completely on the basis of their short-term or some other limited subset of its effects.)

theObserver has a number of objections. First, he objects that pragmatism is still complicated. It's hard to know the effects, and it's hard to analyze the effects we do know. Second, he also objects that there are some ethical ideas, such as "[g]lory, honor, nationalism, even democracy and liberty" that we cannot, because they are not ends, pragmatically analyze. Third, he complains that pragmatism as recognizes that people can have "bad" preferences, but a meta-ethical system should not simply recognize but systematically fix bad preferences. These objections, however, do not seem to undermine pragmatism in any important way.

I don't see the first problem as a problem at all: I don't claim that pragmatism is a silver bullet. I would see as valid the objection that pragmatism is complicated only if the alternatives were simpler and at least just as valuable as, if not better than, pragmatism. But, as I write in the original post, while certainly simpler, deonticism is considerably worse than pragmatism, because it gives us no systematic justification for moral values at all. Remember, a truly deontic moral system must evaluate the moral value of actions independently of their effects. We must, somehow, justify a prohibition against murder independently of the dead body. Once you reject "God says so," or "The chief says so," it's hard to get a handle on how to justify deontic ethics without somehow importing a pragmatic analysis, as theObserver does in his evaluation of Stalin. So, yes, pragmatism is complicated. We can't just predict of all the effects in infinite time and space, precisely evaluate them, and do a rigorous benefit-cost analysis to come to a concrete, deterministic judgment. But once we know where the messiness, imprecision, and differences of opinion lie, we can start to apply all the intellectual tools we have developed to make improvements.

Second, we can judge some ethical ideas pragmatically, and if we cannot judge some others, so what? Does the social construction of democracy, for example, as best we can judge lead to overall positive or negative outcomes? If positive, then it is a useful social construct; if negative, it is a candidate for modification. Is liberty itself a positive or negative outcome? If it seems that sometimes liberty is positive and sometimes negative, then it's worthwhile to analyze why that would be so. And suppose we cannot just cannot evaluate "honor" in a pragmatic way. Perhaps, then, it is simply not an ethically important idea. It cannot be a criticism of pragmatism just that pragmatism is not deontic; such a criticism would simply beg the question.

I don't quite understand theObserver's third point: "If a pragmatic meta-ethical framework consistently allows "bad" preferences for outcomes then we must alter our meta-ethical framework to fix the problem." The phrase "allows 'bad' preferences" seems vague here. First, any meta-ethical system must account for the existence of both good and bad somethings. That pragmatism says that sometimes people have preferences for outcomes that most other people would consider bad, it's doing the job that any meta-ethical system must do. Second, no meta-ethical system by itself solves any ethical conflicts. People use meta-ethical systems to evaluate situations and guide their actions. Thus, retrospectively applying pragmatism and seeing that the outcome of some choice was bad, because (presumably) either the actors did not apply a pragmatic framework and act to effect the best foreseeable outcome, or they did the best they could with limited human knowledge, would not seem to undermine the analytical framework.

This third objection arose in the framework of a specific case. In his comment, theObserver seems to imply that pragmatism was a sufficient justification for Stalin's evils (accepting arguendo the alleged existence, magnitude, and motivation of those evils): "Thus in post-war France, philosophers like Sartre were able to welcome Stalin’s slaughter and the show trails because they showed, perversely, the great cause was worth fighting for." As I remarked in a followup post, Ethics, meta-ethics, death, and killing,, theObserver here is not even alleging a pragmatic justification, neither for Stalin nor Sartre.

So, fundamentally, theObserver's critique here seems to be that pragmatism does not give us easy, "plug-and-chug" answers to ethical problems; true, but why should we expect easy answers? Pragmatism is not deonticism; indeed: it is different. And the philosophy pragmatism is not itself a moral actor. Of course not; no philosophy is. I think pragmatism easily withstands theObserver's challenge.

Ethics, meta-ethics, death, and killing

In his comment to my post, Do the ends justify the means?, theObserver encourages "radical honesty." theObserver believes that all ethical systems are to some extent flawed and self-serving. While I don't agree that all ethical systems are "flawed" — I don't know what would constitute a flaw in an ethical system — I do agree that all ethical systems are in a sense self-serving: an ethical system just is systematic expositions of one's socially relevant preferences. But theObserver raises an interesting question: Do one's preferences dictate a meta-ethical system or any of its components?

In one sense, the question is trivial, since if you dig down deep enough, one's preferences, in some sense, dictate everything. Even science: our preferences dictate what we choose to study scientifically, how we choose to study it, and how what kinds of models we use to describe an object of study. Yes, some specific propositions emerge from this methodology that are preference-independent, but as philosophers since Kuhn have noted, the whole process is so subjective and preference-driven that the notion that science is absolutely "objective" and preference-independent is obviously incorrect.

In another sense, though, we do have methodologies, such as science, that really do subvert some of our preferences. It would be unacceptably reductionist to simply say that we just believe what we prefer to believe, without any reference to constraints imposed on our beliefs by observation, experience, and reason. Thought is complicated, and I don't think it a good theory to say that every particular thing a person does and says results directly from a preference that is simply a brute fact of his or her consciousness. On the other hand, people do have preferences which do inform their speech and action, and while these preferences presumably have a causal history, they are actual facts about the world.

As theObserver correctly notes, the difference between deontological and pragmatic meta-ethics is philosophical rather than scientific; neither deontological nor pragmatic meta-ethics by itself actually solves any particular ethical question. But that observation seems unsurprising. If someone has "bad" preferences, i.e. the sort of preferences that you, gentle reader, and I both find unacceptable or abhorrent, phrasing them in terms of deonticism or pragmatism isn't going to make those preferences any better. I claim that at best, pragmatism makes the analysis of ethical beliefs, good and bad, more straightforward and consistent.

theObserver, however, goes on to make a stronger claim:

Modern history offers its own objections [to pragmatism], even when using a pragmatists own standard. France for example with its long history of revolutionary political violence accepted such violence as the inevitable price of change. Thus in post-war France, philosophers like Sartre were able to welcome Stalin’s slaughter and the show trails because they showed, perversely, the great cause was worth fighting for. The communist revolution was the Party and to dissent against the Party was to weaken the revolution. Therefore sacrifices must be made for the great cause.

It is not clear, however, how pragmatism per se is the culprit here. First, even granting arguendo that Sartre and others really did "welcome Stalin's slaughter and show trials" (I don't know either way), the actual argument is that the extremity of the means justified the ends. This argument might be labeled as perverse deonticism, but it is not pragmatism. A pragmatist could argue only that the ends were so valuable that even the "slaughter and show trials" were of lesser consequence than the value those means obtained. That's a much more difficult case to make; given uncertainty and a welfare-utilitarian view of outcomes, I think the pragmatic case cannot be made. I think the only way to make the case for egregious acts of brutality against human beings is to take a deontic view (e.g. communism is inherently better than capitalism, regardless of any specific consequences), which is of course not an argument against pragmatism, or to take a non-welfare-utilitarian view of outcomes (e.g. the best outcome is one where I have absolute power over other people).

