In it, he rehashes an argument against ethical veganism that he previously made, giving it a new defense, as well as responding to some old objections. As you can likely guess, I disagreed with his original article—and guess what, I think that his argument is STILL bad! And so I will argue now.

Arnfield’s Argument

Arnfield presents the following syllogism:

1. It appears that we are designed to kill animals to eat their meat.

2. If it appears that we are designed to Φ, it is not always immoral to Φ.

3. (Conclusion, From 1 + 2) It is not always immoral to kill animals to eat their meat.

This is of course logically valid. Furthermore, premise 1 is plausibly true—at least I’ll grant that for our purposes. Of course, for the argument to be sound, premise 2 would need to be true. I must admit that I don’t find it particularly plausible on the face of it, and in his first post, Arnfield didn’t really give any positive reason to believe it.

That’s about to change now, as he tries to positively defend the premise this time around. We’ll see what he has to say about that in a moment. First, however, a word about the conclusion of the argument.

What Is Veganism?

A thing to note is that the version of veganism that Arnfield is arguing against is absolute veganism—that it is always, under all circumstances, wrong to kill and eat animals.

The problem—as he himself admits—is that this is not the only position which can reasonably be called “veganism.” But since it’s indeterminate where the boundaries of “veganism” lie, he is satisfied with having shown that one specification of the view is false.

Setting aside the issues of whether he has even done that, this dismissal is WAY too quick! The problem is that almost no one—certainly almost no one on this platform—who calls themselves a “vegan” holds to absolute veganism. If the “always” of absolute veganism is supposed to range over all possible cases1 then you can cook up a case like:

You’re driving in your car on a narrow road. In the backseat is your whole family, a scientist who just came up with the cure for cancer, as well as the detonator for a hydrogen bomb. A massive truck is tailgating you at worrying speeds.

All of a sudden, a fox jumps out in front of your car. You’d be able to stop just in time to not hit it, but doing so would have the truck ram into your rear end, killing you, your family, and the scientist, as well as detonating the hydrogen bomb, vaporizing a nearby village—though the fox will be unscathed.

You decide to run it over, although you weep with sorrow for the lost life. When you get home, you notice that the fox miraculously fell into the hood of your car after it died, where it has been fried by the engine to a perfect medium rare. All the passengers in your car are starving, so that they will die on the spot, unless they eat some of the delicious fox meat.

I doubt that any sane person would say that you act wrongly here by running over the fox and eating it. Yet the position Arnfield is arguing against is committed to saying that it would be wrong.

Even if the “always wrong” is only supposed to range over actual cases, I’m sure we could find some instance somewhere throughout history where everyone but the most brainrotted people dredged from the depths of r/Veganism would agree that it was permissible to kill and eat the animal in question.

I’m harping on this point, because I think that if the position you’re arguing against would be rejected by almost every single person who calls themselves a “vegan,” it’s an overstatement at best to say that your argument shows that veganism is false.

More importantly, the argument has no practical implications whatsoever, unless it also establishes that it’s fine to kill and eat animals in the ordinary circumstances where you find yourself eating meat. Presenting the argument as though it establishes a practically important conclusion, when it does no such thing, may actually be actively harmful, insofar as it makes you or your readers more comfortable with eating meat in ordinary circumstances.

So even if we grant everything Arnfield says, I would not admit that he has shown that veganism—in any plausible precisification of the position—is false.

Why Believe Premise 2?

Alright, let’s now consider Arnfield’s positive reasons for believing premise 2. He divides his case into two versions: One based on (Christian) theism, and one supposed to apply more generally.

Theism

The first argument for premise 2 is that if theism is true, we’d expect God to design us in morally appropriate ways. I’ll let the man speak for himself:

If you believe humans were designed by an all-good God, you will probably also consider it likely that their design is morally acceptable. This is not an ‘auxiliary hypothesis bolted onto’ theism. It is something we can expect to be true given theism.

Another way of putting this is that if moral agents were designed to go around torturing babies for fun, that would be pretty strong evidence that an all-good God had NOT designed those moral agents. Of course this alternative framing suggests that you can modus tollens my modus ponens in order to make an argument against the existence of God, but that would only work if you were already more confident about veganism than about God. I, personally, think there are stronger independent arguments for theism than there are independent arguments in favour of not-3. Therefore, I should stick to my modus ponens and conclude that [killing animals to eat their meat] is sometimes permissible.

Now, if we mean “veganism” in the sense that any reasonable person would actually affirm, the claim that the case for God is stronger than the case for veganism is approximately a 1 billion Scoville Heat Units take. If it’s the absolutist veganism of before then I would agree, but that’s not particularly surprising.

Bad Creatures!

In any case, whatever you should expect given theism a priori, any theist who looks at the world will find that it is in fact not the case that everything is fine and dandy all the time. Conditional on the existence of evil, the idea that an all-good God would create morally acceptable creatures starts looking to be in straight up contradiction with the facts.

There are all sorts of creatures that are seemingly designed to stain the world with as much pain and suffering as possible. An (in)famous example is the New World Screwworm—a fly that lays its eggs in open wounds, leading to its maggots burrowing into the unfortunate victim and painfully feasting on the flesh of their host. Whether or not absolute veganism is more plausible than theism, the claim that the design of such a fly is not morally acceptable certainly is.

I put something like this point to Arnfield in the comments of his previous post. In reply he said that these animals are plausibly not moral agents, whereas humans are. And it is much less morally permissible to create bad moral agents than to create bad non-moral agents. Or specifically: It’s more surprising on theism that there’d be moral agents designed to do bad things than non-moral agents designed to do the same.

I disagree! Here I’ll just steal my own old homework:

Suppose you are creating an AI system. You have a magic line of code that you can put in or whatever that you know will make it not just any ol’ computer system, but will make it a moral agent (and whatever that requires).

Now suppose that you are sure that it will do something bad. Do you then have very strong reason to not add in the magic line of code? That would seem very strange to me! Creating a creature that does bad doesn’t seem that much worse if it’s a moral agent than if it is not—I would think you have roughly equally strong reason for/against creating the system whether or not it’s a moral agent.

But God is in an analogous position.

At this point, we may just have to stamp our feet and insist on our intuitions. But I honestly can’t see how it is at all plausible that creating bad moral agents is so much worse than creating bad non-moral agents—to the point where the existence of the New World Screwworm is not that big of a deal; but conditional on the existence of the New World Screwworm, the idea that God would also allow moral agents like humans to have bad designs is so implausible that it completely swamps the arguments for veganism.

Genesis 9:3

Genesis 9:3 reads:

Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.

This Arnfield takes to be very good reason for Christians to reject veganism. I might actually agree with Arnfield here that it’s quite compelling reason for Bible-believing Christians to reject absolute veganism.

But of course, almost no one today eats meat that was sourced in the same way as meat was back in the bronze or iron age (or however much earlier this passage might pertain to). I’m relatively moderate in my vegan views, and think that raising some goats in your bronze-age village and killing and eating them might actually be permissible.2 Although I don’t know much about the conditions of animals back then, so take that with some salt.

Either way, most meat today comes from factory farms, or otherwise cruel farms, where animals live terrible lives. So it’s simply not comparable. If Genesis instead said:

Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. And if you end up raising these animals in horrific conditions, where they suffer in their own filth, never seeing the light of day, then that’s also fine btw.

Then this might be a relevant point. But at that point you’d probably want to do some exegetical gymnastics, in the same way that you do not want to affirm that the one who smashes babies against rocks is blessed.

The ‘Whatever’ View

Second, he suggests a defense that does not appeal to (Christian) theism:

The idea here is that if a creature has evolved to do something that we don’t like, we shouldn’t hold it against them and consider the action immoral - it’s just something they need to do to survive. We should just say ‘Whatever, live and let live’.

[…]

One way I put it in conversation with somebody was that it tugs on the thought that for something to be immoral it must be something you can change about yourself. Mosquitoes can’t change the fact that they are designed to drink our blood, so we can’t say they’re wrong to do it.

Immediately, there is a slip in the object of evaluation. The reason he gives for the view is something like ought implies can: If you can’t change something about yourself, it’s not wrong. But there are two facts that are true about non-vegans:

1. They (being humans) appear to be designed to kill animals and eat their meat (this we granted).

2. They kill animals and eat their meat.

It may be true that (1) is not something you can change about yourself. I would also agree that it is not wrong to appear to be designed to kill animals and eat their meat.3 But the thing that vegans take to be wrong is (2), and that certainly is something you can change. Let me provide the following proof:

• Premise 1: There exist vegans.

Q.E.D.

The ought-implies-can-style reasoning simply does not go one inch towards proving that veganism is false. After all, the fact that you appear to be designed to do something does not make you incapable of not doing that thing.

Arnfield goes on:

In my original post, I considered the ‘Aliens’ objection to Premise 2 - there could be aliens that have evolved to do nasty things to humans and this could tell against 2. The ‘Whatever’ view deals nicely with this objection by just saying that the aliens aren’t acting immorally by trying to carry out their life cycle. The view would probably also license us killing the aliens to stop them.

Apart from repeating the above in response to this, I’d add: The phrasing “trying to carry out their life cycle” suggests that the aliens in question would not be able to survive, reproduce, or at least have decent lives without torturing and killing humans. But this is not at all analogous to veganism (cf. the above proof).

If we actually make it analogous to veganism, by having the aliens be able to live perfectly fine lives without torturing and killing any humans, then it obviously would be wrong for them to torture and kill humans—and any moral view that does not give us this judgement is clearly false.

Evolutionary Morality

Finally, Arnfield gives a closely related argument:

If you believe morality is a product of evolution, then you might also think that Premise 2 is true. The idea here is that that which is evolutionarily advantageous is also morally permissible. What is good for you in an evolutionary sense is what determines what is moral.

Again, this inference is mistaken. Saying that morality is a result of evolution does not imply that actions that increase your fitness are morally permissible. For instance, if morality is a result of evolution, it does not mean that raping someone is permissible, even though it increases your individual fitness.

To see this, consider two populations. In population A, people are generally self-interested. In population B, people are likewise generally self-interested, except that some individuals go out of their way to punish people who harm others, even when it imposes costs on themselves.

In this case, it might very well be (in fact it’s quite likely) that population B will generally do better than population A, meaning that norms will overall evolve towards ones that include punishment. This is despite the fact that acting according to a norm where you sometimes punish yourself is not evolutionarily advantageous for you.4

All this is to say that the fact that some action is evolutionarily advantageous does not imply that it is right according to the moral norms that are a result of evolution. Of course this doesn’t show that the norms that are a result of evolution will support veganism—but it shows that Arnfield’s inference is wrong, and so that the argument at least needs work.

Though let me add: If you think that morality is a result of evolution, you should perhaps still just do regular first-order moral philosophy. After all, our moral intuitions are the result of evolution, and what moral philosophy does is seek some kind of reflective equilibrium among these intuitions—that is, give the best coherent systematization of our evolved moral intuitions. So since first-order moral philosophy clearly supports principles like “don’t cause extreme harm for trivial benefit to yourself,” I think we can be pretty confident that the norms that are a result of evolution do support veganism. Though I’m not as confident in this point as the rest of this post.

Another view that might support 2 which you could group in here is virtue ethics - what you need to do to flourish is what is permissible.

This is also way too quick! People who subscribe to virtue ethics do usually not just equate “flourishing” with something like a thin sense of having positive experiences or whatever. Rather they bake the moral content of the theory into what it takes for a human to flourish.

To flourish is really to be a good exemplar of your kind (e.g. a sharp knife is a flourishing knife). Hence a sadist who goes around beating people up and enjoying this will not be flourishing, as that is not being a good exemplar of a human being. Similarly, we might think that a person who causes large amounts of harm for trivial pleasure to themselves does not flourish in the virtue-ethical sense of the term.5

All of this is to say: Adam Arnfield’s argument against veganism is STILL entirely unconvincing!

This is a psychologically compelling objection. Thinking about the complex supply chain in the abstract, the idea that you could cause any difference seems almost laughable! It seems especially laughable when you’re standing in the meat aisle. “Surely no one would ever notice the difference if I buy one of these.”

However, no matter how intuitively compelling this objection is, I think it is as close to provably wrong as anything in philosophy ever is.

The Causal Inefficacy Objection

The objection in question is usually called “the Causal Inefficacy Objection.” The core idea is this: If you buy a packet of meat, or don’t, this will not cause any difference to how many animals are raised and killed. The supply chain is incredibly long and complicated, and simply not sensitive to a single purchase. Whatever you do will be way below the level of noise. But if you do not cause any difference, then it’s not wrong to buy meat!

You could maybe object to the connecting premise here by arguing that buying meat has other problems (such as reflecting negatively on your character), even if it doesn’t cause any additional meat production. But I generally tend to agree with this premise—and in any case I will just grant it here.

So the real question is whether our purchases cause any difference. As I said, it’s quite intuitive that they don’t. does a good job of making this vivid in his post Do My Meat Purchases Cause Additional Factory Farming?1 (here B is a world where you buy 1lb of beef a day, and NB is the closest possible world where you don’t):

In each of B and NB [the grocer] is in his office, seated at his desk, looking at the spreadsheets on his laptop. Everything in the two scenarios is exactly the same—with the exception that in NB the number in the relevant box on the spreadsheet reads “1426.5” whereas in B the number in that very same box is “1429”.

The odds that he’s going to react differently to these numbers is ridiculously small. He is exactly the same in each scenario, and he’s merely reading numbers that are ever so slightly different. 1429 is 0.18% more than 1426.5.

And this of course applies to every single step of the supply chain: At each step, some person or system has to first register your difference, and then decide to increase or decrease their supply in response. But at each step, your difference is far below the threshold of noise, so it will simply be ignored. You will not cause any difference.

The Canon Response

There is a standard response to the argument, that runs something like this: Suppose that some huge number of people stopped buying meat. In that case supply would drop roughly a corresponding amount.2 Now, due to the intermediate value theorem (or just common sense), that implies that there must at least be some number of people, where having one more go vegan would cause demand to go down.

It’s worth spelling this out a bit more. In the vignette Frances painted, it seemed pretty plausible that the grocer would not respond to the difference. I think this is because the grocer was not already unsure about whether to order more. Consider instead this case:

In each of B and NB [the grocer] is in his office, seated at his desk, looking at the spreadsheets on his laptop. Everything in the two scenarios is exactly the same—with the exception that in NB the number in the relevant box on the spreadsheet reads “1426.5” whereas in B the number in that very same box is “1429”. In NB, the grocer is extremely uncertain about whether to increase the amount of beef he orders. The demand is right up against the safety buffer that the store keeps, meaning the store almost can’t keep up if it doesn’t increase its order. However, they still barely can, so the grocer decides against ordering more.

In this case it’s not so crazy to think that seeing the number 1429 would have the grocer increase the order. And whether or not you share that feeling, it’s just a matter of logic that there must be some case where this is true, whether or not you find it intuitive.

After all, a sufficiently large step definitely makes a difference. If the number changes by 1000, then the grocer will certainly change his order! Suppose then for reductio that 0.5 can’t make a difference to the grocer’s decision. Well in that case, the grocer wouldn’t order more if he saw 1427 instead of 1426.5. Similarly, he wouldn’t order more if he saw 1427.5 instead of 1427, and so on.

Unless you want to deny that “more than” is transitive—in which case, have fun with that—it would follow that a difference of 1000 doesn’t make a difference. But that contradicts our assumption! So either it’s false that 0.5 never makes a difference, or you have to accept the contradiction that the grocer both does and doesn’t order more if the demand changes by 1000—again, have fun with that!

In other words, there have to be thresholds where some tiny change makes a causal difference. They don’t necessarily have to be evenly spaced, or anything like that, but they have to be there.

How big will the difference be? Well, we can’t say for sure. Sometimes the change might be small, sometimes it might be large. Hell, sometimes it might even go in reverse—human psychology is weird! But what we can say is this: If a change of 1000 will roughly translate into a difference in the order of 1000, then the average difference in order must be roughly equal to the average space between thresholds. So if there are 100 units between two thresholds, then you can expect that reaching that threshold will trigger a difference of 100 in order size.

This argument generalizes to each step of the supply chain, as well as the supply chain as a whole. After all, the argument assumed nothing about the mechanism by which supply changed, nor how complicated it is—so you can slot in the supply chain as a whole as the mechanism and rerun the argument. The sizes of the probabilities and differences might change, but the result is the same.

