What's it got to do with assisted dying?
Posted by Eric MacDonald
People may sometimes wonder what some of my posts have to do with assisted dying, the central reason for a choice in dying website in the first place. (The clue, of course, is in the first word of the blog title. And, while I do not consider this in what follows, I do sometimes discuss things that interest me which have nothing at all to do with assisted dying.) For example, what has the discussion of scientism to do with assisted dying? Why don’t I concentrate more on the issues involved in the assisted dying debate, issues like the sanctity of life, slippery slopes, human dignity, and so on? Well, to put it briefly, as I say in the blog’s banner, I argue for the right-to-die, and against the religious obstruction of that right, so anything which impinges on the issue, even indirectly, is of importance to me. That’s why disputing scientism seems to me to be important, because it implicitly defines away all other forms of inquiry which do not satisfy the canonical rules of scientific inquiry and decision. And that includes morality. In one of his responses to my posts on scientism, Jerry Coyne suggested that we should do away with talk of morality altogether. Here are his words:
I am starting to think that we should dispense with the idea of “moral” and “immoral” acts for two reasons. The first is because morality is implicitly connected with free choice, that is, with “free will.” If one can’t choose one’s acts freely, [then] one can’t decide to be “moral” or “immoral.” Rather, as a consequentionalist, I’d replace “morality” with what it really means for most people, “the effects of an act on an individual or society.” Thus an “immoral act” might better be seen as “an act that reduces societal well being.”
(I need to interject here, lest it be thought that I am picking a fight with Jerry, that what I say here is said with the greatest affection. I have no trouble in arguing with people I admire.) First of all, I cannot, in a short compass, provide satisfactory arguments for retaining the ideas of moral and immoral acts, moral obligation or the notion of freedom of choice. The question of free will is perhaps one of the most complex issues in philosophy, theology, and science, about which more is written than about any other single issue. This is partly due to the fact that it tends to overlap a number of disciplines (or quasi-disciplines, since I have deep reservations about theology as a respectable domain of knowledge). Also of importance in this connexion is the fact that whether or not we use the language of moral right and wrong, of duty and rights, this is a ”choice” which may have significant practical effects. If people were convinced, as Jerry Coyne and other naturalists seem to be convinced, that we are in no sense at all reasonably thought to be the originators of our actions, and thus responsible for them, then it seems that we will have to develop an entirely new language to deal with society, human relationships and self-conception or self-understanding. (And what would it mean “to develop” this or anything else?) For, of course, on this premise, the self is as much an illusion as is ”its” sense of authorship of “its” “actions.” (All these words become misleading under the proposed revisions.) Very few people seem to be aware of the enormous revision of common sense intuitions and expressions that would be necessary to accommodate a thoroughgoing determinism in respect of human “actions.” Indeed, according to the deterministic understanding of the human, we are but puppets on strings of causal sequences, incapable of choice or responsibility.
Jerry Coyne (and many others, of course) would replace the language of morality with the language of consequences and well-being, which, he suggests, is what most people mean anyway. While I doubt that this is what people mean anyway, from a position of a thoroughgoing determinism, there are no acts and no consequences. There are only events in causal sequence. And the term ‘well-being’, which seems to smuggle value language in through the back door, can mean no more than to refer to states of organic systems in causal relationship. It would be, in these terms, simply a mode d’expression to speak in terms of “preferred” states of such systems, for such “preference” would be entirely inscrutable (to use Harris’s language), and not a “preference,” as such, at all. “Preference” would merely identify a behavioural inclination towards the state said to be ”preferred,” much as we may be said to indicate a behavioural inclination towards being healthy rather than towards being sick, these states being simply occurrences and not something to which the language of preference and choice seems obviously to imply (except insofar as — as it seems we can – we can “choose” to undergo treatment, which may lead to the “preferred” outcome). Indeed, it does not seem to me that we have the slightest idea of the effect on self and social order that would result from the proposal that choice is not open to us, and that we are comprehensively determined from moment to moment by forces outside of our control. Large swathes of language would simply become meaningless. Speak in terms of consequences all you like, if ”our” supposed “acts” are simply downstream effects of causation, it no longer makes sense to chastise someone for a broken promise (which would be an act and not simply an event), or for acts of brutality, and it seems peculiar to think in such terms, but the truth is the truth, after all, so we “should” — what? — make an “effort”? But then, what about truth? If we are comprehensively deterministic systems, then so-called “reasons for belief” are also things over which we have no control. We cannot choose to base belief on the evidence. Belief would be simply an occurrent phenomenon, with no intentional content at all, just like “actions” we used to think of as moral or immoral, however much it might seem to be held for “reasons.” As I say, this could become very confusing.
