The problem of ethical motivation is not limited to utilitarianism. Rather, it applies to any ethical philosophy that assumes that people have an impartial motivation, or a motivation to benefit society as a whole rather to advance their own Darwinian interests. Here I will show that John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness suffers from the same kind of weakness. Rawls conceived of the social contract as an instrument through which self-interested people agree to cooperate to advance their interests. Nevertheless, he believed that just principles can be discovered only from an impartial perspective, that is, the Original Position, where people decide on the structure of society from behind a veil of ignorance. He believed that the stability of society depends on people’s accepting and acting on this impartial perspective. This theory raises the same type of problems with motivation that we saw in utilitarianism.

Justice as fairness

What is just? Rawls’ answer was a theory of political liberalism that he called “justice as fairness,” which he spelled out in A Theory of Justice, the most influential work of political philosophy written in the 20^th century. Rawls eventually decided that justice as fairness was not the only acceptable version of political liberalism, but he believed that this theory was the best throughout his life.

Rawls used the model of the social contract to answer to formulate his theory of justice.

The guiding idea [of the social contract] is that the principles of justice for the basic structure of society are the object of the original agreement. They are the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association.1

Rawls thought that there was a deep problem with previous versions of contract theory: the parties to the contract would be biased by self-interest. Thus, for example, if the parties were of different races, the majority race might decide to exploit or discriminate against a minority race. Since such a situation would intuitively strike us as unjust, the contract theory in this form does not yield an adequate theory of justice.

For this reason, Rawls added a refinement to contract theory that would cause the parties to decide on the contract from an impartial perspective: they should deliberate from behind a veil of ignorance. That is, they should think about what principles they would decide on if they did not know their own place in the society. Think of each of the parties as the representative of an actual person, but unaware of what the traits of that person are: the person might be of any race or gender, rich or poor, athletic or handicapped. In this position, or the “Original Position,” Rawls thought that the parties would legislate impartially: if a party doesn’t know what race she is, she wouldn’t vote to subordinate any race, as the person whom she’s representing might be of that race.

Rawls thought that the parties in the original position would agree on a version of liberal democracy governed by two basic principles:

First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.2

The just society is one in which people enjoy a suite of basic liberties or rights that are typical of liberal democracies, like the rights to free expression and assembly, the rights to vote and hold office, and the right to personal property. Further, Rawls thought that the parties would agree on a highly egalitarian economic system, possibly a form of socialism, in which large differences in wealth would not be allowed and in which the privileges that normally attach to wealth would be drastically curtailed. Some economic inequality would be permitted for reasons of economic productivity. However, society would be set up to bring the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, so there would be laws governing taxation, inheritance, and the distribution of property that prevented the concentration of wealth and power. Also, society would be set up to guarantee equality of opportunity, so that the wealthy and the poor had access to equal education opportunities and were treated equally in labor markets. Rawls wanted to eliminate the class privilege whereby the wealthy enjoy great social power and can pass on that power to their children.

Rawls found this version of the social contract compelling because it affirmed each citizen’s status as a “free and equal rational being.”3 The contract gives equal consideration to everyone’s interests, and everyone is free to decide as they like. The contract expresses respect for all citizens because it treats them as inherently valuable ends in themselves.4

Rawls’ conception of justice is a moral one. Moral principles are commonly understood as being objectively right and binding on us regardless of our subjective viewpoint. Since the parties in the Original Position are not limited by subjective bias, the principles that they decide on are objectively right and binding.5

The question of motivation

After he defines what a just society is, you might think that Rawls’ work is done. But not so fast. All Rawls has proved is that, if you perform a thought experiment designed to encourage impartiality, you get a certain vision of how society should work. But Rawls still hasn’t shown that his vision works in real life.

After all, real-world human beings are not impartial. Rather, as I discussed in my last article, we are organisms who evolved to pursue their Darwinian interests. Like other creatures, humans act in ways that lead themselves and their relatives to reproduce. Human nature inclines people to be partial to their own interests and those of their families, or to act as what I call “Darwinian egoists.” Humans naturally seek wealth and power and favor their own relatives over others. Our Darwinian interests shape our motivations—our emotions, desires, and dispositions.

The Rawlsian vision of a just society conflicts with human nature on many points, and he needs to provide a credible account of why people would be motivated to accept his vision of justice. When the wealthy work to entrench and increase their class privileges, they are acting straightforwardly in their Darwinian interests. For Rawls, justice requires that they act against their interests to create an economically egalitarian society. But why would the wealthy be motivated to act justly? The motivational problem is particularly salient in the case of the wealthy, but it would apply throughout society. Why, for example, would a dominant religious group forfeit its social power by allowing religious freedom?

So Rawls faces two problems: defining what a just society is and also defining why people should accept the constraints that the just society imposes on the pursuit of their interests. Let’s call this “the acceptance problem.”

Rawls’ moral psychology

Rawls was very much aware of the acceptance problem. He stipulates that the parties in the original position should be aware of the facts about human psychology and realistic about human motivation. The parties are to consider that humans have different aims and purposes and are thus naturally in conflict with each other and that humans are prone to “anxiety, bias, and a preoccupation with their own affairs” and “selfishness and negligence.”6 Therefore, the parties

cannot enter into agreements that may have consequences they cannot accept. They must avoid those that they can adhere to only with great difficulty.7

So why, then, would people be motivated to accept the constraints that justice imposes on them? A possible answer is legal enforcement. The parties agree to the rule of law, which demands that the policies that they decide on be enforced by legal punishment. In the Rawlsian society, nepotistic bias in hiring, depriving people of rights, and accumulating unfairly large fortunes would be illegal. However, Rawls rejects the notion that compliance with justice should or could be maintained solely or even mainly by the threat of legal punishment. Rawls recognizes that a system of laws cannot be maintained solely through state terror, nor would he find a social order that was maintained in this way just. If you don’t have buy-in from the citizens, then the system cannot survive. The citizens will find ways of subverting and undermining laws that they refuse to accept and seek to change them through political processes.

Rather, Rawls believed that people assent to the just society primarily because of their sense of justice:

I assume that the sense of justice shared by the members of the community has a fundamental role. To some degree, then, moral sentiments are necessary to insure that the basic structure [of society] is stable with respect to justice.8

Rawls develops a moral psychology explaining how the sense of justice would develop in a just society. He thinks that life in a just society would profoundly change human motivations, creating a breed of humans among whom “no one wishes to advance his interests unfairly to the disadvantage of others”9 and who “desire more than anything to act justly.”10 Indeed, he hints that people would be so profoundly motivated to act justly that legal punishment would scarcely be necessary at all: “in a well-ordered society sanctions are not severe and may never need to be imposed.”11

Rawls believed that moral development in a just society would happen in three stages: the moralities of authority, association, and principles. The morality of authority consists of obedience to parents. In a just society, parents are assumed to endorse principles of justice and treat the child well, so the child comes to love them and accept their moral judgments, even if she doesn’t understand the reasoning behind them. As she grows up, the child learns to negotiate various relationships, such as with schoolmates and neighbors, and develops the morality of association. The child finds that feelings of trust and friendship emerge among people when they treat each other justly by living up to their duties and obligations. The child learns to see matters from the perspective of others and appreciate their needs. She starts to feel resentment and indignation when she is treated unjustly and guilt when she treats others unjustly. Finally, as an adult, a person learns that everyone benefits from just institutions and comes to want to uphold the principles on which they are founded. She wants to uphold justice for its own sake and feels guilt when she fails to do so and indignation when others act unjustly.12

Rawls believed that people would come to prefer to act according to the sense of justice rather than egoism. He offers four reasons why.

The first two can be seen in this passage:

a person who lacks a sense of justice, and who would never act as justice requires except as self-interest and expediency prompt, not only is without ties of friendship, affection, and mutual trust, but is incapable of experiencing resentment and indignation. He lacks certain natural attitudes and moral feelings of a particularly elementary kind. Put another way, one who lacks a sense of justice lacks certain fundamental attitudes and capacities included under the notion of humanity.13

Rawls thought that people would find egoism an unappealing option because just citizens would ostracize people who were not acting justly. Therefore, the egoist would be excluded from the relationships of friendship and mutual trust that just citizens enjoyed. Rawls pictured the egoist as an outcast.

Also, egoists are not fully human for Rawls. Certain essential human emotions, like resentment and indignation, are felt in response to injustice. A person without a sense of justice would never feel these emotions and would not live a truly human life. Since people want to live a fully human life, they would choose to act justly.

Rawls also believed that the life of the person who acted unjustly would be one of guilt and shame. We have already seen how the sentiment of guilt emerges in moral development. The Rawlsian contract affirms each citizen’s status as an inherently valuable free and equal rational being. When we act justly, we affirm that we are such beings, and this affirmation is a ground for our self-respect. Failing to act justly causes us to lose our self-respect and feel shame.14

Another motivation for acting on the sense of justice is the desire to live in a stable and supportive society, or a “well-ordered” society, as Rawls called it. A society in which everyone is motivated to obey the law and support just institutions will obviously be stable. The Rawlsian society would also have many other attractive characteristics. Since the society works to the benefit of the least advantaged, for example, it would offer support to the poor and the otherwise badly off.

Does Rawls’ case hold up?

Does Rawls’ case for the sense of justice hold up? Would people be willing to sacrifice their interests for the sake of maintaining a well-ordered society? I am unconvinced. There are common-sensical objections to Rawls’ theory that he has no convincing answer to.

The basic lack of realism in Rawls’ philosophy is evident in his claim that, in a just society, human motivations would be perfected to the point that law enforcement could be largely or even entirely dispensed with. Such a society would be profoundly different from any that has ever existed, so we have good reason to be skeptical about this claim and Rawls’ entire account of human motivation.

Take Rawls’ argument that people would be willing to sacrifice their interests so that they could live in a stable society. Most of us want to live in a situation where we feel safe and where our rights are protected. However, that is not all that we want. We also are motivated to pursue our Darwinian interests. It is reasonable to assume that real-world humans would be willing to sacrifice some amount of social stability to achieve ends like wealth and power and the other goods of class privilege. Take the example of a wealthy person named Austin who wanted to accumulate a large fortune despite the requirements of justice. Say he found a way of concealing his income from the authorities so that he could cheat on his tax payments. Austin might recognize that his action risks weakening social stability. After all, he is failing to do his part to fund the just society. Also, if they find out, people will feel resentful and less inclined to support the social system. Nevertheless, Austin might also reason that the instability would not be severe enough to significantly affect his own life and that of his family. So he would plausibly be motivated to do what he could to hide his wealth.

How about Rawls’ claim that people like Austin would be social outcasts excluded from all relationships of friendship and trust? Extremely doubtful! First, Austin might successfully conceal his unjust actions so people would have no reason to distrust him. Add to the scenario that there are many other wealthy people in Austin’s society who also want to hold onto their wealth. There would be plenty of reason for them to form relationships of friendship and trust among themselves. After all, strength in numbers!

What about the notion that egoists would not be fully human and incapable of feeling resentment and indignation? Rawls’ case here depends on the assumption that the only relationship that can create bonds of obligation and duty is one’s relationship to the whole of society. But even if this relationship failed to meet the standards of justice, obligations might be generated by other relationships, say between Austin and his other wealthy friends. If one of the friends failed to make good on a promise to Austin, he might legitimately feel resentment and indignation. So Austin would remain fully human.

Finally, would Austin feel guilt and shame over acting unjustly? Such a reaction is far from certain. Austin might well resent a system of justice that required him to act against his interests. He might feel pride in defying it and helping out not only himself, but his fellow wealthy people.

Impartiality and the free-rider problem

A Rawlsian who accepted the validity of my criticisms might counter that the theory could be adjusted to address them. After all, realism about human motivation is one of the requirements in the Original Position. The parties might take me to be demanding a more realistic account of moral psychology and try to find one.

However, I doubt that any such adjustment is possible because the Rawlsian account of the sense of justice is essentially and necessarily unrealistic. The reason is that it demands that people act impartially: the viewpoint from the Original Position is an impartial one that requires that we limit our own interests to make them congruous with those of others. However, such impartial motivation cannot evolve among Darwinian creatures.

The reason is the free-rider problem that I outlined in my last article. Say that William acts impartially to create a just society, and this act imposes some cost on him. For example, William might know of a way to conceal income from taxation, but refuses to because doing so would be unjust. William is altruistically creating a public good: he’s doing his fair part to fund a just society, and his honesty tends to strengthen the ties of friendship and trust among citizens.

The problem is that a free-rider like Austin, who did not possess William’s sense of justice, would tend to win out in this system. The free-rider would profit from the social goods that Austin and other just people created, but he would not pay the costs that they pay. So he would get to live in a stable society and also enjoy greater wealth than honest people. Evolution favors those who are willing to act unjustly when doing so furthers their Darwinian interests, so people evolve to free-ride when possible.

Ethics without impartiality

Objectivist moral philosophies require people to sacrifice their Darwinian interests to impartial objective moral principles, like universal benevolence and justice as fairness. Such philosophies are always unrealistic because humans are necessarily partial to their own interests.

My claim is not that people have no sense of justice or motivation to act justly. I am certainly not saying that the whole idea of justice is fraudulent. Rather, my claim is that Rawls’ account of the sense of justice is unrealistic. I hope in the future to explore a more motivationally realistic account of ethics that would not require that people meet inhuman standards of impartiality.

A problem with many ethical theories is that they rest on unrealistic assumptions about human motivation. Psychologists have formulated detailed theories of human motivation that are rooted in evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory explores how motivations evolve in animals and what kinds of motivations are likely to evolve and what kinds are not. Psychologists explore human motivation in light of evolutionary theory.

If an ethical theory is radically incompatible with scientific theories of motivation, that is a reason to reject it. We need an ethics that works for real-world human beings, not for a fantasy creature dreamt up by philosophers.

The philosopher Sharon Street has argued that the evolutionary theory of human motivation is incompatible with moral realism, according to which there are objective moral facts that are binding on all people in all times and places. Here I will explore her insight, as well as a related question: if moral realism presents an unrealistic account of human motivation, why do moral realists claim to have such motivations?

Human nature

Human nature is formed by the forces of evolution, natural and sexual selection. There are any number of excellent introductions to evolutionary psychology, which explores how evolution shapes human nature.1

We evolve to act in ways that maximize the number of copies of our genes that we leave behind us by having children ourselves and aiding our relatives to do so. To do these things is to act in what I will call our “Darwinian interests.” Someone who effectively achieves Darwinian interests has higher fitness than those who are less effective. One way of advancing Darwinian interests is through sex, so we evolve to pursue sex and the goods that make sex more likely for us. Wealthy and powerful people tend to have more sexual opportunities than poor and powerless ones, so humans evolved to desire wealth and power. Another reason why these desires evolved is that for most of human history, wealthy and powerful people tended to have more surviving offspring than others. So people naturally try to gain prestige and dominance in social groups. In many contexts, it is also natural for humans to gain wealth and power through violence, whether at the individual or group level. We also devote much time and energy to childcare so that our children survive and prosper. Our blood relations, like our siblings, share copies of our genes, so another way of maximizing inclusive fitness is to aid them in reproduction.

Of course, people don’t usually pursue their Darwinian interests consciously. It would be a very weird person who thought, “Today I’m going to go out and pursue my Darwinian interests!” Rather, evolution supplies us with motivations—dispositions, emotions, and desires—that, on the whole, cause us to act in evolutionarily rational ways. We are motivated to pursue sex, for example, because we find it thrilling and enjoyable.

Most human behavior is straightforwardly directed at advancing the interests of the self and blood relatives, and I will call this behavior “egoistic” or “selfish.” Strictly speaking, I should I use a term like “egoistic and nepotistic,” but that would be too cumbersome. Humans have evolved to be altruistic to non-relatives in certain contexts when altruism advances their Darwinian interests. I have described the evolution of altruism here.

Moral realism

Moral realism, which I discuss here, refers to ethical theories that posit that there are objective moral norms or truths that make actions stance-independently right or wrong. For example, “It’s objectively wrong to lie” means that it’s wrong to lie even if you really want to. Since our desires are shaped by our Darwinian interests, it’s usually the case that objective norms also set limits on our pursuit of these interests. We are motivated to lie in some contexts because this motivation helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce. Objective norms tell us that it’s wrong to pursue our interests in this way.

The germ of the problem with moral realism is already evident: if human nature evolves to aid our pursuit of Darwinian interests, then human nature is necessarily in conflict with objective norms. We can expect the fittest humans to be the ones that do not accept any objective limitations on the pursuit of their motivations: in the struggle to survive and reproduce, a person who is prepared to lie in some situations will usually outcompete a person for whom lying is not an option.

Universal benevolence and the free-rider problem

As I discussed in another article, act utilitarianism, as formulated by Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, is a form of moral realism that stipulates that it is objectively right to practice universal benevolence, that is, to obey the rule that “each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own.” So if you are poor, and I am rich, and a piece of my wealth would be more beneficial to you than me, then I am morally obligated to hand it over to you. Lazari-Radek and Singer (just Singer from now on) believe that we are obligated to act in this way because universal benevolence is objectively true in the way that mathematical truths are.

Universal benevolence is radically incompatible with human nature. The reason is that universal benevolence falls afoul of what evolutionary theorists and economists call the “free-rider problem.” Say that a society of people existed who practiced universal benevolence. In this society, each person treats the interests of other people as equal in value to her own. Now, let’s say that because of a mutation, a new gene variant emerges that causes someone to be selfish.2 This person would be a free-rider who profits from the altruism of others but does not return their altruism. This gene would likely cause the free-rider to have higher fitness than the altruists and would tend to spread. After enough generations all the members of society would contain this gene and would thus become a society of egoists.3

Take the example of a tribe of universally benevolent people who survive by hunting. A hunter who makes a kill shares the meat impartially with the other tribesmen, even when doing so results in the hunter’s going hungry. Now imagine a gene emerges that causes one hunter to keep all the meat he kills for himself. This selfish hunter would enjoy greater health than the hunters who allowed themselves to go hungry. Also, the selfish hunter would be more attractive to females, who would regard him as a more reliable source of food than the others were. So the genes for selfishness would spread. For this reason, as Richard Dawkins writes, “Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.”4

The problem with universal benevolence is that it is not an evolutionarily stable strategy. That is, it is a strategy that cannot maintain itself and will inevitably get undermined by another strategy.

Humans have evolved to form networks of cooperation, which do require altruism. However, such networks do not run on universal benevolence. As an example, among hunter-gatherers, altruistic and egalitarian sharing of meat is a common practice. However, such cooperative networks ultimately serve egoistic interests. While the rules of the tribe may not be made explicit, a hunter gives away meat only on the expectation that, on a day when another hunter is lucky, that hunter will share his meat with the first. Such cooperative networks can only become stable if there are ways of punishing free-riders, like hunters who refuse to share their meat. As the anthropologist Christopher Boehm documents, hunter-gatherers do have ways of punishing free riders through tactics like ostracism, shaming, and even execution.5

In short, it isn’t realistic to expect people to be motivated by universal benevolence. Rather, we evolve to be altruistic only to the extent that altruism serves our Darwinian interests and egoistic in other cases.

My argument is compatible with Sharon Street’s evolutionary debunking critique of moral realism. It’s a rich and subtle argument, but her overall point is that, even if objective moral truths did exist, there would be no reason to expect creatures who evolve through natural selection to be bound by them. So even if it were true that people were objectively required act from universal benevolence, no motivation to obey this requirement could evolve.6

Singer’s argument for impartial benevolence

Singer defends his theory of universal benevolence against evolutionary debunking. Singer is quite willing to concede that everything I’ve said so far is true. Singer recognizes that evolution would never design people to act from universal benevolence. “It is…difficult to see any evolutionary forces that could have favoured universal altruism of the sort that is required by the axiom of universal benevolence.”7

Because evolution would not design universally benevolent beings, the source of this norm must be something other than our evolved nature. Singer believes that objective moral norms motivate us through reason. We evolve to be reasoning creatures, and reason enables us to grasp moral truths, just as it enables us to grasp mathematical and scientific truths.

we might have become reasoning beings because that enabled us to solve a variety of problems that would otherwise have hampered our survival, but once we are capable of reasoning, we may be unable to avoid recognizing and discovering some truths that do not aid our survival. That can be said about some complicated truths of mathematics or physics.8

Singer goes on to claim that the Darwinian account of human nature must be incomplete because people do act from universal benevolence. He appeals to religious traditions that mandate that people act in this way. One example of such a mandate is the Christian Golden Rule, or the maxim “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Similar moral mandates exist in Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. He concludes:

there is no plausible explanation of this principle as the direct outcome of an evolutionary process, nor is there any other obvious, non-truth-tracking explanation. Like our ability to do higher mathematics, it can most plausibly be explained as the outcome of our capacity to reason. The absence of good rival explanations for our intuitive grasp of the principle of universal benevolence does not prove that it is a substantive normative truth, but we consider it makes that a reasonable hypothesis to hold, at least until a better explanation is offered.9

Evolution never stops

There are many reasons to be skeptical about Singer’s arguments. It seems intuitively highly unlikely that there are any objective truths about morality that resemble mathematical truths. After all, there is widespread agreement on what mathematical statements are true, but no such agreement on moral statements. Nor is there any agreement on how we should discover moral truths: deontologists and consequentialists, for example, disagree about the basic principles that we should use to assess moral truth. If moral truths are like mathematical truths, it’s a mystery why we have a large body of knowledge about mathematics, but no such knowledge about morality.

Furthermore, Singer does not defeat evolutionary debunking. Street makes the case that appealing to reason does not solve the problems that the debunking argument raises. We never reason independently of a subjective standpoint, which is shaped by our motivations. Singer thinks that we can transcend our evolved nature through reason, but it’s hard to see how that could be possible.10

Another argument against Singer is that he assumes that, after humans learn to reason, Darwinian pressures would stop working on them. However, they would not. So, even if Singer is right about universal benevolence, you would expect evolution to weed out people who practiced it. Imagine a society formed of egoists. Among them, one person is born who, as a result of a gene mutation, heeds her reason and acts according to universal benevolence. We get another version of the free-rider problem. Such a person would be exploited by the egoists, and the gene mutation would be rapidly eliminated from the population. What Singer fails to grasp is that evolution not only does not steer us toward universal benevolence, but actively steers us away from it.

Morality as manipulation

What about Singer’s claim that religious traditions bolster the case for moral realism? Religious mandates like the Golden Rule initially seem incompatible with Darwinism. If the world’s great religious traditions demand that people act from universal benevolence, maybe that serves as evidence that the Darwinian account must be incomplete.

However, Singer does not prove that people do act from universal benevolence. He proves merely that they claim to do so. While Darwinism cannot explain why people would act from universal benevolence, it can perfectly well explain why they would want others to believe that they do. As I explained in this article, developing a reputation for altruism contributes to fitness. Someone who has such a reputation is more attractive to potential cooperative and sexual partners. Such reputational benefits are one reason why people have evolved to act benevolently and charitably.

On this account, people espouse objectivist morality systems not because these realistically describe their motivations or actions. Rather, morality is a form of deception that manipulates people to act in ways that benefit the deceiver. Presenting ourselves as moral enables us to gain more friends. Thus, when someone says, “I am a utilitarian: your good matters to me as much as my own!” he is not giving a realistic account of his motives. What the statement means practically is something like: “I am a harmless person who will not try to exploit you. You should be friends with me and not with those dangerous, selfish people over there!” In this way, moral deceivers gain an advantage over those who provide a more honest and realistic account of their motives.

Moral deception can work without being conscious. People can sincerely believe in an unrealistic self-image because of self-deception. Psychologists have shown that we can remain blind to our motives when these are unflattering to us. Biases in what we notice and remember, as well as other psychological mechanisms, can stifle our awareness of our true motivations.11

Experimental work on moral behavior supports the idea that moral statements function as a self-advertisement. As I reviewed here, people are more likely to exhibit moral behavior, like donating to charity, when they know that their moral action will be made public. Also, people’s private behavior often does not correspond to their publicly stated moral ideals: many people present themselves as fair, but do not act fair when their action will not be made public.12

According to Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, charitable giving is driven not only by desire to help those in need, but also as an advertisement of prosocial orientation to the people around one. People are more likely to give to charities that operate locally rather than in distant places, even if the latter do more good. The reputation theory of altruism accounts for this kind of parochialism: we give to local causes because people in our area are more likely to benefit us than people who live far away.13

Aristotelian virtue ethics

Although Aristotelian virtue ethics, which I discussed here, is a more plausible and attractive ethical theory than utilitarianism, it is also motivationally unrealistic and runs into the same problems as utilitarianism. Virtue ethicists posit that there is some list of virtues that we are obligated always to practice, including honesty, loyalty, courage, and so forth. However, such a theory runs into the problem that people who are ethically flexible, that is, prone to behaving viciously when doing so is adaptive, would be at an evolutionary advantage compared to those who consistently practiced the virtues. A person who is honest when being honest is to her advantage, but dishonest when that is to her advantage, enjoys a competitive edge over someone who is always honest, so ethically flexible people will tend to win out in Darwinian competition.

Morality and misery

Some readers may think that I’m missing the point. I have claimed that two moral philosophies set unrealistic standards for people and should, therefore, be rejected. But you may protest that these philosophies aren’t meant to be motivationally realistic. They are meant as ideals that we should strive towards, even if we can’t attain them. However, this objection misses my point: what I’ve been arguing is that universal benevolence and unfailing virtue are not valid ideals. There is no good reason to try to achieve them and every reason to set yourself more realistic goals. Benevolence and virtue can be admirable qualities, but only to the extent that we practice them in ways that are compatible with human nature.

You have every right to try to act as moral realists tell you you should, but I would advise against it, because, if you do, you will almost certainly end up miserable and bitter. Egoists will constantly exploit your altruism while giving you nothing in return. You will also be constantly at war with your natural, human motivations. We all want, sometimes, to be selfish and vicious. We would sometimes rather go out to a luxury dinner than donate that money to charity, as a utilitarian would require. Like Laura in my virtue ethics article, we would like to lie to our boss to avoid getting fired, an action that a virtue ethicist would certainly find dishonest. If you want to live a life of self-denial and self-sacrifice to false ideals, be my guest! But don’t say you weren’t warned. What I recommend instead is subjectivism, according to which you are right to lie or do anything else if that action is the one that will best gratify your desires.

Most moral realists are not miserable, however, and that is because they are hypocrites who present an unrealistic advertisement of themselves in order to manipulate people.

So if someone tells you, “I am a utilitarian, which means I count the interests of others as equal in value to my own,” feel free to answer, “You’re full of shit! That motivation isn’t realistic for a human being!”

Aristotelian virtue ethics, or just virtue ethics from now on, gained in popularity due to dissatisfactions with Kantian and utilitarian approaches to ethics. Many philosophers found Kantianism too focused on rules and utilitarianism too focused on consequences. Also, both philosophies failed to integrate emotion and desire into ethical theory and had little to say about character.

Virtue ethics attempted to remedy these defects. However, virtue ethics fails to provide a plausible or interesting account of ethics because Aristotelianism is not an intellectually defensible outlook in the contemporary world. Hursthouse’s case for virtue ethics is based on an extremely simplistic model of ethical action that falls apart the moment that you try to apply it to real-world human beings. Virtue ethics might have a future, but not in its Aristotelian form.

Virtue ethics

Virtue ethics, also called moral naturalism, is a form of moral realism based on the Aristotelian notion of teleology, or the theory that every natural kind of thing has a natural end, or telos, which is its perfection. The telos of a horse is to exhibit what we find excellent in horses, like speed, sound limbs, and fertility. The telos of human beings is to live rationally, and rationality requires practicing the virtues. If a human achieves his telos, he achieves a state of perfection in which the various components of his character are at harmony with each other.1 Aristotle named this state of harmony “eudaimonia,” which is translated as happiness or, more usually, flourishing. It is right to practice the virtues because doing so will result in my flourishing.

For Hursthouse, a character trait must meet two criteria to be a virtue. The first is that it benefit its possessor: we receive benefits from being honest or courageous that promote our flourishing. The second criterion is that the trait must make its possessor a good person, that is, someone who contributes to the good functioning of society. Group living species, like bees, wolves, and humans, have characteristic forms of social life, such as group hunting in the case of wolves. Wolves who don’t participate in the hunt are defective. What counts as the good functioning of social life for animals is laid down by nature and instinct. However, in the case of humans, we figure out what counts as good functioning through reason. For us, then, right action consists of acting according to norms that we rationally judge will contribute to the good functioning of distinctively human societies. These norms are the virtues, and anyone who doesn’t practice them is defective. Hursthouse does not provide a complete list of virtues, but she often references wisdom, generosity, courage, honesty, temperance, and justice.

To see the dual role of virtues, consider two potential answers to the question of what makes it good to be honest. One answer focuses on the benefits of honesty to the honest person. Dishonesty is cognitively demanding: the liar must keep track of her lies and constantly watch her tongue. Honesty is less cognitively demanding. Also, if you lie to someone, they will likely find out, and you will just look like a fool. Honesty establishes relationships of trust between people and makes friendship possible. So being an honest person is in one’s enlightened self-interest.

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The second answer focuses on the ways in which honesty contributes to the good functioning of society. Without honesty, we couldn’t learn from each other and do science. Our institutions wouldn’t run smoothly if you couldn’t trust most people most of the time.2

Since virtues play these two roles, they are rooted both in our desires and in our reason. The practice of the virtues gratifies our desires by promoting our flourishing, but this practice is also rational because it promotes the good functioning of society. To practice the virtues is to achieve a harmony between desire and reason and realize the human telos.3 Harmonizing our desires with reason is the work of ethical education. If what we desire is incompatible with good social functioning, ethical education can bring the two components of virtue into harmony.

The existence of this harmony means that practicing the virtues is objectively right, or is right in all times and places. The virtues offer an ideal solution to the problems of achieving our own flourishing and promoting the good of society. So practicing the virtues is what we should always do.4

The virtuous life and flourishing

Hursthouse’s reasoning is susceptible to an obvious objection. Virtues, it is true, do often benefit their possessors. However, sometimes vices do as well. If you ever get mixed up in a war, you might find cowardice a very useful vice to have, as it might save your life to hide in fear while the courageous people charge off to their deaths. In many dangerous situations, it’s quite arguable that it is the cowards who act rightly and the heroes who are defective.

One question that virtue ethics must answer is: if it is right for people to act in ways that promote their flourishing, then why shouldn’t they act viciously in cases where vice promotes their flourishing? It is obvious that not only cowardice but other vices as well might lead me to flourish. Think of the benefits of dishonesty in certain situations. For example, Laura misses a deadline at work because she procrastinated, but blames her tardiness on a computer malfunction. As a result of this lie, Laura manages to avoid getting fired. So, maybe we should behave dishonestly when doing so augments our flourishing.

Hursthouse, of course, has an answer to this question. She does not deny that sometimes vicious actions can lead to flourishing. Sometimes “the wicked may flourish like the green bay tree.” However, she argues that the consistent practice of virtue is more likely to lead to happiness than the consistent practice of vice. Virtue is thus “the only reliable bet” for a flourishing life.5

Hursthouse compares practicing the virtues to following the advice of a doctor. The doctor tells the patient that it would be beneficial for her to give up smoking, get regular exercise, and moderate her drinking. Following these orders does not guarantee that she will be healthy. She can follow them all and still get cancer. Nor is following the orders necessary for a healthy life. Many heavy smokers live to a ripe old age. Rather, following the orders is the patient’s only reliable bet for living a healthy life because non-smokers on the whole are healthier than smokers.6

Hursthouse then effectively argues that consistently practicing the virtues is more likely to lead to flourishing than the consistent practice of the vices. As noted above, dishonesty is cognitively demanding, might make you look like a fool, and is an impediment to the formation of trusting relationships. Honesty is more likely to work out well for you.

Hursthouse quotes R. M. Hare on the difficulties and dissatisfactions of the vicious life:

successful crime is for nearly everyone an impossibly difficult game and not worth the candle. If it is alleged against this that in the past people have amassed large fortunes in business careers which were far from unspotted, I reply that the money did not on the whole bring them happiness, and that with their talents they could have done better for themselves by making less money in a more socially beneficial career. If there are exceptions, they are rare enough to be unpredictable by an educator.7

Hare continues, “it does look as if people who set themselves higher moral standards which are within their capacity, or not too far outside it, are in general happier than those who do not set their sights so high.”8

Hursthouse believes that the only reasonable way for people to behave is to act virtuously even if one happens to live in circumstances in which virtue is punished and leads to death or misery. Such adverse circumstances are just a matter of bad luck, and there is no reason to believe that practicing vices would work out any better than practicing virtues.9

Even if you could find a way to flourish by practicing the vices, you would still face the problem of maintaining a good society. The good society depends on people acting virtuously. If you flourished by acting disloyally, for example, others might imitate you, which would weaken the bonds of loyalty and trust that are essential for a good society.10

The challenge of flexibility

Hursthouse’s case that practicing the virtues best promotes individual flourishing is quite plausible based on her model of ethical action. However, she is less convincing once one introduces a more realistic and complex model. The weakness of her case is that she evaluates only the outcome of the consistent practice of the virtues and vices. Given the choice between consistent honesty and consistent dishonesty, the former wins out. She also contrasts the virtuous person with the “immoralist” or the “mafioso drug baron” that is, the person who is consistently vicious. This framing is implicit in her comparison of virtuous behavior to following doctor’s orders. It is always more healthy not to smoke and exercise regularly than to do otherwise.