Now, you have no idea how close we are to the threshold. So you should give a roughly uniform probability to being anywhere in relation to the threshold, meaning you should think that you have a 1/n chance of causing this threshold to trigger, where n is the average size of steps between the thresholds. And you should expect that if you trigger it, you’ll cause around n more of the product to be produced. So in expectation, buying a chicken will cause a chicken to be raised and killed.3

Let me be clear: This “in expectation” is not some highfalutin mathematical abstraction. It’s not just that there’s some weird sense in which you technically make a difference on average; it’s that there’s a genuine chance you literally cause a difference, and the size of that difference is inversely proportional to how likely it is.

Objection!

I think this argument decisively refutes the causal inefficacy objection. However, there is a potential line of objection that can sound compelling. It goes like this:

The exposition of the argument trades on a bit of an ambiguity. When you say that there must be some number of people, such that the difference of one person will cause a difference, that’s true as a counterfactual evaluation. But it doesn’t follow from this that this ever happens!

Consider a simple analogy:

You have a scale that is sensitive at increments of 100 grams. So whenever the weight on it is above or equal to 100 grams, it displays “100 g”; when it’s above or equal to 200 grams, it displays “200 g,” and so on. Suppose now that you have a bunch of 1 gram pebbles that you’re piling onto the scale.

The above argument works here in a sense: It’s true that if you line up possible worlds in a row, such that you start with 1 pebble on the scale, then 2, then 3, etc., there will be adjacent possible worlds that have different numbers on the display, meaning a single pebble can cause a difference.

However, this doesn’t imply that there is ever an individual pebble that causes a difference. Suppose you start with 50 pebbles on the scale, and then pile them on 100 at a time. In that case no single pebble ever makes a causal difference, even though a single pebble could make a difference.

Tying this back to the veganism case, the analogy should be pretty clear: Even if one person can make a difference in one sense, it doesn’t follow that that ever happens. In fact, it doesn’t even necessarily make it likely.

Supply doesn’t respond instantly to demand, but to large groups, and over a long time meaning that the real world is more analogous to shoveling huge heaps onto the scale at a time, rather than putting on pebbles individually.

This makes it very unlikely that any individual pebble ever makes a difference. If we were placing pebbles individually (end of the supply chain noticing individual inputs, rather than counting them as noise), we’d be sure that individual pebbles sometimes made a difference, making the argument go through. But as it stands, your probability of making a difference is much lower than what the original objection supposed—after all more than the threshold amount of people can change their habits all the time, and no one ever makes an individual difference.

Reply

This is the best steelman I can give of the causal inefficacy argument.4 However, this objection is wrong, flaw being that the analogy is not apt—specifically the example of piling on 100 pebbles at a time. Once we fix the analogy, the Canon response still goes through.

The thing is, in the real world, we don’t know how close we are to the threshold, nor how many people have changed their consumption within the relevant period.5 Or in the jargon of the analogy: We don’t know how many pebbles are on the scale, nor how many pebbles are already about to be scooped on.

Fixing this, we can tell this story:

You’re a pebble who’s sitting in a handful of pebbles about to be put onto the 100g-interval scale. Being a pebble, you don’t have any eyes, meaning you can’t tell how many pebbles are in this handful, nor how many are already on the scale.

But you are a bit of a special pebble anyways: If you want to, you can jump out of the handful, so as to not be placed on the scale.

In this situation, how much lower would you cause the number on the display to be in expectation if you jumped out of the hand?

Well, since you don’t know anything about how many pebbles are on the scale, you should have a uniform credence distribution over the possible numbers. And since we don’t care about the absolute value, but only about where we are in relation to the threshold, we will take modulo 100. So we will turn 301 into 1, and turn 1546 into 46. So you have a 1% credence in each of the 100 possible options.

For simplicity, let us assume that there are 50 pebbles in the hand (we’ll relax this assumption in a moment). In that case, if you jump out you’ll make a difference just in case the number on the scale is exactly 50. So there is a 1% chance that you make a difference. And if you do, you make a difference of 100 (since that’s the step size of the scale). So jumping has an expected change of 1 gram.

What about if the number of pebbles in the hand is different? Suppose there are 49 pebbles in the hand including you. In that case you make a difference just in case there are already 51 on the scale.

You don’t need to be particularly bright to see where this is going: For any number of pebbles in the hand, your chance of making a difference is 1% (giving an expected value of 1). So when you don’t know how many there are, you can just apply the sure thing principle and infer that you will make an expected difference of 1 gram.

I hope that the analogy is pretty clear: When buying meat you don’t know how close you are to the threshold, nor how many people are buying meat that day compared to usual. So the analysis will turn out to be the same: No matter how many people are changing their habits today, the expected difference you cause will be roughly equal to the amount you buy.6

This of course assumes that you have no special information regarding where in the cycle you are. However, if that is your objection—and the reason you will continue buying meat—I will ask you to follow my instructions:

If you can really do that, then sure, I guess you are fine. But if not, then I don’t think this objection will be particularly pertinent to what you should ever do.

Epilogue: Risk Aversion

So far I’ve been assuming that a 1/n probability of n units of value is equal to 1 unit of value. But this is not an uncontroversial assumption—especially when we make n very large. For instance, taking a 1 in a billion chance of saving a billion lives is plausibly not as good as saving a single life with 100% certainty. So you might for instance think that we should disproportionately discount small risks.

At this point, it becomes important exactly how large the distance between thresholds is. I asked Claude to give a guesstimate based on relevant empirical data on the various steps of the supply chain, and it said it might be something on the order of 1/1000 to 1/10,000 chance of causing a difference if you buy 1lb of meat. But, you know, take that with a large portion of salt—I just wanted to get a rough ballpark figure.

If these numbers are approximately correct, I don’t know whether that would be small enough to significantly discount the risk.

But let’s set that aside. Because I think that taking this objection seriously simply works as a reductio ad absurdum of applying the relevant sort of risk aversion to cases like buying meat.

The thing is, risk aversion may be quite plausible in circumstances where you’re taking a one-off risk at a very good outcome. But it stops being particularly plausible when the risk is constantly taken by a lot of agents, all the time.

Consider this analogy:

There is a 10,000-sided roulette wheel, that costs $1 to play, and pays out $10,100 if you win by betting on the correct number. If you were playing this alone, it might be plausible that it’s not worth betting on this (even setting aside decreasing marginal utility).

But suppose instead that you are 10,000 people deciding whether to bet on this. Additionally, you are not taking the money for yourself. Rather, the 10,000 people are all members of a club, and they’re trying to raise money for it. If anyone wins, they’ll put the money into the club’s bank account, and it will benefit everyone equally.

Considering this as an individual, the conclusion might be the same: There’s only a 1/10,000 chance of winning, so you should discount the $10,100, making it not worth it. But if everyone bet on different numbers, you’d be guaranteed to win, and so just earn $100 with certainty. So the correct strategy obviously isn’t being risk averse.

I take it that the latter version is much more analogous to buying meat. If you’re a moral person, what you care about is that animals not be hurt—that is, the goal you are valuing is shared between all moral people (just like the value of the club’s money is shared by all). Now, if 10,000 people decided to not buy meat, that would cause less meat to be produced (let’s suppose). If each person treated their decision as a one-off lottery, then everyone being “morally rational” would with certainty lead to the moral goals being undermined. So being risk averse in this kind of situation seems to be incorrect; you know someone will win (since changes in production happen all the time), and you are not special.7

The examples that make risk aversion seem plausible are cases where you have a one-off lottery with a very tiny probability of a good outcome—or cases along these lines. But this is decidedly not such a case, and in this case, risk aversion gives the wrong result. So a plausible version of risk-discounting should take into account something like:

Collective Difference-Making: One ought to take into account the choices of other people and consider whether the collective has a non-negligible probability of making a difference.

If that’s right, then discounting small risks does not save the causal inefficacy argument, since we are exactly in a situation analogous to the above lottery. The “lottery” is won all the time, since the amount of meat produced often changes, meaning we do collectively make differences like this.

But let’s suppose that this is not right. Even so, you still aren’t off the hook if you discount small risks. Because while each purchase may have a negligible chance of causing a difference, other options may not.

Specifically, consider the choice of going vegan:

Suppose that you form the firm intention to no longer eat/buy meat, and suppose that you have a reasonably high credence that this will more or less succeed—let’s say that you expect that this will cause you to eat 80% less meat (since you have a decent credence that you will stick to it. And even if you do “relapse” you have a decent expectation that you would still substantially reduce your meat consumption overall). Furthermore, let’s suppose that you expect to live another 55 years, and you—like the average American—eat roughly 225 lbs of meat a year. These numbers are just made up for illustration.

If that’s right, then deciding to go vegan will roughly lower your meat consumption by 10 000 lbs. Let’s also go with the pessimistic assumption that you only have a 1/10 000 chance of causing a difference—which will, per the argument from earlier—on average be a difference of 10 000 lbs.

If so, then your chance of causing any difference at all (i.e. a difference of at least 10 000 lbs of meat) is 63%! Surely you shouldn’t discount a 63% chance! The chances for various sizes of difference are laid out in this table:

If we did not discount risks, this would of course have an expected value of 10 000 lbs of meat. But we do discount risks for the sake of the argument. Let’s suppose that we completely discount all risks under 1% (although that threshold seems way too high!). If so, the expected difference caused still remains roughly 9800 lbs. That’s slightly lower than if we were perfectly risk-neutral—but it’s basically the same.

Now, there’s obviously a bit of a conundrum here: Going vegan would have massively positive expected value. However, if you don’t go vegan, none of your individual purchases have any negative expected value (with regards to animal welfare). However, that seems inconsistent! Which is it? Does not buying meat make a difference or not?

The problem is, of course, that risk-discounting views are sensitive to how you individuate options, since how large the chance of an outcome is depends on how generally you describe it. But that’s a problem for the proponent of the theory to figure out.

Unless they can give a positive account that solves each of these problems in a way that implies that eating meat has no negative expected value—and in a way that is plausible, rather than an ad hoc way of weaseling out of the conclusion—then I think a general precautionary principle should mean that you don’t justify eating meat with the causal inefficacy argument.

Why do I tell you all these interesting facts about myself? Well, when I reached chapter 8 of Ted Lockhart’s Moral Uncertainty and its Consequences (pictured above), I found an intriguing argument: Lockhart argued that it is sometimes the rational thing to do (i.e. what you ought to do under moral uncertainty) to act wrongly now, so that you may act rightly later. Reading the argument, I became sure that I had to write a post about it. Both because it was very interesting, and also because it was very wrong.

So in this post I’ll give a brief overview of Lockhart’s project, explain the argument, and then tell you why it’s wrong.

A Bit of Background

So as I said, Lockhart is interested in the question of moral uncertainty—and as far as I know he’s the first analytic philosopher to give this topic any thorough treatment.2 In the book, he argues for the view that we should maximize expected rightness. That is, when we decide what to do, we consider how right each option would be according to the various theories you have positive credence in, and weigh that by their credences.

So suppose you’re at a modified trolley problem:

A trolley is hurtling towards 5 people tied to the track, who will all die if you do nothing. You can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a track with 2 people. Alternatively you can push a single large man onto the track, killing him, which will stop the trolley.

You are 40% sure of absolutist deontology, and 60% sure of utilitarianism.

Let’s say that the deontological theory says that both pulling the lever and doing nothing are permissible (right), while pushing is wrong. And this theory only has two possible evaluations: Right and wrong. We represent right with the number 1, and wrong with 0.

Utilitarianism is slightly more complicated, since it evaluates rightness and wrongness in degrees. To handle this, Lockhart introduces the Principle of Equity among Moral Theories (PEMT), which says that we normalize theories according to the options that they consider best and worse in any given choice situation. That is, we assign 0 to the worst option according to the theory, and 1 to the best option.3

So in this case, utilitarianism gives doing nothing a value of 0, and pushing a value of 1. Since doing nothing will kill 5, pushing will kill 1, and pulling the lever will kill 2, pulling gets a score of 3/4. This leaves us with the following decision table:

In this case, pulling the lever is the right thing to do. This also seems plausible enough!

As we will see, Lockhart extends this principle to courses of action, rather than individual actions. So how do we calculate the moral rightness of a course of action? Well, we of course simply do the same, and take the weighted average of the rightnesses given by the various theories to the various courses.

But what rightness does a theory ascribe to a course of action? Here Lockhart says that we take the average of the rightnesses of each of the actions making up that course. So the rightness of giving you a bouquet of flowers and then punching you in the face is the rightness of each of those, divided by two.

Alright, with this in place, we can continue to the actual argument.

Lockhart’s Argument

To argue for the conclusion that we ought sometimes act wrongly at one time, to act more rightly later, Lockhart gives us an abstract case. Basically, you are uncertain between two moral theories. Let’s say, as above, utilitarianism at a credence of 0.6, and absolutist deontology at a credence of 0.4. Also you have three times, t₁, t₂, and t₃, that you’re going to act at. At t₁, you can choose between x₁ and x₂, at t₂ you can choose between y₁ and y₂ if you choose x₁, and z₁ and z₂ if you choose x₂, and so on. So you have a decision tree like this:

Now, let’s say that both consequentialism and deontology say that x₁ is better than x₂. However, if you choose x₂ your later options are better according to the theories, overall.

Let’s make this more concrete. This scenario will be a little intricate:

Suppose you’re at a trolley footbridge. A trolley is hurtling towards a track with 5 people tied to it. In front of you stands an improbably heavy man. So heavy that if you push him onto the tracks, he’ll stop the trolley, although he himself will be killed.

A little further ahead, there is a woman with a heavy backpack full of valuables. The backpack itself is heavy enough that it will be able to stop the trolley. However, the straps are extremely tight, so she’ll not be able to get it off in time. However if you push her onto the tracks with the backpack, you know the straps will snap.

Yet further ahead is a guy standing with a rope. He won’t be willing to give it up, but if you steal it from him you can help the backpacker up. And if you don’t help the backpacker up, her body will somehow act as a perfect ramp for the trolley, so that she’ll be killed, and the trolley will jump over the backpack and still run over the five (you somehow know with certainty that this will happen).

If you do push the fat man from the bridge, there’s a policeman who will see this and arrest you. You can either lie to him or not, but it won’t really improve your situation much if you do. And if you don’t lie, you can either cooperate in the arrest, or not do so by hitting the policeman, which will harm him as well as make your sentence worse.

Now, as all this is happening, a kindergarten class of 10 kids is crossing the tracks. The children are not large enough to stop the trolley, so if they get run over the 5 people tied to the tracks also get run over. If you don’t push anyone, the kids will not notice what is going on, and 15 people will be run over. But if you either push the fat man or the backpacker, the kids will notice and avoid being run over.

For an overview of the scenario, I’ve filled in the decision tree like this:

Now, what should you do according to each moral theory? Well the deontology theory always suggests that you don’t do harm. So it will tell you to not push anyone, and let the 5 people and the kindergarten be run over. But it prefers that you push the fat man and then cooperate with the police twice over not pushing the fat man and then both pushing the backpacker and stealing the rope to help them out.

If we fill these verdicts into a table, it will look like this:

As for the utilitarian theory, it says that the best option is to push the backpacker and help them up with a rope, as that will only destroy the valuable stuff within the backpack. But pushing the backpacker and not then stealing the rope is horrible, as it’ll kill 6 instead of 5. Pushing the fat man is close to optimal, as it only kills one person (and we can say that you’ll only get a small fine if you cooperate). And the absolute worst thing you can do is do nothing, as that will lead to the 5 people and the kindergarten being run over.

Filling it in, it might look something like this:4

So what should you do? Well, if we use Lockhart’s theory, then multiplying all the paths out, it turns out that the best thing to do is to push the fat man and then cooperate with the police. The best path according to deontology is to do nothing, but that’s absolutely horrible on utilitarianism—and the best path according to utilitarianism contains two rights violations (both pushing and stealing). So the best compromise is to push the fat man.

However, notice that both theories say that pushing the fat man is not right! Individually, each would prefer not pushing. So the best course of action involves taking an action that is certainly wrong, in order to open up a path of action that will minimize disagreements between the theories later down the line. If that’s right, then it can be the case that you should act wrongly now so that you can act more wrongly later.

Not So Fast

As I said, I think Lockhart’s argument almost certainly goes wrong. To see why, we need to do a distinguish two types of theories, and see how Lockhart’s principles fail to treat them adequately.

Two Types of Theories

To see why Lockhart’s argument does not work, we need to distinguish two types of normative theories: Time-neutral and time-relative theories. This distinction generally tracks the difference between agent-neutral and agent-relative theories as used by Parfit in Reasons and Persons, but there’s no logical connection there.