In this situation I can scarcely do better than to quote from Ronald Dworkin:
Determinism and epiphenomenalism may both be true: I am not competent to judge either of them as scientific theories. Neither has been demonstrated to be true. Everything is possible. Every Tuesday brings fresh surprises about brain geography, physics, and chemistry, about potent alleles on neglected chromosomes, and about the interrelations among all these and our mental life. Every dinner party brings fresh speculation about the sexual reasoning of baboons, the religious lives of chimpanzees, the reptilian brain beneath your cerebrum, and the neo-Darwinian explanation of the trolley problem I discuss in Chapter 13. Our grandchildren had better be ready for anything. [Justice for Hedgehogs, 220]
At the moment, however, it seems best to retain the language of morality and moral responsibility. That is the only way, at any rate, that I can make sense of the question of assisted dying. Assisted dying is assistance offered to those who are dying in great pain and misery which they find intolerable, or who are living with chronic conditions which make continuing to live a contradiction of all that it seemed reasonable to hope for in life, at their choice and request. This is the only way I can understand Elizabeth’s life and her decision – considered deeply for several years before she opted for it, and then only after she had tried and failed to end life on her own, without assistance – to ask for assistance in dying. The act, when it came, was one of great dignity and courage, and it seems absurd to me to suggest that it was simply an occurrent phenomenon, to which praise (or blame), or the language of reasons for action, cannot be ascribed.
It is perhaps apropos to make a short digression here to express my regret at the recent death of Ronald Dworkin, whose arguments in defence of assisted suicide are remarkable by their scope and clarity. Perhaps the most significant legal mind of his generation, Dworkin’s writings extend from boldly original work on the principles of jurisprudence to interpretations of American constitutional law, especially as these impinged on human rights, which he took as the basis for the claim that law is grounded in morality — which is why this recent Jesus and Mo cartoon (linked here), while certainly reflecting Walter Kaufmann’s view of the parallels between law and theology, is simply wrong. Certainly, law does take the legal tradition seriously, sometimes too much so, and the exposition of the law as traditionally understood is an important element in legal judgements. But the legal tradition plays a very different role in law than sacred texts play in theology. In theology, the moral law is read from texts held to be unrevisable. The common law tradition is always in the process of evolution, based upon the changing moral template of the society in which interpretation of the legal tradition takes place. And Dworkin was a central figure in making clear how this is based on the principle of human rights. His death is a great loss. He died at 81, of leukemia, and published not long before his death a genuine tour de force, Justice for Hedgehogs, not only an important analysis of the nature of morality, but unusually, in the present climate, where the idea of the good life, or of a life lived well, is seldom addressed by contemporary philosophy, seeks to answer the question of the ethical meaning of life, “the only kind of meaning in life,” as Dworkin says, “that can stand up to the fact and fear of death.” (198) The book itself is a remarkable achievement for a man of any age, but for someone in or nearing his eighth decade of life, written in failing health, it is outstanding. (For Dworkin obituaries, if you are interested, check Arts and Letters Daily, in the first column, under Articles of Note.)
We may argue, if we like, and as Onora O’Neill does (see her Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics), about the complexity of the notion of informed consent, but one aspect of that argument will not be that consent itself is merely an illusion. Attempts at understanding morality simply in terms of consequences and well-being, besides being implicitly self-contradictory, do not take account of the decisions that individuals are called upon to make, and cannot attribute to them the moral seriousness of those decisions. So, that’s what the discussion of scientism has to do with the issue of assisted dying, which this blog is all about.
Posted on 22 February 2013, in Assisted Dying, Autonomy, Free Will, Jerry Coyne, Morality, Scientism. Bookmark the permalink. 48 Comments.
Welcome to FtB!
(ignore this note… trying to subscribe to a new post)
(still get a 404 error trying to “manage subscriptions”. I’ll report later today if I get notifications via email)
And the term ‘well-being’, which seems to smuggle value language in through the back door
Exactly. Consequentialism makes huge assumptions about our ability to know what is best for us (or others) at any given time, or there’s an assumption of “enlightened self-interest”. In spite of the obvious fact that people constantly choose to do things that aren’t best for them (example: smoking) and are otherwise hardly “enlightened”. Basically, it’s begging the question.
I’m a bit puzzled. I had thought you defended compatibilism on Coyne’s
blogwebsite; do I mis-remember?A compatibilist will, of course, deny much of what you say about determinism. E.g.,
To my (compatibilist) way of thinking these claims are obviously wrong. Are you arguing for libertarianism or hard determinism?
I’m also puzzled by your claim that “… other naturalists seem to be convinced, that we are in no sense at all reasonably thought to be the originators of our actions.”
Compatibilist naturalists (i.e., most philosophers) will of course reject this, unless you mean something very strong by “originator” (so strong, that nothing but the Big Bang would count as the “originator” of anything).