The latter "bad" case above just rests on "bad" preferences for outcomes. But it is already admitted that a meta-ethical system does not by itself entail that one's actual preferences are good. A meta-ethical system is just a framework for conceptualizing ethics. In much the same sense, the scientific method does not mean that all actual science performed by scientists accurately describes the real world; it's just a framework for a process. So just like saying that a scientist can do bad science (or even do good science and get fooled by the world, which happens a lot),
simply saying that a pragmatist can have bad ethics is not by itself an argument against pragmatism.

And in fact, the theObserver's pragmatic analysis of the specific ethical failures of Stalin shows the power of pragmatism as an analytic tool. The outcome wasn't worth the means to get there; if the outcome had been worth it, if the Soviet Union were today a Stalinist paradise, we would be as tolerant of its historical faults, however grievous, as most people are of the historical faults of every other society, including our own*. We judge Stalin bad not because he contravened any deontic, inherent ethical truth, but because he failed. The ends were insufficiently good to justify the means.

*Stalin is a monster, and communism is utterly discredited, because Stalin unjustly tried and killed a few hundred thousand people. The founders of the American Republic, however, who suborned the actual enslavement of millions of human beings and laid the foundation for our present society that imprisons and oppresses millions of black and Hispanic human beings and is has killed tens of millions of human beings for its colonialist and imperialist ambitions, were intelligent, thoughtful men struggling as best they could (and quite well indeed) with difficult political problems, and they helped build today's capitalist society , which is, absent a few judicious reforms, a successful, vibrant political system which should serve as a model for the rest of the world.

theObserver continues:

You may answer ‘Yes but as a result of pragmatism I no longer support a party system and instead support delegate democracy.’ Fair enough. But cost of that knowledge was horrendous and consequentialist ethics were deployed to justify these actions in opposition to deontological ethics. If we were to pragmatically choose ethical systems based on pragmatism by observing outcomes, I don’t think pragmatism itself comes out ahead very often.

I don't see this as much of an objection. First, all knowledge, and all changes in our ethical beliefs, have come about by horrendous costs. All of human history is written in the blood of children. More importantly, I am not convinced that "consequentialist ethics were deployed to justify these actions in opposition to deontological ethics." As theObserver himself notes, the difference between consequentialist/pragmatic and deontic ethics is philosophical, not scientific: any ethical belief, good or bad, can be framed in both pragmatic and deontic terms, and any objection to some ethical belief can be similarly framed in both meta-ethical terms. One can, therefore, simply frame everything bad that's happened in pragmatic terms, and frame all the objections in deontic terms, and poof! pragmatism comes out looking terrible. One can also do the opposite, of course, and find deonticism to be completely horrible. Therefore, this kind of analysis does not seem promising.

However, it's worth noting that deontic meta-ethics often tries to frame its principles in terms of pragmatism or pseudo-pragmatism. As theObserver notes, deontic ethicists assert that deontically worse actions (somehow) always have "negative and usually unforeseen consequences"; they also usually assert that deontically better actions always have positive consequences. To the extent that the consequences of actions can be judged independently of the means, then they are simply asserting the equivalence of deonticism and pragmatism. However, there are three varieties of pseudo-pragmatism. The first is vacuous pseudo-pragmatism: the best outcomes are whatever happens to occur from deotically better actions; we cannot judge an outcome independently of the means used to obtain it. So if, for example, the deontically good free market system entails that we have massive unemployment and a permanent hyper-exploited and imprisoned underclass, well, those must be good outcomes; people are getting what they deserve, or, bad as these outcomes might be, any change would be for the worse. The second is unfalsifiable pseudo-pragmatism: submitting to the Church's moral authority will have a pragmatically better outcome, more people will go to heaven in the afterlife), but while the pragmatic outcomes can be independently judged (it is better per se to go to heaven than hell), they cannot be independently observed. Finally, there's delusional pragmatism, means justified by some imaginary end that cannot possibly be known to result from those means. None of these are actual pragmatism (rational pragmatism entails that the ends be reasonably knowable and known), but all four of these cases show the value of pragmatism: even when they cannot do so, and have to retreat into metaphysical bullshit, the pragmatic argument remains powerful.

Finally, I want to confront one of theObserver's points head on. "How many people can we kill to make the world a better place for the rest? How much must I sacrifice to reach my goal?" These are questions that demand, I think, answers less simplistic than "none" and "nothing," respectively. How many people should we have killed to end slavery? We can argue that perhaps, the answer is less than the hundreds of thousands who died in the U.S. Civil War, but to answer none at all is to suborn chattel slavery. How many should Gandhi have encouraged to protest, exposing them to death, to achieve Indian independence? Hundreds, perhaps a thousand, were killed in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre alone. How many construction workers have to fall to their deaths or electricians have to be electrocuted so we can have our homes and offices? Again, the answer might be fewer than actually occur, but none? We live in a hostile and uncertain world, and we have to make trade-offs, sometimes trade-offs that result in people's death. If you absolutely condemn killing as unjustifiable, then you also, I think, have to absolutely condemn putting people in situations where you know some will die; else you cannot condemn Hitler, who never, as far as I know, actually killed anyone. And, fundamentally, if you will not kill, or suborn actual killing, you cannot defend yourself against tyranny and oppression.

This is not to say that killing and death are entirely unproblematic, tools as benign as eating and drinking. They always result in, well, the deaths of human beings, which is an unarguably bad outcome. Without a doubt we always want to have fewer deaths (i.e. shortened lives), but we cannot have zero.

Do the ends justify the means?

Do the ends justify the means? To understand this question we have to deconstruct it. There are, I think, three ways to look at this question. First, we can say that we can ethically judge only the means: good ends, whatever they might be, are just the ends that results from good means; on this view, the ends cannot justify the means. Second, we can say that we can ethically judge only ends; good means, whatever they might be, are just those that result in good ends. The third is to say that we can judge both the means and the ends, and sometimes we have to weigh the good of the ends against the bad of the means (and vice-versa): sometimes we might have to employ bad means to obtain a good end (e.g. lying to the Nazis to hide the Jews); sometimes we have to accept bad ends to employ good means (e.g. risking a Romney victory by not voting for Obama because he's insufficiently progressive). The first is usually labeled deontic ethics, the second pragmatic ethics, and the third is a mixture, juxtaposition, or dialectical combination of deontic and pragmatic ethics.

All three constructions are problematic.