• Time-Neutral Theories: These theories are such that what your theory-given aim is, is not indexed to times. If you ought to bring about X now, you also ought to bring about X in the future, all else being equal. An obvious example here is utilitarianism: What you ought to do is not relative to when you do it. You ought to bring about welfare, and it’s not more important that you do it now than do it later.

• Time-Relative Theories: As you’ll probably predict, these are theories where your theory-given aims are indexed to times. So what you ought to bring about cannot be determined without finding out when you are. An example here is deontology: You ought to not violate duties now—rather than minimize duty-violations over the course of your life. To see this, consider these two cases:

  • Modified organ harvest: This is like the regular organ harvest case, except that it was you who poisoned the 5 patients. So you can harvest the organs from one innocent person, killing them, but saving 5 others. According to standard deontology, you can’t do this, even though it would minimize how many rights you violate.

  • Future maniac: You’re mentally unstable, and know that in five minutes you’ll go on a killing spree, killing 5 random people with your gun. For thought-experiment reasons, the only way you can avoid this is to empty the magazine of your gun into another innocent person standing in front of you. Again, I think standard deontology would not allow this.

Each of these types of theories, taken on their own, could not license doing something they take to be wrong now, so that you do something more right in the future:

• Time-Neutral Theories: If what you do now is wrong, that is because it will go against your time-neutral aims. But those time-neutral aims, being time-neutral, will already factor in your future possible actions. So the action you should take is just whatever action would bring about those aims, which will, of course, be part of the best course of action (barring a wrinkle we’ll discuss at the end).

• Time-Relative Theories: Suppose here that you could take an action that, would be wrong now,5 but which would make you act more rightly in the overall course of action. Well, in that case, the theory simply tells you that you should perform the right action now. Sure, you’d be acting wrongly later. But the theory doesn’t care about that! So it can’t be the case that you should, according to the theory, act wrongly now.

Alright, so assuming these categories of theories are exhaustive (which I think they are), and what I have said so far is right (which I think it is), no moral theory could tell you to act wrongly now in order to take a more right course of action.

Still, the whole deal with Lockhart’s book is that he’s employing higher order principles about how to act under moral uncertainty, rather than applying first-order morality. So does this make a difference?

Is Rationality Different?

Here is a plausible restriction for principles of moral uncertainty:

If you are 100% sure about moral theory T, then your principle should tell you to act in accordance with T.

I mean, the principle is supposed to be about moral uncertainty. So if some moral theory is definitely right, your principle for moral uncertainty had better not interfere with the verdicts of the first-order theory.

In his treatment of time-neutral theories (consequentialism), Lockhart does fine with this.6 But his way of accommodating time-relative theories is a bit of a mess, and definitely doesn’t comply with this!

The problem is his way of evaluating courses of action as the average rightness of each action in the course of action, he goes completely against the spirit of time-relative views! If you’re an absolutist deontologist, you do not care about the average proportion of right to wrong actions over time. Rather you care about not acting wrongly. For instance:

A murderer is about to kill five innocent people. You have two choices, other than doing nothing:

1. You can use an innocent person as a meat shield to save the two. Or,

2. You can steal some metal sheets from one person, and some duct tape from another, and create a shield that will protect the five.

In this case an absolutist deontologist would say that both courses of action are wrong. That’s it. If it were to prefer one over the other, it would probably prefer (2). But on Lockhart’s principle it should prefer (1). The reason is that (2) involves two separate wrongdoings (stealing twice) in the time that (1) only involves a single wrongdoing (sacrificing one person). So the average wrongness of (1) is half that of (2).7

But that’s not what deontology would say! The wrongness of taking the course of action that is pushing the big guy over the bridge is not watered down by the fact that it involves taking a series of steps beforehand. Rather for absolutist deontology, the wrongness of a course of action is the wrongness of its worst link.

And this generalizes to time-relative theories more broadly! Deciding to take a course of action where you act wrongly is acting wrongly. What matters is not the weighted sum of rightness over time, but what you do now.

I mean, just to hammer this point home, consider this choice:

You either

1. Murder one person and then kill yourself immediately. Or,

2. Murder two people and then go on to live for another 100 years, where you do nothing but sit in a room and stare at a wall.

If we accept Lockhart's principle, it seems (1) would be a lot worse than (2). After all, the course of action is short, meaning the wrong action is a large part of it. However that’s patently absurd! Doing literally nothing for a 100 years does not make your actions any better, or make the total course of action any more choiceworthy!

Instead, I propose that insofar as we should evaluate courses of action, we should evaluate them by treating them as a single action: The wrongness of a course of action is the wrongness of causing yourself to perform all of the actions in that course of action. So the wrongness of pushing the guy in the trolley problem is not the wrongness of taking the steps towards the guy plus the wrongness of pushing, divided by 2—rather it’s the wrongness of going up to the guy and pushing him.

Why Lockhart Is Wrong

Okay, so with what we’ve got so far, can we be sure that Lockhart’s argument is wrong? That is, can we be sure that the most rational course of action is never one that involves an option that all of your theories deem less right over one that they all deem more right?

Yes! Remember, for both types of theories, you could not trade off rightness now for rightness later: 1) If the theory is time-neutral, then rightness later is already priced into the rightness now. And 2) if the theory is time-relative, rightness later is irrelevant. And to evaluate a course of action, you treat it as a single action, meaning you evaluate it by the least right action—meaning later rightness cannot outweigh a wrong action now.8

In other words: On neither type of theory can a course of action be less right than its first member—and one course of action must be at least as right (namely the one where you act perfectly from then on).

If this is right, then there is an immediate proof that Lockhart’s argument is wrong: If all theories prefer option A over option B, then by the above principle at least one course of action resulting from A must be more right than all courses resulting from B. After all, the most right course resulting from A must be as right as A, and no option in B can be as right as that course.

To diagnose his example, we need look no further than the table for deontology:

In this table there are several rows that violate our result from earlier—namely that no course of action is better than its first member. Specifically rows 5-7. These all start with a 0, but end up with positive scores. This is due to Lockhart’s faulty averaging principle. If we instead go with my principle and treat the course of action as a single action, then all rows that contain a “0” would have a total rightness of 0, since absolutist deontology absolutely prohibits you from breaking duties.

Lockhart Redux?

In the above, we saw that the problem with Lockhart’s argument was his treatment of time-relative theories. But what if I told you that there really is a way that what you should do now and which course of action is most right can conflict? Specifically if we change our assumptions about how to treat time-neutral theories. And what if I further told you that this actually shows a deeper and more principled way in which Lockhart’s argument goes wrong?

Well, I am going to tell you that. At least I am if you’re a paid subscriber. The argument above was my main aim with writing this. So I’ll leave this extra result as a treat for my paid subs.

Conclusion

So I don’t think Lockhart succeeds in showing that we should ever act immorally. Does this reflect my opinion of his book as a whole? Yes and no.

Yes, because I don’t think most of the principles he defends in his book are much more plausible than the argument we looked at here. But that’s hardly a surprise for the first attempt to develop a theory in one of the most difficult areas of philosophy. Philosophy should not primarily be judged by whether it’s right—it’s just as important that it’s insightful. And there I found this book great.

As an introduction to the issue of moral/normative uncertainty, I would recommend it. A lot of pages are spent on working through concrete examples, and much of that content can be skipped without missing much. But the theoretical considerations are still good, and the book gives a nice taste for many of the central problems in the field, as well as some of the surprising ways in which theorizing about moral uncertainty can give answers where first-order moral theorizing leaves us at a deadlock.

I’ll be quoting and summarizing Overmuser’s arguments here, to make the reading experience coherent. But I’d feel bad if I stole traffic from their post, so please go over and like their post and subscribe to them, seeing as you’ll have read their post too by proxy:

Groundwork

Anyways, Overmuser starts off by laying out preference utilitarianism:

A preference is simply a desire. It need not be associated to any “feeling” of desire, it just needs to be desired. Thus, anything an agent wants, whether the agent is sentient or not, is a preference. These preferences can be ordered and compared, or weighed against one another. They can either be compared through time, or only in the present. For instance, an agent may prefer to have cake over an apple for dessert, and they can prefer to have it now rather than tomorrow, and they can also prefer to stay fit rather than get fat over the next year. All these preferences need to be appraised and ordered by the agent, both in the present and in the various time intervals that they need to take into consideration, in order to determine what they want to do. Then, the preferences of all the agents need to be weighed against one another, and the best course of action is the one that satisfies the greatest number of preferences. The most well-known form of Preference Utilitarianism also stipulates that all preferences should be weighed equally when making comparisons between agents. This seems to imply that the strenght of the preference should not count. I will examine the two possiblities anyway: whether it does or doesn’t count.

I find this exposition broadly reasonable, though there are a couple of points where I’d object:

1. Overmuser says that preferences don’t have to be conscious/sentient. I agree that you don’t have to occurrently think about some preference for it to count. But I don’t agree that preferences have nothing to do with consciousness—or at least that this is any core commitment! I can say that for something to count as a preference, it must at least be something that a conscious agent is disposed to occurrently think about. So completely non-conscious systems can’t have preferences in the morally relevant sense. This will be important later.

2. They also say that preferences should be weighed equally, and that this “seems to imply that the strenght of the preference should not count.” I absolutely think that strength of preference should count! However we choose to make intrapersonal and interpersonal comparisons, it should respect strengths of preferences!

Now, in place of preference satisfactionism as a theory of welfare, Overmuser will want to say that hedonism is the correct theory. This will be important as we go through the objections, as many of them are not just a problem for me, but perhaps also for thee.

With that settled, we can go on to the actual objections, of which there are a whopping 7.

1. Misinformed Preferences

Here Overmuser brings up the classic problem that we sometimes have preferences that are based on false beliefs, in which case it seems odd to say that it’s good to satisfy them—something that preference utilitarianism may seem to be committed to. They (rightly) dismiss this as a bad objection, though their reason is a little odd:

this objection is rather weak, and can easily be mitigated by adding a meta-preference that subsumes all others, namely that agents have to be well-informed. This would lead us to use some kind of regret-minimization algorithm to decide what to do, which is what humans seem to be doing in real life.

I don’t think this is a good solution (if I understand it correctly)! We can’t simply add in a meta-preference for being well-informed, if the agent doesn’t have that preference. We have to work with what we’ve got. And even if we do, having a preference for being well-informed doesn’t obviously entail that preferences that are based on incorrect information don’t count.

Anyways, I think the correct solution is quite simple: We say that only non-instrumental preferences count towards welfare.

Suppose I want a bite of a cake because I believe it will taste nice, and I desire nice taste sensations. However, unbeknownst to me, it is actually a cake made with dogshit rather than chocolate. In that case I won’t get any welfare from the cake, because the thing I really wanted was nice taste, and I only wanted the cake because I believed that it would taste nice.

With this view, preference utilitarianism is not committed to saying that preferences based on false information count.

2. Malevolent preferences

Next, Overmuser brings up the problem of malevolent preferences: People can have preferences that other people be harmed. In that case it could be good to torture one person for the sake of many other sadists. That seems wrong!

I think this is the toughest objection out of the bunch. Sadistic preferences are one of the things that make me most inclined to add further conditions to the preference theory of welfare, as it really doesn’t seem like sadistic preference satisfaction is good. So I’m not completely sure what to say here. If I don’t add this sort of restriction, then I’d probably have to bite the bullet, and then say some stuff about why the intuition may not be too damning.

However, this is the first place where it becomes important to remember that Overmuser thinks that hedonism is the correct theory, as this is just as big a problem for hedonism: People can likewise derive pleasure from seeing people be tortured, meaning it could be good to torture one person for the pleasure of the many. That seems equally bad, and so it’s not really any strike against preference satisfactionism in comparison to hedonism.

3. Contradictory preferences

Here the problem is supposed to be that we can have preferences for mutually exclusive things (even necessarily mutually exclusive things). Overmuser gives the example of not wanting to hurt animals, and wanting to eat meat. Given the moral nature of this example, a more apt test case may be something like: Wanting to go to a party, and also wanting to stay at home and watch a movie.

To be honest, I don’t see what the problem is supposed to be here at all. I simply think we should have the preferences count against each other in proportion to their strength. So if I have a 10 unit preference for going to a party, and a 7 unit preference for staying home and watching a movie, I get 3 units of welfare by going to the party.

At this point, Overmuser brings up Arrow’s impossibility theorem as a problem for aggregating conflicting preferences across persons. But one thing that’s important to keep in mind is that this requires preference comparisons to be merely ordinal in order to go through.

If you’re a preference utilitarian, you should not grant this! Rather you should say that we can make cardinal comparisons across persons. How to do this is another can of worms. I’ll open it very slightly, but only say a couple of things:

First, I think we can definitely make cardinal intrapersonal comparisons of preferences. The classic method is to see how large a probability of X you would trade for a certainty of Y. But even if that doesn’t work, the fact that this is something you have definite answers to in certain circumstances seems to me to imply that our preferences are at least interval scale comparable.

So what about interpersonal comparisons? Here I have a plan A and a plan B:

• Plan A: There is some way of making direct comparisons, so that we can say that person A’s preference for X has such and such strength compared to B’s preference for Y. How this might be done is not obvious, but there may be a way.

• Plan B: If that turns out not to work, we should normalize variance. That is, we calculate the variance of each person’s preferences across the set of options. We then scale people’s preferences such that everyone’s variance is the same (or perhaps we weigh the variance by how conscious the agents are, or whatever).1

4. Two methods of preference satisfaction

Overmuser now points to the fact that preferences can be satisfied in two ways:

by not having them, or by having them and achieving the preferred outcome.

This phrasing is a little confusing to me: Not having a preference is simply neutral. But judging from the objection that follows, I assume the idea is that you can increase net satisfaction of preferences either by giving an agent more of what they want, or by increasing the strength of the preference without giving them more of what they want.

We then get two cases, which we’ll tackle in turn:

1. A person is dieting and tempted to eat a cake. Eating a cake will have negative consequences for them. But they could take a pill that would make them desire cake so much that it would outweigh the negative consequences. According to preference satisfactionism, this would be good for them.2

This is a case of wireheading, and I have come to the conclusion that the correct thing to say in these cases is: It is not good for the person to take the pill.3

Why not? Because their preferences are such that eating the cake overall counts more against their preferences than not doing so (as is stipulated into the case). Additionally, they don’t have any higher order preference for increasing their preference to eat cake (because they don’t value the satisfaction of their preferences de dicto). Or at least if they do, then it’s not strange to say that it would be good to take the pill.

Now, taking the pill may still increase overall preference satisfaction, if we aggregate preferences across all the time-slices making up the person. This is similar to how killing one person to save five may be better for the group of six people, once you aggregate their welfare together. But it still remains true that it is bad for the one person to be killed—and similarly it remains true that it is bad for me now to take the pill.

So taking the pill can be good from an outside perspective. It may be morally good for the agent to take the pill—they may be benefitting the aggregate of their time-slices. But it is still not good for them, as taking the pill does not promote their own preferences.

Note also that this example partly works for hedonism too: You could similarly take a pill that would make you enjoy the cake more. At some point this pill would be strong enough to make eating the cake better than not, all things considered. So again, it’s not much of a relative advantage for hedonism.

2. You could likewise take a pill that would greatly increase the strength of your preferences for the present, compared to the future.

Much of what I say here will be the same as the above. But Overmuser then adds:

In this case, they would become like Parfit’s present-aim theorist, always doing that they most want to do in the present, and damned be the consequences.

First, I want to note that this is only a special case of present-aim theory. Being a present-aim theorist doesn’t imply disregard for the future—you can have preferences that your future life go well, for instance. Rather, it implies that if you don’t currently have a preference for something, then you are not self-interestedly irrational by not pursuing that aim.

That was basically what I defended above. Unsurprisingly, I’m convinced by Parfit’s arguments that the self-interest theory is wrong, and that present-aim theory or morality are the only plausible places to stop. Self-interest over time is one of many gerrymandered values, just like you could have what is good for the group of six people from before, or what is good for the group of me in the next hour, Napoleon, and some random duck.

Not acting for the benefit of my future self may be a moral failing, or something analogous to a moral failing, but I don’t feel any pressure to say that it’s inherently irrational.