Physicalist, no, you do not misremember. However, Jerry is not a compatibilist, and it is to his position that I am responding. Indeed, since this is a continuation of my series on scientism, I think scientism is inevitably committed to a strong from of determinism which overrides compatibilist free will or free choice. (Of course, I may be wrong about this.) Agreed, many if not most naturalist philosophers are compatibilists, so my reference to “other naturalists” is obviously referring to those that are not.
Thank you.
Those who say we cannot punish (or otherwise control) wrongdoers (broadly defined) if we accept determinism are not thinking through their own objections. While personal responsibility (blame) and moral responsibility are required in our current culture in order to say that someone “deserves” punishment, there is of course no such requirement under determinism. Without laying blame, without asserting moral responsibility, we recognize that behavior is controlled by its contingencies–by its functional antecedents and consequences (reinforcers and punishers–an observation our culture, at one level, agrees, else punishment would only serve to bring some Platonic justice and not be seen as a deterrent). If a behavior is deemed unwanted, the manipulation of consequences is a perfectly reasonable part of how to reduce that behavior.
The benefit of a deterministic world view is that punishment, while among our tools, is not necessarily our go-to control method. Recognizing that we are controlled by our environments (instead of freely choosing) allows us to structure environments that don’t need to wait until bad things happen, and then punish them; we can also reward good behavior, and we can set up an environment (by manipulating antecedent conditions–through education, among other things) that makes it easier to be good in the first place, and harder to be bad.
Mind you, this goes against the libertarian mindset which says that any intervention is bad–that punishment is ok because people freely chose to violate other people’s rights and punishment is self-defense or defense of property… (yes I am oversimplifying)… a view that only allows correction after damage has been done.
A deterministic view, without blame, allows us to look for causes, and to fix problems instead of blaming the individual and allowing a toxic environment to remain.
Cuttlefish, I suggest you go over your comment and notice the number of times you use words or expressions which imply choice. We can reward, punish, structure environments, use tools, employ methods of control, manipulate, educate, intervene, etc. All of this language should simply not be available to a radical determinist. And if it is, then there should be no problem in ascribing praise and blame, as one of the modalities or tools of control, manipulation, education, intervention, etc.
Thanks, that’s helpful. I guess I got confused about what positions your were attributing (or ceding?) to Coyne, and what you were endorsing.
I’m not convinced that “scientism” is committed to rejecting compatibilism, however. Among philosophers, Dennett would probably be considered the closest to embracing scientism, and he’s a compatibilist. If we accept Coyne’s redefinition of science (to include all evidence- and reason-based inquiry) then such “scientism” also seems obviously compatible with soft determinism.
I also can’t quite refrain from complaining about the phrase “strong form of determinism.” The determinism of the soft determinists is every bit as “strong” as that of the hard determinists. Perhaps you have in mind a form of eliminative materialism that denies the existence of folk-psychological states (like choices)? I wouldn’t think that scientism forces one into eliminativism, though. Presumably Coyne thinks there are beliefs, desires, etc.
Anyhow, I enjoy the blog. Glad to see you at FTB.
I’m still not clear on this. It seems to me that all of those tools still work whether or not you are a determinist. If you have free will then you can choose to be influenced by them, if not then they are part of the environment that is the determinator.
It seems to me Eric that you have worked yourself into a corner. If you reject the supernatural (as I understand you do) then the natural world is all there is. Investigating the natural world with scientific methodology has so far revealed no grand purpose or anything other than deterministic cause and effect. Investigation by other methods, such as philosophy, does not seem to be converging on any specific ideas.
People certainly act as if they have free will, but there appears to be more and more scientific evidence that the feelings of agency and free will are actually useful fictions – confabulations used to explain the behaviours arising from hidden deterministic causes. My causes hidden from me, and also your causes hidden from me, but result in behaviours which will be judged against social cohesion .
What alternative mechanism do you therefore propose to generate ‘free will’? Or are you arguing for a ‘so far from deterministic causes that we don’t have to worry about them’ form of free will? Otherwise free will arises from other than the natural world and we are back to miracles.
Acharper, I am not denying determinism, as I explained in my response to Physicalist. What I am denying is that this is inconsistent with a perfectly intelligible sense of free choice. (I am still not entirely convinced that a form of incompatibilist free will is not an option, though I do not know how to argue the point. Robert Kane, I am told, has some very strong philosophical arguments that make such free will a conceptual possibility. I would have to read and understand before I could accept this.) Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves is probably the most accessible exposition of the argument for compatibilist free will. I would ask you to remember that the natural world includes beings with minds such as ours, and that is no small consideration when discussing the conceptual possibilities.
Physicalist. I realise that compatibilist free will accepts as strong a determinism as any, so I used the term only as a distinction between, say, Dennett, and the position taken by Coyne and Harris. It is not a substantive point, merely a terminological one.