However, living a human life is more complicated than following doctor’s orders. As Hursthouse concedes, there are times when virtue leads to misery. When faced with such circumstances, there are more options available to us than choosing a life of consistent vice. We can be flexible. A person can be courageous in most situations, but chicken out in a situation of extreme danger.

Ethical flexibility is not vulnerable to Hursthouse’s criticisms of consistent vice. While the consistently dishonest person must face constant stress and strain in maintaining her false façade, the emotional and cognitive burdens of occasional dishonesty are much lower. Consider the case of Laura above. She might judge that there is little risk in lying about why her work is tardy if her boss has no way of knowing whether her computer did, in fact, malfunction. So she wouldn’t have to dedicate much effort to maintaining her false story.

Moreover, there is no reason why Laura wouldn’t be able to maintain trusting, loving relationships if she were only occasionally dishonest and only to certain people. Perhaps she doesn’t mind being dishonest to her boss because she doesn’t want a loving relationship with him. But she could choose to be consistently honest with her boyfriend because she does want that kind of relationship with him.

Also, ethical flexibility is compatible with the maintenance of a good society. We can agree with Hursthouse that practicing vices like dishonesty does tend to weaken the social fabric, as it tends to lead to distrust. We can also agree that society would collapse if everyone were consistently dishonest. However, if people are only occasionally dishonest, then it is plausible that the damage to the social fabric will not be fatal.

Hursthouse’s argument is, then, based on a false dichotomy. While the life of consistent virtue may be better than the life of a mafioso drug baron, there is every reason to think that a life of ethical flexibility would be best of all. It is a fatal weakness in her book that she does not address this issue. To be clear, I am not advocating for a life of ethical flexibility, merely showing the weakness of Hursthouse’s case.

Humans are a mess

If ethical flexibility better promotes our flourishing than the consistent practice of virtue, not only is Hursthouse’s account of virtue ethics in trouble, but the Aristotelian foundations of that theory are no longer tenable. If vicious behavior, which damages the good functioning of society, can be right, then my own flourishing and the social good are inevitably in conflict. Desire and reason can no longer be harmonized, which means that practicing the virtues cannot be considered objectively right. The notion that humans have a telos where everything fits together must be discarded. How we should live is up to us, and no options are absolutely off the table. That is, we are left with subjectivism.

It is unsurprising that Aristotelianism cannot provide a plausible theory of ethics for the contemporary world because Aristotelianism is obsolete. The best current theory of why human beings are the way they are is Darwinism, and Darwinism leaves no room for Aristotelian teleology. There is a teleology implicit in Darwinism—the goal of a living thing is to maximize inclusive fitness, that is, to maximize the number of copies of its genes that it leaves behind by reproducing and aiding blood relatives to reproduce. Such a conception does suggest that people will usually behave in certain ways—they will usually seek out sex and nurture children, for example. However, since Darwinism is a scientific theory and not a moral philosophy, it provides no reason why we ought to do those things rather than others. Nor does Darwinism provide any guarantee that characteristic human purposes will be better accomplished through virtue rather than vice.

Darwinism also does not give us much grounds for hope that humans can achieve internal harmony. Discussing the implications of Darwinism for ethics, Bernard Williams writes:

the most plausible stories now available about [human] evolution, including its very recent date and also certain considerations about the physical characteristics of the species, suggests that human beings are to some degree a mess, and that the rapid and immense development of symbolic and cultural capacities has left humans as beings for which no form of life is likely to prove entirely satisfactory, either individually or socially.11

We are equipped with a set of emotions, desires, and cognitive abilities that evolved because they enabled our ancestors to reproduce. There is no reason to expect the various aspects of our personality to harmonize with each other, nor do they provide us with a pre-determined telos. Everyone has the right to choose their own purpose in life, and Aristotle’s one-size-fits-all teleology must be rejected.

Hursthouse finishes On Virtue Ethics with a discussion of the essay by Williams that I just quoted. She hysterically calls Williams’ philosophy “moral nihilism” and his message one of “misanthropy and despair.”12 The charges of nihilism and misanthropy are unfair and insulting. If you consider all ethical thought that rejects objective foundations to be nihilistic, then Williams was a nihilist, but that does not mean that he thought it was just as justifiable to do one thing as another or that there was no reason to care about the virtues. He actually wrote a major work of virtue ethics! Williams never called himself a nihilist, and Hursthouse should reflect on why. It is not misanthropic to be realistic about the human condition and human nature: honesty is, after all, a virtue. Finally, if this kind of realism causes you despair, that is your problem, not that of the realist. It is certainly not inevitable that we should greet the idea that humans have no telos with despair.

What subjectivism can take from virtue ethics

In her zeal to establish that it is objectively right to consistently practice the virtues, Hursthouse does violence to the complexities of human life. Another sign that there is something wrong with her thesis is that it yields nothing but platitudes. Consider the contention that the practice of the virtues is the most reliable bet for a flourishing life. We can grant that there is some truth to this idea: if you are usually virtuous, you are more likely to flourish than if you are usually vicious. But this seems simply a matter of common sense, like “Honesty is the best policy.” I didn’t find that Hursthouse illuminated a single ethical issue for me.

That being said, subjectivism, the philosophy that I have argued for, can be enriched by virtue ethics. In my recent account of subjectivism, I focused on how subjectivists migh evaluate crime and criminals. My topic may have made it appear as though subjectivism is a philosophy for criminals. But there is no reason why subjectivists shouldn’t opt for a life of virtue if they judge that such a life will best fulfill their desires. Hursthouse explains why subjectivists might so judge.

Williams’ Truth and Truthfulness, which I wrote about here, is a work of virtue ethics in which he describes the virtues of truthfulness, Accuracy and Sincerity. It is a far more interesting and convincing work than Hursthouse’s because Williams jettisons the Aristotelian framing. Williams doesn’t try to elaborate a big-picture theory of how we should live. He rejected this conception of ethical philosophy.13 Rather, he focuses on elucidating one aspect of the human mess by exploring the social contexts from which the virtues derive their meaning. I think writers on ethics would do well to follow his example.

So, to be a good person, I must act impartially in that I treat the good of others as equal in importance to my own. For dLR and Singer, the relevant others are animals as well as humans. The utilitarian principle that one should act in a way that maximizes aggregate well-being follows from the axiom. If I have an apple, and I am only slightly hungry, I have an obligation to give you the apple if you are hungrier than I. If I can save a city from destruction by sacrificing my life, then I am obligated to do so, since the happiness of millions of people outweighs my own. As for the exceptions that Sidgwick notes, I am not obligated to give you the apple if I know that you are less hungry than I or if I cannot ascertain how hungry you are.

To act from rational benevolence is to transcend your own point of view and desires and thus to act impartially “from the point of view of the universe”2 in Sidgwick’s phrase.

Utilitarianism has been critiqued for all sorts of reasons. There are serious, possibly devastating, problems with defining and quantifying well-being, happiness, pleasure, or whatever utilitarians are supposed to aim at.3 Utilitarianism has any number of counter-intuitive and loathsome consequences, like the repugnant conclusion. In his classic critique of utilitarianism, Bernard Williams was looking for the most fundamental problem with utilitarianism, the problem that would remain even if you could solve the problem of quantification and were willing to accept all the loathsome consequences. His integrity objection to utilitarianism aims to prove that, if people attempted to live consistently as utilitarians, they would be forced to abandon any recognizably human form of selfhood. Bees or ants might be able to approximate a society of utilitarians, but not human beings.

What is integrity?

What does integrity mean for Williams? This question requires some interpretation. As Williams defines the term, “one who displays integrity acts from those dispositions and motives which are most deeply his.”4 An artist would be acting with integrity if she refused to design propaganda posters for a government she hates even though her refusal put her at risk of imprisonment.

It may seem that Williams is defining integrity as a virtue, like loyalty or generosity. However, he made clear that he was not using the term this way: “one should perhaps say that integrity is not a virtue at all.”5 Rather, Williams thought of integrity as an ideal that humans are constantly driven to try to attain. It is possible to act without integrity, as the artist would if she were not faithful to her own deepest motivations, but we always want to act with integrity. A life totally without integrity, in which our actions were permanently and entirely disconnected from our deepest motivations, would not be a recognizably human life at all. The inclination to live with integrity is a necessary condition of human agency, including virtuous agency. Humans can be disloyal or ungenerous, but they cannot abandon the striving to connect their actions with their deepest motivations.

For Williams, it is the projects and commitments that we discover and choose that constitute our deepest motivations. A person is “identified with his actions as flowing from projects and attitudes which in some cases he takes seriously at the deepest level, as what his life is about.”6

Many [projects] will be the obvious kinds of desires for things for oneself, one’s family, one’s friends, including basic necessities of life, and in more relaxed circumstances, objects of taste. Or there may be pursuits and interests of an intellectual, cultural or creative character.7

Williams says further on, “One can be committed to such things as a person, a cause, an institution, a career, one’s own genius, or the pursuit of danger”8. Without projects and commitments (just “projects” from now on), there could be no human self. Our projects are what give substance and individuality to our lives. They are the source of our character or personality.9

It is in the context of projects that ethics becomes relevant to us. If you make it your project to run a construction company, it is crucial to your success that you treat your customers with a basic level of respect and honesty, or else no one will hire you. As Williams puts it, “Unless there were first-order projects [like running a construction company], the general utilitarian project would have nothing to work on, and would be vacuous.”10 We mean by “ethics” a body of knowledge that guides human behavior. Without projects there would be no human beings, and ethics would become meaningless.

Also, having projects is essential to happiness, so if utilitarianism aims to augment human happiness, it should aim to help people advance their projects or at least accept that having such projects is essential to a happy human life.11 This is why Williams calls utilitarianism a “higher-order project”: it is the project of helping others to advance their projects. But, as we will see, it fails to do that.

What is the integrity objection?

As Sophie-Grace Chappell and Nicholas Smyth write in their excellent introduction to Williams’ thought: “In a slogan, the integrity objection is this: agency is always some particular person’s agency; or to put it another way, there is no such thing as impartial agency, in the sense of impartiality that utilitarianism requires.” If you decide on actions from the point of view of the universe, you are no longer deciding on them from your own point of view, so your actions become disconnected from your self.

The distinctive nature of utilitarianism stems from its tenet of negative responsibility: you are not morally responsible just for your own actions, but also for the actions of others to the extent that you exercise some influence over them. On utilitarianism, you are just as much to blame for the suffering that you might have prevented, but did not, as you are for the suffering that you cause through your own actions.12

The famous thought experiment of George the chemist illustrates the concept of negative responsibility. George is an unemployed chemist who is against chemical warfare. His wife and children are suffering financially from his unemployment. A colleague tells George that there is a job opening at a chemical weapons factory. George’s deepest motivations forbid him from taking the job. The colleague understands George’s reluctance, but then points out that, if George doesn’t take the job, it will be taken another chemist, who is a zealous and frightening proponent of chemical warfare. This crazy chemist will push along the factory’s research with much greater enthusiasm than George would do. If George refuses the job, then, the result might be that more people will die from chemical weapons. Also, George’s wife does not share his abhorrence for research into chemical warfare, so there might be domestic trouble if George refuses the job.

For a non-utilitarian, it makes sense for George to answer that he is not obligated to take the job because he is responsible only for the consequences of his own actions and not for those of others. The utilitarian cannot answer that, however. The maximization of aggregate well-being demands that George accept negative responsibility for the actions of others that he can prevent, in this case those of the crazy chemist. Therefore, for the utilitarian, it is obviously right that George take the job. The utilitarian reasons that George will experience unhappiness because of his decision, but he will prevent much greater unhappiness by supporting his family and preventing deaths from chemical weapons.

Many of us passionately disagree that it’s right for George to take the job. We think George should act with integrity and refuse the job. George’s pacifism is one of the commitments that define him, and this commitment causes him to deeply abhor working for a chemical weapons company. Utilitarianism tells him that he has no right to this commitment because it conflicts with the aggregate well-being. Utilitarianism thus cannot make sense of integrity. It leaves no room for us to link our actions to our projects and commitments. It demands that the source of our actions be other people, rather than ourselves. For utilitarians, it is the crazy chemist, potential chemical weapons victims, and George’s family who should determine George’s action, not George himself. Since integrity is essential to our selfhood, utilitarianism thus demands the abolition of the self and makes ethics meaningless. This is the absurdity of utilitarianism.

It is absurd to demand of such a man, when the sums come in from the utility network which the projects of others have in part determined, that he should just step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which utilitarian calculation requires. It is to alienate him in a real sense from his actions and the source of his action in his own convictions. It is to make him into a channel between the input of everyone’s projects, including his own, and an output of optimific [i.e., well-being maximizing] decision; but this is to neglect the extent to which his actions and his decisions have to be seen as the actions and decisions which flow from the projects and attitudes with which he is most closely identified. It is thus, in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity.13

Utilitarians see George’s unhappiness at taking the job as just one input into a utilitarian equation, and they think that George’s unhappiness should count equally with the well-being of everyone affected by George’s decision. But, since George’s feelings about the job are constitutive of his self, treating them as one input equal to the others in this way leaves no self for ethics to work on.

A society of principled utilitarians would thus be a society of people without character or personality. As Chappell and Smyth write, such a society would not look like a human society at all, but more like a nest of ants.

For all agents will then have lost their integrity, in the sense that no single agent will be an unimpaired and individual whole with projects of his own that he might identify himself with; all agents will have to abandon all “ground projects” except the single project that utilitarianism gives them, that of maximising utility by whatever means looks most efficient, and to order all their doings around no other initiatives except those that flow from this single project. What we previously thought of as individual agents will be subsumed as parts of a single super-agent—the utilitarian collective, if you like—which will pursue the ends of impartial morality without any special regard for the persons who compose it, and which is better understood as a single super-agent than as a group of separate agents who cooperate; rather like a swarm of bees or a nest of ants.

This analogy is excellent, but it is not creepy enough to capture the true horror of the utilitarian vision. Humans can choose to act with integrity or not, but ants have no power of choosing to do one thing or another. Since humans desire to act with integrity, a society of utilitarians would be one in which everyone suppressed this desire. They would have to constantly quash their need to form an identity. They would also be disconnected from their actions, constantly doing things that they loathed just as much as George would loathe working at a chemical weapons factory. A utilitarian society might not end up being as miserable as Oceania in 1984, but this is the best portrait of what a society of utilitarians would look like that I am aware of.

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Do you want to be a human or an ant?

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek (dLR) and Singer attempt to answer Williams’ integrity objection. Their interpretation is marred by the fact that they think that Williams views integrity as a character trait or virtue rather than as a necessary condition of human agency: “Integrity may be a character trait that we admire, but it is like loyalty in that, just as we do not value loyalty in the soldiers of evil regimes, so we do not value integrity when it is based on indefensible values or projects.”14 This misunderstanding causes them to miss Williams’ point about the absurdity of utilitarianism, and they do not engage deeply with the problems that he raises.

That aside, what is most striking about their response to Williams is that they are willing to accept that utilitarians cannot have projects and commitments. Even though commitments would seem to be a necessary component of any recognizably human self, dLR and Singer are willing to dispense with them:

I should choose only what leads to the greatest expected good, and therefore must be ready to abandon every project that does not do so. There is a sense in which a utilitarian cannot have ‘commitments’ to projects that he will stick with, irrespective of the circumstances.15

dLR and Singer see no reason why you should want yourself, rather than other people, to be the source of your actions. By implication, they deny that it is important for a person to have a personality or character. Indeed, they think it is wrong for a person to develop a personality. dLR and Singer would seem to enthusiastically support what I have called the abolition of the self. They would perhaps be on board with the project of making humans more like ants.

This interpretation is supported by the rest of the book and other writings by Singer. Indeed, the abolition of the self is arguably the fundamental inspiration that has driven Singer’s life’s work. dLR and Singer present a vision of morality in which humans have no reason to do anything that is contrary or even indifferent to the collective interest. This vision is far more extreme than that of Derek Parfit, another inspiration for dLR and Singer. Parfit believed that human life was a balance of the partial and the impartial, the egoistic and the moral, both of which gave us reasons for action. However, dLR and Singer think that acting from self-interest is always irrational and that it is only impartial benevolence that gives people reasons to do anything.

If the rationality of egoism can thus be put in doubt, we can tentatively conclude that all reasons for action are impartial, and the dualism that led Sidgwick to fear ‘an ultimate and fundamental contradiction in our apparent intuitions of what is Reasonable in conduct’ can, at least on the level of rationality, be dissolved.16

For dLR and Singer, all desires that do not aim at the aggregate well-being, whether for satisfying romantic relationships or prestige or the development of our individual talents, count as egoism, and, as such, are irrational and should be suppressed to the extent that that is possible. If you have money, the right thing to do is always to give it away to someone who has less than you do, and never to spend it on a date or a vacation or a piano or a set of golf clubs. All pleasures, other than the pleasure of maximizing aggregate well-being, are suspect, if not illicit, including the pleasure of developing your individual character. These views are very much in line with Singer’s other writings.

I think that utilitarianism is a destructive and dangerous philosophy, but not because people will ever be persuaded to act as utilitarians. People will reject the abolition of the self and go on wanting to be the source of their own actions, forming commitments and projects, and striving to act with integrity. The real danger is that utilitarianism gives such a loathsome aspect to the ethical that it encourages people to reject the whole notion that it is sometimes right to act altruistically. I think that the notion of rational benevolence is a fundamental part of the way that Americans understand ethics: your good ought to matter to me as much as my own. Certainly, I very often hear people say this or something similar. But the consequences of this maxim are so absurd and monstrous that people rebel and adopt the equally loathsome opposite maxim: the good of others shouldn’t matter to me at all.

There have been a flurry of articles recently expressing alarm at the amoral nature of Donald Trump, who doesn’t respect the ethical standards that must be respected if society is to function. I interpret Trump’s popularity as a sign that Americans have grown sick of the dominant ways of understanding ethics in our society, not only rational benevolence, but also philosophies like Buddhism and Stoicism, which also cast our egoistic desires as forces to be transcended rather than embraced. Trump is a sign of our morality fatigue. We need more humane conceptions of the ethical that encourage concern for the common good without abolishing the self. I hope that one day subjectivism might fit the bill.

People routinely make two objections to subjectivism. The first is that I’m preaching a crude egoism. If everyone should act to fulfill their own desires, why would they ever do anything unselfish? This egoism seems obviously incompatible with human nature. People regularly act in altruistic and self-sacrificing ways, and we judge it right for them to do so. If subjectivism forbids us from acting altruistically, then it is an inhuman philosophy.

The second objection is that it’s wrong to follow your deepest impulse if it leads you to do things that are evil. People ask me, “What if your deepest impulse leads you to sexually abuse children? Or to own slaves? Surely you can’t think that doing these things would ever be right!”

My critics believe that these problems can be solved only by an objectivist moral system, like Christianity, Kantianism, effective altruism, or moral realism. There must be a set of rules that tell us what is objectively right and wrong in all times and places, whether it’s the Ten Commandments, Kant’s categorical imperatives, or Parfit’s objective reasons, which mandate that we treat people impartially and not harm them.

I’ve been gratified to find that some people are starting to discuss my take on subjectivism. However, since my account of it has been scattered across many articles and has shifted over time, people do not always have a clear understanding of what I’m saying. So this article summarizes what I mean by subjectivism and how I answer these criticisms.

I’ve argued in the past that no objectivist moral philosophy is intellectually defensible. I’ve stated my objections to Kantianism, moral realism, and effective altruism. So the appeal to objective values is likely to be invalid. Some form of subjectivism is likely the right way of looking at ethics, and I believe my own is the most plausible. You should also consult the linked articles for a more scholarly account of subjectivism that makes references to the philosophical literature on the topic.

What do right and wrong mean?

For subjectivists, the terms “right” and “wrong” have multiple meanings: there is what is conventionally right, what is subjectively right for me, and what is subjectively right for others.

Conventional morality refers to the moral norms that prevail in a society. An action is conventionally right or wrong if it conforms to or violates these norms. Laws are one part of conventional morality. The other part is conventional social practices: you’re not legally required to be a good son to your parents, but, if you’re not, many will condemn you.

Subjectivists believe that conventional morality evolves to promote social order. Moral norms have no objective foundation. A society can choose whatever norms are most conducive to the kind of social order that its members want. Also, no norm is right in all times and places. In some situations, there might be compelling reasons not to pay your taxes. In some societies, killing someone in a duel is legal, and in some, it is not.

Most of the time, it is in people’s interests to approve of and protect conventional morality. Most of us benefit from social order and the protection from harm that the laws provide us.

The second meaning of “right” is what is subjectively right for me. What is right in this sense is to fulfill your desires. People are driven by a churning, morphing mob of desires. Subjectivists believe that it’s right to survey and weigh these desires and then do what you most want to on the whole. By deliberating on our desires, we discover our deepest impulse.

The notion that there is something that is one’s deepest impulse, that there is a discovery to be made here, rather than a decision; and the notion that one trusts what is so discovered, although unclear where it will lead—these, rather, are the point. The combination—discovery, trust, and risk—are central to this sort of outlook, as of course they are to the state of being in love.2

Discovering, elaborating, and adjusting your deepest impulse is the work of a lifetime. When this impulse conflicts with the demands of conventional morality, it is the first that should always win out. If your deepest impulse compels you to do something that conventional morality labels evil, then it’s right for you to do that evil thing.

It may seem counter-intuitive that it could be right to do something evil, but many of our normal intuitions about ethics are compatible with this idea. If a society labels homosexuality evil and legally punishes it, then it makes sense to us to say that it might be right for gay people to do the evil thing so that they can discover love. Indeed, we might even judge that it’s cowardly in this circumstance for gay people not to do the evil thing.

Finally, there is what is subjectively right for others, which refers to my subjective preferences about other people’s behavior. I want people to do some things, like reading my articles and subscribing to me, and not to do others, like leaving mean-spirited comments. More broadly, I want them to behave in ways that benefit me, or at least don’t harm me. I want the people around me to obey laws that forbid them from attacking me. I want them to be economically productive because, in doing so, they tend to make their society as a whole wealthier, including me. It is justifiable for me to shape moral norms so that they conform to my subjective preferences.

Subjectivism and freedom

For subjectivists, as you decide on how to act, no options are off the table. You have total freedom to choose any action that you can conceive of. One problem with objective morality systems is that they arbitrarily limit your freedom. They tell you that there are some actions, like lying, masturbation, or murder, that you must absolutely never do. But why should you accept any limitation of your freedom? Why shouldn’t you be allowed to decide for yourself whether you want to lie to people or murder them?

As an adult, you ought to claim and defend your autonomy, which is the right to decide what to do for yourself. If someone tells you that you are obligated to respect some system of rules because they are objectively right, then that person is treating you as though you were a child and not respecting your autonomy as an adult. That is why I call subjectivism an ethics for adults.

Subjectivism is not egoism

Subjectivists condone and even admire selfishness in many cases. Many of our desires are selfish, and it is often right for us to act to achieve them. However, subjectivism is not an egoism because subjectivists recognize that people often desire to act in an altruistic and self-sacrificing manner. Many forms of altruism are as natural to people as hunger and sexual desire.

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I have discussed the evolution of altruism and compassion here. Many forms of altruism are evolutionarily adaptive in that they increase our fitness. Our emotions, therefore, evolved to make us desire to be altruistic in many situations. People often want sacrifice their own good for that of their children. People also evolved to be generous because generosity facilitates reciprocal altruism: if I am a hunter, I may generously give you some of my food today so that you will give me some of yours next week. People evolved to be compassionate and charitable because of reputational and sexual benefits.

People sometimes desire to behave in self-sacrificing ways to fight for the type of conventional moral norms that they prefer. Most people would prefer to live in a society in which norms of truthfulness are respected. We want to be able to trust the information coming out of our government, and we want to be allowed to state the truth about what is happening in our society without the risk of censorship. We also want standards of justice to be maintained in our society. If a government can arbitrarily imprison someone without trial, what’s to prevent the same from happening to you? Such norms are so powerfully motivating for people that many put themselves at risk to maintain them. Citizens of an authoritarian state may find it emotionally satisfying to publish articles critical of the government even when doing so incurs the risk of imprisonment.

Deliberative error

For objectivist morality systems, actions are right or wrong to the extent that they conform to an objective standard. Since subjectivists don’t believe in any objective standards, how do they judge an action to be right or wrong? The answer follows directly from the central premise of subjectivism: an action is right if it achieves your desires and wrong if it does not.3

It is for this reason that deliberation plays a central role in subjectivism. Before acting, you ought to deliberate with circumspection and imagination to make sure that your action will achieve your desires.

Let’s say there’s a person named Judy who finds her boss demeaning and intolerable, so she impulsively quits her job. Judy makes this decision because she wishes to feel like a powerful person who doesn’t tolerate ill treatment. She also thinks that she will be easily able to land another job in which she will be better treated and happier. Her decision will be wrong if it doesn’t accomplish these desires. If quitting her job ends up making her feel less powerful and less happy, then it is the wrong thing to do.

What kinds of deliberative error might cause Judy’s decision to be wrong? The first is being wrong about the relevant facts. Judy might believe that there is an opening for another job that she is guaranteed to get. After quitting, Judy finds that this job has been filled. Due to her factual error, Judy must conduct an arduous and uncertain job search and may end up with a job that is even worse than the one she quit.

The second type of deliberative error is an insufficient consideration of the likely consequences of your decision. Because she quits impulsively, Judy doesn’t envisage the financial strain that a prolonged period of unemployment might cause her. She doesn’t consider whether her impulsiveness might harm her reputation among her colleagues.

The third type of deliberative error is a failure of imagination and creativity. It seems to Judy at the time that she quits that the only way of getting out of her situation is to quit her job, but there might be other options that would work out better for her. Maybe she could ask her employer to transfer her to a new location. Maybe she could complain about her boss to the higher-ups and try to get her fired.

Crime and deliberative error

As I noted above, people are curious about what subjectivism says about crime. My answer is that it’s right to commit a crime if it will satisfy your desires, but crimes, and especially the serious ones, are usually the product of deliberative error. Crimes normally don’t accomplish the desires that motivate them.

Imagine a man named Larry who murders his father so that he can inherit his father’s money and live happily on the wealth. The murder is not likely to have this outcome. The police take murder investigations very seriously, so Larry is likely to end up in prison. But even if he gets away with the crime, it is unlikely that Larry will end up happy because of the negative psychological effects of crime. If you commit a serious crime like murder, you must always keep that fact secret or risk being apprehended. People have an emotional need to speak about themselves openly and frankly at times, but criminals can never allow themselves that outlet. Also, for most of us, maintaining a positive image of ourselves as trustworthy and benevolent is essential to our self-esteem, but it would be delusional for a Larry to see himself that way.

Is it possible for murder to be the right thing to do? In theory, yes. Think of Dexter Morgan, the hero of the classic crime drama Dexter. Dexter has deliberated deeply on his desires and found his deepest impulse: murdering other murderers. He is motivated by a profound urge to kill people and he finds doing so deeply emotionally satisfying. He’s clever and cautious in committing his crimes, so he gets away with them for years. Since he only kills only other murderers, he views his crimes as justified and is able to maintain a positive self-image. So it’s subjectively right for Dexter to murder. The show was fascinating to millions in part because it was a philosophical thought experiment. However, I don’t think that the show is very realistic. In real world conditions, it is virtually certain that murder will not work out well for you.

People who deliberate on their actions with realism and sanity will almost certainly decide against committing serious crimes. That is why criminals are so often mentally ill and unintelligent: they are people who are unable to deliberate appropriately. Training people to deliberate on their actions has been shown to reduce their likelihood of committing a crime.

How we impose our values on the world

As I noted above, subjectivists believe that it’s right to shape the moral norms of the society that you live in so that they conform to your subjective preferences. This definition of right means that the subjectivist way of evaluating actions differs radically from the objectivist way.

For moral objectivists, the actions of others are inherently right or wrong. An objectivist would think that a murder was wrong even if no one judged it to be so. However, for subjectivists, the actions of others are not inherently right or wrong. Rather, right and wrong are values that we impose on the world. If actions are contrary to our subjective preferences, we are motivated to make that action wrong. We do so by arguing that our own subjective preferences ought to be shared by others. If we are persuasive enough, we can alter conventional morality. We can make it so that the action that we hate gets punished legally and in other manners

According to the commonsensical understanding, an action is punished because it’s wrong. But subjectivism inverts that logic. For subjectivists, an action becomes wrong in large part because we punish people for it. An action is wrong only if the actor suffers for it, and punishment is one way of making them suffer.

How do you make an action wrong? Consider the case of sexual harassment in the workplace. It used to be the case that powerful men were not usually punished for coercing female subordinates into having sex with them. In this situation, it would have been subjectively right for powerful men to so coerce women if doing so gratified the men’s desires. However, starting in the 1970s, feminists fought back against harassment. They made the case that sexual coercion was contrary to most women’s subjective preferences and that it was thus reasonable for women to oppose it. By coining the term “sexual harassment,” publicizing the problem, fighting for legal punishment of it, and publicly disgracing harassers, feminists made sexual harassment wrong.

What use is objective morality?

Take a situation in which you are trying to persuade someone not to do something because it would be wrong. Say you are debating with Larry before he murders his father and trying to convince him not to do it. Let’s say Larry is your friend, and he brings a lot of joy to your life. You have agreed not to inform the police about Larry’s actions, but you’re sure that you will no longer want to be his friend if he commits the murder. So you have a good reason to persuade him not to do so.

If you’re a subjectivist, you try to convince Larry that he would be making a deliberative error if he carried out his crime. You argue that he may think he wants to commit the murder, but that, if he deliberated with greater circumspection and imagination, he would see that he doesn’t really want to do it. You might try to persuade him that he’s wrong about the facts. Larry wants to commit the crime to inherit his father’s wealth, and he thinks that he will inherit $10 million. You happen to know that his father is much poorer than Larry believes, so, realistically, he will inherit only $2 million. You could inform him about the risks of punishment, which he might underestimate. After all, since Larry obviously stands to benefit from the crime, he will be the first one the police will suspect. You could tell him about the devastating psychological effects of crime. You could also tell him that your friendship with him must end if he goes through with it.

The objectivist, on the other hand, tells Larry that he shouldn’t commit the murder because murder is objectively and morally wrong.

Which of these people is giving Larry genuine reasons not to murder? The considerations that the subjectivist raises are likely to have an impact. Larry might well think that $2 million is not sufficient compensation for all the risks entailed by murder. He might well not have considered how likely the police are to capture him. He might well want to maintain your friendship. He might well not want to have to spend the rest of his life lying about who he is. So the subjectivist is giving him powerful reasons not to murder.

However, there is no good reason why Larry should care about what the objectivist says. Of course, he might be swayed by moral considerations if he believes in them, but there is no justification for such beliefs. He would be right to say, “I don’t care what you think is objectively right and wrong.” Also, if someone has made up his mind to murder someone, it isn’t likely that he will be persuaded by the declaration that doing so would be objectively wrong.

Subjectivism captures the types of considerations that really matter to people in making decisions. That’s because subjectivism describes what is really going on in human ethical life, and objectivism does not.

My critics often imply that, if subjectivism became more popular, more people would commit crimes and behave in other ways that are wrong from our subjective standpoint. However, I think that the reverse would be the case. By becoming more realistic about what human motivations are, we would be better able to persuade people to act in ways that we find desirable.

I think that increasing acceptance of subjectivism would mean that people would live more freely and joyfully. Many people make themselves miserable out of a sense of moral obligation. They stay in terrible marriages because they regard marriage as a sacred obligation that is more important than anything that they could want. They continue relations with abusive parents because they think that they are morally obligated to “be a good son.” They refrain from sexual practices that are forbidden by conventional morality, even when doing the evil thing would make them happy. The subjectivist says: staying in a marriage or visiting your parents is right only if it makes your life better. If it does not, you are right to cast off the chains of morality.