5. Self-harming preferences

Here I’ll just let Overmuser speak for themselves:

Consider the following: an agent knowingly decides to self-harm (due to, say, self-hatred). The agent is not misinformed about the consequences of the self-harm: they know it will hurt. They are not inconsistent: they know that this is what they want most. They are not having any desire to not self-harm, thus unwilling to change their preferences to avoid hurting in the future. This person is, under PU, perfectly justified in hurting themself, and it would be wrong to intervene to prevent them from doing that.

This is fine. However, I don’t think that it’s very implausible. If someone genuinely doesn’t care that they are being hurt, and doesn’t have any conflicting preferences—if harming themselves is literally the only thing they want—then I can’t see why it should be bad for them.

There’s something a little ambiguous about “hurt” here. If we simply mean the feeling associated with, say, knocking your toe into a table leg, then it might be the case that someone doesn’t have any preferences regarding that feeling.

In that case I don’t see why we should think that “hurting” is bad. If I have that feeling, but am entirely indifferent, and no part of me is inclined to want it to stop, then it doesn’t seem bad to me at all.

If instead “hurt” is a slightly thicker concept, involving also a desire for the feeling to stop, then preference satisfactionism necessarily implies that it’s bad, all else being equal.

There might of course be someone who desires to be “hurt” in this sense too, all things considered. But again that doesn’t seem implausible at all. I don’t find anything weird about saying that it’s good for a sadomasochist to have hot wax dripped on them, if that’s really more in line with their desires, all things considered.

Now, in this case there is probably some other non-instrumental goal, such as feeling close to the dominatrix or whatever (not my area of expertise). But what about a person who simply desires to be hurt for its own sake. They have a brute preference to have experiences that they prefer not to have.

First, I’m not sure whether that’s even a possible preference to have. But if it is, it’s certainly extraordinarily weird—so weird that I can’t imagine what it would be like, meaning I don’t trust any intuitions I form about this case. And given that the other two cases turned out to not be intuitively wrong when spelled out in more detail, I trust that the same would probably hold for this if I could imagine it.

Overmuser then goes on to add:

Note that this holds even if “self-harm” is defined as “something that reduces their ability to satisfy their preferences in the future”, because it doesn’t change the fact that this is the preference they want to satisfy in the present.

At this point I think they make a mistake! It does not automatically hold even if “self-harm” is defined as “something that reduces their ability to satisfy their preferences in the future.”

At least, this is ambiguous. If the preferences I am prevented from satisfying in the future are some that I already have, or that I’m committed to by my own values, then preference satisfactionism does not say that self-harm is good!

For instance, if I have a preference to live a long and healthy life, but I also have a preference to stuff myself with chips and heroin every evening, this would count as self-harm under this definition. But in this case, preference utilitarianism does not imply that you should eat chips and take heroin! After all, this is another case of conflicting preferences. And if eating chips and taking heroin satisfies the collection of these preferences less overall (as is plausible), you should not do so!

This is a common mistake I see: People assume that preference satisfactionism is committed to the claim that it’s always good for you to do whatever you want to do right now. That’s not true! You can have preferences about the future, and have preferences that are not currently motivating. Doing what you want right now can conflict with the overall satisfaction of your preferences. Exactly like how if you want to have as much money as possible, it does not follow that you should immediately borrow as much money as you can, just because that is what will make the number on your bank account immediately go up the fastest.

We could instead disambiguate “something that reduces their ability to satisfy their preferences in the future” as meaning preferences they would have in the future, though ones that are not implied by their current values. If that’s right, however, this is another case of wireheading like the pill and the cake—and what I said above applies.

6. Absent preferences

According to preference satisfactionism, if you do not have any preferences, then your life is morally neutral—you can neither be harmed nor benefitted. This, Overmuser claims, means that if one loses all desires, one ceases to be a moral patient, according to preference utilitarianism.

I don’t want to be too pedantic, but while this is almost right, it isn’t strictly speaking right. It’s not that someone who has no desires is not a moral patient, it’s just that you can’t possibly harm or benefit them—but if you could, it would still matter. This may sound like a distinction without a difference. For practical purposes that’s right, but I think Overmuser’s framing makes this sound less plausible than it is.

The next claim is not nearly as defensible, however. Overmuser says:

Depressed people can literally lose the will to live, and stop eating, showering, going out, and sometimes even sleeping (although some can develop hypersomnia rather than insomnia). According to PU, a depressed person loses moral patienthood because their condition makes them unable to form preferences.

Now, I have never been depressed, so I can’t speak to the details of how it is. But I’m pretty sure that depressed people are not literally bereft of preferences whatsoever. There is a difference between motivation and preference: You can prefer something while lacking the motivation to go out and do it. I believe depression mostly harms motivation. Depressed people certainly don’t lack preferences entirely.

Maybe this is supposed to be some sort of hyperbole or whatever? But I can’t find anything to indicate that in the text.

In any case, Overmusers claim—taken at fact value—becomes ridiculously implausible once we imagine what someone devoid of preferences would actually be like:

If someone genuinely had no preferences whatsoever, then that would mean that you could kick them in the balls and they wouldn’t mind. If you started sawing off their arm, they would not object; they would not want the feeling to stop; and there would be no goals of theirs that they would no longer be able to achieve. If you put a gun to their head and threatened to blow out their brains, they would not have any preference either way. If they shat their pants they would not mind—nor would they mind if you cleaned it up. Does this sound like a normal depressed person?

Seriously imagining a person like this, I feel no inclination to say that it would be bad for them to have their arm sawed off, shit their pants, or be killed; or go on living, for that matter.

In fact, I think it is a counterexample to hedonism that it would (presumably) say that it would be bad for this person to be kicked in their balls, even though they would have nothing against it whatsoever, and would not have any desire for the accompanying feeling to stop.

Next, Overmuser says:

However, depression is not the worst example. As I have written multiple times, some forms of pain can be so intense that they abolish moral agency. What I didn’t realize is that there are pains that do something even worse than that: they abolish agency, period. People can become delirious and unable to reason because of the pain. How do we take into account their preferences in this case? What if someone is in so much pain that, in the midst of their delirium, they ask for more? Did they form a preference? Or should an external observer decide for them?

Here we have to remember the two senses of “hurt” or “pain.” If the pain they’re in is the kind that they desire to stop, then it would be bad for them, and the verbal report would simply be wrong.

If instead it’s merely the feeling of pain, but their brain somehow clicks, so that they no longer desire that feeling to stop in any way (or even wholeheartedly desire it to continue), then I don’t find it implausible that it would no longer be intrinsically bad—though it may be bad for instrumental reasons.

Now, Overmuser also seems to find it problematic that it’s hard to know which it is. But that’s a perfectly general problem for any theory of welfare that makes reference to internal states—which includes all of them, I believe.

7. Who has the preference

The final objection is that non-sentient entities could have preferences. Overmuser brings in the concept of a Vulcan:

a hypothetical kind of beings first theorized by David Chalmers, that are not capable of sentience (no hedonic values, no what-it’s-likeness to feel anything whatsoever), but who are still conscious and capable of forming preferences (in a very narrow sense: ordered set of actions, ranked from most preferred to least preferred).

Hold on a second… They’re conscious, but they have no “what-it’s-likeness”? If you’re a phenomenal realist, that’s not gonna slide. In that case we’re just talking about philosophical zombies.

As I said at the start, preference utilitarianism is not automatically committed to saying that non-conscious systems have morally relevant preferences. In fact, I think that’s clearly wrong! You might object “oh, well per the definition of ‘preference’ they do.” Fine, then I’m a schmeference utilitarian, I guess.

I would only want to say that the morally relevant notion of preference is one that involves at least some kind of disposition to have a conscious thought about the preference.

But let’s go with the idea of a Vulcan as being conscious (and so not lacking “what-it’s-likeness”) but lacking hedonic states. So they have qualia, but no pain or pleasure or the like. Is it implausible that these have moral weight?

Ehh, I don’t know, not really? That seems totally fine to me! I mean, to the extent that humans have preferences with no associated hedonic states, it seems to me that it matters: If my friends are only pretending to be my friends, but I never find out, I think that would be bad for me. In that case, I don’t feel any pain from my preference not being satisfied, but it’s still bad for me.

Also, I’m inclined to say that what makes hedonic states valuable at all is the preference to have them stop or continue. If I’m in pain, but no part of me wants it to stop, then I can’t see how it’s supposed to be bad. If that’s right, then it’s hard to see why only the subset of preferences that are about my immediate conscious experience should matter.

Overmuser goes on to claim that this is especially implausible because it would mean that non-sentient entities like Vulcans could outweigh human interests:

The Preference Monster: a being (or group of beings) that is not sentient (it doesn’t even need to be conscious), but forms a very strong preference for obtaining certain things, like, say, paperclips. The Preference Utilitarian could, in theory, be morally obligated to allocate all the world’s resources to this category of agents, even though there is nothing akin to what we call “desire”, “pleasure” or “pain” happening in their mind.

Now, I think slipping that “desire” in there is a little suspect. I do think desires matter intrinsically. In fact I think that desires are the fundamental part, and that preferences matter insofar as preferences result from desires (hence why I usually say that I’m a desire satisfactionist—usually the distinction isn’t too important, but I guess it is here).

Setting that aside, I have two problems with this:

1. I think it matters immensely whether the entity in question is conscious. And I don’t think stuff like groups are conscious (this will matter in a moment).

2. Whatever implausibility comes from this comes from combining different things that are slightly unintuitive on their own: Non-sentient but conscious beings mattering, large numbers or high degrees of welfare swamping concern for others, and inequality being justifiable.
   This is no less plausible than the utility monster, or many small pains being worse than a torture. That is, most of the intuitive force comes from the utilitarianism part, not the preference part. So noting that this is an unintuitive result and putting the blame on preference satisfactionism is not a good argument.

At this point, Overmuser makes the most outrageous claim yet:

However, the greatest problem with Preference Utilitarianism is that we can literally stipulate moral patients into existence: for instance, suppose I stipulated that there be a non-sentient, non-conscious, abstract entity whose sole purpose were to hold the preference “people should subscribe to Overmuser”. According to PU, you would be morally obligated to.

What?!…

What?!…

The most charitable reading I can make here is that Overmuser is using “literally” to mean “figuratively” here. Even then, I don’t even know where to start here, or what this is supposed to mean. You decidedly can’t stipulate things into existence and have them matter.

Perhaps we can gain some clarity by reading on:

Now this is obviously absurd: you can’t just stipulate entities that hold preferences in the abstract.

I agree…

And yet, we have real life examples of such entities, with real-world effects: many humans were horrifically sacrificed to various mythological entities, for instance. Closer to us, corporations are legal persons that can have rights and obligations, and have humans act on their behalf. […] These entities are abstract concepts that only exist because we have decided to stipulate them into being at some point in the past, and that continue to have consequences, for better or worse, to this day.

Okay, so it sounds like Overmuser is just using “stipulate” to describe anything brought about by intentional human action. This is obviously absurd!

Suppose that I told you that I had “stipulated” a child into being. What I really meant was that I had intentionally had unprotected sex with a woman, who became pregnant and then gave birth to a child. Would you say that using the word “stipulate” was appropriate here?

Once we translate this, the objection—as far as I can tell—is that preference utilitarianism is wrong because it says that things that were brought about through intentional human action matter.

Uhh… Yes? That seems fine.

Now, again, I don’t think that non-conscious entities like groups matter intrinsically, and nothing in preference utilitarianism forces me to say this. So this objection doesn’t even get off the ground. Even if it did, however, saying that you can just “stipulate” things that matter into existence on preference utilitarianism is wildly inaccurate!

The solution is not just hedonism

Finally, Overmuser claims that the solution to all these problems is hedonism. As we’ve seen, that is not correct, as several of the objections apply roughly equally to hedonism. But they also give an argument:

Some Preference Utilitarians resort to an idealized version of the deliberative process in order to obtain a “filtered” list of preferences, one that is supposedly “better”. What is this filtered list? The one that… best promotes the agent’s well-being. In other words, hedonism.

That’s not accurate. Filtered list views much more resemble something like objective list theory, since they will still include stuff like relationships as intrinsically valuable (which hedonism doesn’t), but try to exclude stuff like grass-counting. Now, I don’t find these sorts of idealized preference views plausible or necessary, but they certainly aren’t hedonistic.

Now, at this point, Overmuser makes what I can only classify as a Freudian slip, handing the whole game back to the preference satisfaction view (half-kidding):

Any attempt to get rid of this is anti-human, anti-sentience, and doomed to fail for sentient agents. Why? Because we already know what sentient agents care about. All the talk about preferences is just a proxy for a more fundamental source of value: the hedonic valence. Without it, we are left with a morality that doesn’t apply to humans.

[…] We must take into consideration the things that we actually value, whether positively (pleasure) or negatively (pain).

Boy, do I have some good news for you: If you want to base your theory of welfare on what we actually value and care about, I have just the theory.

If this is genuinely the reason why Overmuser finds hedonism plausible, then I think they’re a preference satisfactionist who happens to think that our preferences are only for pain and pleasure.

Now, maybe that empirical premise is plausible (I don’t think it is), but it would only make hedonism and preference satisfactionism accidentally coextensive. If we happened to value some other stuff than our immediate conscious experience, this motivation should lead us to say that that stuff matters too. That is, we should simply be preference satisfactionists.

So I guess Overmuser and I do agree after all.

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Aisha can’t breathe. Her palms are cold and pale. She presses her body against her mother, delirious and confused, seeking any comfort from the pain. She tries to cry but her voice is faint. She doesn’t understand what’s happening.

Like most severe malaria patients, Aisha is under five years old. A parasite is destroying her red blood cells faster than her body can replace them. Her nascent immune system was unprepared and was already weakened by malnourishment before she was infected by a mosquito bite.

Aisha was picking pink hibiscuses just two days ago, smiling proudly when she handed the bouquet to her mother. Malaria comes on fast. The disease is hard to detect and treat in small children because early symptoms mirror a dozen other common illnesses until it’s too late.

Aisha’s mother holds her and prays. Please, God. Please. Let it pass before the seizures. Give her any help, anything. She doesn’t deserve this.1

When you first hear Peter Singer’s drowning child thought experiment you’ll likely find it rather convincing. On the off-chance that you haven’t heard it, the basic idea is this:

You’re walking past a shallow pond with a $4000 bill (never heard of those?) in your pocket. Passing, you see something splashing about in the pond. Turns out it’s a small child who—due to his stumpy legs—is unable to reach the bottom, and is about to drown. You could save him by simply walking over, but since your pockets are very deep, you won’t be able to fish out your $4000 in time. So it’s the child or the dollars.

I suspect you’d think you should choose the child in this story. But—surprise, surprise—this is very much like the real world! There are charities that on average save a human life for $4000.2 So if you should sacrifice $4000 to save a life in front of you, why not when the only difference is that you’re separated by some kilometers and a button? In other words, it seems you’re obligated to donate substantial amounts of money to charities that are at least as good as the ones mentioned.

There might be a bunch of disanalogies you’re thinking of. Most likely they have already been discussed (see e.g. here, here, or here). But there is one objection in particular that is uncomfortable—and, I believe, a large reason why many people don’t act on the argument.

If I’m obligated to spend $4000 to save a life, then what about after I’ve spent those $4000? There’ll still be money in my bank account and people in need of saving. If I had to save the person the first time, then what exactly is the reason why I shouldn’t save another person, and another, and… Buying the drowning child argument, it’s hard to see how we escape the conclusion that we have to work 9-9 jobs to maximize our income, donating it all, until we’re just barely better off than the people we’re helping.

I would guess that almost everyone agrees that this is an implausible implication. However, note that denying the drowning child argument wholesale is no more plausible of a response:

You’re just about to wade out to save the child. However, as you reach the shore, you peek behind a bush that was obstructing your view. Behind it you find more pond, and hundreds—if not thousands—of children also drowning.

Were this to happen, it’d not be plausible to say that you had to spend all hours of your day pulling children out of ponds, until your life were eat-sleep-save-repeat. But note that, if anything, it’s even less plausible to say that in this situation you should just shrug your shoulders and say “whelp, guess I won’t save this child after all.” The number of children you should save is not as many as humanly possible—but it’s definitely not 0 either.

This still leaves us in an uncomfortable situation: We should definitely do something but we probably don’t have to do as much as we possibly can, yet there’s no plausible line to draw between these two poles.

What makes this situation especially uncomfortable is that there is no solution. It’s simply not plausible to say that there’s any particular amount you have to do, after which everything else is extra credit. And even if there were, it’s hard to see how we could get any good justification for where it is. Instead you have to make up with yourself how much you want to do. You have to decide what you think is a reasonable amount of children to save.