Eric, once again I think the ball is in your court: what, exactly, is the difference between a moral decision and a plain old ordinary decision? I’ve been asking this of various people for several years now, and I still haven’t got a plausible answer. Here are some of the suggestions that have been put up, and why they don’t work:
“A moral decision is one that affects other people.” — but all my decisions affect other people in some way.
“A moral decision potentially has great consequences for many people.” — so does the decision to build a sewerage works or an opera house, but these are not normally regarded as moral decisions. And this definition would rule out pretty much all of my decisions straight away.
“A moral decision is when you do what I want you to against your own inclinations” — comment superfluous, surely.
“A moral decision is when you do what God says.” — ditto.
My personal favourite at the moment is — “A moral decision is one that makes you feel guilty, no matter what you choose.” — but I don’t think it has the rigour to stand up in debate.
So again, just as you need to define ‘science’ in order to explain what you’re objecting to about it, I think you have to tell us what a ‘moral decision’ is in order to explain how these differ from the plain old everyday decisions we can make effectively with reason and logic.
We have to make choices even if we don’t believe in free will. What’s the alternative? Most of the time, few of us prefer to toss a coin or ask someone else to make a decision for us, and we’d still be making a choice if we did. I feel silly getting all existentialist, but Sartre was right: we are condemned to freedom.
I don’t understand why anyone would think that, just because our brains can be detected initiating an act a second before we experience the intent, that it somehow was not a conscious choice. We don’t experience very much of what goes on in our brains; I would have thought that any educated adult would know that.
It isn’t just that routine activities don’t require focused attention, most creative activity takes place elsewhere as well. My muses have over the years dependably delivered nearly full-blown inventions and limericks to me without my deliberate cogitation. Most of us learn that if you’re stymied by a problem or searching for a memory you can just keep it in the back of your mind and wait for the answer to pop out.
This mind of which our only experience is its output is still ours, and we can’t claim that we aren’t free just because we can’t examine its processes.
Surely, jonjermey, jon or corio, moral considerations, or perhaps a refusal to entertain moral considerations, or perhaps downright immoral considerations (I think of the way corruption in Indonesia makes life in its capital city ever more unbearable unless you are revoltingly rich in which case you can live abroad, keeping an address in Jakarta and doing business from abroad) regularly enter into, or are raised by, the decisions we make in ordinary life, not to mention decisions about to whether to build an opera house or a sewage facility? Certainly, in my experience, our ordinary decisioons do. Why should they not? What is surprising about this? What has Eric missed?
Jon, Jon, why do you continue to mischaracterise what I say? And why oh why do you repeatedly suggest that I need to define my terms (and then, when I do that, suggest that I’m wrong anyway)? And most of all, what ever suggested to you that I am, as you say, objecting to science? As to the latter, I am doing no such thing. All I have ever said about science is positive. My brickbats I have saved for the tendency of science to place all knowledge and inquiry whatever within its imperium, a tendency which is both misleading and counterproductive, by blurring the distinctions between various domains of inquiry and the sciences (which themselves do not from a strict unity, either in respect of their subject matters or their methodologies, which of course makes them hard to define as a single species).
You tell me, once again, that the ball is in my court, because, apparently, I have not defined morality adequately enough. But then, I never set out to do that, and certainly, in this particular post, this was not even the focus of it. Basically, it’s addressed to the question of what my concerns about scientism have to do with assisted dying, and is fairly limited to that scope. I did not set out, nor did I intend to, to present a disquisition about morality, its scope or nature.
However, just to gesture vaguely in the direction of the subject matter of morality, we may say that morality has to do with what we ought, as human beings, to do, how we should behave with respect to other people. Morality, broadly, considers such things as virtues, obligations, rights. what things are good, what things are wrong, how we should pursue the first, and eschew the second, and so on. There is no definition of morality which will exhaustively account for its content, though it is clearly related to personal and social good, how these can be achieved, who owes what to whom in the pursuit of it, and so on.
Moral philosophy attempts to study these things in a systematic way, and, at least in certain cases, to attempt to provide the ground upon which our rights and duties may be said to stand. Religious people tend to see morality as confined to the scope of a god’s commandments. Utilitarians think that what is right and good can be defined in terms of utility, which itself can be understood in different ways. Rule utilitarians think in terms of the utility of observing certain rules, and the benefit that derives from them. Act utilitarians think that utility should be calculated at the level of individual acts. Deontologists claim that there is something about moral principles or laws which intuitively characterise such principles or laws as absolute moral directives, something like Kant’s various accounts of the categorical imperative, such as to act only on that principle which you can at the same time will as a universal law of nature. Acts which are consistent with this principle would be moral principles, others would be prudential. And so on.
Aside from this, I am not sure what you are getting at, but I do want to reiterate here that nowhere have I so much as hinted that I am objecting to science. That would be foolish waste of time, though the place of science amongst domains of knowledge and inquiry is something that is a perfectly legitimate question to ask.