Deontic ethics have an essentially epistemic problem: how do we know whether some means are intrinsically good or bad, independently of the ends? We have our intuitions about means, but how do we know our intuitions are accurate? Remember, for everyone who asserts that lying or killing is intrinsically wrong, independently of the outcome, there's another who asserts that atheism, or homosexuality, or equal rights for women or black people, etc. is intrinsically wrong, regardless of the outcome that would result from tolerating the intrinsic wrong. But how do they know? By definition, we cannot evaluate the intrinsic ethical character of some means by looking at their ends, so what can we observe to determine the character of means, especially when there's controversy about people's intuitive opinions of means?

Pragmatic ethics suffer from the "Omelas" problem, from Ursula LeGuin's story. What if we really could achieve very great positive ends (the deep "spiritual" fulfillment of a whole society) by small but horrific means (the unremitting torture and degradation of a single child)? It intuitively seems that there are some acts that shock our consciences so deeply that even though the harm is relatively small, no possible gain could justify it, especially when the harm is intentionally inflicted, rather than accidentally occurring. That there are some means that seem so desperately wrong that no ends could possibly justify them deeply challenges pragmatism.

A mixed strategy just brings in both problems without resolving either.

Fundamentally, I've come down on the pragmatic view. We can, in theory, judge only ends, not means; it therefore trivially follows that the ends justify the means. We can see people's happiness and suffering more directly than we can see the ethical value of means, and our judgment of happiness and suffering (broadly defined) as good and bad, respectively, seem relatively uncontroversial. Once we accept that human (or sapient, or sentient) happiness and suffering are morally relevant, our epistemic problem disappears.

But the pragmatist must explain our intuition that means really do have intrinsic moral character. Even (and perhaps especially) if these intuitions were completely erroneous, why would we have them? Why do they seem so compelling? Why do some walk away from Omelas? Why do we have very different intuitive reactions to the different constructions of the Trolley Problem, even though the outcomes seem exactly identical?

Although pragmatism solves the foundational epistemic problem posed by deontic ethics, it has its own practical epistemic problem. We cannot know all the ends that will from any means even in the short term, and we know no ends at all in the long term. Theoretically, a pragmatic philosophy must look at every implication of every actions, however trivial, until the end of time, to make an optimal choice. This kind of infinite analysis seems entirely impossible.

A curious paradox! We can know what the means are exactly, but we have no basis to judge them. We can judge the outcomes consistently, but we cannot know completely and exactly what they actually will be. We cannot judge what we can know, and we cannot know exactly what we can judge.

However, while the epistemic problem of deonticism seems fundamentally unsolvable, the epistemic problem of pragmatism is at least partially tractable. We cannot analyze outcomes completely, but we can often analyze outcomes well enough to make justifiable decisions. We can, for example, analytically predict with measurable confidence that laws against murder really will result in greater overall happiness, with the benefits clearly outweighing the drawbacks, even though we don't completely know the outcome in precise detail. If chance* really does exist, then chance seems to be proportional to distance and time: it is impossible to predict the effect that my eating eggs in the US for breakfast this morning will have on a middle-class family in China because all the chance between me and them renders the effects of my actions unpredictable.

*In the sense of in-principle unpredictability, which is compatible with ontological determinism.

In addition to our reasonable analytic capacity, we also develop our pragmatic understanding from cultural evolution. We know from history, for example, that people seem happier and suffer less in societies that have a particular range of liberty, somewhere between absolute submission to authority and chaotic, uncoordinated individualism. This finding is not directly analytical, but seems scientifically supported by a study of history. Thus, there is evidence that our moral intuitions about means is just our accumulated understanding of what has and has not pragmatically worked in the past; it's not some mystical judgment about the means themselves, independent of any possible ends.

Indeed, I've argued before, the main problem with Omelas (and related arguments) are their lack of realism. It's difficult to believe that the torture of a child really could result in the spiritual fulfillment of a whole society. We might be reacting negatively to the torture of a child simply because, on some intuitive level, we do not believe that such torture really could have good results; we might really object that the result of the torture could not possibly be as LeGuin describes it. Other counter-arguments, such as the Trolley Problem, can be similarly recast in pragmatic/habit forms.

We cannot differentiate between deontic and pragmatic meta-ethics directly by experiment. Every pragmatic conclusion can be recast as a deontic conclusion, simply by saying that it's irrelevant that deontically good means tend to have pragmatically good ends, simply because we've become conditioned to approve of the ends that come from good means, just as in a pragmatic philosophy, we say that we become conditioned to deontically approve of the means that generate good pragmatic ends. We can, however, differentiate between deontic and pragmatic meta-ethics metaphysically: pragmatism is simpler and more direct than deonticism, with fewer ontological entities. Hence, pragmatism is a better meta-ethical system than deonticism.

What gives you the right?

A friend of mine asked me yesterday, "What gives a society the right to coerce [some] of its members?" He didn't ask this question rhetorically, he believes that sometimes society really does have the right to coerce its members, so he wants to know where these rights come from, and how we know what they are.

My friend has stated earlier that he's a moral objectivist and perhaps a realist: morals, values, ethical principles really do exist, independently of our opinions about them, and we can (somehow) know they are true. I, however, have a different view. I have written at some length on meta-ethical subjective relativism, where I hold that our moral beliefs are fundamentally related to our subjective natures.

From my subjective relativistic view, I see our use of language to discuss rights is confused and sometimes fundamentally in error, especially when we draw conclusions from linguistic habits. We talk about "rights" as if they were objects "out there" in the world, in the same sense that rocks and trees, or physical laws, are "out there." But they're not. Instead, "rights" refer to two different, but related, kinds of subjective facts. First, rights refer to explicit, socially constructed legal or customary standards of behavior. The First Amendment and its associated jurisprudence, for example, establish the legal right, and the limitations of that right, of free speech. But legal rights don't exist in a vacuum; we create the legal right to recognize certain facts about the minds of people, i.e. subjective facts. First, people want free speech, at least for themselves individually. Second, we have found from experience that when we legally protect speech, our society operates more smoothly, peaceably, and responsively.

Meta-ethical subjective relativism is a fundamentally pragmatic philosophy. It's not about what we should do whether we like it or not; it's about our preferences, what we actually do like. Of course, our preferences are not infinitely labile; we are products of our biological and cultural evolutionary history, and this history constrains our actual preferences, our available preferences, and how preferences change over time.

Similarly, the natural world constrains our preferences, both individually and socially. Given how things are today, some changes in one individuals' preferences cannot easily propagate to others, and eventually disappear. Other changes in preferences result in social collapse in cultural "group selection" events, such as revolutions, conquests, military defeats, again causing those preferences to disappear from people's minds, or become so marginal that they do not much influence our overall society and culture.