Here’s something that seems reasonable to me: Giving away 10% of your income. If you do this, you can rest easy knowing that you will save several lives throughout your life. Were you to do that with your hands, you’d rightly be considered a hero—the difference is that you do it with your salary instead.

But while you’ll be making a heroic difference to the world, it’s not enough to meaningfully reduce your own quality of life. You’ll not be struggling to care for your own children because you’re pulling others’ out of ponds. If you live in a reasonably wealthy country—as you probably do if you’re reading this—the biggest hardship you’ll endure is foregoing some luxury goods that probably don’t improve your life much anyways. And in return you’ll know that you leave the world better than had you not entered it.

Naturally, 10% doesn’t have any deep significance, other than being a nice, round number. There’s some historical precedent with tithing and whatever, but apart from that it’s an arbitrary number, just like any other would be. If someone were to ask you why you don’t give 10.5% or 11% instead, there’s no good answer. But that’s true for any number other than 0% and as much as possible—but we already discussed those.

Well, there is one way in which 10% is significant: It’s the number on the Giving What We Can 10% Pledge. If you think that you should pull the child out of the pond, I implore you to seriously consider taking this pledge.

By doing so, you in no way bind yourself legally. All you’re doing is making a good-faith promise that you will give at least 10% of what you earn from now on to whatever organizations you think can effectively make the world better. There are no rules for where to give, and no one will come after you if you fail.

You don’t have to give 10% of each paycheck you receive. If you are having a hard time at one point in your life, you can take a break and then compensate later—it’s important to be good to yourself.

From my own experience as a seasoned miser, there’s not any money-spending pain associated with letting some recurring donations run in the background of your life. And once you get used to your new income level, you hardly feel it. If anything, you only feel better knowing that you’re doing something to better the world without even lifting a finger.5

If you’re a student, there’s an option to give away 1% of your spending money until you get a real job. I think this is a good idea. You shouldn’t be self-flagellating when the sums you could currently give are not much in the scheme of your life anyways.6

Oh, and you also get a cool piece of paper:

It’s easy to become lost in the philosophical weeds, considering objections and counter-objections. Sometimes it’s healthy to take a step back and look at the issue with eyes as fresh as you can make them.

Remember how you felt reading those vignettes scattered throughout this post? If not, try to read one of them again.

Really imagine that it’s your son or mother suddenly wasting away in your arms—or you whose life is unexpectedly doomed to end before next Friday. Imagine that an animal with as much soul and personality as your dog is mutilated and locked up, never to see the sun again.

There are individuals for whom these stories are currently a hundred times more real than whatever you imagined.

Look out your window, and imagine the streets you walk every day empty. No soul to ever set foot in them again. No one ever giggling about a stupid inside joke that takes 5 years of friendship to find funny. No nose ever enjoying the smell of summer that you always forget until it returns on the first warm day.

Never before has this been a more serious possibility.

By giving to charities, you’re making a difference to these things. There will be fewer people and animals who have to suffer than if you had not given.7 It may not look as heroic as running into a burning building, but to the person that would have withered away from malaria, it matters just as much.

Giving away 10% of your income will of course not be enough. But that’s because nothing will ever be enough so long as there are still beings experiencing these things, and something left to do about it. However, it will be enough to do more good than most people in history have ever done—enough to make the world lucky to have had you.

Hello reader! I have set up a script that reads the entire browser history of any device that clicks on this post. That means that I now have all your dirty little secrets. All the depraved porn and (*shudders*) posts you’ve been consuming—it’s all mine.

And you know what? I'll release it! I swear I'll release it, so everyone can see what a sick little freak you are!

Unless, that is, you become a paid subscriber for the modest sum of $5. That's all.

—Yours Truly

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Supposing I’m being serious here, and planning on making good on my generous promise (which I am), is what I’m doing wrong? If the decision I’m blackmailing you into weren’t so prudent, we’d like to say yes: It’s wrong to blackmail people.

However, it’s hard to make sense of why that is. Let’s say I’m already going to release the information. When I blackmail you, all I’m doing is giving you an extra choice. If you value $5 less than your friends, family, and Wonder and Aporia posts, you’ll be better off than if I just released the whole, grim truth without asking. And if you value it more, then you don’t have to accept, and you lose nothing (other than the time spent thinking). Blackmail simply dominates not doing it.

Now, maybe there’s something a little sketchy about the way I acquired said information. But suppose I already got it, whether or not that was wrong, it’s surely wrong for me to then additionally blackmail you.

In fact, we can suppose that I’m a journalist, and you’re some big name in politics or whatever. As it happens, I’m sat behind you on the bus. I happen to glance over the seat, and find you sexting with your secretary (who is not your spouse (of which you have one)).1 Not only that, but stupid little me was unintentionally filming with my meta-glasses the whole time! “Whelp, now that I’ve got the footage, I might as well publish it” I think. However, after deciding on this, I get the even more brilliant idea of passing you a note that asks for a hefty sum in exchange for not publishing the video. Would that be wrong?

Again it seems so! But that’s very strange. The gathering of the evidence was not wrong, as it was all an accident. Furthermore, it’s unlikely to be wrong or illegal for me to publish the video, as it was filmed in a public place, and I, as a journalist, have a responsibility to bring this sort of news.2 And by blackmailing you, I’m only giving you more options.

Still it seems wrong! what’s going on?

I want to say that the action of blackmailing is not intrinsically wrong. But it’s still wrong in a very important sense—and it’s wrong in the same way that harvesting organs is wrong for utilitarians.

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This was originally an exam essay. For this reason you will not be blessed with my characteristic quick wit and ever-ready hysterical remarks, which I know you all love and live for. As a tradeoff, the arguments will be much more sleek and sexy, giving you a lot more rigor-per-word (I quite like the diagnosis/arguments I give here).

1. Introduction

Here is one sentence. And here is another. There are at least two sentences here. Therefore there exists the beginning of an essay. Substitute in hands and you have a rigorous proof of an external world. Or so G.E. Moore claimed anyway (1939). The proof is supposed to refute external world skepticism, i.e. the idea that you cannot know that there is an external world as there appears to be, due to the possibility of being massively deceived. All but those with the least reflective of childhoods have surely felt the grip of the skeptical challenge at one point or another, and it would thus be a welcome surprise if it could be escaped simply by holding up your hands in succession. But despite the grand promise (or perhaps because of it), one is left with a feeling that something tricky is going on here. It cannot be that easy, right? No, say I! It really cannot, and Moore’s argument is no aid to us in the fight against skepticism. My claim is that the Moorean proof fails to succeed as a proof of an external world due to being justificatorily circular.

In §2 I lay out the skeptical challenge, and I present Moore’s proof in §3. The proof is diagnosed and deemed unsuccessful in §4. §5 is then devoted to anticipating and answering objections to my diagnosis—that it can be avoided with direct realism, that it can be avoided with liberalism about perception, and that a slightly different interpretation of Moore avoids it.

2. Here Is One Argument

Let us briefly lay out the skeptical challenge and some motivations for it, through giving a skeptical argument. First three clarifying definitions: I define “alternative to P” simply as a proposition that entails the falsity of P. A set of alternatives to P is said to be “relevant” just in case I should have a credence so high in their disjunction as to render P sufficiently improbable for knowledge. Finally I take evidence to mean positive relevance: E is evidence for H iff P(H|E) > P(H). P(A) is the probability of A and P(A|B) is the probability of A given B. The relevant probabilities here are subjective probabilities.

The first step of the argument consists in comparing the real world hypothesis (RWH)—that the world is roughly as it appears to you, with trees, hands, etc.—to some skeptical hypothesis (SH) that you are deceived into believing this without it being so. Consider the following hypothesis: You are a (handless) brain in a vat of fluid, connected via electrodes to a computer, stimulating you to have exactly the experiences you’re currently having. This and other SH’s, are both alternatives to P and (so goes the argument) jointly relevant. After all, you could have no evidence favoring RWH over SH, and you’re surely not justified in ruling SH out as irrelevant a priori—they are perfectly imaginable alternatives, and most people have been worried by them at one point or another.

The second step then goes that if you cannot rule out relevant alternatives, then you cannot know the RWH. After all—assuming knowledge is closed under entailment—if I know P and Q→¬P, then I can simply infer (and hence know) ¬Q. Thus if I do not know ¬Q that must mean that I do not know P. This may be bad enough in itself. But sticking with this closure principle, we can derive that for any ordinary proposition, O, that assumes RWH (such as that you have hands, or are currently sitting) you also do not know that. This gets us:

1. (S does not know ¬SH)→(S does not know O).

2. S does not know ¬SH.

3. S does not know O.

3. But Here Is Another

Not a particularly pleasant conclusion. But in his Proof of an External World, G.E. Moore (1939) provides a quite simple proof to escape the problem:

By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, ‘Here is one hand’, and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is another.’ (Ibid.)

From this he may deduce that two human hands exist at this moment. And since hands are external objects, it follows that there is an external world. We may formalize the argument as follows (Moore himself does not do this):

1. Here is one hand.

2. Here is another.

3. Two hands exist at this moment.

4. Therefore there exists an external world.

This, he takes it, is a perfectly rigorous proof—in fact, one could not ask for a better one. To corroborate, he lays out three criteria for successful proofs:

1. The premises should be different than the conclusion.

2. The premises must be known, not merely believed.

3. The conclusion must follow from the premises.

(I) is clearly satisfied, as he might have hands or there might be an external world, whether or not there is one hand here and now. And nothing could be more plain than that (II) is satisfied, Moore claims. In denying it, “[y]ou might as well suggest that I do not know that I am now standing up and talking” (ibid.). While not in a strictly valid form as stated, (III) can certainly be allowed, given that we are not overly pedantic—and crucially given that “hand” is interpreted as “a hand in the external world” rather than “the appearance as of a hand.” Hence all boxes are checked.

I shall first take the straightforward interpretation that Moore is simply presenting the above syllogism as a direct proof of an external world (and by implication against any skeptical hypothesis). This seems to be the interpretation in e.g. (Pritchard, 2007) and (Pryor, 2004). A slightly different interpretation is presented in §5.3.

4. Diagnosing the Proof

I do not believe this proof is successful. To lay out the case, I will first consider what the role of a proof is, and what it takes for one to be successful. One important distinction regards the scope of the proof:

Firstly it may function to persuade a (hypothetical) interlocutor who is not already convinced of the position in question. If this is the intent of Moore’s proof, I believe it immediately fails its purpose. After all, any skeptic will simply deny that we know that any hands exist in the first place—by raising his fists, Moore is bringing no new consideration to the table that the skeptic would not already have considered.

Secondly the proof might function to justify one’s own belief in a position. That is, we are persuading no one other than ourselves, and simply making salient reasons for why we may hold the beliefs we do. I take it that this is a much more plausible interpretation of what Moore’s argument is trying to achieve.

We ought also consider what a proof should be a proof against. Specifically, a proof should rule out all relevant alternatives to its conclusion, though it may plausibly leave irrelevant alternatives untouched. That there are at least two apples on a table can be easily proven by looking: Here is one apple, and here is another, so there are at least two apples on the table. But suppose I remember having many fake plastic apples in the house. This raises the relevant alternative that what I see are simply plastic replicas. The above proof would no longer work as there is now a relevant alternative it does not rule out. This may appear to be a contextualist point, but it need not be (and I do not wish it to be). After all, I might hold that “relevant” does not vary contextually in meaning, and that it is simply the justification for my credences that has changed.

Should we then simply add a further criterion to Moore’s three that a proof should rule out all relevant alternatives? That would not work, as any valid proof really does rule out all inconsistent possibilities, simply in virtue of its logical form; from “here are two apples” it really does follow that “there are at least two apples on the table.” Instead I propose the criterion:

4. The inference is not justificatorily circular against any relevant set of alternatives to the conclusion.

Let us expand on what is meant by “justificatory circularity”:

The inference from premises P to the falsity of alternative A is justificatorily circular IFF P is not immediately known AND for all my evidence E to justify P(P)=X, I must presuppose that P(¬A)≥X.

This will take some unpacking. The first conjunct ensures that the P in question does in fact rely on some evidence (more on this in §5.1). The general idea of “presupposing” is that an inference from E to P presupposes Q just in case a belief in Q is “logically prior” to E justifying P. A way of illustrating this is to imagine yourself behind a sort of “veil of ignorance,” not knowing whether E obtains or not. For the inference from E to P(P)=X to presuppose P(Q)=Y then means that P(P|E)=X only if P(Q)=Y.

That is, even before finding out whether E, I have to already have P(Q)=Y to make the inference. Or applying it to justificatory circularity: Even before finding out whether E, I already hold ¬A to be at least as probable as the premises, which are supposed to establish ¬A.

It should be quite clear, then, that if E supporting P(P)=X presupposes P(¬A)≥X that is a problem for the proof in question. After all, the proof was supposed to show us that we need not worry about A. But if the premises being probable enough to show that we need not worry about A already presupposes that A is sufficiently improbable, then the proof cannot possibly serve its function. It might very well be that we really can be sure of ¬A, but we certainly do not have the proof in question to thank for it!

What does it take for some premises to make this presupposition? It essentially just requires that none of my evidence favors P over A. If some evidence favors P, then I could presuppose a credence in both P and ¬A less than X, and infer from the evidence to P(P)=X; and if no evidence favors P, then, well, I cannot do that.

We can now look at some examples which the keen reader may recognize, and see whether or not they satisfy criterion (IV). First imagine that I wish to prove that there at least two apples on my table, and that I have no particular reason to expect to see non-apple apple-like objects on my table—meaning (let us suppose) that no relevant alternatives involve me seeing non-apple apple-like objects on my table. As it happens, I see what appears to be two apples on my table, prompting me to give the following proof:

1. Here is one apple.

2. Here is another.

3. There are at least two apples on my table.

This seems perfectly legitimate, and that is also the verdict (IV) gives. Ex hypothesi none of my relevant alternatives involve deceptive possibilities, including only things like “there is only one apple-like object on my table, which is an apple.” My evidence for believing (1) and (2)—i.e. my visual experience—thus does not presuppose that the disjunction of these is highly improbable. In fact I might antecedently be quite confident that there are no apples on the table, but since no relevant amount of my confidence here is in a “skeptical” possibility, it is easily overcome by my seeing what looks like two apples.

Suppose now that I have many plastic apples in my home, meaning some of my relevant alternatives involve non-apple apple-like objects on my table. Again I see what appears to be two apples, and produce the same proof as above.

Here things have clearly gone awry! The problem: My evidence does not adjudicate between (1) and (2), and the relevant alternatives to my conclusion, seeing as some relevant alternatives involve there being at least two apple-like objects on the table, which I would of course equally take to justify (1) and (2).

I am now troubled by the possibility that I might be a brain in a vat. To clear my mind of these doubts, I raise my hands and whisper to myself:

1. Here is one hand.

2. Here is another.

3. Two hands exist at this moment.

4. Therefore there exists an external world.

Did I succeed? Sadly, it seems not. The trouble is again that some of the relevant alternatives to my conclusion—such as my being a brain in a vat—predict my evidence equally as well as my premises. This means that the argument fails condition (IV). Remember why this is a problem: The trouble is that this means that I can only establish my premises to the extent that I presuppose that relevant alternatives are false. Thus I cannot possibly use this to rid myself of relevant alternatives.

It is of course very much possible that I should have a very high credence in (1) and (2), and be very confident that RWH is true. But the skeptical argument runs on the—quite plausible—idea that we may not start out assuming that skeptical alternatives are irrelevant, and so we cannot just start off assuming knowledge of (1) or (2). In any case it will have been through no fault of the Moorean argument if we end up knowing RWH.

5. Objections

I anticipate that the Moorean sympathizer will not yet be persuaded. Let me thus preempt some objections I suspect they might raise.

5.1. Direct Realism

Remember that an argument cannot fail (IV) if the premises are immediately known. In assuming that they aren’t, I appear to have been making the controversial assumption that direct realism—the view that objects in the external world are the immediate objects of (veridical) perception—is false. By the time of Proof of an External World, Moore himself was no longer a direct realist, it seems, favoring some sort of sense-data view (Moore, 1925, Section 4). Although John Greco (2002, p. 557) argues that Moore’s views are not incompatible with direct realism (or some position relevantly similar for our purposes), due to what he means by “sense-datum” (see e.g. (Moore, 1952, p. 643)). At any rate, our goal is not to perform flawless Moore-exegesis, but to consider what might be said in favor of his arguments (or arguments close enough).