Kantian and contractarian theories of truthfulness

Williams takes aim at several philosophical accounts of truthfulness. Among them are the Kantian and contractarian accounts.

Kantian posits we are under a moral obligation never to lie. A moral obligation is one that supersedes all of our desires: we are obligated never to lie even if we want to lie or if lying seems like a good idea to us. This rule is true regardless of time and place. “To be truthful (honest) in all declarations is… a sacred command of reason prescribing unconditionally, one not to be restricted by any conveniences.”1

Kant’s rigorism about truthfulness is apparent in his treatment of the “murderer at the door” thought experiment. Say a friend of ours is being pursued by someone who wishes to murder them and has taken refuge in our house. If the murderer comes to the door, is it permissible to lie about the whereabouts of our friend? Kant says no!

I have elsewhere examined the Kantian case for moral obligations and found it unconvincing. The shakiness of the Kantian case is also evidenced by the fact that his rule about lying is entirely unworkable in real life, in which lying and other forms of dishonesty are sometimes prudent or even necessary.

On the other hand, there is the contractarian account of truthfulness. Contractarians like David Gauthier believe that people abide by cooperative agreements because they are mutually beneficial to cooperators.2 Cooperative agreements depend on people’s ability to convince others that they are truthful: before you enter into a cooperative agreement with me, like starting a business, you have to believe that I’ll do what I say. Otherwise, I will be a poor cooperative partner. On this theory, truthfulness has an instrumental value, which means that truthfulness has value not in itself, but in service of some other good, like gaining wealth through the establishment of a lucrative business.

The problem with the contractarian theory is that it cannot explain why I shouldn’t lie when it promotes my own interests. If I am truthful because I want to make money, why shouldn’t I lie if a situation arises in which lying results in greater wealth than truthfulness? When truthfulness has a merely instrumental value, problems with trust arise that would be fatal to the establishment of many cooperative relationships on which the public good is based.

The genealogy of truthfulness

Williams explores the nature and value of truthfulness through the method of genealogy, which illuminates the nature of a practice by examining how it arose. Williams asks what problems truthfulness is designed to solve and what qualities it must have to do so.

Williams begins with the state of nature, defined as a state of society before elaborate technology and writing. Humans evolved to use language, among other purposes, for the communication of information. One person might have witnessed something another did not, and the first might tell the second what happened. Language is thus a means of pooling information from multiple people that serves the interests of the group. Since this is a valuable function of language, there is reason to encourage people to perform it effectively, and this means encouraging them to display the two virtues of truthfulness. The first of these is Sincerity, or the practice of saying what you truly believe to the best of your ability. The second is Accuracy, or the practice of making sure that what you say is true.3

Such an account of truthfulness as an instrumental good runs into the problems of contractualism. If I am truthful because it is in my interests to promote the good of my group, then why shouldn’t I lie when that is in my interests? And if it is in everyone’s interests to lie for their advantage, how can the regime of truthfulness be maintained?

Williams’ answer is that people have to take truthfulness to be an intrinsic good, rather than an instrumental one.

One important way of securing [the dispositions of trustworthiness] is that the parties come to think that trustworthy behaviour, such as keeping one’s word, has an intrinsic value, that it is a good thing (many other things being equal) to act as a trustworthy person acts, just because that is the kind of action it is.4

Truthfulness is valuable as an intrinsic good because it helps solve problems of trust. It is only if people generally take truthfulness as an intrinsic good that recognizably human societies and practices can form.

To demonstrate that most of us do see truth this way, I will adapt one of Williams’ examples. Say that you are friends with man and his mother. The man has recently contracted a terminal illness, which he is hiding from his mother. The mother asks you how your friend is doing. You decide to tell her the truth. The mother is devastated and asks, “Why did you tell me that when I didn’t need to know it? Why would you cause me this pointless pain?” She is saying that the truth has no instrumental value, indeed a negative value. You reply, “Because it’s the truth!” Your statement makes sense only on the assumption that telling the truth is intrinsically good and doesn’t need to be justified instrumentally.

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Relationships of trust

Truthfulness is essential to the formation of relationships of trust. To say that we “owe someone the truth” and that “someone deserves the truth” is to say that it is necessary to speak truthfully to that person to maintain a relationship of trust. People are normally enmeshed in many such relationships, which demand different norms of truthfulness. A professor owes a student the truth about her performance in a class, but telling her the truth about his personal life would be inappropriate. However, the professor would owe his wife the truth about at least some aspects of his personal life: if he developed a gambling problem, she would likely feel betrayed if he didn’t tell her about it.

This interpretation of the value of truthfulness explains our practices of truth telling and the emotions that surround them, like indignation and regret. To return to the example of the mother with a sick son, say that, instead of telling her the truth, you return a dishonest, evasive, or even lying response to avoid causing her pain. Despite the fact that you lied for her own good, she might well feel indignant if she finds out about the lie because she thinks that friends owe each other Sincerity. She might decide that she can no longer be friends with you because she cannot trust you. Even if she doesn’t find out, you will likely feel regret for lying and feel like your relationship with her has been damaged.

The lie to the old lady may have been rightly told out of kindness, but we have reason to regret it, to feel bad about it, to think that something has been lost, because our relations to her were in general structured by a sense that we deserved the truth from each other.5

Being a trustworthy person is part of the complex of emotions and attitudes that we label “honor.” People feel that they dishonor themselves by lying. In part, this sense of dishonor is due to the fact that deceit is typically viewed as a resource of the weak. We believe that a strong person ought to be able to achieve their goals through honest means.

People who don’t deserve the truth

However, the mere fact that truthfulness is intrinsically good in relationships of trust does not mean that it is good in all circumstances. We are not in a relationship of trust with everyone. We form such relationships because they are beneficial for us. But if a relationship with someone would not bring us any good, or would be contrary to our good, then it’s often appropriate to decide that that person does not deserve Sincerity from us. The murderer at the door is one such case. It is right to lie to the murderer since that is the only way of protecting your friend. Another example of someone who does not deserve the truth is someone who persists in asking you intrusive questions about yourself when you have made clear that you don’t want to answer.

People typically feel regretful or dishonored when we lie to someone with whom we have a relationship of trust. But such feelings are not appropriate if you lie to the murderer or the intrusive questioner. It is they that are at fault, not you, and they who should feel regret about the encounter.

If it is right to lie, in this kind of case it is no sign of a good disposition to feel bad about it, and anyone who had a sleepless minute over having told a lie to this murderer has his Sincerity out of shape.6

Virtue without rules

Our practices of truthfulness cannot be captured in rules, and any attempt to do so impairs our ability to manage our relationships in a thoughtful and fitting manner. As Williams says:

Sincerity is a disposition, and it cannot be understood just as the disposition to follow a rule. Of course, there have to be some general considerations to which Sincerity attends, or the disposition would have no content…. But they do not add up to a rule, in the traditional sense of a requirement which is relatively simple and does not leave most of the work to be done by judgement. If there were a rule, what would it be? If it were merely a rule against lying, or against deceit more generally, it would be a rule with many and various exceptions, since there are all sorts of cases in which the best thing to do is to deceive, and in some of them it is not a good thing to feel bad about it, either.7

The example of the mother and son demonstrates how complex our relationship to truthfulness is. A case can be made either for dishonesty and truthfulness when you talk to the mother about her son. Truthfulness is of value in a friendship, but so is sparing your friend pointless pain. As is usually the case with ethical problems, no rule will give you a right answer here. Indeed, there is no answer that is wholly right: whatever you say, the mother will probably be angry at you, and you will feel regret.

If a rule about truthfulness cannot guide us in relationships of friendship, how could it guide us in the myriad forms that relationships of trust take? No rule could capture what practices of truth are appropriate in friendships, professional relationships, and legal trials. Also, how could a rule be valid in all cultures? What truthfulness means varies by culture. In a pre-modern culture, if you ask someone what happened in the past, they will be truthful if they recount a fantastic mythology to you. But in contemporary societies, the truthful answer is history that has been verified by research.

The Kantian insistence that morality be reducible to rules does not always, and perhaps not even usually, guide you to appropriate decisions. If infatuation with Kantianism causes you to facilitate the murder of your friend, then that moral system is making you a worse person, not a better one.

Williams exposes how the demand to define the ethical life in terms of moral rules has distorted our understanding of it. Kantian morality is heir to a long Christian tradition that also defined lying as wrong in all circumstances. However, there is in this tradition a murky, unclarified recognition that there are situations in which telling the truth is not appropriate. Christian casuistry has handled the problem by claiming that, while telling a direct lie was always wrong, dishonesty and evasion were not. As Thomas Aquinas put it:

All lies are by definition wrong, acts out of tune with their matter, since words should by definition signify what we think, and it is perverse and wrong for them to signify what is not in our mind. So since lies as such are out of order, they cannot be used to rescue others whatever the peril; rather the truth must be cleverly masked in some way.8

Here is an example from an account of the life of St. Athanasius:

If we read the lives of the Saints, we see how they managed to avoid lying in crises. St Athanasius was rowing on a river when the persecutors came rowing in the opposite direction: “Where is the traitor Athanasius?” “Not far away”, the Saint gaily replied, and rowed past them unsuspected.9

What these casuists were doing was “fetishizing assertion.” They thought that dishonesty was permissible as long as it was couched in the form of a true assertion. Through this means, the purity of the rule “never lie” could be maintained. But this way of understanding ethics does not stand up to scrutiny: “if deceit is justified at all, as in defending the innocent fugitive [in the murderer at the door thought experiment], something is wrong if one thinks that it is more honourable to find some weasel words than to tell a lie.”10 The error is the result of the belief that the ethics of truthfulness can be defined outside of the social contexts that give truthfulness its meaning and value.

“The service of truth is the hardest service”

I have focused on the Sincerity side of truthfulness and have said little about Accuracy. For Williams, Accuracy is about resisting wishful thinking and being diligent in trying to achieve the most realistic view of a situation that is possible for us.

Williams believed that we could account for ethics without reference to any rules or reasons that exist externally to our desires and standpoint, or objective reasons. In fact, he believed that the very notion of such external reasons was incoherent. If desires are the sources of our actions, how could you act on any reason that is external to your desires? I have called this ethical philosophy “subjectivism,” and I have elaborated it in several articles.

When people first hear about subjectivism, they often assume that it is a type of egoism that casts selfishness as the good. Subjectivists are indeed more inclined than most moral philosophers to find selfishness permissible and even admirable. However, equating subjectivism with egoism rests on a narrow interpretation of what people desire. As I discussed in my article on the evolution of altruism, many of our desires are altruistic. People want to care and make sacrifices for their children and other family members. People also naturally feel compassionate and charitable impulses.

The account of the virtues of truthfulness further broadens our understanding of what people desire. People often desire to be truthful despite the inconvenience, hardship, and even risk entailed in telling the truth. It is a part of human nature to say what you really feel in some circumstances despite the risk of offending and alienating people. Many journalists and thinkers in illiberal societies go on doing their best to communicate the truth about their governments despite the risks of doing so.

For subjectivists, risky and difficult truth-telling is rooted not in obedience to objective moral rules, but in the interest of preserving relationships of trust. There is another reason discussed in Truth and Truthfulness that I have not yet addressed: truthfulness is also necessary to preserve the value of language itself. After all, if you can’t rely on most people to tell the truth most of the time, language ceases to be an instrument through which we share truth with each other and deteriorates into an instrument of manipulation and social control.

A powerful illustration of how language and relationships deteriorate in the absence of truthfulness is George Orwell’s novel 1984. The novel is about a regime called INGSOC that does its best to eradicate all practices of truthfulness by lying to its citizens and presenting them with an incoherently shifting portrait of reality. Even worse, INGSOC requires its citizens to endorse the party line and to collaborate in their own deception and victimization. In this world, saying “2+2=4 no matter what the Party says” is a heroic, though ultimately fruitless, act. Language ceases to be a vehicle of truth. It is used, rather, to incite emotions that inspire blind, rabid loyalty to the Party. With the decay of language, relationships also decay into a tissue of deceit, betrayal, and hatred. 1984 is not meant to be a realistic novel, but it is popular because the problems it points to are real, and it is effective in expressing why truthfulness should matter to us.

Sincerity and Accuracy are virtues because they prevent these kinds of deterioration. One passionate believer in the intrinsic value of truthfulness was Nietzsche:

Truth has had to be fought for every step of the way, almost everything else dear to our hearts, on which our love and our trust in life depend, has had to be sacrificed to it. Greatness of soul is needed for it, the service of truth is the hardest service.—For what does it mean to be honest in intellectual things? That one is stern towards one’s heart, that one despises “fine feelings,” that one makes every Yes and No a question of conscience!11

I’ll be discussing racial wokeness, particularly as it pertains to the relationship between black and white Americans. Proponents of racial wokeness, whom I will call “wokeists,” interpret the existence of economic and social disparities between the races, like the racial wealth gap, as evidence of systemic injustice. Wokeists believe that whites are obligated to offer blacks reparations of various kinds to compensate them for our nation’s racist legacy.

The political realist framework of Bernard Williams clarifies why so many people find wokeness illegitimate and infuriating. Williams thinks that a government is legitimate only to the extent that it can justify its power to each subject. Since reparations cannot be reconciled with any plausible interpretation of what is in the interests of white Americans, there is no reason for them to accept reparations as legitimate. My claim is not that the policies recommended by the wokeists are universally wrong, but rather that they justify these policies in the wrong way.

Williams on political legitimacy

When is the exercise of government power legitimate? We typically think that power is justified when it conforms to an objective moral order. Utilitarian and Kantian theories of justice are examples of such political moralism. As I have shown in other articles, however, it is very hard to justify claims that there is any objective moral order. Such claims can be defeated by various arguments, including integrity, parsimony, and evolutionary debunking arguments.

Williams, therefore, wants to place legitimacy on a more philosophically defensible non-moral foundation. Governments are legitimate, on his view, not when they conform to a moral order, but when they can justify their use of power to subjects. Theories like Williams’ that deny that there is a moral foundation for politics are known as political realist theories.

On Williams’ view, a state cannot be legitimate if it does not provide “order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation.” However, establishing this order is not enough to make a state legitimate. An orderly state could be one in which a racial group was enslaved or discriminated against. This group would be justified in finding the political order illegitimate and, therefore, in rebelling. What truly makes a state legitimate for Williams is that it is able “to offer a justification of its power to each subject.”1 For example, the state must be able to justify inequality in wealth and status even to people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy. The politically powerful can’t just say, “You’re poor and powerless because that’s what’s best for us. We’re exploiting you, and we’ve got the guns, so what are you going to do about it?” Rather, for their power to be legitimate, the powerful must be able to provide justifications for the existing order. For example, they could say, “This hierarchy is the inevitable result of a free market, and the free market is the best way of organizing the economy because it tends to increase everyone’s well-being, including that of the poor. There is a huge body of economic research proving that this kind of economic system leads to the best outcomes for the most people.”

There are many forms that such justifications might take. The powerful might appeal to the subject’s economic interests or they might appeal to the subject’s emotions, loyalties, values, or cultural identity. I use the term “interests” to refer not just to the desires for wealth and power, but to the whole range of desires that might motivate a subject to accept the legitimacy of government power.

Williams’ political realism is compatible with some forms of contractarianism, or the legitimation of the law through an appeal to a social contract. While it is generally against my interests to sacrifice my wealth and freedom to others, I might rationally consent to laws that require sacrifices from me but that bring me a greater good in return. I might accept a law of taxation as legitimate, provided it was universally enforced, because the state can use my wealth to solve problems that I want to solve but can’t solve on my own, like crime and poverty. Many laws can be justified straightforwardly by this contractarian logic, like laws against murder, robbery, and other crimes, which protect subjects from harm and promote public order.

Many potential laws also obviously do not pass the legitimacy test. If the state made it the law that everyone had to attend a Christian church on Sunday morning, non-Christians of all sorts would have a powerful argument that this law was against their interests, and that the general interest would be better served by a law that allowed everyone to worship as they pleased.

The reparationist logic of wokeness

The core claim of the wokeists is that blacks are owed reparations of various sorts because of the legacy of slavery, racial discrimination, and racial exploitation. Wokeists believe that the racial wealth gap between white and black Americans is due predominantly to exploitation and that, therefore, whites are morally required to close these gaps. As Ibram X. Kendi puts it, throughout American history:

white people were collectively accumulating, compounding, and passing down wealth from selling black bodies; exploiting no-wage or low-wage black labor; stealing black assets, from the days of whitecapping to the foreclosure era; seizing opportunities, such as the New Deal or GI Bill, that were denied to black people; utilizing family wealth to start businesses; owning government-subsidized homes in government-subsidized white suburbs or gentrified neighborhoods; and cashing in on Reagan-, Bush-, and Trump-era tax cuts for the already wealthy.

One type of reparations that some wokeists demand is a cash transfer. The subtitle of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article “The Case for Reparations” states his thesis clearly:

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Coates doesn’t put a dollar amount on the reparations owed, but the economist William A. Darity has estimated that the federal government should hand over $14 trillion to blacks.2

Wokeists also demand reparations in the form of positive discrimination, or affirmative action. As Kendi writes, “The only remedy to past negative racist discrimination that has produced inequity is present positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity.”3 Kendi defends various forms of affirmative action, like awarding government contracts to blacks and university admissions rules that favor blacks.

Finally, wokeists think that whites owe blacks reparations in the form of racial sensitivity. In White Fragility, wokeist writer Robin DiAngelo says that in their interactions with blacks, whites are obligated “to own and repair our inevitable patterns of racism.”4 Since whites have been socialized into and profit from a culture of white supremacy, they owe it to blacks to treat them with special consideration. Whites should learn to “minimize our defensiveness” about racial issues and “interrupt privilege-protecting comfort” and “internalized superiority.”5 Whites owe it to blacks to reflect deeply on their own racism, to be ready to apologize to them, and to seek feedback about how their behavior is perceived from black people.

Are reparations legitimate?

Many have argued that reparations are illegitimate, but I will be making a case that is, I believe, original and more fundamental than the others are. Authors like Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams commonly criticize reparations on the grounds that they are impracticable, that the woke interpretation of American history is unfounded, and that it is inappropriate to make contemporary Americans pay for the sins of their ancestors. It is quite difficult to define who should pay and receive reparations, and it is far from clear that exploitation is really the cause of racial gaps in wealth and social status. These are valid points, but I want to go beyond these criticisms and make the case that reparations are based on an untenable theory of morality according to which people are obligated to act against their interests.

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We saw above that, on the realist conception, a government is legitimate to the extent that it can justify laws and government policies to each subject. Whites, therefore, have the right to ask how reparations will make their own lives better. If the US government implemented reparations without being able to answer this question, then it would rightfully risk losing legitimacy in the eyes of whites.

Recent immigrants to the USA have particularly good reason to find reparations illegitimate because there is no plausible case to be made that they profited significantly from the exploitation of American blacks. In the interests of steelmanning the wokeist case, I will leave them out of consideration. The wokeists’ strongest case is that white people whose ancestors owned slaves, as mine did, are required to pay reparations, so I will consider blacks’ claims against this subset of white Americans.

The wokeists do sometimes argue that paying reparations is in the interests of whites, but they do not devote much effort to justifying this point. Coates, for example, says that paying reparations would create “a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt” and “a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.” However, Coates offers no proof that whites do in fact feel guilty and that their psyches need healing. Moreover, he does not justify the claim that paying reparations would lead to spiritual renewal or explain why we should want to be spiritually renewed.

Reparations require sacrifices from white people, and I reviewed the contractarian argument that it can be rational to sacrifice one’s own interests if doing so plausibly results in benefits that are greater than the sacrifice. However, it’s hard to see how reparations could be justified in this contractarian manner. If you try to apply social contract logic to the issue, you get nonsense: “If I, a white person, agree to pay reparations, then, if I am ever enslaved or exploited by another race, they will be obligated to compensate me.” There simply isn’t any realistic prospect that white Americans will be enslaved or otherwise exploited because of their race, so this contractarian argument fails.

Wokeists might argue that paying reparations would make black people less angry at white people, and that increased racial harmony would be part of what Coates calls “the spiritual renewal” of the USA. But it isn’t clear that increased friendliness between the races would inevitably or even probably result from paying reparations or would be worth the cost even if it did. It also isn’t clear what whites have to gain from increased harmony between the races. If blacks were less angry at us, how would our lives be better? Why would interracial harmony make us feel spiritually renewed?

It’s more likely, in my view, that reparations would increase hostility between the races and tend to legitimate white racism. I think most whites would find reparations an outrageous injustice and resent black people for demanding them. Reparations would tend to justify the racist sentiment that blacks are economically parasitic on whites and “just looking for handouts,” a perennial theme of American right-wing commentary. I find it likely that the fury that the idea of reparations provokes in many people, and not just white ones, is due to the fact that we intuitively think of legitimacy in political realist terms, even if we do not clearly understand our intuitions.

I said above that we should understand interests in an expansive sense that would include all human motivations, not just selfish ones. I have written that altruistic emotions like compassion are just as natural to humans as selfish ones like the desire for wealth and power. Might whites, then, be motivated by compassion to make sacrifices to blacks?

Compassion seems to me the strongest foundation for the case for reparations. Certainly, in the past, black Americans have been fitting objects for compassion. It’s hard to know how you would feel if you had grown up in a different social environment, but I certainly hope that I would have been on the side of the abolitionists and civil rights activists if I had lived in the age of slavery or segregation. I hope that compassion would have moved me to outrage at the sight of a race condemned to slavery, poverty, and powerlessness by a society that was openly contemptuous of them. And, indeed, compassion would have been only one valid reason for outrage. A regime that can deny human rights to a racial group is one in which no one’s rights are safe. It is in the general interest to make sure that a government enforces a basic level of respect for rights.

Today, however, it is much less obvious that blacks are fitting objects for compassion. The USA has made great efforts to ensure that there is no barrier in blacks’ way to participating in the economy, and blacks’ living standards have increased immensely. Many have made the plausible case that the reason for the racial wealth gap is not the legacy of racial exploitation, but dysfunctions in black culture. So it is not clear to what extent blacks are deserving of whites’ compassion anymore. Certainly, there is no good reason to think that blacks deserve of $14 trillion of compassion.

Wokeness is a morality system

Wokeness emerged from postmodernism, so woke writings contain much discussion of subjectivity and standpoints. You might expect, therefore, that wokeness would be compatible with ethical subjectivism, according to which right and wrong are meaningful only within a given standpoint. However, wokeism is not a form of subjectivism. Rather, it is a form of moral objectivism based on the assumption that people have moral obligations that are binding on them regardless of what they want. When wokeists tell us that white people are obligated to pay reparations regardless of their interests, they are assuming that there are objective standards for behavior that white people are not meeting.

Wokeists do not justify their conception of morality, nor do they appear aware that their moral vision requires any justification, nor do they appear entirely clear about what their moral vision is. They simply assume that there is some transcendent, cosmic scorecard that obligates those who have done wrong in the past to compensate the descendants of the victims. However, there is no such cosmic scorecard. Old wrongs do not necessarily need to be righted. Rather, there are only individuals who demand that governments advance their interests and who are oriented towards the future.

In Williams’ view, a morality system is defined by concepts and practices of obligation, guilt, and blame.6 These systems are based on commandments, categorical imperatives, and other precepts that you must obey regardless of what you want. Failure to conform to the moral order makes us deserving of blame and requires that we feel guilty. By these standards, wokeness is a traditional morality system in which whites are morally obligated to pay reparations, to be blamed when they don’t, and to be made to feel guilty about the racial wealth gap and other matters. I have argued elsewhere that morality systems impose a kind of oppressive psychological slavery on people that we ought to try to free ourselves from.

A better kind of anti-racism

My critique has been directed at the philosophical assumptions underlying wokeism. I do not necessarily object to the policies that wokeists propose, but to their way of justifying those policies. I agree with wokeists that many white Americans are racists and that racism impedes the achievement of the public good. I, therefore, want anti-racists to present a more persuasive and appealing political vision that makes a plausible case that anti-racism brings benefits to everyone.

One writer who is taking this win-win attitude towards anti-racism is Heather Mcghee. In The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, McGhee makes the case that the American right uses racist dog-whistles to sabotage government investments and assistance that would benefit everyone. By presenting government assistance as a handout to blacks, the right turns even poor white people against it, even though they would stand to benefit. McGhee attributes low government funding for college tuitions and healthcare, as well as many other problems, to racial animosity.7

I also agree with DiAngelo that white people should reflect on their racist biases and do their best to take the perspective of the racial other. However, I don’t think of such reflection as something that I am obligated to do to repair the harms of white supremacy. Rather, I want to do it so I can enjoy a more cordial relationship with the people around me. Nor do I think that such reflection ought to be thought of as a special burden on white people. Everyone stands to gain by better understanding the perspectives of those around them.

Reframing anti-racism in win-win terms might be vital to the political health of the USA. Most Americans think that anger at wokeness is one reason for Donald Trump’s popularity. If you defend a morality system that imposes costs on a group without making a realistic case that there will be benefits as well, then you shouldn’t be surprised when they turn to political leaders who express their inevitable resentment.

Another tradition has it that our emotions naturally lead us to be good people without the need for external moral rules. For David Hume, the origin of good behavior is sympathy, or our ability to feel what others are feeling. Witnessing the suffering of others generates uneasiness in us, which we would like to relieve. Sympathy thus naturally leads us to be benevolent to others so that we can reduce their pain. For Hume, people are good not because they are morally obligated to be, but because they naturally develop sociable and benevolent emotions. Bernard Williams’ philosophy, which I have called “subjectivism,” is an elaboration of Hume’s idea.

When I use the term “morality,” I will be referring to objective moral systems. When I use the term “ethics,” I will be referring to all ways of conceiving how we should treat each other. Both morality systems and Humean subjectivism are types of ethical theory.

One common objection to subjectivism is that it can’t account for the altruistic behavior that we see in humans. After all, our emotions evolved through natural selection, which generally shapes us to act in our self-interest. An organism that didn’t prioritize its own well-being over that of others would never win out in the survival of the fittest.

If this objection is valid, then the case for subjectivism would be weakened. Most of us would say that you cannot be a good person if you never act altruistically out of compassion. Peter Singer’s drowning child thought experiment illustrates the centrality of compassion to our conception of ethical goodness: if you would not be willing to ruin a pair of expensive shoes to save a child from drowning, most people would consider you a bad person.

However, this objection is not valid. Contemporary psychology, rooted in evolutionary theory, validates Hume’s point that human altruism does not require an objective moral system but is rather rooted in our natural emotions. Evolutionary theorists have argued that some forms of altruism are compatible with natural selection. Natural selection led to the evolution of compassion, our current name for Hume’s benevolence. Subjectivism presents a coherent, precise, and encompassing theory of human ethical behavior that does not suffer from the weaknesses of objectivist theories.

The evolution of altruism

In The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World, psychologist Nichola Raihani provides a fascinating account of the gene’s eye view of the evolution of sociality.1 Genes contain the code for the traits of living things, and life takes the form that it does because these genes are trying to leave behind as many copies of themselves as possible. Sometimes, genes within an organism compete against each other so that they will be represented in the next generation. However, genes must also cooperate with each other so that they can create healthy organisms that are likely to spread copies of the genes. Individuals can do so by reproducing themselves, but they can also spread copies of their genes by aiding the reproduction of relatives who share genes with them. This process, known as “kin selection,” is responsible for altruistic behavior towards kin. Parents often evolve to sacrifice time and effort to ensure that their young grow up to be healthy and attractive and likely to reproduce. Siblings evolve to help each other out because nephews and nieces share a lot of genes in common with their uncles and aunts.

Another source of altruism is reciprocal altruism, or the mutual altruism between two or more unrelated parties that lies behind cooperative partnerships and coalitions. The logic here is that, when individuals come into repeated contact with each other, it pays for A to be altruistic to B provided that B will return the generosity when A is in need. If they are hunters, A shares with B when A kills something and vice versa. Such reciprocal relationships work best when they are reinforced by punishment of those who fail to hold up their end of the bargain.

Altruism also evolves because of indirect reciprocity, or displays of altruism for reputational purposes. The existence of rating systems in online transaction platforms illustrates the need to maintain a reputation for being a fair cooperator who will give you the full value of your dollar. The desire to maintain a good reputation accounts for many behaviors that are otherwise hard to explain both among humans and other animals. For example, some hunter-gatherers hunt even though hunting is an inefficient method for acquiring nourishment. If these people were only concerned about the most energetically efficient means of acquiring calories, they would only gather plants. However, these tribes may hunt nevertheless because of the reputational benefits that accrue to successful hunters. If a hunter catches a wildebeest or turtle and shares it with the rest of the tribe, they develop a reputation for generosity and fairness that makes them attractive as potential cooperative partners. Many cultures develop food sharing rituals that emphasize the absolute fairness of distribution.

Traits also evolve to demonstrate the genetic quality of their bearers. When a hunter brings home dangerous game, they are demonstrating that they are smart, strong, and fast. Hunting is thus advertising to potential mates that the hunter is of high genetic quality. Signs of genetic quality must advertise some trait that isn’t immediately observable, and they must also be costly to the signaler. The message of the successful hunter is, “I am so strong and healthy that I can track game for a whole day and survive dangerous animal attacks.”

Humans evolve to prefer mates who demonstrate high genetic quality, as this will likely be passed on to offspring. Costly signals that evolved to attract mates, like hunting in humans or the peacock’s tail, are sexual displays. Among most species that perform sexual displays, it is usually males who perform them. Males’ reproductive rates vary much more widely than females’, so males have greater incentive to prove their genetic quality than females do.

The evolution of compassion

Natural selection equips us with traits, or adaptations, that on average enhance our fitness, or our capacity to leave behind copies of our genes by reproducing ourselves or enabling blood relatives to reproduce. Emotions are such adaptations. Emotions are control systems that organize cognition and behavior in ways that solve the problems that humans regularly encounter.2

One such emotion is compassion, which evolved to facilitate all the forms of altruism that I reviewed in the last section. Compassion is a feeling that arises from witnessing someone’s suffering and motivates us to help them. Charitable giving is often motivated by compassion.3

Compassion evolved in part because it motivates us to care for vulnerable offspring. Compassion also signals that a person is likely to be a good cooperative partner. Someone who cares about the well-being of others is less likely to cheat in a cooperative endeavor. For this reason, it is adaptive for someone to develop a reputation for compassion.

Another function of compassion is sexual display, as compassionate behavior makes us more sexually attractive. When people are asked what traits are most desirable in a mate, kindness is rated as the number one attribute for both sexes. There are two main hypotheses as to why compassion is so important in attraction. First, compassion might signal a willingness to share resources with a mate and ability to commit to a relationship. Alternatively, compassion might serve as a costly signal of high genetic quality. Human charitable giving is costly in the most literal sense: someone who can afford to give away money is signaling that they are quite successful.4

Because of these adaptive benefits, humans evolved to find compassionate altruism intrinsically rewarding. Charitable donation brings us an emotional warm glow because it activates reward systems in the brain.5

Compassion, charity, reputation, and sexual display

Quite a lot of research has found that displays of compassion serve the evolutionary functions described above.

That people donate to charity for reputational reasons has been shown in many studies that find that people give more when they know that their gift will be publicized. One study compared donations under various conditions of anonymity and publicity to a campaign to make a cinema house more climate friendly. Subjects donated nearly twice as much when they knew that they would be given a bag that publicized their gift as they did when they knew that their donation would be anonymous.6

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People also benefit reputationally from public charity. Another study found that subjects were more likely to volunteer time to charitable causes like organizing a blood donation drive when their commitment was public, as opposed to when it was not. Also, subjects who agreed to volunteer got a reputational bump. Their scores improved on a measure of social desirability that was given to raters before and after the offer to volunteer.7

Another study found that subjects who expressed a public willingness to donate to the charity UNICEF gained political clout. Donors were more likely than non-donors to receive a vote for election to a student council.8

Evidence that compassion functions as a form of sexual display comes from studies showing that women are more sexually attracted to altruistic than selfish men. A study by Daniel Farrelly and colleagues found that both physically attractive and unattractive men who displayed high altruism were rated as more desirable by women than men low in altruism for both long and short term relationships. As would be expected based on the commitment/resource sharing theory, the effect was particularly strong for desirability as a long-term mate. Indeed, for long-term relationships, the level of altruism proved more important for desirability than the level of physical attractiveness.9

There is also evidence that men compete to prove themselves more altruistic than other men when they are donating to an attractive woman’s cause. Using Facebook fundraising pages to measure generosity, Raihani found that men gave substantially more when a fundraising page was owned by an attractive woman and there was a record of another man giving a large donation.10

The reputation tightrope

A moral objectivist might argue that this evolutionary theory fails to account for essential features of human compassion. The objectivist might say, “On your theory, people ought to go around boasting about how compassionate and generous they are so that they will get the greatest reputational advantages from their altruism. But that is not how people normally behave. People often keep quiet about things like charitable donations and get embarrassed when they are publicized by others. People even donate anonymously. How can your evolutionary theory account for that?”