So what "gives" society the right to coerce some of its members? That should be obviously not a well-formed question. Rights are not objects that can be given or received. Instead, people assert rights, and, if the right becomes sufficiently popular, begins to enforce it. People create rights, such as the right to not be murdered, because they want to live in safety. People create the government's right to tax themselves and their neighbors because they want public goods such as roads, bridges, schools, police, etc., and they want to manage the allocation of resources by taxation, because they believe that's the most effective and efficient way to obtain those public goods. Indeed we can say that a society, as opposed to some random collection of people, is defined by the rights its members hold in common.

Rights are social constructs, they are aggregate statistical features of the minds of people in a society. In any society, but especially in large societies such as most modern nations, none of these social constructs are assented to by everyone. Societies, therefore, create "meta-rights": what rights must an individual affirm to remain a member of society. These meta-rights range from the absolute (enthusiastically affirm every right in word or deed or die) to the pluralistic (some rights demand conformance in behavior or suffer punishment or death, but verbal dissent does not remove one from the society), with many gradations in that range.

Since rights are social constructs, any individual can challenge a right merely on his or her own preference. If you would prefer we manage our society without taxation, you may, in a pluralistic society such as our own, speak out and say so with neither permission nor legal consequence, on no authority but your own. The rub is, of course, that to change a right, which is a social construction, you must not only dissent from it, but convince enough other people to dissent from the right that it becomes socially "unconstructed." Thus, we socially constructed, for example, that alcohol was bad, and unconstructed the right to consume alcohol, and constructed the right for the government to punish people who bought, sold, transported or consume alcohol. Thirteen years later, we decided that was a bad idea, and reconstructed the individuals' right and unconstructed the government's right.

But what if "the people" socially construct an "unjust" right? Suppose, for example, they decided that freedom of speech was no longer either a shared preference nor a valid legal principle? Wouldn't they be mistaken, in the same sense that, for example, people who do not admit the scientific validity of evolution are just mistaken? Isn't it true in some sense that freedom of speech is a "natural" right?

Under an objectivist view, a natural right is a right that is true even if everyone were to believe it false, in again exactly the same way that evolution was true even when everyone believed it false, and in the same sense that some profound new theory of physics we may discover in a hundred years is true today even though today no one believes it. But this view is epistemically problematic. How could we know such a natural right? We cannot know it by scientific means. We know that a scientific law is actually true by never observing an exception, but of course we observe people contravening even those rights that we do hold, much less those we do not hold (because no one believes them). It seems that the only way to hold this kind of natural right as true is by divine or mystical revelation.

In the subjectivist view, a "natural" right is one that most people actually hold, due in some sense to the more-or-less fundamental biological or cultural evolution of our minds, or a right that is more consistent than its opposite with other rights that most people actually hold. A right that almost no one holds is not presently a natural right, but if human nature changes (and we are changing, biologically and culturally; change is inevitable), it might become a natural right.

We talk about the difference between natural and legal rights simply because historically, many governments have functioned with only minimal popular legitimacy. These governments regularly operated in ways that shocked the consciences of its own populace. The government didn't abridge an objectively true right, it abridged the subjective sensibilities of its own people.

I think this subjective view of rights accords more closely with history. Our changing views of rights, governments, ethics, are, unlike science, not a matter of conforming more and more closely with objective truth but a matter of reflecting how our culturally- and socially-constructed minds decide what kind of society we actually prefer, and how those preferences change over time.

Separation of church and state

In his essay, Don't tear down that wall!, Roger Ebert argues against legislating religious morality on First Amendment grounds. Ebert draws an analogy between "the eagerness of states to permit the teaching of Creationism . . . in public schools" and "the attempt to legislate birth control, abortion and other matters pertaining to birth." Because issues of birth, pregnancy, and sexuality are dictated by religious belief, attempting to legislate these matters is tantamount to imposing religious belief by law. Instead of passing laws, Ebert argues that to increase social adherence to their moral beliefs, sincere religious believers should try to convert others to their religion. Although I agree with Ebert's politics, and I'm a strong supporter of the Separation of Church and State, his analysis is flawed because he implicitly leaves no mechanism for deciding moral values in a democracy.

It would be convenient if we could use objective, secular scientific reasoning to determine the correct moral values. However, the world does not appear to work that way. As I explore in more depth in my series on Meta-Ethical Subjective Relativism, science cannot establish moral laws in the same way it establishes physical laws. A physical law is, by definition, a statement that despite careful and focused and careful effort, we cannot observe any exception. If we do observe an exception to what we thought was a physical law, we do not conclude that a "miracle" happened; we must readjust our construction of physical law to permit the observation. However, the only interesting moral "laws" are those we do observe contraventions of; a moral law prohibiting killing (under specified circumstances) is useful only to the extent that people do actually kill. Since we cannot (or it is not useful to) "falsify" a moral law by observing an exception, we simply cannot apply the scientific method to determine moral law.

There have been other philosophical approaches to determining moral law, but, lacking scientific foundation, all of them suffer from the Universal Philosophical Refutation. Science can "privilege" hypotheses only because the universe itself appears to refuse to contradict the hypothesis, but when the universe does not speak to the conclusions, any premise can, with a little ingenuity, be abandoned or replaced by its opposite without contradiction. There is no objective way you can say, that it is morally wrong to kill a person (under specific circumstances). There is no objective way you can say, we ought to (somehow) maximize the "well-being" of society. There is no objective way you can say that we should do only what everyone always ought to do. I can simply deny it's wrong to kill a person, maximize utility, or be compelled by the categorical imperative, and although we might not like or respect each other, neither of us can find a contradiction in the other's reasoning.

A democracy fundamentally rejects the idea of objective moral law. Instead of "searching for the truth," about morality, we search for ways we can all live together. Some of those ways involve prohibiting or compelling behavior. Democracy is not a simple matter of always doing what the majority says; because we are not completely stupid, we can look at issues at varying levels of abstraction and generality. A majority of us can, for example, strongly disapprove of specific, concrete speech, such as racist or sexist speech, but still strongly approve generally and abstractly of freedom of speech, and we can decide to implement the general and abstract into law. Furthermore, we have learned to institutionalize certain democratic principles, such as the First Amendment, and making the process of changing those principles complicated and difficult. But at the end of the day everything in a democracy is up to the arbitrary preferences, specific and concrete or general and abstract, of the people. The people are sovereign; because the universe constrains only how we can act, not how we ought to act, there is no higher authority on how we ought to act than the preferences of the people.