If direct realism is true, I am immediately aware of my hands. My justification for the premises in Moore’s argument is then not some kind of inference from intermediary representations, but rather I just know that they are true—they are part of my immediate evidence.

However, this solution is cold comfort for my skeptical doubts. It only works given that I am in fact perceiving hands right now. But what I care about is not per se whether I technically know that I have hands; rather I care about whether I may be quite confident that I have hands, and this the direct realist solution doesn’t help me with. For when I look at what I take to be hands, I have no way of telling whether I am veridically perceiving or simply hallucinating hands. Direct realists—at least of a contemporary sort—will likely reject the idea that a veridical perception is the same kind of experience as a hallucination. But whether or not they are different kinds or not does not help ease my mind one bit, as they are completely indistinguishable to me either way.

I of course admit that I am relying on internalist intuitions here, and someone who is already sympathetic to epistemic externalism is unlikely to be moved here. However, if one does not feel the pull of the internalist intuitions here, one is unlikely to feel the pull of the skeptical challenge anyhow, as it is a non-problem to begin with for (many) externalists. At least if it is a non-problem—if I am a brain in a vat, skepticism is a problem. The direct realist response is of course not reliant on internalism, as one can claim that veridical perceptions are internal states. Nevertheless, the intuitions that make internalism compelling should make this response uncompelling.

5.2. Liberalism About Perception

A similar objection to this sort of diagnosis is raised by James Pryor (2004). He claims that we should be liberal, rather than conservative, regarding perceptual knowledge.

Let P be what my perceptual experiences are as of (e.g. that I have hands), and H be some hypothesis (e.g. that I perceive veridically). Conservatism then claims that for my perceptual experience to give me prima facie justification for P, I must have antecedent justification for H, whereas liberalism denies this. The idea is then that if we are liberals, we no longer need to presuppose P(¬A)≥X to end with P(P)=X, as we can get our justification for P without first consulting the status of A (¬A is our H in this case), even when A is an SH. I do not think this maneuver works though.

I take it that prima facie justification for P from your perceptual experiences is simply justification to hold a higher P(P) (by some amount) than you otherwise would have. The question is then whether getting this requires also having justification for ¬A. Even giving the negative (i.e. liberal) answer, does not avoid the diagnosis.

Imagine that you are behind a “veil of perceptive ignorance.” In this position, you have credences such that P(¬A)≥X and P(P)<X, and, for some experiences E, you would be justified in assigning P(P|E)=X. Recall, this is a paradigm illustration of presupposition. In other words you presuppose that the skeptical alternative is false with an equal or higher probability than X, but having E would justifiably raise your credence in P.

The veil is lifted, and—lo and behold!—you have E. This justifies assigning P(P)=X, and thus gives you prima facie justification for P. At the same time you have no specific justification for ¬A—or at least you’re not required to have that. Hence liberalism is satisfied. But had you presupposed P(¬A)<X, E would have to in some way favor P over A, in order to end up with P(P|E)=X. But when A is an SH, E is ex hypothesi no more surprising on A than on P, so it surely cannot favor P over A.

That is to say, you get prima facie justification for P without having direct justification for rejecting the SH (i.e. liberalism), but this does not help disprove the SH, as you still have to assume that P(¬A)≥X. So liberalism does not avoid the diagnosis.

Or perhaps I am misunderstanding liberalism, taking it to be weaker than it is. Perhaps the idea is that there is some quality to having the perceptual experience itself which adds to your justification, beyond the evidential value. In that case this may instead be considered an intuition pump against liberalism: Surely(! table slammed and foot stomped) there is no such quality! We can suppose that you had a perfectly vivid imagination behind the veil, being able to imagine exactly what it would be like to have these perceptual experiences; the only thing that happens is that you then actually have the experience. Are we supposed to believe that that adds some justification into the mix that you could not predict beforehand? I of course admit that I am again relying on internalist intuitions; read §5.1 for my response to that charge.

Or perhaps the point is that you get evidence favoring P over A from your perceptual experiences. This seems to imply one of three options:

1. The liberal has not understood the skeptical hypothesis: The skeptical hypothesis by definition predicts all your evidence equally as well as P (assuming direct realism is false—and even then we saw even that was not quite enough).

2. The liberal is using “evidence” differently than me: I use “evidence” to mean positive relevance. In fact, let me stipulate that to be what I mean! We are then talking past each other, but simply using words differently does not affect the substance of the issue in any way.

3. The liberal is denying that our credences should conform with standard probability theory: Given a positive relevance definition of evidence, it simply follows from the Kolmogorov axioms that two hypotheses predicting something equally well means that it is not evidence favoring either. This is certainly not an impossible position to hold, but I believe it makes liberalism look less modest than initially expected.

5.3. Plausibility Comparison

Finally, William G. Lycan (2001) gives a reconstruction of Moore’s argument that ostensibly avoids my criticisms. Rather than the point being to give a straightforward proof of an external world, it is simply to invite a comparison of plausibility. The skeptic gives the modus ponens:

1. (S does not know ¬SH)→(S does not know P).

2. S does not know ¬SH.

3. S does not know P.

And Moore gives us the corresponding modus tollens:

4. (S does not know ¬SH)→(S does not know P).

5. S knows P.

6. S knows ¬SH.

But rather than simply asserting the latter argument, he asks us to consider which is more plausible. Or more specifically: Is (2) or (5) more plausible? And the idea is then that (5) is obviously going to be more plausible when O is something like “here is a hand.” Formulated this way, my charge of justificatory circularity does not stick, as the argument does not even have the requisite structure: It is not a deductive proof, but simply a comparison of plausibility.

While the exact diagnosis from before no longer works, I think a closely related one will. To see this, we must consider when we may compare plausibility, and when we may not. It is often perfectly legitimate to make this comparison. Consider:

You return home from work, and see two apples on your table. As you are admiring them, your partner, N.N., who left for work after you, calls you and (in an odd choice of conversation-topic) tells you “the table had no apples on it when I left, so there aren’t any on it now.” Even more inexplicably, they give you the following syllogism over the phone (pronouns substituted):

1. If what N.N. tells you is true, there are no apples on the table.

2. What N.N. tells you is true.

3. Therefore there are no apples on the table.

But being a devout Moorean, you immediately reply:

4. If what N.N. tells you is true, there are no apples on the table.

5. There are apples on the table.

6. Therefore what N.N. tells you is false.

You then compare (2) and (5), and find that (5) is much more plausible, meaning you make the corresponding inference. Everything looks fine here.

However, imagine you are again admiring some (apparent) apples, when N.N. calls you and tells you they have replaced all apples in the house with plastic replicas. This prompts you both to exchange the above arguments. Again you compare the premises and find (5) much more plausible than (2)—I mean, just look! There are obviously two apples there! This time something feels a little more off.

What went wrong? The trouble, it seems to me, is that in the second scenario, it is equally likely that you would find (5) more plausible than (2), regardless of which is actually the case. In the first scenario, if (2) is true, then it would be very unlikely that you would find (5) plausible. After all, if (2) were true, you probably would not seem to see two apples. There are naturally certain possibilities compatible with (2) where you would still find (5) as plausible (e.g. that you are hallucinating two apples), but these are not probable enough to be relevant, simply given (2). In the second scenario, it is basically just as likely that you would find (5) most plausible, either way, since (2) being the case predicts you finding (5) very plausible equally well.

Why is this problematic, then? Well, I think it should be quite clear: Your confidence in the premises in no way tracks their truth. While you do not use your confidence as evidence for the premise, meaning the problem is not underdetermination of evidence, you still seem to have a higher-order defeater for your belief. After all, if all of your mental states (including the reasons you cite for your confidence) are equally predicted by two hypotheses, trusting your reasons for favoring one over the other seems to be pure dogmatism!

6. Conclusion

I thus stand by my initial thesis: The Moorean proof fails to succeed as a proof of an external world due to being justificatorily circular. Justificatory circularity, of course, in the sense I defined in §4, and which I defended as being a necessary criterion for a successful proof. Further, I claim that neither direct realism, liberalism, or a reinterpretation of Moore’s argument saves it from succumbing to this problem (or some equally troublesome related problem as in §5.3).

This is not to say that skepticism is an unsolvable problem. Far from it! I believe something like an abductivist or bayesian response might, for example, very well be successful. What it is to say is that the Moorean proof is doing no work here, and to the extent that it is sound, it is simply due to being parasitic on another solution. If some other response is successful, that might also very well explain why the Moorean proof has quite some intuitive appeal—we really are justified in rejecting skepticism, and so Moore’s proof really does go through in some (pedantic) sense. Nevertheless, it still fails qua proof, as it does not help alleviate the skeptical worry in any way.

You Might Also Like:

This is a translation of a project I did on the question of why vegans are hated. Unlike what I usually do, this was undertaken with the help of a lot of Continental theory. So if you are otherwise skeptical of the merit of continental philosophy, this may also be a fun project.

The project had to include empirical investigation (*ugh*) so it is based on a number of interviews (which I have of course made GDPR-kosher). All in all it turned out a lot more interesting than I expected, and I think there were some interesting insights to be had.

1. Introduction

Vegetarians and vegans are a hated group. According to one study, vegans are viewed as negatively as immigrants and feminists, and more negatively than environmental activists (MacInnis & Hodson, 2017). Shared meals in particular are a battleground for negative interactions (Salmivaara et al., 2022). It is not immediately obvious why vegetarianism and veganism are viewed so negatively—and especially why they are viewed more negatively than seemingly comparable movements such as climate movements.

In this article, I will therefore investigate where the negative view of vegetarians and vegans comes from—especially in relation to meals. More precisely, I will examine the issue: How do the unique social structures of the meal affect the negative view of vegetarians and vegans, and the conflicts vegetarian and vegan lifestyles give rise to? The issue is examined through semi-structured interviews and theories from Harré and Van Langenhove, Simmel, Douglas, Gadamer and Habermas.

The article proceeds as follows: §2 explains positioning theory (theoretical and methodological framework). §3 reviews empirical method. §4 presents Simmel and Douglas, which are used in §5. §6 adds Gadamer and Habermas, leading to analysis in §7. §8 discusses options for improving meals with vegetarians, before §9 concludes that the conflict stems from three interwoven relationships: the grammar of the meal, its balance between individuality and community, and a clash between two different normative horizons.1

Read more

Be sure to check out Lorenzo’s blog, First Principles, which rivals my own in greatness:

First Principles

First principles thinking applied to the chaos of modern life.

By Lorenzo Elijah, PhD

Also, as promised:2

Tohn M. Jaurek is at the dentists office signing a waiver. Despite the dentists’ strongly worded advice, Tohn insists on not being anesthetized during his tooth extraction, as he’ll be able to save $5 on materials. After incessant pestering, the staff relented, so long as Tohn was willing to sign a waiver. Fine with him!

Just as he’s about to put the pen to the page, a flash of light illuminates the room. Before Tohn M. Jaurek stands… a wrinkly Tohn M. Jaurek?

Jaurek [the Tohn M. Jaurek who just popped into the room]: STOP IT! You don’t know what you’re gett—

Tohn [the Tohn M. Jaurek about to sign a waiver]: Woah there! Calm down a second. What the hell just happened? Why am I… you… we here?

Jaurek: Oh yeah, sorry. I’m you from the future. I know, it’s a little cliché, but I couldn’t think of anything better.

Tohn: I’ll let it slide.

Jaurek: I’ve come here to warn you that what you’re about to do is a huge mistake!

Tohn: I don’t think it’s possible for you to change that. Actually, you’re probably not even really me.

Jaurek: Wow, I must be fun at parties… If you’re that pedantic, the author has a footnote for you.1

Tohn: Okay fine. But what are you doing here?

Jaurek: Well, after you sign that waiver, you’ll have your tooth pulled out without anesthetic. The pain is completely intolerable, and you’re left traumatized. Literally the worst decision of your entire life. As a result you—by which I mean I—invent a time machine, through sheer determination, to correct your past mistake, which leads me here.

Tohn: Oh, that’s all? When then you can go back where you came from.

Jaurek: ARE YOU CRAZY?! Did you not hear what I said?

Tohn: Loud and clear.

Jaurek: The pain is unbearable! You’re willing to go through this torment for $5?? I’ll give you $5 right now if it’s that.

Jaurek: Uhh… Nevermind, you probably can’t legally use that.

Tohn: And the pain of the needle.

Jaurek: Excuse me?

Tohn: You said I do it for the $5. I also do it to avoid the pain of the needle that they give the anesthesia with.

Jaurek: What difference does that make? The pain of the extraction is obviously worse than that!

Tohn: Is it really? I did some research before coming here. Turns out that there is a split second where the stab of the needle is just as painful as anything that happens throughout the rest of the procedure.2

Jaurek: Okay? But the procedure is much longer than a split second. You barely register the needle—but I don’t think you can comprehend just how horrible the procedure is.

Tohn: Yeah I know. But I just don’t really care about that part.

Jaurek: Well, I think you should! It’s clearly worse.

Tohn: Look at it like this: Suppose you’re given the choice between saving your peripheral friend Dave from the pain of the needle vs. saving a stranger from the pain of the procedure. It seems reasonable that it’d be permissible to save Dave.

Jaurek: What? No it doesn’t!

Tohn: Oh okay then, scrap that. Then what about this: When you’re saying that it’s worse, who is it worse for?

Jaurek: Me—that is, you.

Tohn: And what is this “you”?

Jaurek: What do you mean?

Tohn: Well, here we are, talking to each other. Each of us is supposedly “me.” But we have entirely different thoughts, feelings, values, and so on. If I kick you in the balls, I won’t feel a thing.

Jaurek: Sure you will. Just not yet.

Tohn: I guess by some definition of the word, yeah. But is that really a sense that matters? I won’t feel it now. So if I just don’t care, why does it matter if I’m technically the same person as you.

Jaurek: Are you really dragging us down into the metaphysical mud of personal identity, just to save $5?

Tohn: I’m not meaning to do that! Say what you will about personal identity—what I say is independent of that. Now, what can you say to me if I just don’t care about how my future time slices feel?

Jaurek: I’ll say that it’s bad for you! Whether or not you care, it’ll be bad for you.

Tohn: But will it be bad for me-now or me-in-the-future?

Jaurek: You-in-the-future, but that’s still the same person.

Tohn: In what important sense is it, though? What is this person-entity you’re talking about? Maybe it’s true as a matter of metaphysics that I am that future person. But there’s no state of awareness that’s thinking about what to say right now and is also feeling that pain.

Jaurek: Er, I mean, I guess not. You’re not having both experiences at the same time.

Tohn: Right, so if I don’t care about the suffering of me-in-the-future, what mistake am I making? What difference is there between me-in-the-future and some random other person similar to me?

Jaurek: The difference surely is that you can anticipate and fear your future suffering in a way you wouldn’t anticipate others’ suffering.

Tohn: But is that not just a contingent matter of my psychology? I anticipate it because I-now really care about my future self in a very special way. However, couldn’t I happen to be constituted so that I didn’t. Just like someone could be constituted in a weird way where they don’t care about the suffering of their close family members. As I said, there’s no consciousness of both me-now and the future pain—there is no entity experiencing both in any important sense.

Jaurek: I feel like you’re assuming a deflationary view of personhood now, even though you said you wouldn’t talk about metaphysics. If I really am, in some deep sense, the same person over time, then surely I’d be irrational to have this strange psychology, in a way that having the same attitude regarding other people isn’t.

Tohn: I am not. Consider whether it is likewise irrational to not care about other people. To settle this question, it wouldn’t matter whether we settle the metaphysics of whether you’re part of this entity called a “group” or not.

Jaurek: Maybe not.

Tohn: But it sounds like you want to have it both ways: There’s something special about the intrapersonal case that’s not there for the interpersonal case. I have to care specially about my own future in a way that I don’t have to care about other people.

Jaurek: Right.

Tohn: But compare these three positions: 1) It’s rational to pursue whatever you care about right now, 2) it’s irrational to pursue a smaller benefit for me now over a greater benefit for me later, and 3) it’s irrational to pursue a smaller benefit for me over a greater benefit for others. You’re trying to say that (2) is specially plausible in a way that (3) is not.

Jaurek: Yes, that’s right.

Tohn: But that’s an unstable position! When I choose what to do, I choose now. Other people differ in the I, and my later selves—like you—differ in the now. In both cases, the thing that’s actually choosing is differentiated, either through time or person. If you want to appeal to stuff like that my future experiences will be painful or whatnot, that doesn’t get you anywhere, since other people’s experiences are also painful.