My point, Kevin, that the very using of the tools, the intervening, controlling, manipulating, educating, etc. are, in some sense, already choices which intend purposes and ends, and this implies a freedom of choice, and not a lack of it. In other words, these are just as tied up with issues of choice as are reward and punishment, praise or blame.
The mailman just yesterday delivered my copy of Braintrust. I’ve only read the first chapter and I’m already in love with Patricia Churchland.
Even if, strictly speaking, you can’t derive an ought from an is you can still know what you ought to do because your brain has already had that worked out by the evolution of morality.
Eric, thank you. I get it now.
No notifications. Is this just some god’s way of hurting me?
Churchland is very good, and does not go in for exaggerated claims to wow the hoi polloi.
I’m interested to find out how she deals with the fact that not only has morality evolved but so have things like selfishness and cruelty.
Eric: “morality has to do with what we ought, as human beings, to do, how we should behave with respect to other people.”
But that’s easy: I should behave with respect to other people exactly as I behave with respect to objects: that is, in such a way as to maximise my present pleasure and future happiness. What possible motive could I have to act any other way? The only important difference is that the way I treat other people has more potential to generate internal sensations like guilt and remorse, and so these need to be taken into account. (But even this is not a decisive difference: I can feel remorse over trashing my computer in a fit of anger, though not as much as I would feel over, say, beating up a child.)
Another incidental difference is that how I act towards humans generally — though not always — has less predictable consequences, so I need to adjust my risk levels accordingly. As Donald Rumsfeld would say, there are more ‘known unknowns’.
But I still don’t see what I need to do in a so-called moral decision that I don’t already do in any other decision — gather the evidence, consider the consequences for myself and those others who have some influence upon my happiness, draw analogies, look for examples, and try to make the choice in a rational and objective frame of mind. What else is there? What else could there possibly be?
jon,
That’s a sociopaths response. You feel things for others without calculating your own benefit. It could be argued that evolution gives us feelings for others that enhance our own genes success (I’m reading Churchland right now) but to see it as a conscious calculation seems kind of creepy to me.
What amuses me, is how quickly discussions of morality get sidelined into discussions that assume there is a sort of rational calculus whereby we calculate how moral or immoral a certain action may be and choose on the basis of such calculations what to do, as well as into discussions of rewards and punishments, as though it were only the prospects of reward or punishment that make us moral… Perhaps it is living in East Asia for so long, and being aware of moral traditions other than those that derive from Abrahamic religions that makes me feel how parochially Western are the attitudes of those who think of morality in this way, how shallow their view of human beings is, and how imperceptive they are about the wellsprings of human behaviour. The first thing that morality should surely require is a genuine to effort to understand what we are, what the human animal is. Two good places to start would be Montaigne and, for a pessimistic view of humanity (and ‘pessimistic’ is understating it), Thomas Bernhard’s account, in ‘Gathering Evidence’ of being brought up in wartime Austria. There is none of that clinical foolishness in the work of these two men.
The ridiculous idea that morality consists in following rules…. I think that people who go on about this sort of thing are almost completely oblivious to how they actually conduct themselves in theitr daily lives, and also to how others conduct themselves.
Cuttlefish: ‘Without laying blame, without asserting moral responsibility, we recognize that behavior is controlled by its contingencies…’ But who the devil is ‘we’? Some highly trained specialist in moral science who somehow remains calmly above it all (because he is so highly trained and believes that everything is wholly determined) and who also, and more importantly, possesses the power and knowledge to consign people to whatever punishment he considers condign?…. Perhaps Cuttlefish considers himself or herself to be, because of what he or she believes, to be in able and suited to such a position… I am only reminded by this sort of unrealistic, sanctimonious, self-blind and ultimately narcissistic attitude of the ghastly Dr Brooks at the school I had the misfortune to attend who would before beating a boy sit the boy down in front of him and interrogate him for a while with such questions as ‘ You do understand, So-and-so, don’t you, why I have to beat you?’ and ‘You do understand what you have done, So-and-so. don’t you?’ And having beaten the boy, he would again sit the boy down in front of him and interrogate him: ‘You do underatand, don’t you, So-and-so, why I had to beat you?’ – because he wanted to make sure, he wanted, if possible, to see the tears in the boy’s eyes. I havd never hated and despised a man so much. One first lesson of a genuine morality is that you yourself are implicated, you are not because of your knowledge or training above it all and in some God-like position from which you may hand dowm judgements. I loathe moralisers with a passion.;
Yay! You ordered it after reading that post about it at my place the other day, right?
Caring.
I did indeed! Thank you again.