Raihani provides a very strong answer to this objection. Flamboyant and ostentatious displays of altruism tend to generate resentment. After all, ostentatious altruists make other people look poor and stingy by comparison. Moreover, people understand that altruism can lead to reputational benefits and fear that altruists will use their enhanced status to dominate others. For this reason, many cultures develop social norms that encourage modesty when it comes to altruism. For example, here is a member of the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen, who live in the Kalahari desert:

“Say there is a Bushman who has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggart, ‘I have killed a big one in the bush!’ He must first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and asks, ‘What did you see today?’ He replies quietly, ‘Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all [pause] just a little tiny one.’ Then I smile to myself,” he continued, “because I know he has killed something big.

“Yes, when a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So, we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”11

Altruists are thus in an awkward position. They are motivated to let it be known that they are altruists without seeming that they want it to be known. Raihani calls this problem the “the reputation tightrope.” David Pinsof calls it a social paradox.

Some charity systems are designed help people walk the tightrope. The company JustGiving, which facilitates donations to causes, wanted to encourage donors to share their donations on Facebook, as this sharing boosted total contributions. They tried displaying various messages to donors to see which one worked best. The message “You’re an amazing person. Share your donation!” was ineffective because it made it appear as though the donor was bragging about their generosity. The message “Help your friend raise even more money by sharing their page!” was more effective because it enabled donors to publicize their donations while avoiding the appearance of bragging.12

Why subjectivism wins

We don’t need to believe in an objective morality system to be compassionate. Rather, our natural emotions are sufficient. Since morality systems aren’t necessary to explain altruistic behavior, we should accept subjectivism as the superior ethical theory because it doesn’t run into the problems that dog objectivist theories.

For one thing, subjectivism is naturally compatible with scientific research on human behavior, whereas objectivists have trouble reconciling their theories with science. Indeed, we saw in my last article that one of the most effective arguments against moral realism is the “evolutionary debunking” argument. Moral realists have trouble explaining why creatures designed by natural selection would care about objective moral reasons. Not only does subjectivism not face such difficulties, but it is synergetic with scientific research: subjectivists can naturally draw on science to make their theories more detailed and convincing.

Moreover, subjectivism offers a more effective means of ethical persuasion than objectivism. Ask a Christian, Kantian, or effective altruist why wealthy people should donate to charity, and they will say, “Because they are under a moral obligation to!” People are well within their rights to ask what moral obligations are and how they can be justified. As I have shown in other articles, it is difficult to explain what moral obligations are and even harder to explain why they should be binding on us.

A subjectivist, however, has a much easier time coming up with an effective answer to the question. They can say, “Charitable giving and other sorts of compassion are a natural part of human sociality. Giving to charity will improve your reputation and social status. It will make you loved and respected. It will even make you sexier! Because compassion has these effects, evolution has equipped you with an emotion to encourage it. So being compassionate will just feel good as well!” I think people will find this kind of argument for charitable giving much more convincing than the moral obligation account. After all, who doesn’t want to feel good? And who doesn’t want to be loved, respected, and sexually attractive?

Finally, subjectivism is an ethical theory that is compatible with the maintenance of our personal integrity. As I explained elsewhere, one of the strongest objections to morality systems is the integrity argument. People naturally form ground projects for their lives, like becoming a champion tennis player or writing a novel or being a great father. Since morality systems are indifferent to people’s desires and individual perspectives, it is impossible to reconcile these systems with ground projects. If a moral obligation conflicts with your ground project, you are simply obligated to give the project up, which potentially violates your integrity. If, for example, the utilitarian obligation to maximize aggregate well-being requires you to take a job that you hate, you are obligated to take that job, even if doing so makes you want to kill yourself. For subjectivism, our altruistic motivations don’t trump any of our other motivations. You may want to donate money to charity, but also want to spend it on education to further your career. For the subjectivist, there is no question of being obligated to choose either of these courses. You should just do whatever feels emotionally right after deliberation, and there is no reason to give up your ground project due to moral obligation.

When I say that ethics is a matter of doing what feels emotionally right, objectivists are quick to reply, “But our emotions don’t always lead to good behavior! Being a serial killer seems emotionally right to some people! That’s why we need an objective standard to morally evaluate our behavior!” However, I don’t find this argument for objectivism persuasive. We are naturally sociable and compassionate creatures and we create laws, rules, and social norms to encourage these motivations in each other. Therefore, people who are motivated to behave badly will be rare, and we can prevent them from doing harm by incarcerating them. It seems to me that this is all we need to create livable societies. It isn’t clear to me why objectivists think that moral condemnation improves on this situation. If someone really wants to be a serial killer, will they be dissuaded from their course if someone tells them that killing people is morally and objectively wrong? That seems unlikely. Indeed, I think that the only real function of morality systems is to obscure the true nature of our ethical lives. Morality systems are useful to people who do not wish to understand human nature, and that is why many go on defending these systems.

Moral realism is one way of answering these questions. Moral realists think that moral truths exist independently of any human standpoint, and that moral judgments are objectively right when they correspond to these truths. “Objectively right” means right for all people at all times and in all places, regardless of their individual standpoints and desires. Naturalist moral realists hold that moral truths exist in the same way as natural properties do. To say “this situation is fair” is like saying “this apple is red.” Non-naturalist moral realists, like Derek Parfit, hold that moral truths are like necessary mathematical or logical truths. So to say, “We shouldn’t attack strangers” is like saying “2+2=4.”

Another way of understanding ethical rightness is subjectivism. For subjectivists, there is no objective moral order. Rather, ethical judgments are right only from within an individual standpoint, so what’s right for one person may not be right for another. For subjectivists, only desires provide potential reasons for action, like the desire for food or the desire to be loved and respected. For Bernard Williams, an action is right or justified when there is a sound deliberative route to it from our set of desires. Deliberation means evaluating which of our desires we have most reason to fulfill and making sure that our plans to achieve those desires are based on true beliefs. I have discussed Williams’ subjectivism in multiple articles, and I would recommend reading especially this one as background to this article.

Parfit’s primary philosophical project was to defend moral realism against subjectivism. Christian Gonzalez has written a careful and precise summary of Parfit’s defense. Parfit’s central argument is that subjectivists cannot account for what it means to have a reason to do anything. He thought that only objectively real truths, rather than subjective desires, could provide reasons. A world without objective reasons is a world in which people have no reason to do anything, a world where “nothing matters.”1 However, subjectivism does, in fact, offer an adequate account of what it means to have a reason. Also, Parfit’s account of objective reasons runs into insuperable problems. Particularly, once you separate reasons for action from desires, it becomes unclear how those reasons could motivate anyone.

Parfit against subjectivism

Parfit believed that subjectivism gives the wrong account of what a reason is, and that the term could be properly understood only in a realist, objectivist sense. He believed that we have both self-interested and moral objective reasons. We have self-interested reasons to prolong our lives, to avoid agony, and to experience pleasure. We have moral reasons to be impartial in many circumstances, not to harm others, and to help others, especially when helping does not cost us much. Parfit conceived of these objective reasons along the lines of mathematical and logical truths. Reasons for human action would exist even if humans did not. Parfit thought that we had no reason to do things that are self-destructive or immoral.

Parfit’s case against subjectivism begins with the Agony Argument.

I know that some future event would cause me to have some period of agony. Even after ideal deliberation, I have no desire to avoid this agony. Nor do I have any other desire or aim whose fulfilment would be prevented either by this agony, or by my having no desire to avoid this agony.2

In this case, the subjectivist is committed to the position that I do not have any reason to avoid agony because I lack a desire to do so. Parfit argued that in this case I have a reason to avoid agony whether I desire to or not. Most people would, I think, intuitively be on Parfit’s side here. After all, it seems strange and implausible to say that someone has no reason to avoid agony. Parfit goes on to make the case that since subjectivism can’t account for the concept of a reason, it cannot justify the use of normative language: the subjectivist cannot coherently say that it is wrong for me to avoid agony or that I ought to avoid agony. Finally, Parfit objected that many subjectivist accounts of deliberation are incoherent because they smuggle in objective standards.

Is subjectivism implausible?

Parfit’s first justification of moral realism is that we can’t make sense of the concept of a reason on subjectivist grounds, with the Agony Argument as proof. However, a subjectivist can argue that it is our desires that give us potential reasons for actions. We have a good or justified reason to do something when there is a sound deliberative route from our desires to a given action. If you see a glass of clear liquid, your thirst gives you a potential reason to drink it. However, if the liquid turns out to be gasoline, you’re not justified in drinking it. An action is justified when we have deliberated on it and made sure that it is what best satisfies our desires, that it is not based on false beliefs, will not have unacceptable consequences, and so forth.

So how would a subjectivist named Carol respond to Mark, who has no wish to avoid agony? Carol could urge Mark to deliberate on his decision and make the case that there is no sound deliberative route from normal human desires to his decision not to avoid agony. Carol could make sure that Mark understood the meaning of the term agony and explain that human beings are happier when they are not experiencing agony. Carol could berate Mark for being stupid and crazy.

However, Mark is deaf to all of Carol’s efforts to persuade. He tells Carol that he has deliberated on the matter and is not under any false beliefs about the situation. In that case, I follow Sharon Street in concluding that Carol must simply accept that Mark has no reason to avoid agony.3 This seems counter-intuitive and implausible, but the subjectivist has an answer to this objection: the implausibility of the case stems from the fact that Mark has extremely weird motivations that it is not plausible to attribute to any human being. Indeed, as Street says, the eccentrics that realists use to justify their philosophy are like alien beings whose motivations aren’t recognizably human at all.4 It is not implausible or counter-intuitive that the actions of beings who lack normal human motivations would seem absurd from the human perspective.

Therefore, the subjectivist account of reasons can survive Parfit’s objection. Desires give us potential reasons for action, and, if he has no desire to avoid agony, Mark has no reason to avoid it in this case.

Can subjectivism be normative?

Normativity refers to the question of whether some thing or action meets a standard. Words like “should,” “ought,” “right,” and “wrong” are normative terms in that they judge whether an action meets an ethical standard.

Parfit believed that the failure of subjectivists to justify the concept of a reason meant that they were incapable of justifying the use of normative language. We naturally want to tell Mark that he’s wrong not to want to avoid agony. If subjectivism does not allow us to do that, then it would seem that subjectivism fails to justify normativity. For this reason, Parfit wrote, “Williams did not understand the distinctive concept of a non-psychological purely normative reason.”5 Street defends Williams against this claim: defining the concept of a normative reason as “the concept of one thing’s calling for, or counting in favor of, something else,” she makes the case that Williams believed in normativity just as much as Parfit did.6

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If the subjectivist account of reasons is adequate, then so is its account of normativity. It is right for us to perform an action when there is a sound deliberative path to it from our desires. The subjectivist account of normativity is different from the realist account in that the subjectivist believes that, if Mark has no desire to avoid agony, then it is right for him not to avoid it. However, the subjectivist account is perfectly coherent and intuitively plausible when it is not applied to beings with alien motivations. When subjectivists say, “It’s wrong to attack strangers,” what they mean is that there is no sound deliberative route from what humans normally desire to the action of attacking strangers. After all, it is hard to see what normal human desire the action would fulfill—why would anyone want to attack strangers? Moreover, if someone publicly attacks strangers, they will likely be attacked back, be abhorred by virtually everyone, and sent to prison. Since people normally don’t want to be attacked, abhorred, and locked up, the subjectivist would say that you ought not to attack strangers.

Is subjectivism incoherent?

Parfit outlines various versions of subjectivism, and argues that some of them fail because they are incoherent in the sense that they try to smuggle in objective moral standards that are not included in a person’s set of desires. Consider this version of subjectivism:

when we are making important decisions, we ought if we can to try to learn more about the different possible outcomes of our acts, so that we can come to have better informed telic desires or aims, and can then try to fulfil these desires or aims.7

“Telic” means “goal-directed.”

Parfit believes that this kind of subjectivist theory might sneak in an objective reason that is foreign to our actual desires. The reasoning is not completely clear to me, but I think that Parfit is saying something like this: if we say that our deliberations should meet the standard of being fully informed, then we are saying that our deliberations should not be motivated solely by our desires, but by an objective standard. You can imagine subjectivists smuggling in objective reasons in various ways and forms. For example, if a subjectivist believed that we should always try to be fair to people when we deliberate, then fairness would an objective standard that guides deliberation.

Parfit may or may not be right that some versions of subjectivism are incoherent in this way, but he concedes that there is one version of subjectivism that does not fall prey to this criticism, the Telic Desire theory, and that theory seems an adequate ground for subjectivism. Parfit defines this theory as follows:

we have most reason to do whatever would best fulfil or achieve our actual present telic desires or aims.

we ought to try to discover the facts about how we can best fulfil our present telic desires or aims.

if we want to have such better informed desires or aims, we ought to try to discover the facts about what the different possible outcomes would be like, so that we can have such desires or aims.8

For the Telic Desire theory, your present desires are the only potential reasons for action, and you deliberate to better fulfill them. Among your present desires may be a desire to have different desires. You may want to lose weight, and so you may want to have different desires when it comes to food. You wish you didn’t desire to eat so much. However, since this is a goal that you desire, it is not an objective standard that you are imposing on yourself. Therefore, this version of subjectivism is not incoherent. Parfit thinks that this version of subjectivism is defeated by the Agony Argument, but, as we saw above, that argument does not defeat subjectivism.

What’s wrong with moral realism?

So subjectivists have answers to the accusations that Parfit makes against them. What are potential subjectivist lines of attack against Parfit?

The subjectivist can begin by asking for more information about these objective reasons. What are they and how do they work? Parfit conceives of objective reasons as being akin to “necessary truths, such as logical and mathematic truths.”9 We come to understand them better through reflection as we do mathematical truths. Parfit believes that objective reasons have no observable effects on the world, so there can be no empirical evidence for them.

On our view, since these beliefs are irreducibly normative, they are not about entities or properties that are part of the causal fabric of the world. Since such normative truths could not have any observable effects, or help to explain what we can observe, we could not have any empirical evidence supporting our belief in these truths.10

Objective reasons have no motivational force, just as mathematical truths do not. They are, to use Williams’ phrase, purely external reasons that do not interact with our desires at all. Objective reasons justify our actions, but do not cause them.

The subjectivist can then ask why we should believe that these objective reasons exist at all if there can’t possibly be any evidence for them. We have already seen Parfit’s answer to this question. These reasons must exist because we can’t make sense of the concept of a reason without them, nor can we justify normativity.

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However, if we can justify the concept of a reason and normativity on subjectivist grounds, as I have argued we can, then subjectivists can declare that we simply don’t need objective reasons. This is the argument that moral realism is unparsimonious.11 We should prefer theories that don’t multiply explanatory entities beyond necessity. Say that someone told me that there was a force called ytivarg that was the opposite of gravity because it caused objects to rise rather than sink. When I ask how ytivarg can be measured or observed in any way, I am told that it can’t be. In that case, I would be justified in rejecting the existence of ytivarg on the grounds of parsimony, and the same argument applies to objective reasons.12

The second line of argument against moral realism is Street’s evolutionary debunking argument. We know that evolution is responsible for the design of our brains and has shaped what incentives we respond to. We are incentivized to preserve our own lives and seek the good of our offspring because organisms that do those things tend to have higher fitness, or more surviving copies of their genes, than those who do not. We also have incentives to seek high social status and to cooperate with each other.13 However, there is no reason to think that acting in accordance with Parfit’s objective moral reasons would have enhanced our fitness, and, therefore, there is no reason why we would have any incentive to do so.14

In his response to Street, Parfit rejects the idea that evolution can account for moral reasons. Indeed, he thinks that evolution has had a “distorting influence”15 on our moral judgments because behaving in selfish and other immoral ways often enhances evolutionary fitness. Parfit believed that our evolved psychology had a strongly determining effect on early humans, but that we are outgrowing our natural inclinations and are increasingly guided by moral truth.

though humanity’s earliest moral beliefs were in several ways distorted by evolutionary forces, those distortions are being overcome, so that true moral beliefs are becoming more and more widely held.16

Street believes that this account of the relationship between morality and reason does not stand up to scrutiny:

we are left with the implausible skeptical conclusion that our evaluative judgements are in all likelihood mostly off track, for our system of evaluative judgements is revealed to be utterly saturated and contaminated with illegitimate [evolutionary] influence. We should have been evolving towards affirming the independent evaluative truths posited by the realist, but instead it turns out that we have been evolving towards affirming whatever evaluative content tends to promote reproductive success. We have thus been guided by the wrong sort of influence from the very outset of our evaluative history, and so, more likely than not, most of our evaluative judgements have nothing to do with the truth.17

Parfit answers that even if evolution did not equip us to recognize moral truths instinctively, we could still come to recognize them through rational reflection. He compares the process to the discovery of mathematical truths through reflection: we do not innately understand the notion of infinity, and we had no such concept until relatively recently in the history of our species.18 However, Street has an answer to this line of reasoning: if evolution shaped our cognition from the ground up, then there is no way that we could escape the effect of evolutionary influence through rational reflection. Indeed, our reflective powers were shaped by evolution just as much as our other cognitive powers were.

reflection of this kind isn’t going to get one any closer to evaluative truth, any more than sorting through contaminated materials with contaminated tools is going to get one closer to purity.19

Street’s critique reveals the basic problem with all non-subjectivist moral systems: if you separate the moral reasons that ought to motivate us from our desires, and what matters to us are the things that we desire, then there is no reason why these moral reasons should matter to us. She is elaborating on Williams’ argument that the notion of an external reason is incoherent.

Moral realism fails as a philosophy because moral realists fail to prove that objective reasons are necessary for normativity. Besides that, moral realism is unparsimonious and contradicts the scientific understanding of human motivation. So why does moral realism continue to be popular among philosophers? I think the reason is terror of human nature and the human condition. Like all of us, realists feel horror when they see their ethical preferences disrespected and disobeyed. When we witness murder, lack of compassion, cruelty and the like, we want to persuade people that they should stop. Telling them that their behavior is objectively wrong sounds weighty and important. Also, the notion that our ethical preferences are somehow endorsed and ratified by the cosmos gives us hope that they will prevail. However, I think more and more people are getting wise to the fact that talk of objective wrongness is baseless. We should accept that there are no objective reasons for people to endorse our ethical preferences. To persuade people to accept what we think is right, we need to appeal to their real human desires.

In a response to my article, Bentham’s Bulldog accuses me of a crude relativism that would render all ethical deliberation and argumentation, or practical reason, illegitimate and nonsensical. The bulldog takes me to be saying that subjectivism offers us no means of critiquing ethical commitments, no matter how hateful we may find them. If desire is the only valid reason for action, does it follow that having a desire justifies the action that fulfills it? If someone desires to kill someone else, does that desire of itself justify the action of killing them?

Some types of subjectivists would answer “yes” to these questions, and they are fully deserving of the bulldog’s criticism. If subjectivism inevitably led to crude relativism, that would be a reason to reject the philosophy. After all, it is natural for people to engage in practical reason, and no reasonable person would want them to stop.

However, subjectivism of the kind defended by Bernard Williams is compatible with practical reason. Williams found crude relativism “completely useless.”1 For Williams, it is perfectly valid to criticize people’s ethical commitments for being based on unjustified beliefs about the world and for leading to bad outcomes.

To determine what is really best for us, deliberation is required. We should make sure that our desires are based on accurate and consistent beliefs about the world, and we should think about what it is that we most desire to do. We can also encourage others to deliberate by criticizing their commitments. This type of deliberation and argumentation is subjectivist practical reason. Due to the central role of deliberation in Williams’ subjectivism, I will call it “deliberative subjectivism.”

What is morality?

The central thesis of Williams’ work is that “we would be better off without [morality].”2 The claim may seem absurd. After all, how can we live without standards that are binding on all of us? Deliberative subjectivism is meant to be an answer to this question.

While Williams opposed morality, he very much believed in ethics. He refused to define that term because ethical systems are too diverse and culturally specific to admit of a definition. One part of ethics deals with questions of how we ought to treat each other. Typical topics in ethics are the nature of obligation, duty, and virtue.3 Morality is one type of ethical system that emerged in Christian philosophy and is also expressed by secular philosophies that descended from Christianity, like Kantianism and utilitarianism. Williams thought that Kant had given “the purest, deepest, and most thorough representation of morality,”4 so Williams based his definition of morality on Kantianism, but much of what he says also applies to other moral philosophies.

Morality is characterized, first, by a distinctive notion of obligation.5 Morality systems ascribe an overriding importance to one class of obligation, moral obligations. For Kantians, we are morally obligated to act according to rules that a rational being could will to be universal. Kant believed that we have quite a lot of duties, including ones forbidding breaking promises, lying, murder, and masturbation. Utilitarianism tells us that we are morally obligated to maximize the aggregate well-being of humanity or sentient life. Moral obligations are overriding in the sense that they should win out if they conflict with any of our other motivations. As I discussed here, if a moral obligation, like keeping a promise, conflicts with a non-moral desire, like seeing an art exhibit, a Kantian thinks that the obligation must win out.

Moral obligations are overriding because morality is supposed to be a set of objective principles that are right regardless of your desires or individual perspective. “X is morally wrong” means X is wrong for all rational agents in all times and places.

Moral philosophers typically believe that moral action is motivated by reason rather than desire. As Kant put it: “this duty – as duty in general – lies, prior to all experience, in the idea of a reason determining the will by means of a priori grounds.”6 For the foundational utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick, the “judgment that ‘X ought to be done’” is “a ‘dictate’ or ‘precept’ of reason.”7 Williams, therefore, calls these moral reasons “external reasons” because they are external to our desires, which are our “internal reasons.” For Kant and many other moral philosophers, to act immorally is to act irrationally.

The following thought experiment from Kant illustrates the externality of moral motivation. An action is moral only if it is not motivated by desire, or “inclination,” as Kant called it.

To be beneficent where one can is a duty, and besides there are many souls so sympathetically attuned that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest they find an inner satisfaction in spreading joy around them and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I assert that in such a case an action of this kind, however it may conform with duty and however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth but is on the same footing with other inclinations, for example, the inclination to honor, which, if it fortunately lights upon what is in fact in the common interest and in conformity with duty and hence honorable, deserves praise and encouragement but not esteem; for the maxim lacks moral content, namely that of doing such actions not from inclination but from duty. Suppose, then, that the mind of this philanthropist were overclouded by his own grief, which extinguished all sympathy with the fate of others, and that while he still had the means to benefit others in distress their troubles did not move him because he had enough to do with his own; and suppose that now, when no longer incited to it by any inclination, he nevertheless tears himself out of this deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, simply from duty; then the action first has its genuine moral worth.8

What is subjectivism?

Subjectivists believe that no philosopher has ever justified belief in moral obligations. They believe that ethical principles, like “You shouldn’t lie,” often provide sound reasons for action. However, there is no reason that our other motivations shouldn’t win out when they conflict with ethical principles. For subjectivists, our desires are the only valid reason for action and “external reason statements, when definitely isolated as such, are false, or incoherent, or really something else misleadingly expressed.”9 Reason itself does not motivate us to do anything. Rather, the role of reason is help us decide how best to fulfill our desires.

Williams refused to label his ethical philosophy, but I prefer to label the views that I talk about, so I will call Williams’ philosophy “deliberative subjectivism.” He thought that any of our desires gives us a potential reason for action, but that we also ought to deliberate on our potential actions to make sure that they are really what is best for us in the sense of best satisfying our desires. Given that our desires are diverse and internally contradictory, figuring out what is best for us entails extensive deliberation. Williams believed that we have a reason to do something, or are justified in doing it, when there is a “sound deliberative route”10 from our desires to a given action. We are not morally obligated to deliberate, but we must often do so if we are to figure out what is best for us.11

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Since our desires depend on our beliefs, deliberation requires checking our beliefs for accuracy and consistency. You might desire to drink a glass of clear liquid because you believe that it contains water. However, if it actually contains gasoline, drinking it is not what is best for you. If you want to live to 80 and also to smoke 40 cigarettes per day, deliberation might show that those desires are inconsistent with each other, and you should opt for one or the other.

Deliberation also means evaluating which of your desires are the most compelling to you. If you’re only a little bit hungry and very thirsty, then you have a more compelling reason to eat than to drink.

Williams depicts ethical deliberation as an open-ended process that often leads to unpredictable results:

As a result of such processes an agent can come to see that he has reason to do something which he did not see he had reason to do at all. In this way, the deliberative process can add new actions for which there are internal reasons, just as it can also add new internal reasons for given actions. The deliberative process can also subtract elements from S [a person’s set of internal reasons]. Reflection may lead the agent to see that some belief is false, and hence to realise that he has in fact no reason to do something he thought he had reason to do. More subtly, he may think he has reason to promote some development because he has not exercised his imagination enough about what it would be like if it came about. In his unaided deliberative reason, or encouraged by the persuasions of others, he may come to have some more concrete sense of what would be involved, and lose his desire for it, just as, positively, the imagination can create new possibilities and new desires.12

Morality systems give meaning to normative terms, like “should,” “ought,” “right,” and “wrong.” You should do, and it’s right to do, what you are morally obligated to do. Subjectivists, of course, do not use normative terms in this sense, but their meaning can be adjusted so that they are compatible with subjectivism. We want to do what’s best for us, and understanding what that is requires deliberation. What we should do, and what it’s right to do, is what a reasonable person would choose to do after deliberation.

“Desire” is another tricky word for Williams because we tend to think of desires as being egoistic. However, people often have desires to perform actions that are altruistic. Parental sacrifice for children is an obvious example: most parents feed and care for their children out of a desire for their children’s well-being, not out of a sense of moral obligation.

I have discussed S [a person’s set of internal reasons] primarily in terms of desires, and this term can be used, formally, for all elements in S. But this terminology may make one forget that S can contain such things as dispositions of evaluation, patterns of emotional reaction, personal loyalties, and various projects, as they may be abstractly called, embodying commitments of the agent. Above all, there is of course no supposition that the desires or projects of an agent have to be egoistic; he will, one hopes, have non-egoistic projects of various kinds, and these equally can provide internal reasons for action.13

Deliberating on our desires leads us to form commitments or ground projects, which are the enduring practical projects that make us who we are and constitute our individual character. You may be committed to caring for your child, body building, or learning Japanese.

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In the process of ethical deliberation, principles derived from moral philosophies can be helpful. In deciding what action is best for you, you might want to ask the Kantian question of what would happen if the rule for your action was universalized or the utilitarian question of what action would maximize total well-being. However, for the subjectivist, you are not morally obligated to ask these questions, nor must the answer to them trump your other motivations. You may perfectly well decide to live as a utilitarian, Kantian, or effective altruist, but you are not obligated to, nor is anyone else. I would also say that you should not live as any of these things because all these moral philosophies, if followed literally and consistently, lead to a life of misery and moral slavery.

Disagreement and persuasion

So how do subjectivists think that people should deal with ethical disagreements? You may consider someone else’s ethical commitments to be wrong and want them to have different ones, whether because you want that person to be happy and successful or because their commitments are antagonistic to your own well-being.

Bentham’s Bulldog asked how an anti-racist subjectivist might argue with a racist in order to change the racist’s mind. Ethical debates are about inducing people to deliberate on their ethical commitments. If you disagree with someone else’s commitments, you can argue that those commitments are based on inaccurate or inconsistent beliefs and that acting on them will not turn out well for them.

Let’s call the anti-racist subjectivist Linda and the racist Joanne. Joanne wants to start a Substack urging that all non-white people be removed from the USA. Linda can try to persuade Joanne that her commitment to racism isn’t justified by the facts. Joanne might believe that there is an immigrant crime wave in the USA, as many racists do, and Linda can point out that this is a myth. Linda could ask Joanne how much she really knows about the people of color whom she hates and fears. If Joanne confesses that she has never gotten to know a black person, Linda could encourage her to do so so that she might see that they are not much different from white people.

Linda could also urge Joanne to consider the consequences of her commitment to racism. Linda could tell her that her views might make her unpopular and stigmatized. Linda could warn Joanne about the corrosive effects of hatred on the human personality.

In short, the subjectivist could use all the techniques of persuasion in this case that a moral objectivist might use, except for one. The subjectivist could not tell the racist that racism is morally or objectively wrong. However, I don’t think this is a weakness of subjectivism. Rather, it is a strength. If morality is unjustifiable in principle, as Williams believed, moral condemnation of Joanne would hand her a winning argument. Also, bringing nebulous concepts like morality into ethical debates is likely to divert them into abstract and unproductive philosophical meanderings. The best way to persuade someone is to “hit them where they live.” Showing your ideological opponents that their beliefs will lead to bad outcomes for them and those they love is a much more powerful technique of persuasion than appealing to moral abstractions that many people don’t take seriously anymore.

This kind of subjectivist critique of ethical commitments can happen not only between individuals, but between cultures as well. You can perfectly well argue that Islamic fundamentalism, for example, is based on unjustifiable beliefs and leads to bad outcomes.

What happens if you fail to persuade your ethical antagonist? You try to convince them that they are wrong on the facts and are headed for disaster, but they are deaf to all your arguments. Often, the best thing to do is to tell them, “Well, it’s your life!” and walk away or change the subject. “It’s your life” expresses the essence of subjectivism. The phrase is a concession that people have the right to disagree with you and choose who they are no matter how unwise and hateful you may find their choices. The phrase is a balm for any hard feelings because it ends the argument with a recognition of the opponent’s humanity and freedom. The fact that the phrase has become a customary way to wrap up arguments is a sign that subjectivism is winning.

Of course, there are times when such resignation is inadequate. If someone is threatening you, you need to protect yourself and call the police. You may also want to counteract a political commitment that you find harmful by taking political action of your own. Examining how the law, state, and politics relate to subjectivism would require a separate article. However, Williams did not believe that any of these institutions required a moral foundation.14

Deliberative subjectivism does not result in crude relativism, and practical reason and normative terms can be justified on subjectivist grounds. We can critique ethical commitments that we find harmful without appealing to any objective morality. Moral objectivists might complain that subjectivism fails to provide us with satisfying final answers to our ethical conflicts. They might think that appeals to an objective moral system do provide such final answers. But, if morality can’t be justified, such appeals provide no answer at all and only confuse our ethical debates. Ethics is a set of historically evolving conventions through which we manage our relationships with each other. As societies change, so will their ethical systems. The idea that there is some set of unchanging moral principles that provide final answers is an illusion that hinders our efforts to meet the challenges of a changing world.

I’m sure many feel, as I do, that there must be something terribly wrong with a moral philosophy that leads anyone to privilege shrimp welfare above all other causes. The philosopher Peter Singer, who laid the groundwork for EA and is now its most prominent advocate, lays out the rationale for such bizarre commitments. Singer is a utilitarian who believes that we ought to seek to reduce the total amount of suffering in the world, regardless of which creatures are suffering. The anti-moralist, subjectivist philosopher Bernard Williams, whose work I explored in my last article, explained the basic problems with EA over 50 years ago in his critique of utilitarianism. Williams held that utilitarianism failed as a moral philosophy for many reasons. Utilitarianism tends to alienate us from the ground projects that define us. Also, by assigning overriding importance to moral obligation, utilitarianism causes us to neglect the non-moral aspects of life. Finally, utilitarians cannot explain why their philosophy should be binding on us: if I don’t feel like being moral, why should I be? On Williams’ view, no moral philosopher has ever successfully answered that question.1

The basic argument for effective altruism

Utilitarianism posits that it is a moral obligation to promote overall well-being, also known as utility or happiness. A moral obligation, as I explained in my last article, is an obligation that I am bound to act on regardless of what I want. Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism in that utilitarians judge acts to have moral value to the extent that they result in well-being. Utilitarians also believe in an impartial stance: well-being is equally valuable no matter whose well-being it is.2 For act-utilitarians like Singer, the obligatory act is the one that maximally increases the total well-being of humans or of all sentient creatures, even if it results in lower well-being for the actor.