Jaurek: But there is a difference: The future pain is mine.

Tohn: Right, but before we agreed that the metaphysics of groups didn’t matter. If it happens that there’s some deep metaphysical sense in which I’m part of a group, so that another person’s pain is the group’s as much as mine, that doesn’t matter. The metaphysics is irrelevant here. Likewise, if it turns out that your pain is mine in some deep metaphysical sense, that doesn’t really matter. In each case I’m the thing that’s choosing, and the mere fact that there’s this wider entity I’m a part of doesn’t do anything by itself. You’d need to give me further reasons to care about the larger entity. And as soon as you try to do that, the arguments cut both ways—treating the intrapersonal case inherently differently from the interpersonal case is unjustifiable.

Jaurek: Okay, fine, maybe I should be an altruist then. And maybe you are consistent in your position. You can’t convince the consistent skeptic, and you can’t convince the consistent present-aim egoist. But I can still charge you of being immoral—of not taking your future selves into account. Don’t you care about morality?

Tohn: Sure I do. But maybe I didn’t make it clear enough what I’m arguing. What I’m arguing is a moral conclusion, not a self-interest based one. The symmetry with intrapersonal and interpersonal self-interest is just an important step. I’m not just arguing that I’m not inconsistent if I don’t care, but that it’s literally not worse if I have my tooth extracted without anesthetic. I don’t have any inherent reason to prefer the needle over the procedure.

Jaurek: You can’t be serious.

Tohn: Deeply serious. When you say that some option is “worse,” what do you mean? What makes it worse?

Jaurek: That someone is experiencing extra pain or something.

Tohn: Right, so it’d be fair to say that it’s because it’s worse for someone?

Jaurek: I guess so.

Tohn: Aha! Well with this surgery, who is it worse for?

Jaurek: For the you during the surgery.

Tohn: Is it really though? Let’s call the time-slice at the time of the needle prick T₁ and the set of time-slices during the surgery T₂ to T₁₀₀₀. So we’re supposing that there are 999 slices during the surgery. Now, you might think that the surgery is 999 times worse. But it’s not 999 times worse for any slice, is it? If I choose the anesthetic, it’s worse for T₁ and if I don’t choose it, it’s worse for T₂ to T₁₀₀₀.

Jaurek: Sure, it’s not worse for any particular time-slice, but it’s worse for the whole aggregate.

Tohn: And what is this “aggregate” you’re talking about? As we just established, there’s no unified experience of the whole set. So I ask you again: You say that it’s worse to not take the anesthetic. But worse for who?

M. [the even wrinklier Tohn M. Jaurek who just popped into the room]: STOP IT! You don’t know what you’re gett—

M.: Who are you?

Jaurek: I’m here to convince my old self not to go through this tooth extraction without anesthetic.

M.: Weird, me too. I guess you must have failed.

Jaurek: Wouldn’t you remember that.

M.: I don’t know. I’ve been getting a little senile lately, so maybe I forgot. But the memories of that procedure have still been haunting me into my old age. Then one day I found a box labeled “Time Machine” in the garage. I didn’t remember where it came from, but I decided to try and

Jaurek: Yeah, well I hope you’ll have more luck than I did. We were denser back then than I remember.

M.: What, is this guy insane?

Jaurek: I can’t rule it out.

Tohn: Guys, can we cut the crap? I’m not paying for that anesthetic.

M.: Maybe you’ll change your mind after this. Up until now you were not convinced that not getting anesthetic was worse, when you just knew that it was this guy [pointing at Jaurek] who’d suffer.

Tohn: Right.

M.: But now that you know that I’ve been suffering too, you should accept that not getting anesthetic is worse.

Tohn: I don’t see why?

M.: Let’s call the set time slices that only I, and not Jaurek, have experienced T_M. Before you knew whether T_M had suffering, you said that neither option was worse than the other. But T_M having suffering is worse for the members of T_M. So adding the suffering of T_M is worse for some and better for no one—and so it’s surely worse overall. So if neither option were worse than the other at first, then making one option worse should surely make that option worse than the other. Now you can’t ask “worse for who?” The answer is: “Worse for me.”

Tohn: You’re assuming that badness works in a simplistic way where adding some to one side can break a tie—that it’s fungible in some way. But that’s exactly what I’m rejecting! I said that not getting the anesthesia is “not worse” than getting it, not that it’s “as bad.”

M.: What, so you’re rejecting the transitivity of badness? That’s got to be the craziest thing you’ve said so far!

Tohn: Well, it’s only crazy if you accept the fungibility you’re assuming. When I say that neither option is worse, I’m saying that they have a sort of “parity” but they’re also in a sense incomparable. In that case it’s not at all crazy to say that transitivity doesn’t hold—you don’t get the sorts of preference loops that you otherwise run into.3

M. [Sighs]: I’m too old for this...

Tohn: So much for that, I guess.

Jaurek: Seems I didn’t grow anymore patient with old age. Well, I don’t need that guy anyways! What he said gave me a thought: I think you’re failing to account for equality. Surely you agree that equality is important?

Tohn: It certainly depends what you mean! I don’t care about all time-slices having exactly the same welfare.

Jaurek: No, what I mean is more fundamental: That each time-slice has equal moral weight. That is, each time-slice counts for one and only one.

Tohn: Sure, that seems right. But how am I in conflict with that?

Jaurek: Well, you’re treating some of your time-slices as privileged. Specifically, you’re putting a lot more weight on the time slice that will experience the needle, vs. the time-slices that will undergo the horror of the operation. If each counted for one, the interests of the many would obviously outweigh the interests of the few—that is, more would count for more.

Tohn: Nope, equality doesn’t get you there! I’ll just steal an argument from this philosopher called who claims to have graduated from MIT. He wrote a paper about some guy called John M. Taurek.

Jaurek: Strange name.

Tohn: Yeah it’s a little weird. But no connection. Anyways, I’ll retrofit the important things from this Muñoz-character’s article to what we’re talking about here. The key is to treat our decisions like voting systems.

Jaurek: Why would we do that?

Tohn: Well, it lets us be more precise about what exactly we mean with “equality.” So let’s say that we’re voting over actions, and each time-slice gets a “vote” depending on whether some action is good or bad for it. Our theory of aggregation (or lack thereof) is then our voting rule, and the verdict is over which action to choose.

Jaurek: I’m following.

Tohn: Now, we can then express equality in terms of constraints on our voting rule. Specifically, equality seems to come down to anonymity: That who casts each vote doesn’t matter. The fact that some time-slice is this time-slice doesn’t matter when counting up the vote.

Jaurek: But you’re clearly violating that when you favor the earlier time-slice!

Tohn: Not quite. You can see my view as “unanimity rule.” Every time-slice has to agree on some action for it to be deemed correct. Otherwise we just have a tie. And so I can choose to skip the anesthetic if I want the $5 instead. It’s not because it’s this time-slice that objects, but because there’s some that does—and so I also have anonymity.

Jaurek: Right well clearly there’s something wrong with having anonymity be the only criterion for equality. It’s not just enough that no one is special—but everyone has to count for something. Specifically we could say that if we have a tie, adding one more vote on one side should turn the result in that direction. As we saw when M. was still among us, that’s clearly not something you can get.

Tohn: I simply reject that that’s a requirement. Every slice is perfectly equal with unanimity rule. Slices don’t always have to be able to make a difference to count as equal—in fact they don’t even do that for you. If we have anything else than a tie, no one can make a difference. I just set the threshold in a stricter place. But it’s not less equal for that reason. To be frank, I think trying to give an argument to convince me from neutral premises is a fool’s errand.

Dentist: What the hell is taking you so lo—

Dentist: [Sigh] Look, you’re really cutting it close with the time here. Also, there’s another guy who just came in needing an emergency root canal, who’ll need to be treated after you. If you insist on being difficult about this and not taking the anesthetic, your extraction will take longer, and he’ll have to sit there and suffer even more. Just sayin’.

Tohn: Great, I’ll be there in a sec!

Jaurek: So you’re gonna get the anesthetic now, right?

Tohn: What, why would I do that?

Jaurek: Are you kidding me?! You’re just gonna let some poor guy suffer so that you can save 5 bucks?

Tohn: I mean, it’s not any worse—so why would I not?

Jaurek: Jesus Christ! You’ve been going on and on about “oh, worse for who?,” but clearly the aggregationist respects what’s worse for people at least as well as you do. Let’s grant that the equality argument doesn’t go through. Well, then your argument about aggregation requiring some “impersonal good” certainly doesn’t entail your innumerate ethics either!

Tohn: And why is that?

Jaurek: I mean, just consider the voting analogy. Each of us is equally counting up votes—you just stop after one. But it’s not that I have some “super-vote” that the other votes are transformed into. I’m simply counting individual votes.

Tohn: But you’re still counting them, right? In other words, you’re treating them as fungible goods that can be measured with a single parameter. What you’re making your decision on the basis of is this abstract value, rather than the plights of individual slices.

Jaurek: Oh, but I am not! Just think of M. back there. The reason that adding his pain into consideration tipped the scales was because of his pain—not because it made some number go up. Worse for who? Worse for M.

Tohn: But you still need the abstract aggregated pain to even be able to make your decision.

Jaurek: I can represent the decision with some number, yes. But I can likewise represent your theory with some abstract thing: You’re simply making decisions on the basis of some abstract comparator that checks to see whether someone will be harmed on each option, and either outputs “indifferent” or “option X is better.” That’s no less abstract or objectionable than the aggregationist picture—only yours ignores more information. The fault is of course that even though these representations are equivalent to the corresponding decision rules, they’re not what we actually care about. The reason I care about the aggregate is because I care about each of the people it’s an aggregate of. And the reason you care about the comparator is… Well I don’t really get it, to be honest.

Tohn: But you’re still making decisions based on some overall impersonal “worse” rather than “worse for.” Maybe we can represent each view abstractly, but you’re committed to using an abstracted impersonal value, whereas I can get away with just looking to individual time-slices by themselves.

Jaurek: I don’t see how I am committed to that anymore than you are. I can just make pairwise comparisons. I can see that T₁ will be in pain if you get the anesthetic, and that T₂ will be in pain if you don’t, so these have equal claims. I can then notice that T₃ will also be in pain if you don’t get the anesthetic, and so there’s more “worse for” on one side. And I can maybe weight these comparisons by the degree of pain, and so on. None of this requires reference to some impersonal “worse.” It’s all just “worse for.”

Tohn: But you’re smuggling in the impersonal worse when you’re tallying up the weights on each side.

Jaurek: Well, you’re also tallying up on each side. It’s just that you can only count to one. If the problem is keeping track of who we’ve counted and who we haven’t, then we’re both in trouble. And if neither of us can make neutral arguments, we would have to go with the view that’s most reasonable on the face of it. Given the insanity of what you’re signing up for right now, I think it’s a pretty open and shut case.

Tohn: Alright, so let's call it a draw.

Jaurek: What? No! If your argument is right, then you have no more reason to choose one over the other. But if I’m right, you have decisive reason to choose the anesthesia. So surely you should choose the anesthesia when we're in a stalemate like this!

Tohn: Oh, so you want to discuss moral uncertainty too? I'm game.

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This pattern of argument is very frustrating! It usually reflects a naive view of the world, where you can never step on anyone’s toes to make the world a better place. Now, it’s not necessarily that loss is never bad. As we will see, there are ways in which job loss definitely can be bad. The problem is that the focus is usually on some decidedly unimportant aspects.

What is job loss?

When someone says that policy X will cause job loss, this is ambiguous between two claims:

1. Policy X will cause some people to lose their jobs, and

2. Policy X will decrease overall employment.

(2) is a much stronger claim than (1), but it’s also the one that would drive most of the harm of job loss.

If all that happens is (1), then some people will lose their jobs, yes, but that will be balanced out by some other people (or maybe the same people, I guess) being employed elsewhere—maybe at a later time. This is a small harm in itself, but it is pretty much negligible in any case where job loss is actually under consideration. The two main cases where job loss might be bad are in cases of regulations, and in cases of technological advancement. To make you intuitively see that job loss is not worth thinking about in either case, let me give a representative example of each.

First, consider elevators. Back in the day, elevators were much harder to control than they are today. You had to accelerate the elevator with a lever, make sure it lined up with the floor, etc. Obviously not rocket science, but enough to warrant having elevator operators. Sadly for this profession, we soon invented automated push-button elevators, making operators obsolete. This was a huge mistake, due to the resulting job losses—and our workforce has never recovered since.

Not! Elevator operators losing their jobs is just about the least important thing that has ever happened. Even though elevators no longer having to be operated was only a small technological improvement, it would have been completely moronic to oppose it, just to keep people in their jobs. We might as well have paid people to dig holes and fill them again.

Second, consider asbestos. If you were not aware, we used to mine this fibrous silicate mineral and pack it into everything. This involved a whole infrastructure of mining, processing, manufacturing, and transporting the stuff across the globe. After a while, someone got the crazy idea that maybe, just maybe, inhaling clouds of microscopic needles that lodge in your lungs and give you mesothelioma decades later might not be a fantastic plan, and so we regulated it. This caused a large shift in the construction and manufacturing sectors, meaning many miners, factory workers, and installers lost their jobs.

Was this a bad thing to happen? I hope we can all agree that it was not. The job loss is essentially zero weight on the scale. It just doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things.

There are two different reasons why the job loss is not bad. First, the job loss is not permanent—it’s not of type (2) above. Second, whatever harm remains will often be outweighed by opposing reasons.

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This all peaked with the crown-jewel of analytic philosophy’s mythos: Edmund Gettier publishing the paper Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? which, as far as we know, is the only thing he ever did. Since then, much of philosophy has consisted in an eternal spiral of proposing definitions, and giving counterexamples, providing an infinite money and publication glitch for any professor lucky enough to catch the wave.2

Only, there is a small problem: This whole approach is bollocks! The idea of conceptual analysis is misguided—it was dead upon inception. I have talked about this several times before. I promise this is not a rehash of those old talking points. Rather I want to try to make a more systematic case for my position than I have before, as well as give you my alternative in conceptual engineering.

What are concepts?

In good old analytic-philosophical fashion, let me start by saying what we’re even talking about. When I talk about concepts here, I’ll be meaning something like:

Units of semantic content.

This is suitably vague to not commit to any fancy ontology, as far as I can tell. Maybe they’re mental entities, or abstract objects, or whatever else people can dream up, but hopefully we can all agree on this much. And presumably they’ll figure in your thought somehow (we’ll get to that).

Let me spell it out a little more though. I don’t want to commit to any specific account of semantic content here, but it’s helpful to give some example accounts:

1. Extensionalism: The content of a concept is its extension (the set of things it applies to). So the content of TIGER is all tigers.

2. Intensionalism: The content of a concept is a function from possible worlds to extensions (or the set of possible things it applies to). So the content of TIGER is the set of all possible tigers.

3. Hyperintensionalism: The content of a concept is something more fine-grained. E.g. a function from worlds considered actual and worlds considered counterfactual to extensions. So the content of TIGER might be… well something more complicated.3

More generally, I like the following sort of representation of what concepts are (inspired by ). Draw a space that has a dimension for every parameter that’s relevant to the content of concepts.

For instance, if what you take to be the relevant features of things are their color and number of sides, you might draw something like this:

Obviously this is a ridiculous example! You’d at least also have to include saturation! In fact, you’d probably want to include very many things, and hue and number of sides might not figure among them.4 But let’s roll with this for now.

The concept RED QUADRILATERAL would then be the following point:

You could of course also point to green triangles. From here, you might combine points, to create concepts like GREEN TRIANGLE OR RED QUADRILATERAL; and you might even draw areas, and so on. A concept can then be represented in this way.

For example, suppose you’re an extensionalist. You then take all actual things and map them onto the coordinate system, and then the content of RED QUADRILATERAL is all the things that intersect with the red quadrilateral-point.

Again, there should be a dimension for every relevant feature. So there might also be indexical dimensions (like how far something is from you), or any other random thing you can think of (like how it makes you feel).

The important thing is not whether this account is true in some “deep sense,” but just that it’s an adequate representation to help your thinking.

What is conceptual analysis?

Having made this representation, the next question to ask is: What can this tell us about conceptual analysis? Let’s first ask how we individuate concepts. In other words, what are the criteria for when a concept is the same concept? Here I suggest: By their shape in the parameter space.

I mean, I hope this should be uncontroversial. Concepts were supposed to be stuff with some sort of semantic content, and shapes on parameter space were supposed to represent this. So it stands to reason that concepts are individuated by this shape. At least that’s how they’ll be individuated, if you accept what I meant by “concept” in the beginning.