Because democracy is based on implementing arbitrary preferences, there is no good way to distinguish arbitrary preferences from arbitrary religious preferences. This is precisely the distinction Ebert tries to draw. Religions have not become popular because they completely ignore our natural preferences. Religions forbid murder and theft not because wow! who'd'a thunk it until God said so, but because a religion that excused or required wanton murder and theft would not gain many adherents. Even so, people usually attach all their moral beliefs to God; just as they believe homosexuality is wrong because God says so, they also believe that murder is wrong because God says so. They are mistaken, of course, no God exists to say anything, but they are mistaken about the justification, not the preference. A secularist is simply more direct. As a secularist, I am tolerant of homosexuality simply because I don't have any preference about what people do with their genitals*; I am intolerant of murder because I strongly prefer that people don't go around killing each other (and I don't give a tinker's damn that I'm infringing on the liberty of people who do want to kill others). The difference is not in the kind of preference, only the justification (or lack thereof); because all preferences are arbitrary, it is incoherent to talk about correct or mistaken preferences; preferences are just brute facts. Thus, it does not make sense to distinguish between different kinds of preferences; all preferences have equal standing.

Rather than placing limitations on motives, since motives are essential preferential, the First Amendment places limitations on the purposes and effects of laws. Rather than making the government either supportive or hostile to religion, the establishment and free exercise clauses, the First Amendment makes the government indifferent to religion. Thus, any law that has a primary or exclusive purpose or effect of establishing or suppressing religion is illegitimate. Although it's not consistently applied, the Lemon Test expresses this doctrine. Even if some law might have a "religious" motivation, it is legitimate so long as its primary purpose and effect are secular. Thus, even if the prohibition of murder were religiously motivated, it has a secular purpose and effect of suppressing the killing of human beings. It is sufficient to limit the purpose and effect of laws without addressing their motivations.

I myself am, of course, a strong proponent of absolute reproductive rights of women. However, I think the "religious motivation" argument against laws that would infringe on women's reproductive rights is fundamentally flawed. Laws limiting reproductive rights have a clear secular purpose: laws restricting abortion and contraception aim to and would have the effect of promoting the creation of and protecting human zygotes and blastocysts. Whether these are good secular purposes is a matter of preference (or many preferences, at different levels of generality and abstraction), but they are clearly secular: they address physical, concrete things about which we can have scientific knowledge. The secular/religious distinction does not by itself address reproductive rights.

Ebert does, however, imply a useful moral distinction. Rather than the distinction between religious and secular morality, we can draw a distinction between social and individual morality. Social morality concerns behavior that has a direct effect on others: killing people, hitting them on the head, taking their stuff, polluting their air and water, denying them employment, housing, or economic activity, etc. Even though people might have preferences as strong as they have concerning social morality, individual morality concerns behavior that does not have a direct effect on others: consensual sexual activity*, masturbation, diet, health care choices, assisted suicide/euthanasia of the terminally ill**, and similar activities. Religion, one's preferences about what to believe about God, is perhaps the most obvious form of private morality; as Jefferson says, religion (or lack thereof) "neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." By itself, religion has a purely individual effect.I t it tempting, therefore, to locate what are essentially privacy rights in the First Amendment. But that approach ignores most of Supreme Court jurisprudence. Privacy is a right, and therefore any act that affects no one but those who consent is usually considered private. But privacy rights have been located by the Supreme Court, not in the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment, but in the concept of substantive due process, a consequence of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

*that does not have a direct, substantial impact on the transmission of infectious disease.
**with appropriate protection for the poor and mentally ill.

The issue over contraception and abortion rights is important, but the argument from the establishment clause is a bad argument. It is impossible in principle and actively contrary to democracy to try to distinguish between certain kinds of arbitrary preferences. Because they involve tangible, material entities and activities, not immaterial, invisible entities such as gods and souls, contraception and abortion are, whether we like it or not, secular matters. The best constitutional arguments, indeed the ones actually made by the Supreme Court in Griswald, Roe and others, are found in substantive due process. We must, in a democracy, let people argue (and vote) for any legitimate law, regardless of their individual motivation. If we do not, then we subvert democracy by making some process sovereign over the will of the people, and, more dangerously, unacceptably privilege those individuals who implement that process.

The meaning of subjectivism

One charge against subjectivism is that it entails contradictions. If I say, "Killing Jews is bad," (because I don't like killing anyone) and Hitler says, "Kill Jews is good," (because he does like killing Jews) both statements are true, but they obviously contradict each other. Any type of theory that has this sort of internal contradiction is obviously incoherent, n'est pas? But this view misses a fundamental point: while there are certainly philosophers who would endorse this kind of view (since there are philosophers who will endorse anything) a subjectivist account of morality must talk not about the objective truth of moral statements but about their meaning.

It is a tenet of meta-ethical subjective relativism that ethical statements in general are true relative to some subjective entity or entities. In other words, ethical statements are statements not about the "objective" world (i.e. the world outside peoples minds) but about the minds of various entities. As such, seemingly contradictory ethical statements are simply statements about the properties of two different entities, and we are typically not philosophically distressed when different entities have different properties. We do not see a contradiction when we say that "Alice is tall" and "Bob is short." Similarly, the statements, "Killing Jews is good," and, "Killing Jews is bad," are not in contradiction, because they are statements about the different properties of different minds.

The subjectivist account really can't be understood as establishing a pattern of logical entailment. Subjectivism cannot attempt to establish the syllogism

Minor Premise: I dislike killing Jews
Major Premise (enthymeme): What I dislike is bad
Conclusion: Killing Jews is bad

because of the rather obvious contradiction that different people really do have radically different likes and dislikes, which would entail that mutually contradictory statements would be accepted as true. The subjectivist position can't be that "Killing Jews is bad" follows from "I dislike killing Jews;" instead, the subjectivist position must be that the statement, "Killing Jews is bad" is the same statement as "I dislike killing Jews." A subjectivist theory is not a theory about how to find ethical statements objectively true or false, it is a theory of what moral statements mean.

Now it is of course true that a lot of people really do intend an objective meaning by ethical statements. In contrast, when people say "Ice cream tastes good," they consciously and intentionally understand that they really mean "I like the taste of ice cream." In this case, the apparently objective syntax ascribing a property to ice cream itself serves only as a metaphorical idiom for the more literally accurate subjective language. But people typically don't have this idiomatic metaphor consciously in mind. Whey they say, "Killing Jews is bad," they really do mean that it is objectively true that killing Jews is bad, regardless of anyone's preferences; it is merely a happy accident (or the consequence of the objective truth) that they also dislike killing Jews. The subjectivist therefore sees the conscious meaning as a category error, an error that can be corrected only by applying idiomatic interpretation.

Whether subjectivism in general and this particular flavor of subjectivism is actually true at the meta-ethical level is a different argument. It might be true that "Killing Jews is bad" really is objectively true regardless of what anyone or everyone actually thinks. It might be true that "Killing Jews is bad" really does follow from "I dislike killing Jews." To date, however, I've been unimpressed by the arguments for either position. More importantly, I think subjectivism has a compelling positive case (which I've described in previous essays). Until someone comes up with a compelling epistemic theory that can give us any knowledge at all about the mind-independent truth of of ethical statements — a theory which, as far as I can tell, would be as revolutionary an epistemic innovation as was the scientific method — I have to go with the simpler theory that when we make ethical statements, regardless of category errors we might make in our interpretation, we cannot be talking sensibly about anything other than our own preferences.