Say that I don’t care about the total well-being of sentient creatures or any other moral principle that would place me under a moral obligation. I just do whatever I want to. What can a utilitarian say to persuade me that a moral principle should be more important to me than what I want? Singer presents a thought experiment to justify morality to the amoral. Imagine you put on a brand new pair of expensive shoes and walk to work. As you pass by a shallow pond, you see a child flailing in it at risk of drowning. You know that if you wade in to save the child, you’ll be perfectly safe, but you will ruin your shoes. What should you do?3

Virtually everyone who encounters this thought experiment, including myself, believes that it’s worth ruining your shoes to save the child. It simply seems obvious to most people that we should make a small sacrifice to prevent a death in this case.

Singer uses this thought experiment to deduce a basic moral principle: “if it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.”4 If we can prevent great suffering without suffering as much ourselves, then we ought to prevent it. For this reason, Singer believes that we are under a “moral obligation to help those who are suffering.”5 It’s a matter of logical consistency: if you accept that letting the child drown is wrong, you must necessarily accept the principle.

Singer continues that it is always the case that we could prevent great suffering without suffering as much ourselves. About 600,000 people die of malaria alone every year, and some of these deaths can be prevented by donating to anti-malaria charities. Therefore, the principle obligates us to donate to effective charities that prevent malaria and other diseases, as well as starvation. Not only that, but Singer thinks that his principle should affect your choice of employment: the more you earn, the more you can give to charity, so you should try to take a high-paying job and then give most of the money away.6

You might object that the case of the drowning child and the malaria victim are very different, in that the drowning child is someone whom we encounter in our neighborhood, but the malaria victim is on the other side of the world. But Singer denies that distance should be a relevant concern here. Why should preventable deaths on the other side of the globe matter less to us than those in our own city? The preference for the well-being of those close to us is a product of our evolved instincts to seek the well-being of kin and tribe. However, in today’s globalized world, such natural preferences are “obsolete.”7 Since the media have made us aware of tragedies across the globe, and the wealth and well-being gap between the rich and poor countries has grown, we are now obligated to help the suffering no matter where they are.

So Singer has made an argument for why we should recognize a moral principle and act from moral obligation, rather than just doing what we want to. Let’s see where that argument leads.

How much should you give?

What does Singer’s principle mean in practice? How much are we morally obligated to give to effective charities?

Ever since he started writing about this issue, Singer has answered that citizens of affluent societies are obligated to give virtually everything they have to prevent deaths in the poor nations. Singer opens his 1972 paper, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” by describing the desperate state of millions of refugees in Bengal, who were dying from lack of food, shelter, and medicine. Many of these deaths would be preventable with enough funding. Singer evaluates different theories of how much we should be giving, and opts for the following one:

we ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility—that is, the level at which, by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift. This would mean, of course, that one would reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances of a Bengali refugee.8

One is obligated to give away wealth to the poor to the extent that one becomes only slightly less poor than they are. Singer keeps this basic principle in his later work, though he softens it. In the 2009 book, The Life You Can Save, he puts it this way:

you must keep cutting back on unnecessary spending, and donating what you save, until you have reduced yourself to the point where if you give any more, you will be sacrificing something nearly as important as preventing malaria—like giving so much that you can no longer afford an adequate education for your own children.9

Singer gives glowing portraits of ascetics who sacrifice everything else in life to charitable giving. Consider the case of Zell Kravinsky, the real estate mogul who gave away $45 million and left himself only his home and $80,000 worth of assets. As he says, “It seems to me crystal clear that I should be giving all my money away and donating all my time and energy.”10 He also donated one of his kidneys. His wife complained that he should have kept the kidney in case someone in his family needed it, but his view is that “the sacrosanct commitment to the family is the rationalization for all manner of greed and selfishness.”11

While many would consider Kravinsky a monomaniac and a fanatic who is prepared to sacrifice not only his own well-being but that of his family to his obsession, Singer presents him as a moral ideal.

The tug of guilt

Throughout his writings, Singer has struggled with an obvious problem with his moral philosophy: it isn’t realistic. Affluent people are never going to donate so much that they themselves become poor, nor are they going to abandon all their luxuries.

The fact that a moral theory is entirely impracticable might give some philosophers pause. After all, if the theory is at odds with human nature, then that might suggest that the theory isn’t the right one for human beings. However, Singer doesn’t see it this way. He still maintains that his theory is right, but has to be tweaked to make allowances for our basically selfish and parochial nature. “For moral rules to be widely accepted and acted upon, they have to be attuned to our evolved human nature, with all its quirky relics of our tribal past.”12

Therefore, Singer proposes for the majority a relaxed “realistic standard,” conceived along the lines of a progressive income tax. If you make between $40,000 and $81,000, you’re obligated to give only 1% of your income to effective charities, but if you make between $81,000 and $140,000, then you should give 1% of everything below $81,000 and 5% of everything above that. Much higher rates apply to the extremely wealthy.13

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However, it’s plain that Singer conceives of the relaxed standard as a cop-out. He believes that effective altruists should praise those who meet the standard because doing so increases the total amount of donation, not because the praise has been truly earned.14 While those on the realistic standard are permitted a few luxuries, Singer makes it clear that people should feel guilty for enjoying them. He encourages people to second-guess themselves whenever they enjoy a luxury. If you absolutely must, you can buy expensive stereo equipment to develop your taste for music, but you should definitely think about all the hungry mouths you’re robbing while listening to it:

To buy good stereo equipment in order to further my worthwhile goal, or life-enhancing experience, of listening to music is to place more value on these enhancements to my life than on whether others live or die, can be a full member of their community or an outcast, can see or remain blind. Can it be ethical to do that?15

The subjectivist alternative

Effective altruism results in an unrealistic standard for people that requires them either to abandon the pursuits that give meaning to life or to feel guilty for pursuing them. If you buy an expensive guitar so that you can pursue your dream of becoming a musician, you are, on Singer’s view, acting immorally. I think that most people would admit that this is an unattractive outcome and would prefer some other ethical theory that isn’t so radically hostile to human nature.

In my last article, I outlined the subjectivist philosophy of Bernard Williams, according to which our desires, or internal reasons, are the only valid motivation for action. Williams believed that objectivist moral philosophies, like Kantianism and utilitarianism, alienate us from ourselves. They also have a narrowing effect on people: by privileging moral obligation over anything that people want, these philosophies discourage people from exploring and enjoying the non-moral aspects of life. Finally, objectivist moral philosophers fail to successfully answer the question of why their theories should be binding on anyone.

Singer uses the drowning child thought experiment to show why his moral principle ought to be binding on us. After all, if it is obvious that we should let our shoes be ruined to save the drowning child, then it should also be obvious that we should save other lives when the cost to ourselves is relatively unimportant. However, Singer fails to consider the subjectivist interpretation of the thought experiment. If you see a child drowning, you will likely feel a powerful emotional motivation to help even if it means ruining your shoes. Maybe what the thought experiment really shows is that you should just do things that you are emotionally motivated to do. If you feel like saving the child, then you should do that. If you feel like ordering the shrimp basket at a sports bar, you should do that.

People often equate subjectivism with egoism, as though moral principles were the only thing that motivated us to be altruistic. However, the drowning child example shows that this interpretation of subjectivism is erroneous: we often have an emotional motivation to be altruistic. Sympathy is one such altruistic emotion. A person moved by sympathy might well donate to the type of effective charities that Singer prizes. However, on the subjectivist view, a person is not obligated to donate money to charity. If they would rather spend the money on a guitar or fancy sound equipment, then they should do that.

Williams objected to utilitarianism on the grounds that it alienated people from themselves and caused them to violate their own integrity. In another famous thought experiment, Williams has us imagine George, a recent chemistry PhD who needs a job to support his family. Right now, his wife is supporting the family, which causes a lot of problems rearing their small children. An older chemist tells George about a job manufacturing chemical weapons. Since George abhors chemical warfare, he says that he doesn’t want the job. The older chemist understands George’s objections, then adds another reason for George to take the job: if he doesn’t, it will go to a crazy chemist who has none of George’s scruples. This chemist is very enthusiastic about the use of chemical weapons and will further their development with great zeal. Is George morally obligated to take the job?16

From the utilitarian point of view, the answer is obvious: George should take a job that he hates for the well-being of his own family and also all of the potential victims of chemical warfare that he could save by sabotaging work at the weapons factory. By taking the job, George might save thousands, even millions of lives, which would surely be a great increase in the world’s well-being. Against these reasons to take the job, there is only George’s conscience: the job would make him miserable and self-loathing because it would be a violation of his integrity and alienate him from his deepest impulses. However, for the utilitarian, this unhappiness is of tiny weight or of no weight at all in comparison to the amount of well-being he would bring into the world by taking the job. If George didn’t take the job, utilitarians would accuse him of self-indulgence because he prefers his own small happiness to the greater happiness of others.

I think that most people would intuitively not find it obvious that George should take the job and, indeed, would agree with Williams and me that utilitarianism leads our ethical judgment astray here. If taking a job would make you loathe yourself, then you shouldn’t take it in spite of almost any cost.

Williams believed that the problem with utilitarianism, as with Kantianism, is that it tries to tell us what it is to be an ethical self without having a coherent or realistic theory of what the self is in the first place. For one thing, the utilitarian expects George to be persuaded by an appeal to the maximal well-being, but that is not a normal or natural motivation for people. People normally do not pursue well-being directly. They pursue some other project, like learning to play a piece on the piano or finding an academic position, that makes them happy. If you ask a historian why they study history, they will respond so that people will have an accurate understanding of the Second Crusade and see its relevance to the present moment. Doing that might make the historian happy, but the happiness is a byproduct of fulfilling another project.

People naturally form fundamental projects for themselves, which Williams calls “ground projects,” that give shape and substance to their lives and even give them a reason to live in the first place. The historian’s book on the Second Crusade is an example. Ethical systems are there to help us evaluate and facilitate these ground projects, not to replace them with some other project. Our ground projects must be logically prior to ethics, because they provide us with a standpoint from which to deliberate on ethics in the first place. Moreover, our ground projects give us a reason to live, and there is no reason to care about ethics if you have no reason to live in the first place.

Williams thinks that people should define themselves, rather than letting themselves be defined by others. If George takes the job, he is letting others define him. After all, he is taking the job in order to prevent the crazy chemist from getting it, so the crazy chemist is in charge of George’s life, rather than George himself.

The lessons of this thought experiment have an obvious relevance to our evaluation of effective altruism. If charitable donation tends to alienate us from our ground projects, then we shouldn’t donate. If I need to buy an expensive guitar to further my ground project of being a musician, then I should buy it no matter how many people are dying of malaria. After all, it should be me, rather than malaria victims, who gets to define who I am.

Against moral saints

The ascetics whom Singer presents as moral ideals are much like Christian saints. Building on the thought of Williams, the philosopher Susan Wolf criticizes Kantianism and utilitarianism because they naturally lead people to see sainthood as an ideal. Wolf sees saints as unattractive and is glad she doesn’t know any because she thinks that anyone who devoted themselves wholly to the moral good would be a narrow, stunted human being.

For the moral virtues, given that they are, by hypothesis, all present in the same individual, and to an extreme degree, are apt to crowd out the nonmoral virtues, as well as many of the interests and personal characteristics that we generally think contribute to a healthy, well-rounded, richly developed character. In other words, if the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry or healing the sick or raising money for Oxfam, then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe, or improving his backhand.17

The life of the moral saint would, therefore, be “strangely barren.”18 It is not even clear that moral saints could allow themselves a sense of humor:

a cynical or sarcastic wit, or a sense of humor that appreciates this kind of wit in others, requires that one take an attitude of resignation and pessimism toward the flaws and vices to be found in the world. A moral saint, on the other hand, has reason to take an attitude in opposition to this—he should try to look for the best in people, give them the benefit of the doubt as long as possible, try to improve regrettable situations as long as there is any hope of success. This suggests that, although a moral saint might well enjoy a good episode of Father Knows Best, he may not in good conscience be able to laugh at a Marx Brothers movie or enjoy a play by George Bernard Shaw.19

Wolf thinks that both Kantianism and utilitarianism lead people to become boring, narrow-minded moral obsessives. Her view aligns with my opinion of effective altruists. Would you really want to be friends someone like Zell Kravinsky, the man who gave virtually all of his money away, as well as his kidney, and donates most of his time and energy to charity? To me such people lack humanity and interest: they have sacrificed their human selves to moral goodness.

Effective altruism as moral slavery

Williams would have regarded effective altruism as utilitarianism gone mad. For Williams, ethical causes need to make some connection to our emotions, or our internal reasons, to motivate people. Unless they make a living off the shrimp industry, I don’t see how the cause of shrimp welfare is going to motivate anyone emotionally. Lyman Stone has confirmed that nobody cares about shrimp. To feel that we are bound by obligations that are remote from anything that we naturally care about is a kind of moral slavery that Williams wanted us to emancipate ourselves from. The only upside to the shrimp welfare movement is that it tends to make effective altruism, utilitarianism, and morality itself look ridiculous.

I will be interested to see reader responses to this question. In my view, the most intelligent discussion of issues like this comes from English philosopher Bernard Williams. For Williams, Joe’s response is possibly justified. Williams believed that our genuine desires were the only valid reasons for action. He called these desires “internal reasons.” He opposed moral philosophies like Kantianism, utilitarianism, and Rawlsianism because they tell us that we are obligated to act on external reasons, or reasons that are alien or contrary to our desires. Kantianism, for example, tells us we are obligated act on categorical imperatives, or universally binding rules of behavior, even if we don’t feel like it. For Kant, it is never justifiable to defy a moral obligation like keeping a promise to fulfill a non-moral desire like seeing an art exhibit. I will be discussing only Williams’ critique of Kantianism here.

Williams propounded an anti-moralist, subjectivist, internalist ethical philosophy. He argued that moral philosophers couldn’t justify the concept of moral obligation and that moral philosophies were, therefore, not binding on anyone. He also thought that moral philosophies led to absurdities that no reasonable person ought to accept and distorted the real nature of our ethical life. Williams believed that moral philosophies made people more narrow-minded, less sensitive to the ethical issues that ought to concern us, and less adventurous in exploring the possibilities that life offers.

Despite his opposition to morality, Williams does believe that ethics is an essential part of human life. Morality, for Williams, is one form that ethics has taken historically.

Internal and external reasons

What does it mean to have a reason to do something? It is quite clear what a sentence like the following means: “if you’re thirsty, you have a reason to drink some water.” Because the motivation to drink comes from inside you, Williams would say that you have an “internal reason” for drinking. Williams believes that humans come with a set of diverse and often internally contradictory reasons that give us potential grounds for action.1

However, having an internal reason is not in itself a sound reason for acting. Sound reasons are the product of deliberation. Deliberation might reveal that your reason is based on a false belief. If the liquid that you take for water is, in fact, gasoline, then you do not have a sound reason to drink it. If you want to go to church because you believe God will send church-goers to heaven, then deliberation might convince you that your belief is unfounded. If you want to live to a healthy old age and also to smoke 40 cigarettes a day, deliberation might convince you that these desires are likely incompatible, and you should opt for one or the other. If you’re only a little thirsty, but very hungry, deliberation might convince you have a more compelling reason to eat than to drink.

It may sound as though Williams is propounding a philosophical egoism that counsels people to do whatever makes them happy, but he makes it very clear that that is not what he means. For one thing, he thinks that people often have altruistic internal reasons. People may give to a charity not out of moral obligation but because they are internally motivated to help others. You may feel such an intense sympathy for starving children abroad that you desire to help them. For another thing, Williams thinks that our internal reasons do not always aim at our happiness. Many people have internal reasons to fight in wars: they may do so out of the need for a salary or out of deeply held values to which they are emotionally committed, like honor or love of country. It would be nonsensical to say that people fight in wars because it makes them happy to endure hardship and risk injury and death. Williams was at pains to do justice to the diversity and heterogeneity of human reasons and opposed simplifying accounts that reduced our reasons to a single common currency, like inclination or utility.

For Williams, it is perfectly valid for people to argue about ethical obligations as long as they argue only about internal reasons. Such arguments are part of ethical deliberation. In the example above, Mark might have tried to change Joe’s mind by appealing to Joe’s internal reasons. Humans generally desire to have friends, so Mark might have told Joe that if he broke his promise, Joe couldn’t count on Mark’s help or company in the future. Mark might have threatened to tell everyone how unreliable and selfish Joe was so that it would be harder for Joe to make new friends.

However, when Mark tells Joe that breaking promises is wrong, Mark is not appealing to Joe’s internal reasons. Mark is saying that Joe should be motivated by an external reason that is more important than his internal reasons. The condemnation assumes the existence of an objective moral standard against which people can be judged and that they are obligated to comply with. The notion of duty, or moral obligation, was central to the moral philosophy of Kant, probably the most historically influential. Kant believed an action was moral only when it was motivated by duty, not inclination, or the desire for pleasure. However, Williams found the concept of external reasons indefensible: “external reason statements, when definitely isolated as such, are false, or incoherent, or really something else misleadingly expressed.”2

Kantian moral obligation as external reason

So why doesn’t Williams think external reasons should be motivating? I’ll look at his criticism of Kant as an example.

Williams reconstructs Kantian moral philosophy in the following form.3 As a rational agent, I claim a right to the freedom to achieve my purposes and cannot agree to any arrangement in which others would have the right to remove my freedom. However, if I think others should respect my right to freedom, I must acknowledge that they have an equal right to demand that I respect theirs. So it is rational when morally deliberating to treat others’ right to freedom as equal to my own. The upshot of all this is that it’s rational to think about morality in terms of categorical imperatives, or universally binding laws, like “Never break promises” and “Never lie.” Respecting these laws is a moral obligation, an external reason that trumps all of our internal reasons, and this kind of obligation defines what we call “morality.” If you believe in morality, statements like “breaking promises is wrong” take on weight and force and supply a clear answer to interpersonal conflicts.

Williams thinks that Kant’s argument here is highly illuminating and explains much about ethical behavior, but that Kant fails to justify his thesis that morality should be binding on all rational agents “however powerful or effective.”4 While it may be rational to recognize that others desire freedom as much as you, it is not always rational to respect their wish. Kant’s argument tacitly assumes a world in which people are of relatively equal power and thus must respect others if they are to be respected. But the real world is often not like this at all. There are obvious cases in which rational agents who are very powerful relative to others can exercise their freedom while not respecting that of others. Slave traders are a good example: if you attack an iron age African populace with 18^th century European weapons and technology, you can do anything you want to them without respecting their freedom. If you tried to explain to a slave trader that it was rational for him to respect the freedom of slaves, he would no doubt regard you as incomprehensible and hilarious. If you told him that he should abandon his profession because slave trading was wrong, Williams would regard him as being within his rights to tell you that your morality was not binding on him. To persuade him, you would need to appeal to his internal reasons.

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Williams’ point is that it is rational to respect the freedom of others only when one has an internal reason to. In the case of relative equals, each party has an internal reason to respect the other because each party can thwart the other’s interests. But the slave trader has no similar internal reason to respect the freedom of the enslaved, so the appeal to morality is empty and without force.

Another problem with Kantianism is that our flesh-and-blood humanity with internal reasons disappears on our way to morality. If everyone’s purposes weigh equally in our moral deliberation, why should our own purposes matter more than anyone else’s? We end up with moral ghosts who have left all of their desires behind.

How Kantianism makes you narrower

Williams believed that morality tended to have a narrowing effect on people. By privileging moral external reasons above all of our internal reasons, morality causes people to focus on the moral and neglect the possibilities that life has to offer.

For Kant, whenever a moral obligation conflicts with our internal reasons, the obligation wins. “Morality encourages the idea, only an obligation can beat an obligation.”5 That is one reason why you might feel uncomfortable when you read the story that we started with about Joe breaking a promise so he can see an art exhibit. Joe is privileging a non-moral internal reason—“I want to appreciate art”—over a moral reason—“breaking promises is wrong.” From the perspective of Kantianism, Joe’s words are a blasphemous affront to morality.

Williams believed that moral philosophy failed to do justice to the importance of the non-moral internal reasons in our lives and that this failure led to incoherences in the moral outlook. “The deeply disparate character of moral and of non-moral reason, together with the special dignity or supremacy attached to the moral, make it very difficult to assign to those other relations and reasons the significance or structural importance in life which some of them are capable of possessing.”6 Moral philosophies consist of impersonal and universal codes of conduct that ignore the distinctive reasons that make us the individuals that we are. In effect, moral philosophy wants to tell us what constitutes a good self without having an adequate conception of what constitutes a self in the first place.

Williams thought that the self was constituted by our ground projects, or internal reasons that we make it the purpose of our lives to act on. Some ground projects might be being a good mother, gaining 10,000 subscribers on Substack, or winning the Employee of the Month award. Usually, we have a nexus of related ground projects. These ground projects shape our characters, give substance and individuality to our lives, and even provide us a reason to live. Williams thought that people had the right to choose whatever ground projects they wanted, although he also advised us to deliberate on them, as described above. Perhaps upon deliberation, you might decide that you should choose a ground project that was more ambitious than merely being Employee of the Month at a McDonald’s.

Joe’s ground project is being an artist, and he wants to see the exhibit to advance this project. However, if he had believed deeply in morality, he might have sacrificed this broadening and bettering experience to a moral obligation that held no attraction or interest for him. There are surely many people who sacrifice their ground projects entirely to moral obligation. How many stay in stifling and unfulfilling marriages because they regard marriage as a sacred promise that is vastly more important than anything they want? Kant unconditionally affirmed that that it was right for people to stay in bad marriages, but Williams thought very much otherwise.

Williams didn’t think that ethical reasons, like obligations, should inevitably trump our ground projects when they come into conflict. Ethical reasons should have no priority over our other reasons. Prioritizing ethical reasons over all others even renders moral philosophy incoherent. Fidelity to our ground projects must be our priority because they give us a reason to live. If you have no reason to live, why worry about ethics in the first place?

Life has to have substance if anything is to have sense, including adherence to the impartial [moral] system; but if it has substance, then it cannot grant supreme importance to the impartial system, and that system’s hold on it will be, at the limit, insecure. It follows that moral philosophy’s habit, particularly in its Kantian forms, of treating persons in abstraction from character is not so much a legitimate device for dealing with one aspect of thought, but is rather a misrepresentation, since it leaves out what both limits and helps to define that aspect of thought.7

Williams called morality “the peculiar institution,”8 referencing a euphemism for slavery in the 19th century American South. Morality has an enslaving effect on us because it causes us to sacrifice the ground projects that matter to us. Enslavement to morality tends to make us narrow-minded, unadventurous, and Puritanical.9

How Kantianism makes you dumber

When you read the Joe and Mark story above, you might have reflected on it, carefully weighing the competing claims of each character. You might have observed that the decision inevitably involves tradeoffs: both options for Joe mix the good with the bad. Going to the exhibit means losing a friend and possibly risking retaliation, but, even worse, helping Mark would make Joe more likely to fail in his artistic career. You might even have concluded that it was impossible to decide in this case because you could see it both ways. Changing the details of the story might also change your judgment. Maybe you would grant that Joe would be right to break the promise so that he could see the art exhibit, but not so that he could keep a date with a sex-worker. That is, you would see aesthetic education as a worthier excuse than meaningless sex.

Kant’s framework discourages this kind of open-ended reflection. He encourages us to see the world in black and white terms so that we can make decisions easily and unreflectively. A moral obligation always trumps a desire, so Mark is obviously right, no need for any further thought. Keeping a promise in this case involves no tradeoffs: it is the whole good and nothing but the good. Kant is famous for presenting problems that most of us would find perplexing and ambiguous as simple cut-and-dried issues: think of the famous murderer at the door dilemma.

When we reflect on Joe’s position, we naturally take a diversity of factors into account. Joe’s delight in art, his desire to succeed in his career, and his needs for companionship and help are heterogeneous and distinctive types of motivation. Changing Joe’s excuse also matters to our evaluation: if he cancels on Mark because of a date with a sex worker, the problem becomes different, and our judgment of it might change. However, moral philosophers do violence to the complexity of human motivation by reducing our motivations to simple categories, like duty and pleasure.

Philosophy has traditionally shown a desire to reduce this diversity, on both sides of the divide. It has tended, first of all, to see all nonethical considerations as reducible to egoism, the narrowest form of self-interest. Indeed some philosophers have wanted to reduce that to one special kind of egoistic concern, the pursuit of pleasure. Kant, in particular, believed that every action not done from moral principle was done for the agent’s pleasure.10

For Kant, aesthetic education and meaningless sex have exactly the same worth when opposed to an obligation without any shades of gray between black and white. Kantianism thus tends to dumb down ethical evaluation.

Elsewhere, I have argued that religion has a similar dumbing down effect. Religion encourages us to see the problems we face as puzzles with solutions that are wholly correct and nothing but correct as opposed to predicaments involving complex tradeoffs. This similarity is, of course, no coincidence, as Kant’s moral philosophy is modeled on Christianity. Kant believed that we could preserve the moral certainty of Christianity without the need for God. As Williams puts it, the “various features of the moral judgment system support one another, and collectively they are modeled on the prerogatives of a Pelagian God.”11

However, Williams demonstrates that such a vision of absolute justice is a fantasy. We can no longer think of ethics as a set of clear, objective moral rules that enable us to be perfectly just. Rather, ethics is founded on our messy, self-contradictory desires, and ethical judgments are rarely simply right or wrong. We have to accept uncertaintly if we are to free ourselves from moral enslavement and live as we genuinely want to. So next time someone tries to impose a moral obligation on you, consider replying, “I don’t care what you think is right and wrong! I have a life to live!”

This frame of abandoning egotism and achieving internal coherence will be familiar to those of us who have grown up in Christian cultures. This frame also fits mainstream Hinduism as well, as I will show through an analysis of the Bhagavad-Gita (Gita), or “The Song of the Lord,” by far the most widely read Hindu text. The text promises us that if we adopt one of the moral paths defined by Hinduism, we can free ourselves of doubt, perplexity, and internal discord, and discover a world in which there is coherence within ourselves, coherence between the self and others, and coherence between the self and the universe as a whole.

The Gita and the Mahabharata

The Gita is part of the Mahabharata, a sprawling epic written in Sanskrit, probably by various authors over centuries and completed around 400 CE. Although the critical edition of the Mahabharata runs to 6,000 pages, there are fortunately many abridgements, including an excellent one by the novelist R. K. Narayan that presents the main story.

The narrative is weird, delightful, and relatable, and filled with vivid, multi-dimensional characters. It recounts the origins of two sets of brothers, the Kauravas and the Pandavas, and the rivalry that develops between them. The Kauravas are the sons of the king of Kuru, Dhritirashtra, and the Pandavas, the sons of Dhritirashtra’s brother Pandu, who was previously king of Kuru. The territory of Kuru gets divided between the two sets of brothers, but the Kauravas win the Pandavas’ lands by cheating in a dice game. The Kauravas also humiliate the wife of the Pandavas, Draupadi, whom they attempt to strip naked in public. The Kauravas further outrage morality by forcing the Pandavas into exile. When the Pandavas come out of exile, they gather allies and form an army in an attempt to take back Kuru for themselves. The Kauravas also assemble an army and they meet on the plain of Kurukshetra for an enormous battle that comes to involve many kingdoms.

The Gita is set right before the battle is about to begin. It’s a dialogue about the morality of war and the nature of the universe between Arjuna, one of the Pandavas, and Krishna, a king who has agreed to drive Arjuna’s chariot during the battle. Unknown to Arjuna, Krishna is actually the avatar of Vishnu, the chief god in the world of Mahabharata. Krishna reveals himself as Vishnu in the course of the dialogue.

As Arjuna drives out to survey the armies with Krishna, he sees many people whom he admires and loves fighting on the enemy side, including his grandfather, Bhishma, and former tutor, Drona. The notion of killing them throws him into despair.

How can I ever bring myself to fight against Bhishma and Drona, who are worthy of reverence? How can I, Krishna? Surely it would be better to spend my life begging than to kill these great and worthy souls! If I killed them, every pleasure I found would be tainted. I don’t even know which would be better, for us to conquer them or for them to conquer us. The sons of Dhritarashtra have confronted us; but why would we care to live if we killed them? My will is paralyzed, and I am utterly confused. (2:4-7)1

Arjuna is doubtful and divided, and Vishnu’s answer to him explains how to regain a coherent self.

The theology of the Gita

The Gita is a monotheist expression of Vaishnavism, or the worship of Vishnu.2 Vishnu is the whole of reality. Arjuna addresses him thus: “You are Brahman supreme, the highest abode, the supreme purifier, the self-luminous, eternal spirit, first among the gods, unborn and infinite” (10:12). Brahman means the ultimate reality.

Vishnu is not only outside us, but within us as our core self, or atman, which is translated as “Self”: “I am the true Self in the heart of every creature, Arjuna, and the beginning, middle, and end of their existence”(10:20). The goal of life is to see the oneness of internal and external reality. The world that we see full of multiple beings is maya, that is, deception and trickery. The enlightened have learned to see through the veil of maya and recognize all beings as the Self. Krishna, speaking as Vishnu, says:

They see the Self in every creature and all creation in the Self. With consciousness unified through meditation, they see everything with an equal eye. I am ever present to those who have realized me in every creature. Seeing all life as my manifestation, they are never separated from me. They worship me in the hearts of all, and all their actions proceed from me. Wherever they may live, they abide in me. (6:29-31)

This unity of Self with the ultimate reality is difficult to achieve. People intuitively see themselves as separate from others and from nature. That’s why they egotistically pursue their own interests, which leads to conflict and frustration. One chapter of the Gita is devoted to describing such people, who are depicted as atheists and who exhibit “demonic” behavior (16:5). Many of the Kauravas, especially their leader, Duryodhona, are demonic in the way that the Gita describes.

The demonic are incoherent. Not only are their desires not coherent with those of others, leading to conflict, but their minds are not coherent with reality, which results in misunderstanding and delusion, and the various aspects of themselves are incoherent with each other, leading to internal conflict and suffering.

“There is no God,” they say, “no truth, no spiritual law, no moral order. The basis of life is sex; what else can it be?” Holding such distorted views, possessing scant discrimination, they become enemies of the world, causing suffering and destruction. (9-10)

Such people believe that gratification of lust is the highest good life offers (16:11), and they seek material possessions and precedence over others. Precedence and wealth make them vain and complacent.

“I got this today,” they say; “tomorrow I shall get that. This wealth is mine, and that will be mine too. I have destroyed my enemies. I shall destroy others too! Am I not like God? I enjoy what I want. I am successful. I am powerful. I am happy. I am rich and well-born. Who is equal to me? I will perform sacrifices and give gifts, and rejoice in my own generosity.” This is how they go on, deluded by ignorance. (16:13-15)

These demonic characters never know the world truly, which leads them to suffer. “Bound by their greed and entangled in a web of delusion, whirled about by a fragmented mind, they fall into a dark hell” (16:16). The demonic don’t understand the true goal of life, and this lack of understanding is ultimately their undoing: “driven by selfish desire, they miss the goal of life, miss even happiness and success” (16:23). Despite their boasting, the demonic are “burdened with fears that end only in death” (16:11). Their unbelief robs them of the certainty of salvation that calms believers.

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Hindus believe in reincarnation: on death, the soul enters into another being. Bad people are punished by being reborn as animals, demons, and ghosts. The goal of Hinduism is to achieve moksha, or liberation from the cycle of rebirth, which is called samsara. Bad people are never liberated from samsara.

Life after life I cast those who are malicious, hateful, cruel, and degraded into the wombs of those with similar demonic natures. Birth after birth they find themselves with demonic tendencies. Degraded in this way, Arjuna, they fail to reach me and fall lower still. (16:19-20)

A person attains moksha through various kinds of yoga, which means path or discipline. One path is religious devotion to Vishnu by meditating on him and making him offerings. Another path is knowledge, or study of scripture.

However, for Arjuna, Krishna recommends karma yoga, or the yoga of action (3:3). Karma yoga is meant to solve the problem that Arjuna begins with. Arjuna despairs that action in the world, especially the violent action of warriors, leads to death, suffering, and chaos. Krishna presents a theory of virtuous action that leads to peace rather than chaos. Action is wrong when it is designed to achieve the egotistic purposes of the actor, but it is virtuous when the actor is not attached to the action’s results. The virtuous actor acts according to their duty without worrying whether the action will advance their interests.

The awakened sages call a person wise when all his undertakings are free from anxiety about results; all his selfish desires have been consumed in the fire of knowledge. The wise, ever satisfied, have abandoned all external supports. Their security is unaffected by the results of their action; even while acting, they really do nothing at all. Free from expectations and from all sense of possession, with mind and body firmly controlled by the Self, they do not incur sin by the performance of physical action. (4:19-21)

According to James’ definition, religion promises us that there is a hidden order, but we need to adjust our own behavior to attain it. Learning to act without attachment to results is the moral adjustment that Arjuna needs to make in order to perceive and unite himself with the hidden order of the world.