Quite so, Ophelia. Caring is what gives me a motive to behave decently to other people. But the causal chain goes from my caring to my ‘moral’ behaviour, not the other way around. You can’t dictate: “You must act morally, therefore you shall care about other people”, because the response will simply be ‘Why must I?’.
Caring precedes my choices to behave in what are regarded in ‘moral’ ways; it doesn’t follow it.
And one further addition to this: it has struck me how a person like Sam Harris, who seems to think himself knowledgeable about morality, has enjoyed toying in an intellectual way with the desirability of torture (followed, regrettably by Jerry Coyne, for whom I otherwise have great respect) while, so far as I know, never expressing any opinion about the destruction of Jose Padilla’s personality, the waterboarding of certain people hundreds of times, and the treatment of people caught in Guantanamo, including a boy who was, so far as I remember, fourteen when captured, and, who, so far as I know, is still imprisoned there. Rather too many people seem to enjoy intellectual discussions about morality rather than actually having feelings about immoral states of affairs and trying to do something about them.
I did respond to this but it seems to have been hung up: my apologies if it resurfaces.
Anything you think I said about ‘calculating’ has been read into my response by you. I’m quite happy for my ‘moral’ response to be as spontaneous as you like. But what triggers that response — what has to trigger it, because there is nothing else that will do so — is some perceived obligation on my part, which would cause me distress or worse if unfulfilled. If I give money to African families — and I do — it’s because I care about African families, not because there’s any objective connection between African families on the one hand and me donating money on the other.
Clearly some of this sense of obligation is internalised in childhood, and acts on a preconscious or subconscious level. I’m quite happy with that, and if you want to suggest that this is a necessity for a functioning society, I’m happy with that too. From the observation that 99.99% of people care about their own welfare and 99.9% care about the welfare of others you can certainly go on to try and devise a set of general rules which will operate to try and maximise nearly everybody’s welfare. “Do this if you care about others”. In fact I think that’s more or less the way in which moral codes have actually developed.
But what Eric is looking for, as I understand it, is an objective moral rule which will tell someone what to do whether or not they feel any obligation to care for their own welfare or that of other people: and that dog won’t hunt.
Choice, though, does not imply free choice>. We do choose, every time we have multiple options open to us, but our choices are not independent of environmental (including social) influences. All the language you speak of is absolutely available to us; it is the free-will baggage that accompanies that language in our culture that is unhelpful. There is a huge experimental literature on choice paradigms, which does not assume free choice.
We can and do ascribe praise and blame, but our culture has an unfortunate habit of seeking single causes, residing within an individual’s morality, rather than recognizing multiple causation. The language of free will enables this habit, allowing us to hold an individual responsible (to the point we feel justified in executing him) and to ignore huge contributing environmental factors which, if addressed, could have prevented this “freely chosen” action in the first place.
Fascinating, that you invoke punishment as what I am suggesting. I am absolutely not–indeed, our culture’s focus on “free will” is what leads us to use punishment (after a freely chosen, morally owned act) as our attempt at control (or, failing control, at least to exact justice for our transgression). A deterministic view allows us to intervene before a line is crossed; recognizing that our behavior is controlled by our environments allows us to shape environments to be safer, more productive, happier, without resorting to punishment (or, practically, without resorting to it nearly so much as our current society does).
Your Dr. Brooks wanted the boy to be to blameworthy–we have all seen such punishers, more concerned with whether the kid is punished than with whether he changes his ways. This is what comes of a focus on moral responsibility for freely chosen behaviors. This is precisely what I want to avoid.
Quite so, and those who speak in terms of morality, responsibility, and so on, need not say otherwise. The moral question arises when you ask yourself, in a particular situation, which one of a number (two, three, four, whatever) of alternatives would be the caring thing to do. It’s not always obvious, and sometimes requires careful thought, and even more careful distinctions.
Got to read Braintrust. I’m afraid I find Churchland’s writing a bit offputting, and her conception of morality rather simplistic. But I’ll make another stab at it one day soon.
I see no reason to suppose that that is what I am looking for. But I do think that there are situations in which I have objective moral reasons to do what I would rather not do, things which may in fact disadvantage me, even, perhaps lead to my death. There are things worth fighting for, and you seem to suggest otherwise.
I just finished reading it and I’m starting back at the beginning to see if there was something that I missed. The essence of the book as I understand it is that she agrees with Hume that there is a natural moral sentiment, then she goes on to provide the neurological and experimental psychological evidence for it.
She traces the evolution of morality by twinning it with the evolution of caring, first for one’s own offspring, then expanding it to include kin, then tribe and so on.
I’ve said elsewhere that I’m reading it with a kind of confirmation bias because there is nothing so far that I haven’t already agreed with. I appreciate her for giving me more ammunition for my arguments.