The value neutrality of reason

Erstwhile TSIB recipient Ayaz appears to have reformed and has moved on to more sensible positions. I withdraw the charge. Bygones.

In response to my query, Ayaz makes an interesting assertion:

There definitely are huge areas of human life over which reason can have no say. Reason is value-neutral and necessarily hypothetical. Reason essentially boils down to definitions. It can say if x is true, then not x must be false. But it can never provide reasons in themselves.

Reason might tell you that if you don't want to hurt others then don't do x,y and z and that's how secular ethics largely function. But as to why we shouldn't hurt others. Well we basically just assume that on trust/faith/instinct/basic principle.

It doesn't seem a huge problem as most of us agree on those basic tenants, but it's unsettling nonetheless that when the odd psychopath comes along we can't actually use reason to demonstrate why he's wrong, all we can do is disapprove.

I disagree here on a couple of points. First of all, I think we have to disambiguate logic from reason. I think what Ayaz defines as "reason", i.e. hypothetical and concerned with definitions, would be better characterized as logic. Reason, on the other hand, consists of a certain set of logical operations and modes of inquiry based in some sense* on perceptual facts. (If you prefer a different disambiguating term, e.g. science, that's fine. I'm not too hung up on terminology.) Logic is very broad, and includes kinds of operations that do not appear immediately relevant (e.g. the Banach-Tarski "paradox") to the real, physical world and the world of perception. Reason consists of particular kinds of logic and its application to draw conclusions about the real world using perceptions as — in some sense — a "foundation."

*I say "in some sense" because one particular sense, naive empiricism, which holds perceptual facts as specifically logical axioms from which we can draw formal deductions, does not appear viable.

This view of "reason" entails a deep sense in which reason is not just value-neutral but also fact-neutral. Reason doesn't tell us what we "ought" to perceive; we just use reason to draw conclusions about what the world has to be like based on what we actually perceive. Reason would work equally well, at least at the most fundamental level, even with an entirely different body of facts. (Based on earlier exercises of reason on perceptual facts, we tend to incorporate a lot of older conclusions (causality, for example) directly into our methodology (sometimes to our detriment). But there's a big difference between a fundamental metaphysical principle and merely taking something for granted because it's so well-established.)

We can say the same thing about the "value-neutrality" of reason. We can take values as (at some level) brute facts, just as our perceptual experiences are brute facts. They are simply properties of how individual human beings actually are. (Again, I say "at some level" because the supposed "brute facts" of subjective values are probably reducible to more fundamental brute facts of neurological operation. But presumably there are still some brute facts somewhere.)

We just are what we happen to be, that there's no fundamental "reason" why we "ought to be" some particular way. There's a causal story — we have a long biological evolutionary history, and a somewhat shorter social evolutionary history — but no teleological story. We are who we are because we happened to evolve this way; we have tried a minuscule fraction of the stupendous number of ways of living, and what we have today is what wasn't selected against of the ways we've tried. We could have by accident and happenstance turned out very differently. But we have had the accidents we've had and not others; physical law has exerted its selective forces; so here we are.

I've never felt at all unsettled or disturbed by this story. It doesn't bother me in the least that I don't have a teleological reason why the "psychopath" is wrong; I'm perfectly happy basing my response directly on my own and others' disapproval. To be honest, I don't really understand, at least not internally, why any atheist would feel such discomfort; I have to take them at their word. My only response is that feeling uncomfortable without a teleological ethical narrative is no more probative than feeling uncomfortable that the physical world might not be the product of a deity's intentional design. Reason is reason, and the conclusion that our values are just complicated properties of our complicated, evolved brains seems inescapable. Simply wishing the world were more in line with our emotional prejudices doesn't change the world. And I think Ayaz wants to look outside reason for a moral narrative precisely because he doesn't like the moral narrative that reason does give us. There isn't any way the world — and human society is part of the world — "ought to be"; there is only the world as it is, and what we as physical, finite, limited, evolved creatures make of it.

Linking different views of ethics

Humanism is a fundamentally pragmatic (i.e. consequentialist) ethical system: "suffering"* is inherently bad, and "happiness" is inherently good. Suffering and happiness are states of affairs, not choices. Therefore the ethical application of humanism to choices is pragmatic: when a humanist has a choice, the correct choice is the one that leads to the least suffering and/or the most happiness (by some calculus, and it's non-trivial to determine the correct calculus); i.e. the choice that has the best consequences. Since all choices are evaluated by their outcome, humanism is fundamentally pragmatic.

*While pain, discomfort and inconvenience are related to suffering in a substantive way (and pleasure, comfort and convenience related to happiness), the concepts are distinct. A full treatment of what precisely constitutes suffering is outside the scope of this post.

In the ideal case, we might determine that some choice — such telling the truth when we have the choice between telling the truth and telling a lie — always leads to the best outcome. Since we are determining the value of the outcome independently of the nature of the choice, if we were to make this sort of determination, we would be synthetically determining the "intrinsic" value of telling the truth. Pragmatism might be in the ideal case synthetically deontic.

(Contrast this view with the "analytical" pragmatism: in a fundamentally deontic ethical view, the best outcome is defined to be what follows from the "inherently" correct choice.)

Because pragmatism at least might be synthetically deontic, the observation that we have deontic psychological attitudes does not immediately falsify pragmatism. There might still be particular deontic attitudes that would falsify pragmatism, but just observing any old deontic attitude without considering its content does not falsify pragmatism.

In a more realistic case, we have to consider imperfect information. In the ideal case, we assume we know all the available choices, we know all the consequences of each choice for the entire lifetime of the universe, and we know the "correct" calculus for determining the overall value of these consequences. We obviously do not have all of this information available to us; indeed we have very little information about the consequences of an action. So instead we make time- and space-limited generalizations — more limited than universals, and we can empirically determine generalities with confidence — about the likely consequences of an action. So when a pragmatist says telling the truth is good, she means that telling the truth will generally have the best consequences in the foreseeable future. The generalization stands as long as cases are limited where the particular outcomes of particular choices fall outside the scope of the generalization, e.g. lying to the Nazis about the Jews hiding in your basement. Indeed, it is arguable that the exceptions disappear in the ideal case: there won't be any Nazis to lie to in an ideal world where everyone has good faith, perfect information and perfect rationality.

Not only do we have to little information, we also paradoxically have too much information. Our ethical beliefs are informed by all the choices that all human beings have made since we invented the concept of ethical evaluation, sometime in our prehistory. These choices have influenced our ideas, our individual and social psychology in an evolutionary manner*: we have heritable variation of our ideas and some ideas are selected against** by nature and are thus removed from the "meme" pool. Nature cannot select directly against intentions; nature directly selects against only outcomes. Our actual cognitive structures are thus informed by at least a summary of our actual choices from the past.