The coherent life

Abandoning egotism and unveiling the Self creates a coherent life. The unenlightened experience conflict and a lack of fit between mind and world, between themselves and other people, and among their thoughts and impulses. They therefore lack understanding of reality, experience conflict with others, and suffer from internal division. Through the path of yoga, coherence with the world is achieved so that the self, others, and the world fit together.

The first type of coherence is that between mind and world. Devotion to Vishnu and acceptance of Hindu scripture allows people to gain true knowledge both of the divine and non-divine realms.

But they cross over this maya who take refuge in me. Others are deluded by maya; performing evil deeds, they have no devotion to me. Having lost all discrimination, they follow the way of their lower nature. (7:14-15)

Separation from Vishnu traps people in a world of delusion that leads to disaster:

The immature do not look beyond physical appearances to see my true nature as the Lord of all creation. The knowledge of such deluded people is empty; their lives are fraught with disaster and evil, and their work and hopes are all in vain. (9:11-12)

The path to Krishna is the way out of ignorance and towards wisdom. Once one has taken the path, darkness is dispelled and the world becomes comprehensible.

Out of compassion I destroy the darkness of their ignorance. From within them I light the lamp of wisdom and dispel all darkness from their lives. (10:10)

Not only does devotion to Krishna enable coherence between mind and world, but between people. Through non-egotistical karma yoga, action is purged of its competitive and conflictual nature. Krishna is the “friend of all creatures” (5:29). “With their senses subdued and mind serene and striving for the good of all beings, [Vishnu devotees] too will verily come unto me” (12:4).

The renunciation of desire and egotism also leads to internal coherence. The mind governed by self-will is restless and divided, but the religious path unifies consciousness. The Gita contains a book on meditation as a spiritual practice that unifies the mind:

Wherever the mind wanders, restless and diffuse in its search for satisfaction without, lead it within; train it to rest in the Self. Abiding joy comes to those who still the mind. Freeing themselves from the taint of self-will, with their consciousness unified, they become one with Brahman. (6:26-27)

Krishna’s doctrine is also meant to reconcile believers to death, both their own and other people’s. Arjuna need not feel guilty or distraught for doing his duty of killing people in war. Reincarnation means that to die is just to take off worn-out clothes and put on new ones. The eternal Self is all that matters.

As one abandons worn-out clothes and acquires new ones, so when the body is worn out a new one is acquired by the Self, who lives within. The Self cannot be pierced by weapons or burned by fire; water cannot wet it, nor can the wind dry it…It is everlasting and infinite, standing on the motionless foundations of eternity. The Self is unmanifested, beyond all thought, beyond all change. Knowing this, you should not grieve. (2:22-26)

The enlightened state is one of placid indifference to desire, pleasure, and pain, which create unrest in the unenlightened:

Neither agitated by grief nor hankering after pleasure, [the enlightened] live free from lust and fear and anger. Established in meditation, they are truly wise. Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are neither elated by good fortune nor depressed by bad. Such are the seers. Even as a tortoise draws in its limbs, the wise can draw in their senses at will. Aspirants abstain from sense pleasures, but they still crave for them. These cravings all disappear when they see the highest goal. Even of those who tread the path, the stormy senses can sweep off the mind. They live in wisdom who subdue their senses and keep their minds ever absorbed in me. (2:55:61)

What’s wrong with belief in a coherent world?

Since I’ve presented religion as a kind of false consciousness in multiple essays, it will not be surprising that I find the religious vision of a coherent world wrong and harmful. There are many reasons why. One is the that this vision tends to pathologize doubt and perplexity. People who are in the right relationship with God should not experience doubt in the world of the Gita. After all, Vishnu has lit the lamp of wisdom in them and dispelled all darkness. The Gita depicts the experience of doubt as a sign that there is something wrong with you. It is only demonic, atheistic people who experience mental fragmentation and perplexity, so if you’re in perplexity, that must mean that you are demonic.

It seems plausible that this depiction of perplexity as a failing causes religious people to suppress their doubts rather than working through them. The experience of doubt can spur people to reevaluate their assumptions and seek greater information, that is, spur them to learn. If you refuse to acknowledge perplexity, then this path to learning is closed off to you.

I have shown elsewhere that some psychological findings support my hypothesis. People with strong religious beliefs tend to have a higher need for closure than less religious ones, meaning that they tend to be closed-minded and have low tolerance for ambiguity. Other work on intellectual humility and analytic thinking that I review tends to support my hypothesis as well.

The regression of Arjuna

The message of the Gita then is that behind the apparently meaningless confusion of the world lies a hidden order that you can reach if you abandon egotistical action and act pro-socially for the universal good. In my article on the philosophy of Kant, I argued that the Christian vision is similar. Kant’s philosophy can be summed up as follows: through the exercise of free will, which is moral action according to the universalist categorical imperative, we can access the supernatural reality that lies behind the world of appearance, and find order, purpose, and beauty in life.

Arjuna is convinced by Krishna’s discourse. He says at the end of the Gita:

You have dispelled my doubts and delusions, and I understand through your grace. My faith is firm now, and I will do your will. (18:73)

In the context of the Mahabharata, this change in Arjuna is an entirely positive development. Good and evil, right and wrong have been clearly established, and Arjuna is now ready to kill the bad guys enthusiastically and without remorse. However, from the contemporary point of view, the meaning of Arjuna’s change is not so clear. On this interpretation, Arjuna was trying to deal with the moral problems posed by an incoherent reality at the beginning of the Gita. Of course, the Kauravas have wronged the Pandavas in the past, but Arjuna feels doubt about whether a war is the right way of dealing with this grudge. If he doesn’t fight in the war, he will look weak and be dishonored. Also, pacifism would tend to strengthen the demonic Kauravas. At the same time, it seems appropriate for Arjuna to ask himself whether war is the right answer. Many people whom Arjuna loves and respects have joined the Kaurava side, and the idea of killing them pains him. Also, is it right that thousands should die for a family argument?

On this interpretation, Arjuna starts out with appropriate doubt about his options, but suppresses his doubt after Krishna provides him with religious certainty. To me, the change in Arjuna seems like a regression rather than an improvement and a powerful example of how religious belief leads to a simplistic and gamified vision of life. Maybe Arjuna would have been a better person if he had never listened to God.

For Janoff-Bulman, psychological normality is based on assumptions about the self and world that are rooted in childhood: the world is benevolent and meaningful, and the self is worthy of success in it. We assume that people, or at least the people around us, are good, kind, helpful, and caring, and that events will on balance turn out well for us. We assume that there is a justice to outcomes, such that people deserve what they get and get what they deserve. We also assume that we will prosper in a just world because we are good, capable people. These assumptions are “the bedrock of our conceptual system; they are the assumptions that we are least aware of and least likely to challenge.”1 Together, they make up our “assumptive world.”

Janoff-Bulman argues that this assumptive world is the natural result of normal childhood experience. Most infants receive parenting that is sufficiently loving for them to develop trust in their parents. Normal parents are responsive to infant behavior, like crying. When the parent comforts or feeds them, the infant develops a basic schema of how the world operates. The infant learns that they are worthy of care, that the world will provide them with care when they ask for it, and that the world can be understood through cause and effect. As the child grows older, this assumptive world gets reinforced. Parents tie rewards and punishment to good and bad behavior, strengthening the child’s sense that they live in a meaningful and just world. Narratives and religions also reinforce the assumptive world. The good guy may be sorely tested in a fairy tale or a children’s movie, but he wins out in the end, and his persecutors meet with bad ends. Religions also paint a vision of cosmic justice in which the good are rewarded and the wicked punished.

The assumptive world forms the basis of the adult personality. Positive illusions are one line of evidence for this conclusion, as they present the world as a benevolent, meaningful place and the self as worthy of success. Another line of evidence is trauma, the subject of Janoff-Bulman’s book. Trauma is what results when our assumptive world is discredited by life experiences. Traumatic events include being the victim of a serious crime, getting a diagnosis for a life-threatening illness, or experiencing the unexpected death of a loved one. These events force people to recognize that their well-being and survival cannot be taken for granted, and this realization can undermine psychological integrity.

Trauma negates the assumptive world. The trauma “victim’s inner world is pervaded by thoughts and images representing malevolence, meaninglessness, and self-abasement.” The words of a rape victim describe the shattering of assumptions: “I feel ashamed, embarrassed, and stupid… I have always said women could prevent being raped. I never thought this would happen to me.”2

Suddenly, victims are living in a world they perceive as dangerous and threatening, in which one’s own survival cannot be guaranteed. The cognitions of anxious individuals center on themes of threat, danger, unpredictability, and uncertainty, and these are central to the emotional experience of victims. Pervasive anxiety is apparent in the words of a woman after the October 1989 California earthquake: “Once you know what can happen, every little thing terrifies. I’m exhausted and nothing feels the same.”3

Janoff-Bulman’s book, which was published in 1992, is quite old now, but her theory is one of the foundations of contemporary theories of trauma. The World Assumption Scale, which she devised to measure belief in the benevolence and meaningfulness of the world and in the worth of the self, is still used in trauma research.

Blaming the Victim

The sketch of human development above explains why the maintenance of a belief in a just world is so important for our happiness and functionality. No one wants to live and think like a trauma victim, after all. Belief in a just world theory, which was first formulated in the 1960s by Melvin J. Lerner, posits that people are highly motivated to believe in a just world and describes the strategies that they use to maintain this belief. Some of these strategies are rational, but others consist of unrealistic, motivated reasoning that distorts reality to make it conform to our desire for justice.4 One of the most common strategies is derogation and blame of victims. After all, if the victims are bad or weak people, then one can rationalize their suffering as deserved.

Several scales have been developed to measure strength of just world belief. Among the most commonly used is the Global Belief in a Just World Scale, which asks subjects to indicate strength of agreement with statements like: “I feel that people get what they are entitled to have,” and “I feel that people earn the rewards and punishments they get.”5

Lerner and Carolyn Simmons explored the question of how people cope psychologically with clear injustice in a 1966 experiment. The subjects, university students who got a course credit for participating in the experiment, were told that they would be watching a negative reinforcement learning task in which a person would receive a loud and apparently very painful shock every time she got a wrong answer. The subjects were told that this experiment was designed to establish behavioral cues that would indicate how upset and disturbed people were. However, the victim receiving the shocks was an actress, and the real purpose of the experiment was to gauge how the subjects would respond to her situation. During the experiment, the victim wistfully asked the supposed experimenter how long her agony would continue. It appeared to the subjects to be an unjust situation because the victim had obviously not known what she was getting herself into. This scenario was repeated for various groups of subjects, who were then given different options for how the experiment should continue.6

One group was given the option to end the victim’s suffering by voting that the task be changed to a positive reinforcement task in which the victim would be financially rewarded for right answers. Virtually all of the subjects who had this option chose it. Acting to intervene in an unjust situation and compensate the victim for their suffering is a rational strategy for maintaining the belief in a just world. Among this group, some of the students (the reward group) were told that their votes had been effective in changing the task, and some were not told the outcome of their votes (the reward decision group).

The rest of the groups were subjected to continuations in which the victim experienced varying degrees of unjust suffering. Some were told that the experiment was now over so the victim’s suffering was at an end (endpoint). Others were told that they were now at the midpoint of the experiment, so that the victim would go on to suffer more (midpoint). The last group experienced a martyr scenario, in which the victim reluctantly agreed to undergo more shocks so that the subjects could get their course credit for participating in the experiment.

The subjects were then asked to rate the victim’s attractiveness and likeability. Lerner and Simmons found that these ratings were inversely proportional to the degree of unjust suffering that was inflicted on the victim. The reward group rated the victim as most attractive, followed by the endpoint group, then the reward decision group, then the midpoint group. The martyr group found her the most unattractive of all.

The conclusion of the experiment appears inescapable: when people witness suffering, and they are unable to do anything about it, one strategy that they use to preserve their belief in a just world is to blame and derogate the victim. This effect has been experimentally replicated many times, including cross-culturally, and it is particularly strong when the apparent suffering of the victim is severe and vivid.

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Not only do people devalue others when they are undeserving of blame, but they also devalue themselves. Mitchell J. Callan and colleagues conducted a series of experiments measuring how random good or bad luck affected people’s self-esteem. They found that when subjects scratched a lottery card and lost, their self-esteem was lowered relative to those who had experienced good luck. They also felt more deserving of bad outcomes. The same pattern was seen after subjects were told to remember good and bad chance events from their lives. People are thus willing to blame themselves for bad luck in order to preserve their belief that the world is a fair place.7

Our stereotypes about the poor seem to be another example of victim blaming and derogation. People with strong just world beliefs are more likely than others to believe that economic outcomes are fair and deserved, including for the poorest, and to oppose wealth redistribution.8 Psychologist Bernice Lott establishes that Americans’ usually explain poverty in their country by reference to the negative traits of the poor, who are commonly described as lazy and immoral.9 There is, to my knowledge, no evidence at all for these explanations of poverty. Of course, the poor are relatively likely to be criminals and substance use abusers, but only a small minority of them are. Those who blame poverty on laziness have to reckon with the fact that 37.9 million Americans work but still live in poverty. The notion that the poor deserve their fate appears to be victim blaming on a massive scale.

The notion of blaming the victim is usually associated with sexual violence. Research in the USA, China, and Japan has found that strength of belief in a just world predicts blaming of rape victims.

The interpretation of luck as merit operates in the other direction as well. Not only are people with bad luck despised, but those with good luck are admired. In a 1965 experiment by Lerner, subjects observed two workers, Bill and Tom, performing an anagram task. Some of the subjects were told that Bill would receive payment for the task, and some Tom. The experimenters made it clear that payment was assigned by chance and had nothing to do with how well either worker performed. Nevertheless, subjects’ assessment of who had made a greater contribution to the task was significantly biased in the direction of whoever was getting paid.10 More recent research on outcome bias has confirmed this finding.

Other strategies for maintaining just world beliefs

People preserve belief in a just world through other strategies as well. For example, they interpret outcomes in a way that makes them appear just. One common strategy for justifying poverty is to interpret as a kind of blessing. The notion that the poor are really happier than the wealthy is a cliché of popular fiction and film. Take the massively popular and much adapted work of 19^th century English novelist Charles Dickens. The poor Cratchits in A Christmas Carol are happier because of the warmth of family ties than Scrooge, who is bitter, lonely, and wealthy. In Great Expectations, Pip’s impoverished childhood is idyllic, and his acquisition of money results in misery and moral degeneration. The recent film Knives Out exhibits the same sentimental attitude towards poverty. The poor Latina maid, Marta, is depicted as a more moral and happy person than the wealthy scheming, bickering Thrombey family. Such “poor but happy” and “rich but miserable” framings have been shown to increase belief in a just world.11

Another strategy for preserving belief in a just world is simply to avoid situations in which you might be reminded of the existence of injustice. People generally prefer romcoms about affluent singles to documentaries about child mortality in the developing world. They also prefer to spend their time in tony, affluent neighborhoods rather than in impoverished ones. As J.H. Ellard and colleagues write, “Don’t physically go to ‘that part of town’ and change the channel when ‘it’ appears on your television.”12

Immanent justice

One form of reasoning that supports just world beliefs is immanent justice reasoning, or the belief that the universe punishes bad behavior even when there is no plausible justification for such an interpretation. The popular 19^th century belief that masturbation led to medical problems like blindness, depression, and impotence is an example of such reasoning.

Immanent justice reasoning remains pervasive. In one experiment, subjects were told that a man named David was seriously injured in a random car accident. One set of subjects were told that David had previously cheated on his wife with a travel agent named Susanne and was about to go on a vacation with her. The other set of subjects were told that David was not having an affair with Susanne and only dealt with her to arrange travel for his family. Subjects in the first condition were significantly more likely to see David’s accident as a result of his relationship with Susanne.

Immanent justice reasoning is motivated in part by our need to believe in a just world. Subjects use immanent justice reasoning to recuperate their faith that the world is a fair place after that belief has been threatened.13

Effects of belief in a just world

One effect of belief in a just world (BJW) is to make people more optimistic and trusting. High BJW people show greater interpersonal trust and trust in social institutions. They are also more open to taking risks compared to low BJW people, and more willing to invest in their future. This optimism is adaptive: high BJW people also perform better on intellectual tasks, schoolwork, and job performance. High BJW people are also more likely to work to ensure just outcomes by helping people in need, as long as they are deserving and/or members of ingroups.14

John T. Jost and colleagues define belief in a just world as a system-justifying belief because it leads to acceptance of the social order. BJW is correlated with other system-justifying beliefs like authoritarianism, conservatism, opposition to equality, and belief in the Protestant Work Ethic. Strong BJW predicts support of economic inequality and opposition to wealth redistribution.15

Religious believers have a stronger belief in a just world than non-believers. This is unsurprising, as religions generally guarantee the existence of a just world. The Jost et al. paper gives many examples. In Romans 13, St. Paul, for example, defended the legitimacy and justice of ruling authorities, which he declared had been “established by God.” The Hindu concept of karma specifies that, if people suffer in this life, they deserve it because of wrongdoings committed in previous existences. Atheists have lower levels of belief in a just world across the board than Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and Buddhists. Atheists are also lower in general in system-justifying beliefs than religious believers.16

The belief in a just world (BJW) is an essential part of our assumptive world that helps us maintain confidence in benevolence and meaning. On one hand, BJW is highly adaptive in that it encourages optimism and trust in other people and social institutions. On the other hand, BJW is the cause of much injustice because it blunts sympathy for society’s victims. BJW is responsible for the myths that the poor deserve their fate and that rape victims are really asking for it.

My last article argued that religion imposed a videogame framing on life. Religions tell us that we live in a world designed by an external designer who gives us rules and a purpose. Religions encourage us to see the problems of life as cognitively tractable, solvable puzzles, rather than predicaments without right answers. BJW, which is legitimated and reinforced by religion, is another aspect of this videogame framing. Videogames usually have action movie plots where we play the good guys who win out over the bad guys and people generally get what they deserve. Videogames are also filled with immanent justice in which the world punishes characters, including the player, if they do wrong. If you kill too many innocent characters in Dishonored 2, enemies and hazards become more numerous and you are afflicted by blood fly infestations.

As I explained at the beginning, trauma negates our assumptive world. Does that mean that, if we accept that the world is often unjust, we will have to live like trauma victims? I think not. Trauma victims by and large don’t understand what is happening to them psychologically, and an important part of their therapy is helping them cognitively process what has happened to them. What I’m doing here is a kind of cognitive processing that will, I hope, help myself and others face the unjust world with sanity and clarity.

Religion causes us to misinterpret reality because it frames life as a videogame. A videogame is a world designed by an external designer with a clear purpose and clear rules that are not up to the player. The player is then confronted with a series of tests and puzzles to which there are correct solutions. By solving these puzzles, the player achieves the purpose of the game.

The similarities between videogames and religions ought to be obvious. Religions also tell us that we live in a reality designed by an external designer. This designer appoints us a purpose and gives us a set of rules, or a morality, by which we can achieve our purpose. Neither the purpose nor the rules are up to us. Religions interpret life as a series of tests that are solvable like videogame puzzles and will lead to salvation.

Religion distorts the nature of reality and of the problems that we actually face. There is no reason to believe that we live in a designed universe with a purpose and rules that we don’t get to decide on. Also, most of the problems that we face are not solvable puzzles, but predicaments that have no correct solution. By gamifying life, religion encourages naïve realism.

I have confined my discussion of religion to American Christianity. One reason for this limitation is that this form of religion has been studied scientifically more than any other. Also, since I am an American who has been reading books by Christians and books about Christianity all my life, I have an intuitive feel for this form of religion. I will suggest at the end, however, that gamification is also a quality of other religions.

Religion, purpose, and plan

When you play a videogame, you enter a world that is designed by an external intelligence who assigns you a purpose and a plan for getting there. If you play Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, you go on a quest to recover the Cintamani Stone, which had been lost by Marco Polo in a shipwreck. You are confronted with a foreordained series of puzzles and tests, like fights and the discovery of secret rooms and hiding places, that will lead you to complete your quest. By videogame, I mean specifically this kind of mission-driven, narrative game.

Religions resemble videogames in that they provide believers with the same kind of purpose and plan. I’ve previously discussed Pastor Rick Warren’s vision of the Christian life. Warren’s thesis is that God has a unique purpose for all of us: “You were born by his purpose and for his purpose.”1 Our individual purpose “fits into a much larger, cosmic purpose that God has designed for eternity” (25). Not only does God give you a purpose, he ordains a specific plan for you to get there. Warren quotes God’s words in Jeremiah: “I know what I am planning for you… I have good plans for you, not plans to hurt you. I will give you hope and a good future” (35).

The idea that the universe has a purpose is called “teleology.” The cognitive science of religion has found that the teleological vision is a very common, perhaps even ubiquitous, feature of world religions.2

The teleological belief that the world has a plan and a purpose is extremely common among Americans. According to a 2021 Pew poll, 91% of Americans believe in a God or some other higher power (8). Moreover, 68% believe that everything happens for a reason (37). Christians are most likely to believe this (77%), but a few atheists also do (13%) and more than a third of agnostics (37%). Another 2021 survey found that 81% of Americans believe that there is a plan and purpose for everyone's life. According to another survey, if you ask the less stringent question of whether some things are due to fate, defined as “an underlying order to life that determines how events turn out,” 85% of Christians and 54% of atheists agree.3 Among people who believe in fate, majorities of god-believers, as well as a good portion of non-believers, agree that fate is fair and leads to good acts being rewarded and bad acts punished, that fate is kind and serves humans’ best interests, and that fate guides outcomes to teach people life lessons.

How do people come to believe that the world has been designed by an agent? Deborah Kelemen argues that it is likely the result of children’s learning about agency and artifacts. To become competent reasoners, babies must learn that when a person does something, it is usually in pursuit of some purpose. They must also learn that artifacts exist for a purpose: the pen is for writing. Having learned about entities that have a purpose, they apply the same reasoning to natural objects. If you ask them why a rock exists, seven- and eight-year-olds will return answers like, “so that animals could scratch on them when they got itchy.” If you ask them why lions exist, they will answer something like “to go in the zoo.” These are, of course, fallacies: there is no reason to believe that natural objects exist for any purpose. This tendency to see purpose where there is none is called “promiscuous teleology.” Promiscuous teleology creates a natural receptivity to religious ideas and makes children into “intuitive theists.” After all, if you think natural objects exist for a purpose, it makes sense that they were designed for that purpose by a designer. The whole of religion, it seems, may simply be a result of such childish errors in reasoning.

Puzzles in videogames and religion

When you play a videogame, you have a finite set of options. You can typically walk, run, climb, and shoot. You might have dozens of other options, but it is a finite number. You also have a finite world in which to act. Try to go outside of the path that the videogame assigns you, and you will be blocked. There is an obvious similarity between videogames and religion here: if you believe that life has a foreordained purpose and objectively given moral rules, certain actions will likely be unthinkable for you and out of bounds.

But there is a deeper similarity. Through some combination of videogame actions, you can find the correct solution to the problem that the videogame is posing you, whether that’s killing a space alien or discovering a hidden room. Let’s call the type of problem that has a correct solution a “puzzle.”

The view that everyone’s life is guided by a plan with an achievable purpose implies that life’s trials consist of soluble puzzles. After all, if you are meant to succeed in fulfilling your plan, then the trials of life must have correct solutions that you are capable of figuring out.

When one reads Christian religious texts, this framing of life’s challenges as puzzles is ubiquitous. Consider the temptation of Jesus by Satan in Matthew 4. Satan presents Jesus with a series of puzzles meant to flummox and seduce him, but Jesus always comes up with the correct solution. Satan challenges Jesus to jump off the top of a tall building to prove that he is the son of God, but Jesus refuses on the grounds that scripture commands Jews not to make trial of God. Satan leaves defeated, and angels minister to Jesus, which seems like a sign that he found the right answers. In Samuel 17, David is confronted with the seemingly impossible task of killing the giant Goliath, but nevertheless does so by attacking him with a slingshot, an ingenious strategy that Goliath does not expect. Such stories encourage the belief that no matter how hard the challenges that life throws at you, there is always a correct solution, as there is in videogames.

Puzzles and predicaments

So both videogames and religions place us in a world with a purpose and plan and frame the challenges of life as a series of puzzles with correct solutions. One reason that I think religion is a kind of false consciousness is that it causes us to misinterpret the kinds of problems that we actually face.

Occasionally, life does present us with puzzles. When I get a new set of headphones, I often puzzle for a while over how to connect them to Bluetooth, how to control the volume, and so forth. All of those problems have correct solutions.

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But the most important challenges that we face do not have correct solutions, and I will call these challenges “predicaments.” We are often faced with choices between incommensurable goods in which neither option is entirely satisfactory. We also have to do our best to solve problems under conditions of incomplete information and understanding.

Take the famous moral dilemma that Sartre sketches out in “Existentialism is a Humanism.” During World War II, a young Frenchman has the options of either remaining with his mother, who has no reason to live except for him, or leaving home to fight the Nazis. He feels an obligation to his mother, but also to his country and humanity at large. These goods are incommensurable, and there is no way of making a correct decision. Either option is right and wrong in its own way. The young man faces a predicament, not a puzzle.

Take another problem: how to design and implement a successful welfare policy. To do this, you must face a number of questions that are unanswerable: does providing financial assistance to the indigent help or hinder them in finding employment? Is a one-size-fits-all welfare policy the right way to go, or should you tailor it to the meet the needs of different types of people? Should you include churches in the administration of welfare, or does that violate the separation of church and state? You can argue the pros and cons of all of these questions, but they have no right answer because the problems are vague and complex, and you will always lack some information necessary to solve them. This is why debates about welfare policy are never settled.

If you examine the most consequential choices that we make in life, you will find that most are predicaments rather than puzzles. Predicaments don’t just include choices about government policy, but also personal choices like whether you should major in chemistry or anthropology, whether to continue or end a relationship, or whether to have children.

Religion is false consciousness, then, because it causes us to misinterpret our problems as puzzles rather than predicaments.

Naïve realism

You might object that I haven’t offered evidence yet that religion causes us to misinterpret our problems. However, there are a variety of attitudes and behaviors that are particularly strong and common among religious people that seem to be a result of this misinterpretation. One of them is naïve realism.

The philosopher Dan Williams has made the case in several articles that we are naïve realists who think that we see the world as it really is when that is highly unlikely.

The modern world is vast and complex. Our information is limited. Moreover, we acquire this information almost entirely from others—journalists, politicians, pundits, and so on—and we interpret it through highly selective, low-resolution mental models that reduce reality to a manageable form. In other words, our understanding of the political universe is profoundly mediated. It is stitched together from the reports, gossip, ideas, and theories of those we trust, and it is filtered through simplifying categories, stories, and explanatory frameworks. In most cases, it is also biased by motives such as self-justification, reputation management, and tribal signaling.

However, we do not recognize the difficulties of understanding the world and deciding what to do. Rather, we see the truth as obvious.

Not only do citizens access reality in ways mediated by complex, opaque chains of testimony, trust, and interpretation, but they are oblivious to this mediation. They think they see reality objectively. They treat their opinions as simple reflections of obvious facts. They are—to use language from modern psychology once again—“naive realists”, treating the truth as self-evident and undeniable. In language that Karl Popper would introduce many decades after Public Opinion, they assume that the “truth is manifest”—or, as Raymond Geuss has put it, that the truth lies “there on the street in the sun waiting to be observed by anyone who glances in its general direction”.

Psychologist Lee Ross demonstrated the existence of naïve realism. He gave experimental subjects a bargaining game in which they could choose to cooperate with others or act selfishly. For some of the players, the game was called the “Community Game”; for others, the “Wall Street Game.” These frames caused players to play very differently, with players of the Community Game much more likely to cooperate than the others. They took themselves to be seeing reality, but their vision of reality was determined by frames that they were unaware of.

Ross and Williams make a convincing case that naïve realism causes us to interpret disagreements irrationally. Given the complexity of the world and the limitations of our reason, it is perfectly natural that people from different backgrounds have different interpretations of it. Take the problem of welfare policy that I raised above. It is perfectly reasonable that people would form many different opinions about the matter that are all justifiable based on the limitations of their understanding and information. These opinions will naturally be shaped by the perspectives that result from different life experiences. A billionaire who has always found it easy to make money will likely have a different opinion from that of a poorly educated housing project resident who can’t find a minimum wage job.

However, we usually do not interpret public policy disagreements as inevitable, justifiable, and irresolvable. Rather, since we are naïve realists who assume that the truth is manifest, we believe that we have seen the obvious truth about complex matters and that those who disagree with us are biased, irrational, lazy, or stupid.

Naïve realism and religion

Williams speculates about the causes of naïve realism and proposes candidates like evolutionary mismatch and social benefits. However, one cause that he does not consider is religious false consciousness. If religion causes us to misinterpret predicaments as puzzles, then you would expect naïve realism to be stronger among religious believers than atheists. After all, a puzzle is by definition a problem that you can fully understand. So you would expect religious believers to be more prone than non-believers to the attitude that the world is comprehensible rather than bewildering.

There is historical evidence that religious belief does lead to naïve optimism. The philosopher Karl Popper believed that Enlightenment thought was characterized by epistemological optimism, which means approximately the same thing as naïve realism. This optimism was based on explicitly religious assumptions about the veracitas dei, or the truthfulness of God, which made the truth discoverable for humans.

Descartes based his optimistic epistemology on the important theory of the veracitas dei. What we clearly and distinctly see to be true must indeed be true; for otherwise God would be deceiving us. Thus the truthfulness of God must make truth manifest.

Further evidence that religion leads to naïve realism comes from studies of the way that believers and non-believers reason about the world. Across an array of measures, atheists and agnostics score higher on measures of analytic thinking, or the capacity to analyze problems that have an obvious false answer to find the non-obvious true answer. More analytic thinkers are thus more capable of assessing their beliefs for accuracy, which plausibly would lead them to be less naively realistic.

Strength of religious belief, or religiosity, is also negatively correlated with intellectual humility, which consists of traits like openness to revising one’s own viewpoint, respect for others’ viewpoints, and lack of intellectual overconfidence. Religious fundamentalists also tend to be high in the need for closure, a measure of preference for order and stability, discomfort with ambiguity, and closed-mindedness.

The evidence shows, then, that, compared to believers, non-believers are more analytic, intellectually humble, open-minded, and tolerant of ambiguity, and these traits ought to lead them to be less prone to naïve realism.

Getting outside the videogame

Religious belief, then, causes a thoroughgoing and systematic distortion of reality. Religion presents believers with a gamified reality in which there is a clear and externally imposed purpose. Religion causes us to interpret the problems that we face as puzzles with correct solutions rather than predicaments without them. This gamification leads believers to be naïve realists who take the truth to be easily discernible.

I’ve used American Christianity as my example of religious belief. Is gamification a trait of other religions? Probably. For example, Indians almost universally believe in God (97%), and 70% also believe in fate. I don’t know how Indians understand the term “fate,” but it would not surprise me if it were quite similar to the plan and purpose understanding that is typical of Christianity.

The gamification theory of religion raises many questions. Among them is whether secular ideologies might gamify reality in the same way as religion does. I’ve always found Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” to be a thoroughly religious document even though it posits that the purpose of life is technological progress rather than religious salvation. The document frequently uses language with religious connotations, like “soul,” “glory,” and “I am here to bring the good news.” The manifesto is also drowning in naïve realism. The optimal course for the future is not as clear as Andreesen believes it is, and there are reasonable grounds for disagreement about the matter. Like a typical naïve realist, Andreesen interprets disagreement with him as a sign of ignorance and evil. He writes, for example, that his enemies have been poisoned by “witches’ brew of resentment, bitterness, and rage that is causing them to hold mistaken values.” So perhaps gamification is a pervasive problem and not confined to religion.

In The Truman Show, the hero, Truman Burbank, lives unknowingly in a carefully crafted simulation of reality. At the beginning of the movie, Truman is happy in his fake world, but then he starts to notice glitches and anomalies that don’t make sense, and he figures out that he is being fooled. He finishes the film by climbing up some stairs in a painted wall that he had taken to be the sky and leaving the simulation behind him. Truman is a wonderful metaphor for atheists who are waking up to the fact that we live in a religious videogame. Outside the game lie the messy, intractable, and frightening predicaments that we must confront if we are to survive and thrive as a species.

In my last article, I discussed the 18^th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s extremely influential theory of cognition and action. Kant was a free will libertarian since he believed that spontaneous, non-deterministic processes were necessary to account for human cognition and action. Kant believed that when we make a moral decision, we are freely self-causing and independent of our desires and of our pasts. Kant called this capacity for transcendence “autonomy,” by which he meant that we become self-determining through moral behavior, rather than being determined by external causes.