The problem that I have with it and the reason that I’m re-reading it to see if I missed something is that she seems to be saying, as the title implies, that you can trust your feelings and that is just wrong. Noble sentiments may have a biological basis but so does the most evil shit that men can do. The deep sentimental sadism at the heart of Roman Catholicism for instance is just as selected for by evolution as caring for offspring. The Catholic apologists even call what they do.. morality.
Cuttlefish. What I don’t understand is why someone who takes the point of view you are defending would not use punishment. It is often as effective a tool as others to control behaviour. And what does it mean to “use” something, if all of this is simply causally determined in the first place? Even the language of praise and blame is so. In the end your position seems to be self-defeating. What does it mean that taking a particular point of view “allows us to intervene,” as though this is something that we can choose to do? How do we “shape” environments on the deterministic assumption? Don’t environments simply shape themselves? Indeed, are words and reasons any more than the kinds of sounds that other animals make, merely phenotypic behaviour? Where do meaning, purpose, intervention, enabling, and so on come in, if all this is just the end product of a causal chain? I simply find the language of determinism unintelligible, to be quite frank. It seems very much as Tim Harris says, as though you are somewhere above the fray, looking down and describing something that, in the immediate context where it is all being played out, is mere behaviour. So, I can understand why Tim says it reminds him of the despised Dr. Brooks, even if you are not talking in terms of punishment. And I can understand too why Tom Nagel is so puzzled about the “view from nowhere,” which is the point of view you have chosen. Of course, on the other hand, aren’t some of the views from the East equally deterministic, Tim? Buddhist and Hindu ideas of karma are essentially expressions of the idea that the universe is impersonal, and impersonality with which, resignedly, the victims must somehow conform themselves, if they are to escape it.
But if you want me to prioritise ‘caring’ over other considerations in making a decision — opportunity cost, for instance — then you need to provide a reason for me to do so. Why should ‘caring’ influence a ‘moral’ decision any more than any other? I need reasons for doing the ‘caring’ thing as much as any other option.
Of course there are things worth fighting for, and dying for for that matter. My life is of some importance to me, but there are other things I care about more. I’m not suggesting that the right ‘moral’ decision is always the one that leaves us safe and well-off, any more than the right political decision is the one that most improves the chances of re-election. But I still have a perfect right to weigh the consequences to myself and the other people I care about when making a decision. Self-immolation may be an optimal way to end the Chinese occupation of Tibet; but as a protest against a new supermarket car park it’s probably excessive. Fanatical self-sacrifice is neither pretty not pleasant.
Just to forestall criticism, I agree that there’s an element of circularity in saying “We know Fred cared about his religion because he died for it, and we know Fred must have died for his religion because he cared about it so much”. But we usually have supporting evidence to suggest that someone cares about X before the event. If someone were to suggest that Fred died for Catholicism on Thursday after being a lifelong atheist up to the previous night, that would not be a satisfactory explanation.
I’m sorry, Jeremy, you seem to have missed the point that I was trying to make, which is not that there are things worth dying for, but that there are things that we have objective moral reasons to do, when we would rather not. It was you who suggested that I was looking for something quite different. Your response is entirely irrelevant.
But, Eric, this is simply your original assertion, and you haven’t provided any evidence to back it up. My response is that sometimes dying is the best way to promote the welfare of the people and things we care about, and as such it’s a perfectly rational and reasonable decision to make. And that puts it into the same category as any other decision, ‘moral’ or not.
To show that ‘moral’ decisions are somehow different to ordinary decisions you will need to come up with a plausible situation in which the ‘rational’ thing to do — the thing that furthers my interests the most, as I perceive them — is different from the ‘moral’ thing. And I don’t think you can do that.
Simply pointing out that people don’t like to die is not enough. I would ‘rather not’ go to work, but I do it every day because I have stronger long-term goals and commitments that require it. But that’s not a ‘moral’ decision, unless every decision is a ‘moral’ decision.
But what if Dr Brooks found that that extra humiliation of his recalcitrant charges more efficacious than a beating alone in persuading them not to do again whatever it was they had done? What if that were his reason for doing it? I cannot see how Cuttlefish could object. Eric has pointed out that punishment is an ‘effective tool’ for controlling behaviour, as have Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne when the question of the acceptance of a totalising determinism in relation to legal penalties came up; I remarked more than once on Why Evolution is True that if it is true that, in this wholly determined universe, punishment remains important , though only for its deterrent effects, then why not make punishments as draconian as possible? Create a climate of fear, as Stalin did very effectively do deter any opposition – see Bulgakov’s Journals. But there is this mantra being lullingly recited that if we were all really properly hard-headed men of science and took the bull of determinism by the horns, renouncing the idea of free-will, then somehow magically our legal systems would reform themselves and punishments would be fairly apportioned. What tosh! And how utterly condescending to all those reformers over the years as well as to most sensible people who are very well aware of how environment influences behaviour and don’t need some believer in determinism to tell them about it. There seems to be an extraordinary naivetie, a small awareness on the part of our determinists, who seem stuck in some ivory tower where only intellectual argument matters, of the poltical dimension of all this; it is not because the Norwegians have accepted an all-embracing determinism and have therefore magically become kinder or more well-meaning people that their justice system is far superior to that of the States, which, despite the clamourous mouth-worship it gives to democratic ideals, incarcerates so many of its citizens, and such a large percentage of them, as to beggar belief . Regarding the thorough-going and universal determinism that Harris and Coyne espouse, it might well be true (I don’t know, and I don’t think they really do either), but I really do not care whether it is true or not, since it is so ineffably abstract that, assuming it is true, its links to our lives and its links to a case such as the shooting of Trayvon Martin are so extremely tenous that they might as well not be there. Which is of course not to deny the many factors, social, psychological and otherwise, that resulted in the case, or to deny that they had determining effects on what happened.