*I'm talking about the direct evolution of psychological attitudes; the academic discipline of evolutionary psychology deals primarily with cognitive selection on genetic evolution. There may well be genetic factors at work in our ethical beliefs, but identifying these factors is far beyond my scientific competence.

**Selection against psychological attitudes is usually directly against the attitudes and their verbal transmission, not against the life or biological reproductive success of the individuals holding those attitudes.

So we have evolved collections of ethical ideas we actually use to evaluate our actions. But a collection of ethical ideas is just another name for a virtue. If it is empirically true that telling the truth generally leads to the best outcome (and, more importantly if it is empirically true that lying leads to bad enough outcomes that the propensity to lie has been selected against), we would expect people to retain the ethical ideas that lead us to generally tell the truth: we would expect them to evolve the virtue of honesty, even if they were not at all consciously aware that telling the truth generally led to the best outcome.

Thus we can see that pragmatic and humanistic ethics relate to the supposed "alternatives" of deontic and virtue ethics by virtue of imperfect information and the evolution of human beings' individual and social psychology.

We have an overwhelming epistemic problem trying to explain ethical behavior in fundamentally deontic or virtue-ethical way. A fundamental deontic ethical system must offer us a way of knowing which choices are intrinsically good without any appeal to an independent evaluation of the outcomes. We must say, at least in an ideal theory, that a good choice might always lead to an inferior outcome by any independent method of evaluating those outcomes. But how would we know, independently of the outcome, that such a choice really is good? The same is true of virtue ethics: how do we know some virtue is good independently of the outcome of exercising that virtue? In all my reading of philosophy (which while extensive is not, of course, exhaustive) I've not found even a hint of such an epistemic method that does not in some way covertly import an independent evaluation of the outcome. Pragmatic humanism, on the other hand, has an empirically determinable foundation: we can observe suffering and happiness: it rests on the same general epistemic foundation as all of modern science.

Not only is pragmatic humanism related to deontic and virtue ethics, the specific character of the relation succinctly explains not only our ordinary moral behavior, but also all the weird anomalies.

The canonical exception to deontic ethics is precisely the "lying to Nazis" scenario. If telling the truth is inherently good, regardless of the outcome, we should not feel any discomfort imagining that if the Nazis asked straight out if there were Jews hiding in the basement. But of course we do (or at least I do) feel an intense discomfort in such a scenario. Alternatively, if telling the truth is not inherently good, why do we feel any discomfort ever about lying, regardless of the circumstances? Clever philosopher have, of course, addressed these issues, but the efforts look more and more like epicycles; the fixes have a decidedly unreal flavor. Imperfect information and psychological evolution, however, seem immediately and concretely real.

Even supposed anomalies in pragmatism, such as the Trolley Problem, seem adequately addressed by including imperfect information and psychological evolution.

Almost all investigations into pragmatic ethical intuitions include the assumption of perfect knowledge of the outcomes. We know that pulling the lever will definitely lead to one person being struck and killed by the trolley instead of five. We know that pushing someone in front of the trolley will definitely stop the trolley, and we know that failing to do so will definitely kill five. Additionally, these problems typically assume that pragmatism entails that in actual practice we routinely make our choices by consciously considering the alternatives and making the choice that we consciously evaluate to have the best outcome. One might just as well assume that we consciously set up and solve a quadratic equation every time we catch a ball. But of course we have ethical intuitions in the first place precisely because we have imperfect information. The more removed the consequences, the more they are uncertain: the deaths caused by just switching a lever is more removed and thus more uncertain than the death caused by pushing someone on the track, but the lives saved are just as remote. It is unsurprising then that we would have different intuitions about the different cases.

(Also note that ideal deontic and virtue ethics also predicts identical choices in the different scenarios; no ideal case absent imperfect information and psychological evolution predicts different behavior. Only pragmatism, however, easily encompasses these qualifiers.)

We thus see that pragmatic, deontic and virtue ethics are really the same thing, they just operate at different levels of abstraction. "Deontic" ethics just talk about those actions that generally have the best outcome, and prescribe that we follow the generally best choice when the outcome is really unknown. Virtue ethics just talk about the psychological attitudes that we actually use to evaluate circumstances against our understanding of the generally best choice. And all rest on a fundamental foundation of pragmatism.

Baseball and religion

I have a lot of the same feelings about professional baseball (and professional sports in general) as I do about religion.

I think both professional baseball and religion are a colossal waste of time. The labor and resources we dedicate to both would be far better spent doing something else. I have no sympathy in the literal sense for baseball fans and religious congregationalists: not only do I not enjoy them, I cannot imagine enjoying sitting in a baseball stadium or a church. I find the social prestige and economic privilege we afford baseball players, managers, owners, and commentators, as well as priests, bishops, popes, and theologians, to be completely unwarranted.

Fundamentally, I think both baseball and religion are just silly: it's ridiculous to pay good money to watch a bunch of grown men in silly clothes throwing a ball around or watch a grown man (or, more rarely, a woman) in a silly hat drone on about his imaginary friend and his fanboy crush on a bunch of iron-age goat herders.

On the other hand, I think it's silly, but so what? I can certainly sympathize at a more abstract level with doing what you enjoy, whatever that might happen to be. If you enjoy something I don't , well, it's your money, spend it as you please. And every individual in a democracy has as much of a right to the public purse as any other. I'll vote against a penny in sales tax to build a baseball stadium, but once the vote's taken and I've lost, I'll pay the penny with a good will: everyone has to pay for some things we don't want, that's just life in the big city. If you enjoy baseball, or if you enjoy religion, it doesn't matter whether or not I can sympathize with you: it's a free country, do what you like; you don't have to answer to me.

Of course, along with these real and relevant similarities, there are some enormous differences. Baseball fans don't care that not everyone is a baseball fan, and they don't get all butthurt when I say out loud that I think baseball is silly. And when I say that I think baseball is silly, they don't demand that I learn the infield fly rule or the complex strategy of relief pitching. They don't get apoplectic because I don't just as vociferously indicate my dislike of football, cricket or professional bowling.

When baseball players happen to molest children, the baseball community doesn't close ranks to protect them. They don't say that only those who love baseball are good and moral people, and those who dislike baseball are unfit to be citizens. They don't organize political campaigns to take civil rights away from a class of citizens. A baseball player can't use his skill in baseball to justify violence against his wife or girlfriend. While prominent people in baseball do have social prestige, nobody says that being able to hit a tiny little ball moving at 100 MPH gives one a special insight into ethics, sexuality or law.

And they don't blow up or assassinate football fans.

The critical difference is that baseball doesn't make any special truth claims, so they don't have any special truth claims to defend against scientific or rational inquiry. They don't have to lie, they don't have to bullshit, They don't have to erect an edifice of doublethink. They just say "We like watching grown men throw a ball around; what's it to you?"