With the advent of the scientific study of behavior, Kant’s libertarianism has lost its credibility. Scientists no longer believe that minds cause themselves; rather, our minds are the products of chemical reactions. Some thinkers have tried to update libertarianism by constructing models of free will based on scientific grounds, like quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and emergence. However, the general consensus, with which Dennett agreed, is that such efforts are a failure. If we are to make a plausible case for free will, it must be a free will that is compatible with determinism. The compatibilist project seems paradoxical, but Dennett believed that we could best understand what free will is by studying how it evolved.

Of wasps and semantic engines

In his 1984 book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, Dennett introduces his philosophy of free will by contrasting what he takes to be our two intuitive models for how the human mind works: the animal mind and the Kantian mind. His illustration of the former is the Sphex ichneumoneus, or Sphex for short, a type of digger wasp. The female Sphex faces the problem of providing food for its offspring while it is away. It solves the problem by digging a burrow, stinging a cricket to paralyze it, dragging the cricket inside the burrow, laying her eggs beside it, and closing the burrow so the eggs can mature undisturbed.2

This suite of actions seems like the behavior of an intelligent and rational organism. However, that impression has been invalidated by an experiment. After the Sphex brings the paralyzed cricket to the burrow, it goes inside and checks that everything is ready, then drags the cricket in. However, if an experimenter moves the cricket a few inches away while she is inside the burrow, the Sphex will drag the cricket to the mouth of the burrow, then go inside and check it again, even if she had checked it seconds earlier. No matter how many times the process is repeated, the Sphex will always recheck the inside of the burrow. The Sphex’s behavior is an example of what ethologists call a “fixed action pattern,” a hard-wired behavior that is incited by a certain stimulus, and the wasp cannot learn any new response.

The Sphex illustrates the panic that people sometimes feel when they reflect on the fact that human cognition is just as much a product of biology and evolution as a wasp’s cognition. They take the biological account to mean that humans possess the same kind of limitations as insects. Maybe we are just programmed with a suite of behaviors that are too inflexible to adapt to the problems that we might encounter, just as the Sphex’s are. Maybe we aren’t the rational, reflective beings that we feel ourselves to be, but merely fraudulent simulations of rationality.

The other model of the mind is the Kantian one, which Dennett labels the “perfect semantic engine”: “The perfect semantic engine, the perfect Kantian rational will, is indeed friction-free, infinitely alert to nuances of meaning, perfectly invulnerable to sphexishness—and physically impossible” (32). Whereas the Sphex is limited by its biological powers and incapable of rational evaluation, the perfect semantic engine is unlimited by biology and, therefore, perfectly rational.

Dennett’s belief is that the problem with the free will debate is that people think that they need to choose between one of these options. Either we are like Sphexes, rigidly determined by our biology and incapable of reason, or we are entirely unconstrained by biology in our decision-making powers. Dennett’s contention is that human cognition is both constrained by biology in crucial ways, but, nevertheless, entirely unlike the cognition of an insect. Even though our minds are limited in their potential and reason imperfectly, they can still reason well enough to make humans capable of free will, moral responsibility, and autonomy. Dennett amplified this thesis in his 2003 book, Freedom Evolves.

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Autonomy debunking

The science of human behavior tends to debunk our sense of autonomy. We experience ourselves as autonomous agents who cause ourselves independently of external factors. However, science often shows us that we are influenced by biology and culture in ways that we are not conscious of. For example, according to the theory of positive illusions, people unconsciously misperceive themselves: even though it seems to us as though our evaluation of ourselves is realistic, unconscious processes cause us to be irrationally optimistic and overconfident in our abilities. Autonomy debunking can make us feel like unreasoning Sphexes at the mercy of blind instinct.

Debunking autonomy is the aim of Robert M. Sapolsky in Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. Sapolsky does not give this exact name to his project, probably because, as a non-philosopher, he doesn’t have a clear idea of autonomy and its place in the philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, it is clear that debunking autonomy is his aim.

You can see this in his criticisms of the common contemporary understanding of free will, which he calls “partial free will.” Most people are willing to admit that people have advantages and disadvantages that they did not choose; however, despite these concessions, they still believe that their successes and failures are ultimately due to autonomous self-causation.

This is another version of partial free will—yes, there are our attributes, gifts, shortcomings, and deficiencies over which we had no control, but it is us, we agentic, free, captain-of-our-own-fate selves who choose what we do with those attributes. Yes, you had no control over that ideal ratio of slow- to fast-twitch fibers in your leg muscles that made you a natural marathoner, but it’s you who fought through the pain at the finish line. Yes, you didn’t choose the versions of glutamate receptor genes you inherited that gave you a great memory, but you’re responsible for being lazy and arrogant. Yes, you may have inherited genes that predispose you to alcoholism, but it’s you who commendably resists the temptation to drink.3

The way most people see it, we have a power of self-causation that floats over our biological endowments and is truly responsible for who we are. We often call this autonomy our “grit” or “will power.” It is generally accepted that some people become highly intelligent because they have a lucky combination of genes and environment, but we still think that we can overcome that luck through grit. We say, “He isn’t the brightest guy, but he still managed to pass the organic chemistry class through sheer grit.” The belief in grit leads to the common sentiment that it doesn’t matter what traits you acquired through luck, what counts is what you do with them. As if grit itself weren’t something you acquired through luck!

Sapolsky devotes a chapter to showing how neuroscience proves that it is a myth that our will power or grit is up to us. Say we’re faced with a choice between something that is easy but bad for us, like sitting on the couch watching TV, and something that is harder but good for us, like going for a run. Making the virtuous choice requires us to suppress or inhibit our impulse to do the easy thing. This inhibition is handled by the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), and Sapolsky argues that what powers of inhibition we end up with are just as much out of our control as our eye color. People with damage to their PFC suffer from what is called “frontal disinhibition” and find it harder to suppress harmful impulses. Many people incarcerated for violent crimes have a history of trauma to the PFC (99). How the PFC develops is also dependent on genes and environment. People who are abused as children tend to have smaller PFCs than those who do not (114), and stress in adolescence also adversely affects PFC development (112).

Sapolsky marshals much other evidence against autonomy. We are unconsciously biased in our thinking by factors that are external to our consciousness. People become more politically and socially conservative when they are made to feel disgusted, whether by a bad smell or some other way (47). People are also biased in their decision-making by hunger, with judges being more likely to deny parole when they are hungry (50). The levels of hormones in your blood also unconsciously affect your thinking and motivation. Testosterone levels fluctuate throughout the day due to natural circadian rhythms, as well as sickness and exposure to threats. High levels of testosterone make us less disposed to cooperation and more impulsive (52).

This attack on the notion of autonomy leads quite naturally into Sapolsky’s denial of moral responsibility. (I’ve made a case for the hard determinist view of moral responsibility here.) If we are shaped to be the way we are by genes and environments outside of our control, we can’t be held morally responsible for our actions.

Dennett’s defense of autonomy

Dennett accepted that humans are highly constrained by their biology and culture. If you watch the fascinating debate between Dennett and Sapolsky, conducted shortly before Dennett’s death, you will see that Dennett did not disagree with Sapolsky’s account of how our selves are formed. Dennett’s thesis was, however, that these constraints do not prevent people from being capable of autonomous self-determination. Our autonomy is the result of evolution, rather than of a libertarian free will.

Dennett breaks down the notion of autonomy into its components and tells a plausible evolutionary story about each of them. First, autonomy requires self-control, or the capacity to refuse to give in to temptation in favor of greater rewards. Self-control permits us to rationally evaluate different options rather than to act on impulse. Self-control evolved in the context of group living and cooperation. For people to reap the rewards that come from cooperation, they must be able to inhibit their narrow selfishness in favor of broader group goals. Rather than eating the whole cake, we share it to foster group harmony (206-17).

Another prerequisite for autonomy is the capacity for reflection. Whereas animals simply act on their impulses without understanding the reasons for them, humans are able to “recognize these reasons, and reflect on them, and thereby to change them into entirely different reasons.”4 A dog who fights with another dog can’t analyze his motivation for fighting and reflect on whether the fight was a good idea. Only humans can think this way. Our capacity for reflection emerged because of linguistic communication. Language encouraged us to start explaining to people not only what we were going to do, but why we were going to do it, and eventually prompted us to theorize the reasons for our actions.

We human beings not only can do things when requested to do them; we can answer inquiries about what we are doing and why. We can engage in the practice of asking, and giving, reasons. (251)

Animal behavior can change profoundly only due to natural selection. However, because of our capacity for reflection, we can change our behavior through our conscious choice. We can also imagine a social order that is very different from the one that we live in and work to change our own behavior and others’ to achieve that order.

Until the birth of ethics, Darwinian R&D had proceeded for billions of years without any foresight, gradually climbing the slopes of Mount Improbable (Dawkins 1996). Wherever lineages found themselves on local peaks of the adaptive landscape, their members had no way of so much as wondering whether or not there might be higher, better summits on the far side of this valley or that. In their physical landscapes, the more farsighted of them could do something tantamount to framing the goal of getting to the other side of the river, or to the visible patch of edible grass on that hilltop over there, but more remote questions about what the point of living might be and how it might best be achieved were inexpressible until we came along. We are the only species whose members can imagine the adaptive landscape of possibilities beyond the physical landscape, who can “see” across the valleys to other conceivable peaks…. We can conceive (we think) of better worlds and yearn to get there. Are we right that these other worlds might be better? In what sense? By whose standards? By ours. Our evolved capacity to reflect gives us—and only us—both the opportunity and the competence to evaluate the ends, not just the means. (267-268).

Through self-control, reflection, and imagination, we become autonomous agents capable of freely governing and shaping ourselves.

What Dennett adds to the free will debate

Dennett adds sophistication to the free will debate and provides the material to make the right critique of hard determinism. Whereas determinists like Sapolsky flatly deny the validity of concepts like free will and moral responsibility, Dennett formulates novel definitions of these terms that are compatible with determinism. He also recognizes the uniqueness of human beings in a way that Sapolsky does not.

For Sapolsky, free will is simply a harmful myth that leads to misunderstanding of human motives. Dennett successfully argues, by contrast, that free will is a meaningful concept even if determinism is true. Humans are free because their capacities for self-control, reflection, and imagination grant them a vastly wider range of options than any other animal has, as well as the potential to shape themselves autonomously.

For Sapolsky, moral responsibility is simply another harmful myth that leads to an ineffective and cruel criminal justice system. Dennett successfully argues moral responsibility is a defensible and useful concept even if determinism is true. Moral responsibility is based on the capacity to give moral justifications of our behavior. Because of this capacity, morally responsible people should be entitled to freedom, but they should also be held responsible for breaches of morality. There are people, like children and paranoid schizophrenics, who are clearly not morally responsible because they aren’t able to reason effectively about moral issues. Dennett’s distinction validates our commonsensical perception that moral responsibility is a meaningful concept that permits us to make important distinctions between different types of agents (270-73).

Above all, Dennett justifies our commonsense intuition that humans are profoundly different from other animals. The way Sapolsky sees it, humans have a slightly more sophisticated version of the common primate brain. Dennett makes clear that there are fundamental differences between human and animal cognition. Especially, it is our imagination that distinguishes us. We are the only animal that “can conceive… of better worlds and yearn to get there” (267).

What use is Dennett’s compatibilism?

For a moral theory to be successful, it should provide guidance about how to deal with moral questions. Since the moral judgments delivered by the criminal justice system are so profoundly consequential for people’s lives, it is especially important for a moral theory to give us guidance about criminal justice. In this respect, hard determinism is quite effective, as it leads to clear models of how we should administer criminal justice, like the public health model.

The great failing of Dennett’s compatibilism is that it does not give us such concrete guidance on moral questions. Dennett attempted to articulate a theory of criminal justice, but the philosopher Gregg Caruso demonstrates that Dennett’s theory is incoherent.5 Dennett says that his “‘core concept’ of moral responsibility” is “an ultimately consequentialist, not retributive concept.”6 Dennett appears to believe, then, that punishment is justified because it benefits society, rather than because the criminal deserves it. This kind of forward-looking justification of punishment is typical of hard determinists. However, after dismissing retributivism, Dennett returns to the idea that punishment should be based on “just deserts,” which seems flatly self-contradictory. Dennett seems to recognize that backward-looking, retributivist moral theories are philosophically indefensible and often result in cruel and ineffective criminal justice systems. At the same time, he wants to hang onto retributivism in some form. The result is a mess.7

Not only is Dennett’s moral theory incoherent, but it also seems to be too vague to offer concrete guidance on any moral question. As an example, he presents it as rational for people to seek to maintain the status of morally competent subjects because they enjoy freedoms that criminals and morally incompetent subjects, like the insane, do not. He never enumerates and justifies the freedoms that morally competent people are entitled to, however. He also says that morally competent people are “are intelligent, rational, knowledgeable enough” to understand why they should be punished if they commit crimes.8 It is unclear why intelligent and rational people would ever commit a crime or other moral breach if the benefits of moral competence are so great. Such a vague theory is not useful as a guide to moral decisions.

For this reason, I am ultimately unconvinced by Dennett’s compatibilism, and I remain a hard determinist. Dennett’s compatibilism is compelling because it justifies belief in free will, autonomy, and moral responsibility while remaining scientifically plausible. His evolutionary approach also illuminates the meaning of these concepts. But Dennett’s failure to formulate a coherent and useful moral theory suggests that there is something flawed and half-baked about his compatibilism.

Why does determinism anger and unsettle us? Why are so many people intent on believing that science is, in principle, incapable of explaining human behavior in its entirety? To answer this question, I turn to the writings of the 18^th century philosophical giant Immanuel Kant. Free will was of fundamental importance to Kant and arguably the central concern of his life’s work. He wrote several books in which he addressed the topic at length, the most influential of which are Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason.

Kant is among the most influential thinkers who ever lived. His writings are fundamental to an array of philosophical fields, including epistemology, aesthetics, and the philosophies of morality, politics, law, and religion. His ideas have profoundly shaped our contemporary understanding of and attitude towards free will.

Kant defined free will as the capacity for autonomy, or spontaneous, non-deterministic self-creation. Kant thought that, through free will, we can rise above all the external factors that shape us—our desires, our bodies, our pasts—so that we can be wholly self-causing. We exhibit this self-causation when we behave morally. Kant also believed that our cognition consisted of many spontaneous processes, and that these enable us to form creative, original judgments. Through the exercise of free will, we can access the supernatural reality that lies behind the world of appearance, and find order, purpose, and beauty in life. I think that people are intuitive Kantians when it comes to free will, and his account of it is so attractive and so fundamental to the way that we conceive of the self that it is understandable that people get angry when the existence of free will is denied.

Mechanistic and spontaneous causation

Kant’s philosophical outlook is called “transcendental idealism.” He believed that our perception of the world is constituted and limited by the powers of our mind: the sensible forms of intuition, space and time, and the categories of the understanding, like causality, possibility, and negation. The phenomena that we experience tell us nothing about noumena, or things as they are independently of our perception. He called our knowledge of phenomena “theoretical” knowledge, of which science is one type. So he believed that we can’t know through science what the ultimate nature of reality is.

The only type of causality that people can know through experience is deterministic causality, which Kant called “mechanical.” This is the causality of Newtonian mechanics, where every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and the position of the planets can be calculated out to many decimal places. A movement is caused mechanically when it is caused by something outside of itself, the way that one billiard ball causes another to move. Mechanical causation is not only external, but law-governed—if you know enough about two bodies, you can predict exactly how one will cause the other to move. Mechanical causation is also passive in that bodies are caused to move by something external to them, rather than by some internal power.

Kant believed that things that were caused mechanically were incapable of novel behaviors. Some contemporary philosophers tried to render free will and determinism compatible by arguing that deterministically caused behavior could be considered free if a person were able to do as they wished without external coercion. However, Kant scorned this argument as a “wretched subterfuge”—determinism also made Kant angry! What was wrong with this view was that it attributed to people only the “freedom of a turnspit, which, when once it is wound up, also accomplishes its movements of itself.”1 Mechanical turnspits were devices designed to turn a spit at a steady rate so that meat could get cooked evenly on all sides. For people to exhibit novel, creative behaviors, some kind of non-mechanical causation must be possible for them.

For this reason, Kant believed that humans were capable of active, spontaneous causation. Spontaneous means that the behavior is self-causing and non-mechanical. Spontaneous causation is responsible for human, but not animal, cognition and behavior. Human cognition requires a spontaneous synthesis of sense data. Recognizing an object, categorizing it, assimilating it into the flow of time—all of these forms of thought and others require spontaneous syntheses. It is because of these spontaneous powers that the mind is capable of creative, original thinking. As Robert Hanna writes:

For Kant the mind is essentially active and vital—“the mind (Gemüt) for itself is entirely life (the principle of life itself)” (5: 278)…. A cognitive faculty is spontaneous in that whenever it is externally stimulated by raw unstructured sensory data as inputs, it then automatically organizes or “synthesizes” those data in an unprecedented way relative to those inputs, thereby yielding novel structured cognitions as outputs (B1–2, A50/B74, B132, B152). So cognitive spontaneity is a structural creativity of the mind with respect to its representations.

Since humans can only directly perceive mechanical causation, spontaneous causality cannot be directly experienced or understood scientifically, but its existence can be deduced. Kant’s method is to ask what non-observable powers humans must have if they are to form creative judgments, act morally, and experience beauty. Kant calls these unobservable conditions of experience and action “transcendental” to distinguish them from observable, empirical reality, and he argues for their existence through transcendental deductions.

Free will and autonomy

Another type of spontaneous causation affects our practical existence, that is, our actions. It is in our practical existence that we realize free will. Free will is one requirement for moral action.

Kant believed that there were three sources of human motivations or incentives: animality, humanity, and personality. Our animal incentives are motivations that we share with animals, such as desire for food, sex, and survival. Our human incentives are those that derive from our desire for social status. Such incentives consist of social emotions like jealousy, rivalry, and desire for dominance. Both of these types of motivations are self-seeking. They are not bad in themselves, but Kant believed that self-seeking incentives held such power over us that they regularly led us to disobey the moral law and develop vices. Our natural love of food can become the vice of gluttony, for example.2 For this reason, he deemed humans radically and innately evil.3 It is from our personality that we derive our truly moral and free incentives. Our personality is incentivized by respect for the moral law or our sense of duty.

Kant believed that humans possessed two types of free will, both incompatible with determinism. Practical freedom refers to the humans’ ability to inhibit their impulses and to deliberate. Kant contrasts the human will with the animal will (arbitrium brutum). Animals have no ability to inhibit their impulses, so if a hungry squirrel sees a nut, it cannot inhibit its desire to eat it and goes after it thoughtlessly, automatically, and mechanically. “Human choice, however, is a choice that can indeed be affected but not determined by impulses.”4 So practical freedom frees people from compulsion.

Practical freedom allows humans some independence from the mechanical causation of nature, but not enough to be moral. Morality requires transcendental freedom, that is, the ability to escape self-seeking incentives altogether. Our will commands us to act morally, and we are free to act on this command or not. Kant calls this moral command the categorical imperative: act according to a principle that you could will to be a universal law. Take promising as an example. You could make a promise knowing that you intended to break it in service of your self-seeking incentives. But if you made it a universal law that people ought to make promises without intending to keep them then that law would result in a contradiction: in a world where promises are regularly not kept, they lose their meaning and will be ignored. Rather, the right rule for behavior is the one that you could reasonably decree to be a universal law: always keep promises.5

When you freely choose to act on a categorical imperative, you become free in a different sense: by refusing to let yourself be determined by self-seeking incentives, you transcend them and are free of them. You cause yourself based on your own interior moral judgment, rather than being caused by an external incentive. Kant called this kind of self-causation “autonomy.”6

If you choose to act on a self-seeking incentive, you are determined by something outside of you. Your action is what Kant calls “heteronomous.”7 Even though practical freedom enables the mind to rise above mechanism, people are still caused by the “mechanism of nature” when they act on self-seeking incentives, because their action is caused by something external to them.8 They act passively like billiard balls that get struck from without. Moral action is, by contrast, active and autonomous.

Autonomy is freedom from everything external to us, including our desires, the wishes of others, and our own pasts. Kant believed that people can change their characters and become radically new when they obeyed the moral law. People are capable of “a revolution in the attitude in the human being” through which they “become a new human being… through a kind of rebirth, as if through a new creation and a change of heart.”9 Kant conceives such a revolution in attitude as being akin to a religious conversion.

It is this capacity for autonomy that raises humans above animals and entitles them to a dignity that animals do not deserve.10 As beings with the potential for freedom, humans have an “absolute worth” and should be treated as ends in themselves.11

To be autonomous is to discover order in the world. Categorical imperatives are simple rules that are immediately comprehensible to the common understanding. You don’t need to be a philosopher to know why lying or killing people is wrong. Just act on a rule that you could will to be a universal law. Kant takes the simplicity of this form of moral reasoning to be a sign of its truth. He argues that it is only the categorical imperative that makes moral decisions cognitively tractable. If we make self-interest the principle of our behavior, moral situations become so complex as to be undecidable. If you speculate about whether it is in your self-interest to break a promise, you must consider not only how much you will gain from doing so, but speculate about how it might affect your future interests if you got a reputation as a false promiser: “with all my supposed cunning, the results cannot be so easily foreseen.”12 Kant made similar points about rival moral theories, like consequentialism. Kant believed that our cognitive powers showed a “wise adaptation”13 to our moral vocation, a claim based on his theology. The assumption is that God would not have created a world in which moral decisions were cognitively intractable.

Autonomy also requires the cognitive spontaneity mentioned above. To act morally, we need to make sophisticated judgments about how to implement moral imperatives. We have a duty to be beneficent to others, but it requires creative, reflective judgment to figure out what that duty entails for us. Beneficence isn’t just a matter of mechanically following a simple, one-size-fits-all rule, like going down the street and giving people $5 bills. Our beneficent actions must be tailored to our individual context and abilities.

Free will and the supernatural

Free will is what connects us to the fundamental and supernatural reality of the universe. Though Kant denies that this fundamental reality can be known through science, he believes that it can be deduced from the human experience of knowledge, morality, and beauty. The existence of morality requires a belief in God because people would not be motivated to do their duty if they didn’t have some hope of being ultimately rewarded for it. Since being a good person is not reliably rewarded in this lifetime, Kant asserts that there must be God who assures a reward in the afterlife. Morality also entails that we have immortal souls because duty also requires us to pursue moral perfection, and for morally imperfect beings such as us, achieving such perfection is an infinite task.14

God is also present in the Kantian system as the regulative idea that guides our quest for knowledge. When we seek to know the world, we assume that it has a hidden order that we can uncover through our efforts. To assume such a hidden order is to act as if God exists and has designed the world to be comprehensible to minds like our own.15

Teleology, beauty, and the purposiveness of nature

So far I have discussed mechanistic and spontaneous causation, but Kant also believes in another kind: teleology. A living thing is designed to achieve a particular form, like a flower or a bird, and this end causes its development. Whereas in mechanistic causation, things are caused by what happened in the past, in teleological causation, things are caused by their future. This internal teleology cannot be understood according to the mechanistic causation, and this also means that life cannot be fully understood scientifically. As Kant writes:

it is quite certain that we can never adequately come to know the organized beings and their internal possibility in accordance with merely mechanical principles of nature, let alone explain them; and indeed this is so certain that we can boldly say that it would be absurd for humans even to make such an attempt or to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered.16

Kant’s allusion to an intention here is explained by his theory of the purposiveness of nature, that is, the teleology of nature as a whole. In Kant’s first two critiques, which dealt with theoretical cognition and moral action, respectively, it seems as though there is an unbridgeable gap between the realms of nature and morality. Nature seems to be just a mass of mechanical causation without any direction, totally alien and indifferent to human moral purposes. However, in his third critique, The Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that beauty provides a transition between the two realms because beauty suggests that nature might have a moral purpose. The Kant scholar Henry Allison writes that natural beauty provides “‘hints’ and ‘traces’ that nature is on our side (is amenable to our morally required projects)” and that such beauty, therefore, “helps to support the moral endeavors of radically evil agents such as ourselves.”17

As an example, imagine you are an 18^th century German who doesn’t know about the theory of evolution, and you see a flower that delights your senses and fascinates you as you inspect its intricate structure. You might well reason that the existence of such beautiful objects suggests that nature has been created for the benefit of humans. After all, how could forms that are so complex and so deeply appealing to us exist only by chance? They must surely have been made for human delight. In this way, beauty suggests that nature has been designed for our benefit.

Thus, the experience of beauty hints at the existence of a divine plan for nature and humanity. Beauty means that nature is not indifferent to us but is designed to help us further our moral improvement. For this reason, Kant believed that “to take an immediate interest in the beauty of nature…is always a mark of a good soul.”18

Why do people believe in free will?

We have seen that Kant’s theory of spontaneous causality is his attempt to account for the human potential for creative judgment and novel, free behavior. Through free will, we are able to achieve a total autonomy, or absolute control of ourselves, independently of any external factor. We can transcend our own desires, the wishes of others, and even our past character. Our capacity for free will gives all humans dignity and absolute worth. Acting on free will also puts us in touch with the supernatural and enables us to find order, purpose, and beauty in the world.

Of course, few people read Kant, but I think that, because of his enormous influence, people associate the term “free will” with a confused image of the Kantian vision. I take it that this vision is highly appealing to people. People want to achieve total control of themselves, to be creative and original, and to experience order, purpose, and beauty.

When you tell them that non-deterministic free will does not exist, people think that you are saying the opposite of all of these things, which is what Kant thought. They take you to be saying that people do not possess absolute worth, and are not capable of being autonomous and creative. Moreover, they take you to be denying that the world can be orderly, purposeful, and beautiful. They take you to be saying that they are basically no different from turnspits.

Jessica Riskin’s criticisms of Sapolsky confirm that people do conceive of free will along Kantian lines. Riskin says that without free will, we would be “inert,” mindless “rote machines,” “passive objects of our fate,” incapable of “even minor assertions of choice or will.” This is very much how Kant saw the matter. Riskin’s unsubstantiated assertion that free will is a question for philosophy and not science is also very Kantian. That Riskin’s review appeared in such a prestigious publication as The New York Review of Books means that her opinion is probably widely shared.

People are not entirely wrong when they interpret determinism in this way. Certainly, in a world without teleology, composed of directionless deterministic causation, it is hard to justify the belief that humans have a cosmic purpose. If you are formed entirely out of genes interacting with environments, it is impossible for you to entirely escape your past. Your genes and childhood environment shape you in ways that are impossible to fully comprehend and inevitably influence your current behavior. So Kant’s notion of total, spontaneous self-causation is not possible in a deterministic universe.

However, determinism does not entail that qualities like absolute worth, powers like creativity, and experiences like beauty do not exist, just that they need to be explained differently. In a recent article, I described a theory of creative problem solving through analogies. The developer of the theory, Keith J. Holyoak, explained this process through neuroscience, not by appealing to free will. LLMs can also be creative in this way, and I don’t think that anyone denies that computers operate deterministically. We need more such research that accounts scientifically for the human attributes that people normally associate with free will.

Deterministic explanations of human behavior are, in fact, much more interesting than appeals to free will. Saying that I did something because I have a power of spontaneous causation is not really an explanation. It’s a lot like saying that tigers exist because God wanted them to. A real scientific explanation explores the exact causes of human action or of the evolution of tigers. Scientific explanations are, ideally, precise, testable, and consistent with the wider body of scientific knowledge in a way that idealist explanations are not.

Nothing causes itself, and there is no longer any reason to believe that self-causation must exist outside the bounds of all possible experience. Kant was led to stipulate the existence of self-causation because he lived at a time when people knew virtually nothing about the brain. We now understand much about how physiological processes in the brain generate cognition and motivation, and, as Sapolsky argues, there is no good reason to believe that any non-deterministic process is at work there. Nor do we need to attribute a teleology to nature to understand how a seed develops into a flower. As subtle and intricate as Kant’s argumentation is, and no matter how valid some of his insights remain, we must recognize that, by today’s standards, his basic theory is that our minds run on magic, and that our every judgment and action is the result of a separate miracle. And magic and miracles aren’t real.

In a review of Determined, the historian Jessica Riskin delivers some criticisms of Sapolsky that I haven’t dealt with yet. Riskin’s main criticism of determinism is that it can’t account for the possibility of agency. Riskin places Sapolsky in a determinist tradition that casts people as mere “passive objects of their fate.” Determinists, she claims, believe that people are mindless and unreflective “rote machines” who are incapable of “even minor assertions of choice or will.” Determinists also, allegedly, see people as “inert” and incapable of changing themselves or the world around them. Riskin contrasts Sapolsky with Darwin and other thinkers who attributed “purpose, agency, and meaning” to people. Riskin also thinks Sapolsky’s evidence for determinism is weak and that the nature of free will is a philosophical matter that science cannot decide.

Riskin’s review is useful not because any of her criticisms hit the mark, but because it illustrates many common misconceptions about determinism. Determinists do not, in fact, deny that people have agency of the type that Riskin describes. Riskin’s understanding of determinism is clouded by two basic misconceptions: she equates determinism with fatalism, and she thinks that determinism means that humans must be simple machines, like electric toothbrushes. Neither of these is true.

What determinists really believe

Riskin never defines exactly what she means by agency, but she seems to have in mind something like the following. People form intentions, and often this process involves deliberation, or effortful, conscious thinking about exactly what they want and how to achieve it. They then will often act on those intentions and change the world so that it better fits their desires. People can also reflect on their own behavior and change it for the better. Riskin interprets Sapolsky to be denying that this type of agency exists.

While Sapolsky sometimes criticizes the notion that people have agency, he does not deny that people possess the kind of agency just described. He is critical of the notion that people possess an agency that is undetermined by biological factors, but he does not deny that they form intentions, act on the world, and the rest.

His point about intentions is that it is unfair to judge people based on them, not that they don’t exist. He thinks that judging people by their intentions is like judging a movie by its final three minutes:

this approach misses 99 percent of the story by not asking the key question: And where did that intent come from in the first place? This is so important because, as we will see, while it sure may seem at times that we are free do as we intend, we are never free to intend what we intend. Maintaining belief in free will by failing to ask that question can be heartless and immoral and is as myopic as believing that all you need to know to assess a movie is to watch its final three minutes. Without that larger perspective, understanding the features and consequences of intent doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. (19)

Sapolsky is not saying that the agentic self is an illusion, but that it is formed by factors that are beyond our control, like our genes, childhood environment, natural selection, and so forth. We all have selves that form intentions, make choices, and alter the world, but we don’t choose the selves that do these things. Both a young female San hunter-gatherer and a middle-aged, white, American man like myself deliberate, intend, and act, but we think differently and want different things because our minds have been shaped in ways that we did not choose by different genes, hormones, and environments.

That this is the view that Sapolsky in fact holds is confirmed by the work of other determinist thinkers, like the philosopher Derk Pereboom, whom Sapolsky cites and calls one of his “fellow travelers” (17). Consider Pereboom’s description of deliberative decision-making:

it’s generally accepted that given causal determinism, there remains a sense in which how an agent deliberates makes a difference to how she decides, which in turn makes a difference to the future. Suppose you promise to help a friend clean up his yard, but you consider breaking your promise and doing something more enjoyable instead. But upon deliberation—thinking of and weighing reasons for each option—you decide to keep the promise and help the friend. Imagine also that it was causally determined that you deliberated as you did and decided to keep the promise and that as a result your friendship wasn’t impaired and instead benefited from it. It is still true that had you deliberated differently, you would have decided to break the promise, and your friendship would have been impaired. In this sense, your deliberation made a difference to your decision, which made a difference to the state of your friendship.2

Riskin’s depiction of determinism is, in short, an obvious distortion. Determinists believe that humans are every bit as intentional, agentic, and deliberative as she could want.

Riskin’s assertion that determinists deny people’s capacity for change is explicitly contradicted in Determined, where Sapolsky devotes a whole chapter to explaining how the brain can change to be better adapted to the world. He gives the example of how the brain learns to detect and react to associations. If a tone plays just before a puff of air is fired at your eyeball, a normal human, or indeed any kind of mammal, will learn to shut its eyes after the tone plays. Sapolsky explains the neuroscience behind this simple act of learning. It involves the functioning of a coincidence detector, or neuron 5 in the graph below, which is connected to the neurons that detect sounds and air puffs.

Sapolsky goes on to explain how deterministic processes can account for the categories that humans form and the way that they change in response to environmental input. His point is that determinism does not entail that people are rigid, unchangeable, and “inert.” Rather, creative and flexible cognition can emerge from a deterministic brain.