Regarding your question, Eric: I don’t know much about Hinduism (although I love the Mahabharata – or parts of it – and have been interested in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s accounts of Hindu myth), but I live in Japan, which is heir to Chinese traditions – those of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism (since Buddhism came to Japan through China), and, yes, Buddhism involves ‘karma’, which is deterministic, and there are some pretty horrible paintings of Buddhist hells (sadistic and sometimes near-pornograhic), but in general all these three traditions are far less interested in punishment and jealous deities than the Abrahamic religions are, far more tolerant, and far more interested in making people aware that morality begins at home, not so much in the form of following rules as being aware of who you are and how you tend to repond to others.
What I think needs to be done is to look at the very real institutional causes of what Cuttlefish decries, which means being political, and not trying to convert people to a strict and absolute determinism which in the end leaves everything as it is (since everything, including the reasons one might give for doing this or not doing that, as well as the reasons Cuttlefish gives for thinking and proposing what he does, is rendered void, and our behaviour is rendered inexplicable – I have yet to come across any illuminating explanation of human behaviour that results from a reduction to basic physical processes, or any explanation at all in fact). A good place to start might be a place like Digby’s excellent political blog, Hullabaloo, which I first came across in the Bush (G.W.) years when I became interested in American politics because something clearly very odd was going on. Here is part of a recent entry by Digby on her blog:
“I still think that the most successful single issue group of the last quarter century has to be the NRA:
“‘It sounded like a throwaway line. Toward the end of a four-hour Senate hearing on gun violence last week, Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice president of over two decades, took a break from extolling the virtues of assault rifles and waded briefly into new territory: criminal justice reform. “We’ve supported prison building,” LaPierre said. Then he hammered California for releasing tens of thousands of nonviolent offenders per a Supreme Court order—what he’d previously termed “the largest prison break in American history.”
“‘But California’s overflowing prisons, which the Supreme Court had deemed “cruel and unusual punishment” in 2011 because of squalid conditions, were partly a product of the NRA’s creation. Starting in 1992, as part of a now-defunct program called CrimeStrike, the NRA spent millions of dollars pushing a slate of supposedly anti-crime measures across the country that kept America’s prisons full—and built new ones to meet the demand. CrimeStrike’s legacy is everywhere these days.
“‘CrimeStrike arose out of necessity. The NRA had come into its own as a political power during the Reagan era, but by the early 1990s, it was strapped for cash. The organization ran up a $9 million deficit in 1991 and was on pace for a $30 million shortfall in 1992, even as it was preparing to go to the mattresses over assault weapons and background checks. The NRA needed a shot in the arm.
“‘LaPierre launched CrimeStrike that spring with $2 million in seed money from the parent organization and a simple platform: mandatory minimums, harsher parole standards, adult sentences for juveniles, and, critically, more prisons. “Our prisons are overcrowded. Our bail laws are atrocious. We’ll be the bad guy,” he announced.
“‘The NRA took its case to the public. “Will you let criminals rape your rights?” asked a four-page ad in a 1994 issue of Field & Stream magazine. And the real culprit was in the White House: “The Clinton administration has already cut federal prison construction by $550 million in favor of ‘community placement’ and ‘criminal rehabilitation programs.’” This was reviving an old conservative talking point: Democrats were soft on crime.
“‘It worked like a charm.’
“This shows exactly what kind of people NRA followers really are. For all their talk of watering the tree of liberty with blood of tyrants, they are actually the worst kind of authoritarians. They’re fine with government power when it comes to any police agency (not charged with gun regulation) and they cheer it enthusiastically when it imprisons large numbers of people they consider to be undesirable. The only powers they don’t wish the government to have is the power to tax them for the cost of these authoritarian institutions or to regulate their personal firepower. And they downright love a man in uniform, whether a cop or a soldier. In fact, they don them themselves as often as possible…” (There follows a picture.)
It is political problems such as this that need to be addressed.
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