And that, of course, is why I spend a lot of time talking about religion, and no time at all talking about baseball. If the position of the religious were just that they enjoy getting together on Sunday morning and talking about their invisible friend, I'd give religion no more attention than I do baseball: it's not my cup of tea, but to each his own.

But of course that's not the case.

The major themes of this blog are atheism and religion, communism and economics, the philosophy of science, and meta-ethical philosophy. They're all related: everything about this blog is about what is a matter of truth and what is a matter of opinion, and how we determine — about matters of truth — what is actually true.

Anyone who has read even a little philosophy knows that philosophers no less than theologians have been trying for thousands of years to find a way to determine what is actually true about ethics, the truth about what is good. And what I've discovered, both from thinking as clearly as I can about the subject as well as observing the staggering, monumental failure of philosophers and theologians to offer a reasonable methodology for determining the actual truth about what is good, is that the good is a simply a matter of opinion.

That the good is a matter of opinion doesn't disturb me personally in the least, but it's apparently a very bitter pill for a lot of people to swallow. We would really like to believe that it's true genocide, slavery, racism, murder, rape, theft, misogyny, bigotry, oppression, exploitation are objectively bad. But they're not. The best we can say is that people predominantly have the opinion that these activities are objectionable, and so we deprecate them socially, sometimes violently. We simply have to come to terms that our society is an evolving set of opinions; that our social development is not a "progression" in discovering the One True Set of Ethics. In just the same sense, DNA is just an evolving set of genetic information; it's not a progression of discovering the One True Organism or Species.

Sometimes we can allow conflicting opinions (like about the value of baseball) but sometimes we can't. Just because the status of women is a matter of opinion doesn't mean we must allow men whose opinion is that women are inferior free rein to oppress and exploit their wives and daughters. Learning all the different political ways to effectively reconcile conflicting opinions requires as much careful, patient intellectual work as does puzzling out all the different scientific ways to understand the physical universe.

But to even begin this task, we have to be on the right track. It took us five or six thousand years from the invention of writing to figuring out the right track for understanding the physical world: the scientific method. Once we found the right track, our scientific knowledge started increasing exponentially: indeed, this exponential increase is how we know we found the right track. But getting on the right track means getting off the wrong track. And even in science, people violently resisted getting off the wrong track. Power and privilege is a part of it: if some persistent delusion or myth affords someone power, privilege, luxury and ease, they're not going to blithely abandon that delusion.

But it's also a matter of identity: we are what we value. When we seek to change not just someone's values but the very foundation of those values, we're reaching into the very heart of their psyche. We are, in effect, almost "killing" one person and replacing them with another. Indeed many religious people conceptualize their conversion — and many atheists conceptualize their deconversion — as being reborn: they have changed the foundation of their values: they see themselves as a new person. It's tough, it's fraught with peril, but change — even the deepest metaphysical change — is inevitable.

Billy Graham is right

Billy Graham said, "a true atheist has no real reason to believe in right and wrong or to behave sacrificially toward others." He is correct, although being — like all Christian leaders* — a lying sack of shit, he leaves out important qualifications. A true atheist** really does have no real reason to believe in objective right and wrong, and has no reason to behave sacrificially without any compensation in this world towards others.

*Christian followers, in contrast, are usually ignorant dupes.
**With some additional qualifications that follow from a skeptical, empirical metaphysical system.

Objectively true propositions are by definition true without regard to the subjective preferences of people evaluating the truth of the proposition. Even if everyone thought it was completely terrible that people got cancer (and they do), even if everyone thought it was absolutely impossible to get cancer, people would still get cancer. "Cancer exists" is objectively true, whether we like it or not, and whether we believe it or not.

What Billy Graham would like you to believe is that there are reasons to believe in objective right and wrong, moral beliefs that are true regardless of anyone's subjective preferences. If, for example, homosexuality were* objectively wrong, then it would simply be irrelevant that a substantial portion of the human race finds homosexual activity pleasurable and satisfying, and that homosexuality** does no one else any material harm.

*Updated 8 Mar 2012 from "is" to emphasize the counterfactual subjunctive.
**With the uncontroversial conditions of safety, sanity and consent that apply to all sexual activity.

In contrast, we consider stealing to be wrong because we subjectively want to keep our stuff: we all mostly agree there is considerable subjective benefit to having stuff immediately at hand, and there is considerable subjective harm when our stuff goes missing. We don't need any sense of objective right and wrong to object to stealing: we can rely entirely on our subjective preferences. (Note that communism, which tends to be "anti-property", is not about not having stuff immediately at hand, it is about particular ways to more efficiently allow more people to keep more stuff immediately at hand.)

One could, of course, make a purely subjective case against homosexuality: one could argue that just the thought of other people having buttsecs causes him severe subjective distress. While this is a valid subjectivist argument, it's not going to be at all persuasive: the response is just going to be, "Get over yourself, you bigoted asshole, and mind your own damn business." The only way to avoid this obvious response is to claim not just that one personally dislikes homosexuality, but that homosexuality is objectively wrong, without regard to anyone's subjective preferences, "If it were up to me, I wouldn't care, honest! It's just that God doesn't like homosexuality. Yeah right.

(To be fair, the process of legally and socially privileging some preferences a posteriori is non-trivial, and beyond the intellectual comprehension of even most atheists and skeptics; religious people, who tend to be either profoundly stupid or capable of amazing feats of self-deception, don't have much of a chance. C'est la vie.)

Similarly, Graham wants his followers to make sacrifices without any compensation in this world. There are sacrifices and there are sacrifices: I'm happy to "sacrifice" my ability to arbitrarily take other people's stuff without fear of reprisal for the larger compensation of keeping my own stuff immediately at hand. But Graham wants his ignorant sheep to sacrifice their material well-being and their happiness, to receive nothing in return, at least not in this world.

There is only one reasonable underlying motive for promoting such a view: to allow a "boot in the face" morality, to justify actively oppressing and brutalizing at least some people. We do not need God, indeed we do not need any conception of objective morality to justify wanting to be happy, and it doesn't take all that much brain power to realize that (apart from a few sociopathic or sadistic assholes) each of us will be happier if all of us are happier.

Billy Graham is indeed correct: an atheist has no reason to believe it's objectively true that Billy Graham and his bigoted followers should deny happiness and fulfillment to millions of homosexual people. An atheist has no reason to believe it's objectively true that a woman should be a slave to her husband, her father, and her uterus. An atheist has no reason to believe that millions of working people must sacrifice their material well-being for the benefit of the capitalist ruling class and their parasitical apologists.

And an atheist has no reason to believe that he or anyone else must sacrifice his happiness so that Billy Graham can go to bed satisfied that he has made someone unhappy.