Determinism is not fatalism

Riskin’s claim that determinists regard people as “the passive objects of their fate” is based on the common misconception that determinism is equivalent to fatalism, or the belief that we are fated to do one thing or another regardless of what we want. The myth of Oedipus illustrates the concept of fatalism. Oedipus is informed by the Oracle of Delphi that he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. He very much does not want to do either of these things and tries to avoid doing them, but, due to his ignorance of the identity of his true parents, he ends up doing them anyway because this is his fate. On the fatalist view, we have a destiny that bypasses our consciousness and will. No matter what we want, we must do what we are fated to do. Psychologists have shown that people commonly conceive of determinism this way.

If Sapolsky really were arguing for fatalism, then Riskin’s criticisms of him would much more plausible. Oedipus really is the plaything of fate and is in that sense incapable of agency. However, Sapolsky is not arguing for fatalism, nor is any other determinist thinker that I know of. Rather, Sapolsky is saying that the forces that determine our lives do so by shaping and influencing our consciousness and will, not by bypassing them. In fact, Sapolsky makes it clear that he disapproves of fatalism just as much as Riskin does. At one point he contrasts “scientific determinists (endorsing statements like ‘Your genes determine your future’), with fatalistic determinists (‘The future has already been determined by fate’)” (266). Sapolsky is concerned that the deterministic philosophy might degrade people’s morality precisely because they don’t distinguish between fatalism and determinism. He devotes a whole chapter to this problem. He discusses several studies that have found that lessening people’s belief in free will makes them more anti-social, less grateful, and less motivated to conquer drug addictions. Stating the case against him, he writes:

Thus, undermine someone’s belief in free will and they feel less of a sense of agency, meaning, or self-knowledge, less gratitude for other people’s kindness. And most important for our purposes, they become less ethical in their behavior, less helpful, and more aggressive. Burn this book before anyone else stumbles upon it and has their moral compass unmoored. (250)

It is clear from this passage that Sapolsky considers a sense of agency and meaning just as essential to human thriving as Riskin does. He concedes that, if it were indeed the case that the deterministic philosophy impairs our sense of agency, then it might be for the best to suppress it. However, he subsequently argues that the morality-impairing effects of belief in determinism are overstated. In any case, it seems to me that if people confuse determinism with fatalism, the answer is to educate them about the difference rather than to suppress the truth.

Of humans and electric toothbrushes

Riskin’s understanding of determinism is clouded by another bad analogy. Her reasoning seems to go as follows: Sapolsky is saying that humans operate deterministically. So do machines like electric toothbrushes, cement mixers, and pianos. These simple machines are also passive in that they don’t do anything unless someone acts on them, and they are unable to change themselves for the better. Therefore, Sapolsky must be saying that humans are also passive and incapable of change.

The fallacy is obvious: many deterministic systems may be passive, but that does not mean that all of them are. Obviously, unlike electric toothbrushes, humans come equipped with emotions and desires that cause them to act on their own impulse. Our brains are made up of 85 billion neurons, each of which has an average of 7,000 connections to other neurons. The brain is capable of rewiring itself through learning and even of growing new neurons. These enormous differences between humans and simple machines are capable of fully accounting for the differences in their behavior without the need to appeal to any non-deterministic process.

LLMs are evidence for this view. I don’t think anyone denies that computers operate deterministically. LLMs are programmed to have human-like motivations, like helpfulness. Once you create motivated systems that are powered by billions of parameters, you can start getting human-like behavior, like creative problem-solving using analogies and sycophancy.

What’s wrong with interdisciplinary arguments?

Riskin also criticizes Sapolsky for one of his great strengths as a writer: his dazzling ability to weave the findings of diverse sciences into a rich and coherent tapestry. Sapolsky makes the point that any individual science, like genetics, psychology, or endocrinology leaves some doubt about whether free will might be operative, but as you put them all together, the case for determinism becomes stronger and stronger. Sapolsky thus establishes that convergent lines of evidence point to determinism. Such convergence is usually taken to be exceptionally good evidence for a conclusion. However, Riskin makes the entirely irrational argument that if no one science establishes that determinism is true, then the combined effect of the sciences must also fail. But why shouldn’t a conclusion be established in this interdisciplinary way? I can see no reason. Sapolsky has addressed this point in a response to Riskin.

The appeal to philosophy

If Riskin believes that Sapolsky’s determinism is wrong, what theory of human behavior does she think should replace it? You would think that proposing such an alternative theory would be the central task of Riskin’s essay. Yet she never does. Since she is a history professor, much of her essay consists of information about the history of determinist theories. While this is all quite interesting, none of it is an argument for any theory of human behavior. Riskin expresses enthusiastic belief in agency, meaning, and purpose, but doesn’t explain anything about where those might come from.

The closest she comes is to declaring an opinion on this matter is a bald statement that the question of free will is a philosophical, not a scientific one:

Science can’t prove there’s no free will because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. To misrepresent it as a scientific question is a prime example of scientism—extending the claims of science beyond its bounds.

But why isn’t free will a scientific question, and what philosopher does a better job of accounting for free will than Sapolsky? Riskin gives us no details. In fact, she does not cite a single work on the contemporary philosophy or science of free will, other than Determined, anywhere in her article. Riskin apparently believes that waving vaguely at philosophy is enough to prove that pesky, dogmatic scientists like Sapolsky are sticking their noses where they have no business. Her attitude seems to be that philosophers have written millions of pages about free will, many of which are very hard to understand, so somewhere in all of that, there must be something that effectively refutes determinism.

Riskin’s appeal to authority here is so empty as to be laughable. She uses “philosophy” as though it were a magic spell that can make all the science that she doesn’t like disappear! And this is highly revealing, because it seems like philosophy functions this way in a lot of contemporary debates. When people don’t like what science is telling them, they are highly prone to appeal to philosophy.

Why does determinism make people so angry?

Riskin’s article has a deeply angry and insulting tone. She calls Sapolsky “dogmatic.” She mocks his “late-night-dorm-room literary style.” She compares his views to those of John Calvin, a 16^th century religious zealot who preached the grim and unattractive doctrine that people were predestined to be damned or saved. She says that Sapolsky’s beliefs are rooted in “Judeo-Christian absolutism” rather than scientific rationality. She says that determinists aim for “a total consolidation of power,” a bizarre and sinister phrase. She claims that Sapolsky “relegates people to categories by class, biology, and cultural stereotype.” This is essentially accusing Sapolsky of being a racist or at least an enabler of racism. She doesn’t even try to justify this serious accusation by quoting Sapolsky.

This angry language in combination with all of her misrepresentations of Sapolsky’s arguments make it clear that Riskin is searching for reasons to dismiss determinism rather than to understand it and fairly evaluate its merits.

Determinism seems to make a lot of people angry. The determinist writer Jerry A. Coyne describes his experiences:

I’ve had many discussions about the topic, some of them quite heated, and you may remember that one of my old friends threw me out of his house on Cape Cod because I espoused determinism (it wasn’t even an argument; the guy just couldn’t stand the idea of determinism). A friendship ended over a metaphysical argument! I’ve also described another scenario after I gave a talk called “You Don’t Have Free Will.” A very large jazz musician accosted me afterwards and asked me if I thought that the extemporaneous solos he played were actually determined in advance. When I said “yes,” he got really mad and I was afraid he was going to hit me.

What is the source of this anger? Perhaps it is due to the fact that determinism challenges people’s assumptions about morality and justice. Perhaps the anger is due to misunderstandings of determinism: it may be that people are angry about fatalism, which they have confused with determinism.

It may also be that people have psychological motivations to believe in free will. In “Christianity and Positive Illusions,” I discussed the motivations for religious belief, which boosts self-esteem by inculcating an unrealistically positive view of the self in believers, as well as a false sense control, and unrealistic optimism. It’s quite likely that free will belief is, in part, explained by similar motivations. The belief that your free will and that will alone is in charge of what happens to you, independently of all the forces that formed you, plausibly brings people a false sense of control. People want to believe, “It isn’t my genes and childhood experience that make me do what I do, but my true, autonomous self!” Similarly, the notion that you can shape yourself into whatever you want to be, unhindered by any biological constraints, probably helps to keep people optimistic.

The question of what it is about determinism that makes people angry is a deep and fascinating one, and it deserves a separate article or two or three.

If you guessed D, you solved an analogical reasoning problem: bird is to nest as dog is to doghouse, or bird:nest::dog:doghouse. You judged that things were similar not because of anything about them that can be directly perceived, like color, shape, or size, but because they have a similar relationship to each other. The nest is the home of the bird, just as the doghouse is the home of the dog. Such similar relationships are what constitute analogies.

A new book by psychologist Keith J. Holyoak, The Human Edge: Analogy and the Roots of Human Intelligence, makes the case that analogical reasoning enables humans to be creative problem solvers. Analogies are the source of many scientific innovations, as well as the metaphors on which poetry is built. Analogical reasoning ability is a key component of intelligence. It is also a distinctively human ability. Most four-year-old children can find the right answer to the puzzle above, and by nine, virtually all of them can.1 However, there is no convincing evidence that non-human animals can solve this analogy problem or even simpler ones.

Analogical reasoning and creative problem solving

Imagine that a surgeon has a patient with a malignant stomach tumor. A certain kind of radiation will kill the tumor. In small doses, this radiation is harmless, but the large and intense dose required to kill the tumor would also destroy the flesh along the path to the tumor, which would result in the patient’s death. How can the surgeon use the radiation to cure the patient without killing them?

I was flummoxed when I read the problem, as most people are. But let’s consider another case. You’re a general who wants to capture a fortress that lies at the center of many different roads. If you send your whole army down one road, it will be destroyed because there are mines in the roads that will be set off by that many troops. So you decide to divide your army into multiple small groups and send them down different roads, and you are successful in capturing the fortess.

Do you see how you can kill the tumor without harming the patient now? The doctors should send small amounts of radiation along several pathways that converge on the tumor, just as the general sends small numbers of troops by many roads.

When experimental subjects are given the radiation problem in isolation, only 10% can solve it. However, if they are given the general problem beforehand, about 30% more of them get the right answer. If they are given a hint that the general problem might be relevant to solving the radiation problem, an additional 30% solve the puzzle.2

The solution to this problem involved analogical reasoning, or detection of similar relationships among entities. What makes the cases of the stomach tumor and the assault on the fortress similar is that the elements have similar relationships to each other. The general is like the doctor, the tumor is like the fortress, and the small radiation doses are like the troops. Both the troops and the radiation doses converge on the target from many different directions.

The analogy enables people to come up with a creative solution to the tumor problem that they usually cannot think of unaided. Not only that, but the analogy leads to the formation of a new concept or schema: one way of applying force to a point is to divide the force into smaller forces that converge on the point. This convergence schema may enrich our conceptual repertoire if we hadn’t thought of it before.

By using analogies, we recruit information from one scenario to provide us with information about another. Analogies can be used not only to generate novel hypotheses, but to predict the existence of unobservable properties and to explain difficult concepts.

The analogy gap

Most scientists who compare human and animal cognition believe that cognitive abilities lie on a continuum. Humans may vastly exceed animals in their ability to understand analogies, the mental states of others, causation, and other problems, but the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Human abilities, on this view, exist in a rudimentary form among apes and other animals.

Holyoak challenges this paradigm, however. In The Human Edge and this article, he argues that human cognition is fundamentally different from animal cognition because humans can form explicit concepts of the relationships between things, and animals can’t.3 Explicit concepts of relations are the basis of analogy. We need to form the concept “is the home of” before we can understand that bird:nest::dog:doghouse.

There is some experimental evidence that appears to confirm that animals can understand the very simplest of relationships: sameness and difference. However, Holyoak and his colleagues convincingly argue that this appearance is deceiving. Take the exercises below in which animals are prompted to judge which of the two figures in the bottom row is the best match for the figure at the top. The answer, which is obvious to us, is that the best match is the first item: the two cubes are the same, as are the two puzzle pieces, and the clocks are all the same, like the envelopes. We answer the question easily because we have explicit concepts of sameness and difference.

Many types of animals, including pigeons, chimpanzees, and baboons, can be trained to answer correctly on exercise B, but they usually fail to do the same on exercise A. Rather than using explicit concepts of sameness and difference, the animals turn out to be judging the amount of variety in an image. There is a great deal of variety among the images in the second square of the bottom row in exercise B, so animals can distinguish it as different from the uniform other images in the exercise. In example A, there is less variety among the images, so animals have a harder time detecting similarity and difference.

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Humans have explicit concepts of a countless number of relations: we can understand not only that one thing is the same as another, but also that one thing is on top of another or one thing causes another or one thing is chasing another. Because of these concepts, we can form analogies between different sets of things that are related in the same way.

Because humans have explicit relational concepts, we can apply them easily across domains. We can judge that two images, two ideas, or two sounds are the same. When one pool ball slams into another, we can judge that the first ball causes the second to move. But we can also use this notion of causality in radically different domains, such as when we judge that poverty causes crime or that necessity causes invention.

Until the age of four, human children perform much like animals on analogy tasks, in that they answer correctly on exercise B, but not on A. However, around the age of four, children start pulling away from animals on these tasks, and they begin to perform successfully on creative reasoning tasks by using analogy.4 Increasing skill in relational reasoning is driven by the maturation of the brain, which brings with it improvement in executive functions like working memory and inhibition that Holyoak argues are crucial to relational reasoning.

Holyoak and colleagues have argued that a whole slew of cognitive differences between human and nonhuman animals are explained by the human talent for relational reasoning. This talent explains not only human superiority in analogical reasoning, but also our superiority in reasoning about causation, rules, spatial relationships, transitivity, hierarchy, and the mental states of others.

Analogical reasoning and intelligence

Not only is analogical reasoning one of the abilities that set us apart from animals, but it is a key component of intelligence. Intelligence tests like IQ tests are largely, perhaps even mostly, measuring analogical reasoning abilities. So when you say someone is bright, you may just be saying that they have a talent for analogy.

Here’s an example of a question from the Raven’s Progressive Matrices IQ test, generally considered to be among the most reliable measures of intelligence. What answer is best?

If you managed to guess 4, you did so through analogical reasoning. You figured out that the figures in the right-most column are what remains of the middle row after you subtract the first row from it. Many intelligence tests test verbal analogies as well. Take this question:

Such tests of analogical reasoning are among the best tests of intelligence. Psychologists have defined a factor, called the “g factor,” that accounts for performance on diverse intelligence tests. The best tests of intelligence capture this g factor and are said to be the most g-loaded. The chart below ranks different types of intelligence tests, with the most g-loaded at the center. Most of the tests at the center measure analogical reasoning ability.

Intelligence is based on the brain’s executive functions (EFs), which are “a family of top-down mental processes needed when you have to concentrate and pay attention, when going on automatic or relying on instinct or intuition would be ill-advised, insufficient, or impossible.”5 Executive functions are essential for reasoning, problem solving, and planning. The basic EFs are inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Scores on analogical reasoning correlate with scores on other EFs. Not only that, but analogical reasoning ability predicts variations in intelligence even when EFs are controlled for. For this reason, some psychologists consider analogical reasoning to be an independent EF in its own right.6

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Analogical reasoning and scientific genius

Analogical reasoning is one means by which scientists conceive of novel theories. Physicists developed their theories of light and sound by making an analogy between these phenomena and waves of water. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was spurred by an analogy between human breeders’ selection of animals for desirable traits and the selection of the fittest organisms by the natural environment.7

Psychologist Dedre Gentner wrote a case study of analogy in the writings of Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), who founded the science of astrophysics.8 Kepler’s primary scientific achievement was transforming Copernicus’s mathematical theory of the heliocentric universe into a physical theory. Kepler observed that planets moved more slowly the further away they were from the sun. To explain this fact, he made use of a brilliant analogy. Just as a light is dimmer the further away it is, so there must be some force that operates between astronomical bodies that weakens the further they are from each other. The sun exerts this force, which Kepler called the “moving power” (vis motrix), on the planets, but more weakly on the distant planets, which explains why they orbit more slowly. Through this analogy with light, Kepler had begun to conceive of gravity, and he came close to formulating the mathematics of how the strength of gravity varies with distance. Kepler developed his theory of the moving power through further analogies. He sometimes argued that it was akin to magnetism and other times, to a great water current that was generated by the sun’s rotation.

Kepler was very fond of analogies and used them often. He wrote, “I especially love analogies, my most faithful masters, acquainted with all the secrets of nature.” His writings teem with analogies, such as this one describing his reluctance to work on astrology, which he understood was a pseudoscience:

A mind accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations [of astrology] resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty puddle.

Kepler devoted great time and effort to developing, refining, and interrogating the analogies that generated his scientific theories. Since he saw an analogy between the moving power and magnetism and light, he intensively researched both subjects. He thought in detail about the consequences and limitations of his analogies. For example, he wondered whether the analogy between light and the moving force meant the latter could be eclipsed and concluded that it could not, as this part of the analogy did not hold up.

Gentner compares Kepler’s thinking to that of contemporary scientists, who also regularly use analogy in their thinking. Today’s scientists typically use near analogies, or analogies between closely related domains. As an example, they might compare the operation of the Ebola virus to that of the Herpes virus.9 By contrast, Kepler was skilled in creating distant analogies between radically different entities, like light, gravity, and magnetism, or scientific investigation and the progress of a mule.

Gentner speculates that skill in conceiving of distant analogies aids in the invention of radically novel theories that cause paradigm shifts. Her work also suggests that a taste for analogies may be an essential trait of scientific genius.

The neuroscience of analogical reasoning

An array of neuroscience work has found that analogies are processed in the frontoparietal control network, which is the brain region involved in directing attention and breaking complex tasks down into sequential steps. As the chart shows, four hubs in this network are particularly relevant for analogies.

Say that you’re trying to solve this problem: insect:bee::fish:? The main hubs required for soliving this problem are:

• The posterior parietal cortex (PPC), which is responsible for representing a relation, like insect:bee.

• The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which maintains relations in working memory so they can be further processed.

• The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), which suppresses interference from information that is irrelevant to a reasoning problem. The term “fish” is closely related to many other concepts, like “water,” but these relations that aren’t relevant to the problem must be suppressed to prevent confusion.

• The rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (RLPFC), which integrates relations with others to form an analogy like insect:bee::fish:halibut.

The locations of the different hubs involved in analogical reasoning tell scientists much about how it works. For example, the PPC is normally involved in the representation of space. It seems that the brain might be representing relationships spatially by placing them in positions relative to each other. The RLPFC or “Brodmann Area” is much larger and has different features than it does in the brains of primates and changes substantially over the course of maturation. So this area may account for much of what makes human intelligence different from non-humans’ and adult intelligence different from children’s.10

Analogical reasoning and ChatGPT-3

Holyoak and his colleagues have found that the large-language model ChatGPT-3 has approximately human-level abilities in most forms of analogical reasoning.11 When you give them matrix tasks, a:b::c:d tasks, or problem-solving tasks like the doctor/general task above, the LLM scores much like human beings. Oddly, ChatGPT shows weaknesses in analogical reasoning that are similar to human weaknesses. For example, when you give them two analogous stories, both humans and the LLM sometimes need a hint before they can see the analogy. Also, both intelligences find it easier to solve simple than complex analogies. As Holyoak puts it:

Basically, when the program was compared with human participants who had been asked to solve the same sets of analogies, ChatGPT looked like ‘one of the gang’—nothing in its performance clearly betrayed its nonhuman identity. Moreover, whatever factors made analogy problems easy or hard for people had a comparable impact on ChatGPT.12

ChatGPT underperforms humans on two types of analogy tasks. Since LLMs can’t see or otherwise sense the world, they are worse than us at tasks that require spatial understanding. LLMs also don’t have any long-term memory, so they are unable, as humans are, to retrieve information from long-term memory to form analogies.

Analogical reasoning and the hard problem of consciousness

Many people believe that there is an unbridgeable explanatory gap between our understandings of the physical world and of consciousness, such that the first cannot in principle explain the second. It’s hard to imagine how physical systems operating according to deterministic laws could give rise to something as flexible, protean, and creative as our conscious experience. The concept of a machine seems entirely incompatible with the concept of creativity. This contradiction is expressed in the “ghost in the machine” metaphor, according to which a disembodied mind haunts our biological brain and renders it capable of distinctively human cognition. Because of this contradiction, many are skeptical that AI can ever achieve human levels of creative genius.

The work on analogical reasoning that I have reviewed here might help resolve this contradiction and bridge the explanatory gap. Analogies are one means by which brains achieve creative solutions to problems, and we know that at least one type of machine, AIs, are capable of this kind of creativity. Scientists still don’t understand everything about how analogical thought emerges from the brain, but they have begun to map out how the different subtasks necessary for analogy are distributed in the brain. I continue to hold out hope that neuroscientists will develop an ever more precise and encompassing, and perhaps even complete, understanding of how a deterministic brain can give rise to flexible and spontaneous thinking and action.

If you got something out of this piece, please hit the like button, as that will make it more likely that others will see it.

In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat talks as though it’s virtually certain that cosmic fine-tuning proves that we live in a “cosmos made for us” by God.1 Many Substack writers enthusiastically agree with Douthat. Bentham’s Bulldog has declared his faith in the FTA in an article confidently titled “Fine-Tuning, Made by God”!

Theists should curb their enthusiasm. Many physicists believe that there’s no good evidence that the universe is fine-tuned for life. As astrophysicist Fred C. Adams writes:

Astrophysicists have discussed fine-tuning so much that many people take it as a given that our universe is preternaturally fit for complex structures… But in fact the fine-tuning has never been rigorously demonstrated. We do not really know what laws of physics are necessary for the development of astrophysical structures, which are in turn necessary for the development of life. Recent work on stellar evolution, nuclear astrophysics, and structure formation suggest that the case for fine-tuning is less compelling than previously thought. A wide variety of possible universes could support life. Our universe is not as special as it might seem.

In fact, the FTA is based on reckless overconfidence in what it is possible for humans to know. We can’t be confident that the universe is finely tuned for life because we can’t even define what life is and can’t model what the universe would be like if its physical constants were altered.

I consulted with astrophysicist Coel Hellier while writing this article, and he has reviewed it for errors about physics. (Check out Coel’s Substack!) Evaluating the FTA requires a deep knowledge of physics, and I am not a physicist—neither are Douthat and Bentham’s Bulldog. I am interested in the FTA, as they are, because I am interested in religion. Fortunately, many physicists have written accessible overviews of the FTA and these permit non-specialist readers to gain some understanding of the debate.

What is the fine-tuning argument?

Proponents of the FTA, whom I will call “fine-tuners,” argue that if the physical constants of the universe had been even slightly different, the universe could not have given rise to life. There are multiple examples here. Quarks are the particles that make up protons and neutrons, and they come in various flavors, including up and down. If the relative masses of up and down quarks had been different, then a very different universe would have emerged that would be hostile to life as we know or can imagine it. In some cases, the only element to form would have been helium, in others only hydrogen, and in others no atoms could have formed at all.2 Similarly bizarre universes would have arisen if the relative strength of physical forces or the cosmological constant had been different. Fine-tuners are persuaded that this state of affairs presents a problem that must be solved: can it be just a matter of luck that our universe has exactly the right set of constants to support life? Fine-tuners believe that there must be some explanation of why the universe is so precisely calibrated to the emergence of life. One popular theory is that fine-tuning has to be explained by God or some other supernatural force.

The basic problem with the fine-tuning argument

It is not controversial that life as we know it would be impossible if the physical parameters of our universe took on different values. However, the most effective criticism of the FTA is that it isn’t clear that there is a fine-tuning problem in the first place. We can’t know whether all and any life would be impossible under different conditions. We can only be sure that there is a fine-tuning problem if we can predict what universes with different constants would be like, and we can’t.

That’s the case made by physicist Sean Carroll in this interview and in The Big Picture: The Origin of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself3:

when it comes to most of the numbers characterizing physics and astronomy, it’s very hard to say what would happen were they to take on other values. There’s little doubt that the universe would look quite different, but we don’t know whether it would be hospitable to biology. (305)

He strengthens this argument by noting that the chemistry and biology of our universe could not be deduced from knowledge of its basic physics.

if we didn’t know anything about the universe other than the basic numbers of the Core Theory and cosmology, would we predict that life would come about? It seems highly unlikely. It’s not easy to go from the Core Theory to something as basic as the periodic table of the elements, much less all the way to organic chemistry and ultimately to life. (305)

By Core Theory, Carroll means the theory of the fundamental forces that make up and explain our universe, “the quantum field theory of the quarks, electrons, neutrinos, all the families of fermions, electromagnetism, gravity, the nuclear forces, and the Higgs” (176). This Core Theory has been the most successful in accounting for the results of physics experiments, and it counts as physicists’ best guess at how our universe works.

The point is that, even if we know the basic physical forces at work in an alternate universe, it is impossible to know what kinds of chemistry and other higher order phenomena might emerge. Given this fact, we can’t know whether life would be possible or not in alternate universes.

I asked astrophysicist Coel Hellier to evaluate Carroll’s argument. He replied:

Yes, I do like and agree with Carroll’s criticism. We simply don’t know enough to predict what universes would be like if we started changing physical constants and other things. We can say it would be different, but we can’t then think through all the consequences. There could well still be life forms, just different ones.

This “unimaginable alternate universes” argument seems obviously true. Of course, we know far more about the physics and chemistry of this universe than those of alternate universes. Even here, though, we can’t predict chemistry from physics. Much about the chemistry of this universe remains unknown and chemists must do empirical research to gain new knowledge. As an example, novel experimental techniques have enabled chemists to see how chemicals behave under conditions of high pressure, which might inform us about chemistry in the interior of planets. Chemicals behave very differently in high-pressure and normal conditions. The nature of chemical bonding changes, so that some chemicals that are normally stable become unstable and vice versa.

It seems to me that if the logic of the fine-tuners were correct, we could simply predict what chemistry would be like from physics and would not need empirical research. If physics doesn’t allow us to predict chemistry in this universe, how can we have any idea what kind of chemistry and other emergent traits would arise in alternate universes? To know what such universes would be like and whether they could support life, we would have to observe them, and that is not currently possible.

If true, Carroll’s criticism is devastating to the FTA. If scientists can’t model what alternate universes would be like, then the FTA can’t get off the ground.

I’ll use analogy to illustrate Carroll’s argument. Imagine a primitive tribe that lives in a very arid region. Sometimes temporary ponds will form, but they have no fish or other aquatic animals in them. The tribe usually gets its water from a well. The tribe understands some things about the water, like drinking, swimming, and drowning.

I submit that this tribe would be unable to conceive of any water-dwelling animal, like a fish. If they even managed to conceive of the question of whether any animal could live in water, they would find the whole idea absurd and impossible. They would be sure that there could be no form of aquatic life. After all, they would reason, animals have to breathe air, so how could any animal live in water? The tribe’s knowledge of some facts about water would not provide them with enough information to imagine what a fish would be like. To understand how a fish lives in water, you have to actually observe a fish. In the same way, the existence of life in a universe can’t be predicted from knowledge of its basic physics.

What is life?

Carroll discusses another fundamental problem with the fine-tuning argument: fine-tuners have no definition of what life is. Life is notoriously impossible to define. Astrobiologists, or scientists who study what extraterrestrial life would be like, admit that there is no satisfactory definition of the term:

A common approach is to list life’s characteristics, which include reproduction, growth, energy utilization through metabolism, response to the environment, evolutionary adaptation, and the ordered structure of cells and anatomy. Unfortunately, this way of defining life is unsatisfactory for a couple of reasons. First, the list describes what life does rather than what life is. Second, most of these aspects of life are not unique. Life has structural order such as cells, but salt crystals are also ordered. Some of my friends have no children but they’re alive, I think, as are mules that cannot reproduce. Growth and development apply to living entities, but also to spreading fires. All life metabolizes but so does my car. Life reacts to its environment, but a mercury thermometer also responds to its surroundings.4

The lack of definition of the term “life” would seem to make nonsense of the FTA. How can you define the conditions for life if you can’t even define what life is? Can an explanation be valid if you don’t even know what you’re trying to explain?

The problem here is again illustrated by my analogy. One reason that the tribe wouldn’t be able to conceive of a fish is that they have an overly restrictive theory of what constitutes life. Since the only animals that they could observe breathed air, they wouldn’t be able to imagine how a fish could extract oxygen from water.

The carbon question

To my knowledge, fine-tuners have never addressed Carroll’s unimaginable alternate universes argument. However, they have addressed the issue of the definition of life. In A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos, physicists Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, defenders of the FTA, contend that it is all but certain that life is impossible without carbon. Of course, all life on earth is carbon-based, and one reason why is that carbon can form a wide variety of molecules, which can be used as building blocks for life. While Lewis and Barnes admit that it’s possible that silicon might form the basis of life, they are skeptical, and they think that no other elements could give rise to life.5

For this reason, Lewis and Barnes focus heavily on the cosmic conditions necessary for the production of carbon. The fine-tuners note that the production of carbon is highly problematic given the physics of stars and go on to argue that the existence of large quantities of carbon in our universe is evidence of cosmic fine-tuning. For carbon to be formed, three helium nuclei must fuse. The way that this happens is that two helium nuclei fuse to create the isotope beryllium-8, after which another nucleus must fuse with the beryllium-8. The problem is that beryllium-8 is unstable and rapidly decays, making it hard for the fusion to take place. Stars can produce large quantities of carbon only because this element has a quantum energy level that matches that of beryllium-8 plus helium. Since this is so, when beryllium and helium fuse, they create a carbon atom in one of its excited states. This energy level is known as the Hoyle Resonance. Lewis and Barnes believe that this process shows fine-tuning because it is so unlikely that the carbon atoms would resonate at the level necessary for them to form. They argue that if the physical constants of the universe were only a little different, then much less carbon would be produced by stars, making the genesis of life unlikely.

Subsequent research has not been kind to Lewis and Barnes’ argument since they made it in 2016. The astrophysicists Fred C. Adams and Evan Grohs have shown that in many alternate universes, beryllium-8 would be stable, which would, in some cases, make carbon production unproblematic and the Hoyle Resonance irrelevant.6 The broader point is that if you changed the values of universe’s parameters, you might make it less friendly to life in one way, but more friendly in others, which is a point that fine-tuners don’t consider.

For this reason and others, Adams believes that there is no evidence of fine-tuning:

the parameters of our universe could have varied by large factors and still allowed for working stars and potentially habitable planets. The force of gravity could have been 1,000 times stronger or 1 billion times weaker, and stars would still function as long-lived nuclear burning engines. The electromagnetic force could have been stronger or weaker by factors of 100. Nuclear reaction rates could have varied over many orders of magnitude. Alternative stellar physics could have produced the heavy elements that make up the basic raw material for planets and people. Clearly, the parameters that determine stellar structure and evolution are not overly fine-tuned. Given that our universe does not seem to be particularly fine-tuned, can we still say that our universe is the best one for life to develop? Our current understanding suggests that the answer is no.

It’s also possible that carbon is not necessary for the genesis of life. Biochemists have discovered that many chemical elements could form the basis for life, not just carbon. One biological process that is likely to be at the origin of life is autocatalysis, or a self-sustaining chemical feedback loop where the product of a chemical reaction can serve as the catalyst of the same reaction. Autocatalytic loops are essential to life as we know it. While most research on autocatalysis has been confined to carbon, biochemists Zhen Peng and colleagues have shown that a dozens of chemical elements, including chlorine, copper, and calcium, can give rise to autocatalysis. Peng et al. conclude, “the conditions under which life originated could be dramatically different from what living organisms are dealing with today, and extraterrestrial life, if it exists, could be very different from life as we know it.”

These scientific developments illustrate how rash it is for fine-tuners to assume that they can define the conditions for life. Since we know so little about what life is and how it might originate, trying to defend the FTA is a fool’s errand.

I hope that Carroll develops his brief and schematic criticisms of the FTA into a richer account of the overconfidence of the fine-tuners. Many other criticisms of the FTA are also valid. For one thing, the theory is frustratingly vague and incomplete. Many questions about the theory are natural, and it provides no satisfying answers. Why would God value life so much that he would fine-tune a universe so that it could arise? Why did God choose the particular physics of this universe when others would presumably have been possible for an all-powerful being? If the universe is fine-tuned for life, why are so much of the earth and the universe apparently uninhabitable? The FTA provides no principled, scientific grounds for answering these questions.

If physicists like Carroll, Adams, and Hellier are right, the whole debate around the fine-tuning argument is pointless because the argument can’t get off the ground. It would appear that all the fine-tuners are saying is that it is impossible that something indefinable exists in universes that are unimaginable. And that is not a thesis worth taking seriously.

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