Okay, so in conceptual analysis what’s going on is that you’re trying to identify one concept with another. For instance, you have the concept KNOWLEDGE and you’re trying to label some region on parameter space with that. But what is this KNOWLEDGE you start with?

To give you my answer upfront, I don’t think there is any “deeper” fact about this. There are the shapes that correspond to JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF and to JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF ABSENT DEFEATERS etc. The question about which of these is KNOWLEDGE is empty. It’s a matter of labeling one of the shapes, and there’s no answer that’s truer than the other.

But you probably require a little more persuasion.

What are we aiming at?

In the dialogue Meno, the titular interlocutor presents the following paradox for conceptual analysis (not his words). Basically, either:

1. You already know what the concept means, in which case there’s no need to analyze it. Or,

2. You don’t already know what the concept means, in which case you wouldn’t be able to tell if some analysis is correct.

Socrates gives a bit of a non-solution, about recollecting things, which seems to move the bump in the rug around. But we can do better.

The psychological view

First, we might say that you already have a concept which you apply, but you don’t think about the rules of application—you just use them.

For instance, suppose you’re operating with the following concept:

What you “see” when you use it is not the above. Rather, you apply it to some cases. So you consider some things, and judge whether the concept applies, giving you a map like this:

You can then try to draw a shape to fit these, and if it turns out that there’s a counterexample (a dot on the wrong side of the line) that means your guess was wrong:

So what conceptual analysis is about is finding out what concepts you were already using all along.

This successfully evades the paradox: We take the first horn, but we have an explanation for why our already having the concept doesn’t mean that we already know the rules for application (i.e. the shape in our parameter space). Additionally, it operationalizes conceptual analysis nicely, giving clear truth-conditions.

Still, there are major problems.

1. Carrying the weight of our expectations

First, this account turns conceptual analysis into something of psychological self-investigation. All you’re doing is trying to figure out how your mind is operating. However, that makes it puzzling why it matters. Why does plotting out the shape of our own mental entities have such deep philosophical significance?

Furthermore, we have no reason to think that we’re talking about the same thing. The way I learned how to apply KNOWLEDGE was some mix of being given examples of how to use the word “knowledge,” as well as some intrinsic dispositions of concept formation and whatnot. But everyone will have had slightly different experiences and dispositions, so there’ll be differences in the concepts being used. And anecdotally, people often seem to have differing or unclear intuitions in various cases.

Simply put, on this account, saying that “KNOWLEDGE is X” is nothing other than saying that “as a matter of fact about my psychology, when I use the word ‘knowledge’ I mean to express a concept with the shape X.” Fine, but that’s hardly of much philosophical interest.

2. Being true

The bigger problem is that this account is false, which is about as big a problem as you can get. At least, it’s false as an account of why searching for necessary and sufficient conditions makes sense. When doing conceptual analysis we’re looking for necessary and sufficient conditions—for rules that univocally classify everything as being either an X or not an X. That is, the concepts we’re looking for are supposed to look something like this:

But that’s most likely not what the concepts we’re actually using look like. Rather they’ll look something more like this:

As said before, the way that we form concepts is probably something like extrapolating based on some core examples. But there’s no clear reason to think that we somehow form universal rules that apply cleanly to every possible case. For example, whether Mr. Truetemp (someone who reliably forms true beliefs about ambient temperature without knowing how) knows the ambient temperature. Upon hearing this for the first time, it’s unlikely that there’s a perfectly clear verdict—but if we were implementing sharp concepts, there should be.

For conceptual analysis to make sense, you’d have to think that the sharp picture is in some sense the “correct precisification” of the blurry picture. That is, the concept that we were really using all along. But:

1. The psychological account doesn’t clearly license saying that the result of conceptual analysis can be an idealized version of the concept we’re using, rather than the one we’re actually using. And,

2. It’s implausible to think that there is some single true sharp concept, that the blurry one is an approximation of.

I can’t say it much better than Wittgenstein does it in Philosophical Investigations:

76. If someone were to draw a sharp boundary I could not acknowledge it as the one that I too always wanted to draw, or had drawn in my mind. For I did not want to draw one at all. His concept can then be said to be not the same as mine, but akin to it. The kinship is that of two pictures, one of which consists of colour patches with vague contours, and the other of patches similarly shaped and distributed, but with clear contours. The kinship is just as undeniable as the difference.

77. And if we carry this comparison still further it is clear that the degree to which the sharp picture can resemble the blurred one depends on the latter's degree of vagueness. For imagine having to sketch a sharply defined picture 'corresponding' to a blurred one. In the latter there is a blurred red rectangle: for it you put down a sharply defined one. Of course—several such sharply defined rectangles can be drawn to correspond to the indefinite one.—But if the colours in the original merge without a hint of any outline won't it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? Won't you then have to say: "Here I might just as well draw a circle or heart as a rectangle, for all the colours merge. Anything—and nothing—is right."

Additionally, conceptual analysis is looking for single, universally applicable concepts. But it’s not clear that my concept of KNOWLEDGE now is the same as the KNOWLEDGE I had when I was, say, 10 years old. In what sense can I then say that there is a single KNOWLEDGE to be found, which is more important than others?

The “further facts” view

To remedy this, we might instead try to go another route, and say that conceptual analysis is not aiming to find out what’s going on inside our own minds, but to find properties that are “out there.” KNOWLEDGE is not only a concept, but a property certain things have, and what we’re doing is trying to find out what that property consists in. If our concept is a blurry mess, then that’s on us. The property of knowledge is not blurry, and it’s our job to get our concept to align with this property.

This view easily escapes the two other objections. By making conceptual analysis about properties in the world, rather than about our own psychology, it’s much clearer why it’s worth caring about, and why it’s of philosophical interest. And we can say why it doesn’t matter that our own concepts are blurry: That’s a fault with us, but the property itself is perfectly crisp, and out there to find.

Predictably, I still have worries.

1. The psychological view is true

First, this view would seem to run right back into Meno’s paradox. If we already have a clear conception of the property in question, then what are we looking for? And if not, then how will we know we’ve got it when we find it?

By way of response, one might say that we don’t already know the concept, thus impaling ourselves on the second horn (where the psychological view went with the first). But we are not in the dark, as we can get evidence by considering hypotheticals. When I consider a Gettier case, I’m getting evidence that knowledge is not justified true belief, and so I’m refining my concept and getting closer to the truth, even though I didn’t know it to begin with.

The issue is that the first view we discussed is true. This might sound a little strange, seeing as I just argued that it’s not correct. And while it’s not correct as an account that can ground the legitimacy of conceptual analysis, it seems clearly right about what’s going on when we try to do conceptual analysis.

When I consider a Gettier case, what I’ll be making my judgement on the basis of is the blurry concept of KNOWLEDGE that I already have. I can’t make judgements on the basis of a concept I’m not using—that doesn’t make sense. For this story of how we learn about concepts to make sense, it seems we either have to tell some very mysterious story or some very spooky story about how we are not just reusing our old concepts—neither of which I expect will be particularly plausible.

There are of course some obvious ways in which we can make progress. Namely by rooting out inconsistencies, and trying to reach some sort of reflective equilibrium about how to draw the sharp concept. But here we’re back at the idealized psychology account before.

But as discussed, why think that there’s some correct way of precisifying our blob? And even if there is, why think that we have any good way of finding it? There’s no external “check” on whether we’ve taken the right path at any crossroads about how to make our judgements coherent. All we can do is cross our fingers and hope that we by some miracle end up in the correct place.

And, as mentioned earlier, it’s also not obvious that our concepts are the same, the same over time, or the same across culture. It’s hard to maintain that we could find the correct concepts with all this noise.

2. Why these concepts?

Second, this account still doesn’t explain why certain concepts are more “true” than others. In conceptual analysis, we try to find the concept of KNOWLEDGE. But we could also look for the concept of SCHMOLEDGE, which is like knowledge, except that it doesn’t apply before 1920.

We can say that it’s because we are looking for that property “knowledge.” But any instance of knowledge after 1920 will also have the property of schmoledge, so that only kicks the can down the road.

This points back to what I said about individuation. Both KNOWLEDGE and SCHMOLEDGE are simply shapes on our parameter space:

That’s all that characterizes them. What makes KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE is that it has that shape, and likewise for SCHMOLEDGE. Why then is one more “correct”?

We could give a normative answer. We could say that SCHMOLEDGE is a horribly useless concept compared with KNOWLEDGE. I agree! It’s hard to imagine situations where we’d want to talk about SCHMOLEDGE rather than KNOWLEDGE. However, that’s not an explanation of why knowledge is the true concept, but an explanation of why it’s useful, and as we’ll see below, that’s something we can appeal to, even if we don’t accept conceptual analysis.

Instead we could say that KNOWLEDGE is important because it plays an indispensable role in our epistemological practices, or whatever. But we can construct a parody system, called shmepistemology. SCHMOLEDGE, SCHMELIEF, SCHMEVIDENCE, etc. play similarly indispensable roles in schmepistemology. Then the question becomes why epistemology is more correct than schmepistemology.

An obvious answer is to say that schmepistemology doesn’t give reasons in the same way that epistemology does. If schmepistemology tells me one thing, and epistemology tells me another, then I’ll side with epistemology, thank you very much. But notice that we’ve now given a normative explanation again, which is not enough to save conceptual analysis.

Instead we could say that what’s important is that KNOWLEDGE is the thing that we actually use. But that’s not particularly different from the psychological view, and what I said there applies here too: The fact that we, as a matter of fact, use some concept, does not justify taking that concept as being “privileged” or “truer” in any important sense.

We might similarly think that the traditional concept MARRIAGE implied a relation between a man and a woman. Recently, we have begun using the concept MARRIAGE*, which can also be between two people of the same sex. Was there something about the fact that MARRIAGE was the one we actually happened to use, that gave it any important claim to being more “true” than MARRIAGE*? Certainly not in any philosophically interesting way. Then why think that about KNOWLEDGE and SCHMOLEDGE?

3. It’s just weird

This is maybe not as much an objection as a sentiment I have, that you may or may not share. But I find that the idea that concepts latch on to certain properties in a way that goes beyond our own minds, and that we can discover, to be plain old weird. It flies in the face of what I take myself to be doing when applying concepts—at least when I reflect a little.

When I stipulate all the facts about a case, and then ask the question of whether this constitutes knowledge, I’m not attributing further properties, that were not already settled. Rather I’m classifying the case. That is, I’m judging how to group other—more specific—properties under broader labels.

Unreflectively, it might seem that I’m making substantive judgements, but that’s because I already come pre-packaged with certain classificatory schemes (like my learned concept of knowledge), that I’m employing. As we discussed earlier, these do not appear to me as explicit rules. Rather I’m applying the rules intuitively. This may make it look like I’m judging that there is some specific property that I’m figuring out whether or not is instantiated. But if I think about what’s going on, I cannot in good faith hold anything other than that I’m just applying labels.

Like, think back to the parameter space representation. How can we express that one shape is more “correct” than another, or “corresponds to some property” more? No concept could do that, as they’re groupings along these properties, rather than properties in their own right. The whole premise does not make much sense to me.

Conceptual engineering

It’s easy to tear down in philosophy. The real trick is building up, and unless I can give an attractive alternative, we have not gotten any further. Luckily, there is a great alternative: Rather than trying to figure out which concepts are correct, we can figure out which are best.

That is, instead of doing conceptual analysis, we should do conceptual engineering. For the reasons laid out above, it does not make sense to say that any concepts are better than others on descriptive grounds. Any shape in parameter space is just as “true” as any other—in fact, it’s almost a category error to say that there can be intrinsic descriptive privileging between concepts. But that does not mean that they’re equal in all respects: They differ in how good they are.

Some concepts are complicated and hard to use, some concepts serve as Schelling points for communication, some concepts lead us to overlook important distinctions, some concepts will implicitly classify certain people as wrong, etc. Concept choice is not neutral, but something that has effects in the world—and so we can submit it to normative scrutiny.

This gives us an easy way of “operationalizing” concept choice: Take some normative standard. Then take some concept choice, find out what will happen if we go with it, and then evaluate according to the normative standard. This gives an easy way of ranking concepts.5 The reason is that choosing what concepts to use is an action like any other.

I find this much more plausible than conceptual analysis. Any argument against this approach cannot appeal to any normative consideration, as that is already included in the engineering approach. You can’t say “oh well if we do that, then we’ll all be confused, no one will know what anything means, and we’ll end in carnage!” That’s an appeal to the negative normative consequences of following the approach,6 which the engineering approach will already agree with you about. It shows that we should generally use concepts that already resemble common concepts, or something like that.

To argue against this approach, you’ll have to give some account of the sense in which some concepts can be more correct than others. What is it that makes KNOWLEDGE correct and SCHMOLEDGE incorrect? And once you’ve done that, you would have to show how we could ever figure out what the correct concepts are, as well as why that standard is philosophically interesting in any way.

And even if you do that, you could never show that we should use that approach over the engineering approach. If we should, then it’ll already fall out of the engineering approach that we should, and so you’ll be agreeing with me.7

Conclusion

As I said, I think conceptual engineering wins comfortably. This is not because there’s some clean knockdown-argument—and if you were already inclined to conceptual analysis, you may not have been convinced. The problem for me is that analysis is a non-starter.

It’s easy to be introduced to something like the JTB analysis of KNOWLEDGE, and some Gettier cases, roll up your sleeves, and start doing the first-order theorizing. That is, conceptual analysis comes naturally to us, and we can proceed unreflectively engaging in it for large amounts of time, without considering what it amounts to. But as soon as we step back and examine what we’re doing, it’s hard to make sense of—as I hope I’ve shown.

I do not pretend that the options for making sense of conceptual analysis that I have presented are exhaustive. But I do think they are some popular options, and the problems with them are general enough to apply to many possible accounts.

To end this off, I’d like to invite the reader to reflect on the similarities between this dispute, and dispute around things like mereology, or natural kinds. If, like me, you have a skeptical disposition regarding the success of realist accounts in those kinds of domains, I hope you can see why that might apply here too. But I think the case against conceptual analysis (or lack of case for it) is stronger than in these other domains—even if you’re a realist there, you might be convinced against analysis.

As mentioned before, I have written about this issue a few times. The pushback I have gotten there has been limited, which is a shame. I know that many people—including, I believe, many of my readers—are fans of conceptual analysis. If you are one of these people, I’d be interested to hear how you respond to my case!

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The following is my Official Translation of a dialogue I wrote for the student magazine at the philosophy department I study at (coincidentally the magazine is called Aporia, which I find amusing). The topic was Freedom, so I decided to write a dialogue. I was also reading Gödel, Escher, Bach at the time, which inspired me—and inspired me to play a little with the structure, and add a couple of easter eggs. This was some of the most fun I’ve had writing in a long time. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Domilivra: Isn’t that unnecessary? The light won’t get any greener—I already pressed it.

Fremachia: Yeah, I know. It’s more a matter of principle. At least now I feel like I’m doing something—I’m expressing just how damn much I want that light to change soon!

Dom: But you’re not really doing anything as such, are you? If you hadn’t pressed it, the light would have turned green just as quickly. You can’t actually make anything happen other than what was already going to happen.

Fre: So you’d say that an action is only mine—or let’s say free—if I have the possibility of making a difference? In other words, if there are several different options open to me at the moment I take the action?

Dom: Yes, that’s right.

Fre: Okay, but imagine that you’re taking some action. For instance, we can imagine that you choose to take a sip from a cup of coffee.

Dom: Not unheard of.

Fre: There is clearly an explanation for why you did what you did. For instance, that you felt like having coffee. But if that explanation is sufficient, then you couldn’t have done otherwise. If the desire for coffee automatically means you drink the coffee, you had no option of doing the opposite—and so the action is not free.

Dom: Then I’ll just say that the explanation isn’t sufficient. That I feel like having coffee may make it likely that I drink it, but my desire is only sufficient in combination with my choosing to act on that desire. So it’s my desire plus my choice that are sufficient.

Fre: Okay, but then we’re still missing something: why the hell do you choose one thing over the other?

Dom: I’d say that I simply choose, and that’s that. If I gave an explanation, we’d just be moving one step further along the chain of explanations, and run into the same dilemma. At some point I need to say that I just choose as I do.

Fre: Exactly! But that’s absurd! You have now said that the story bottoms out in your just choosing as you do. Why do you choose this? It’s not because of a desire—we already included that part, and it wasn’t sufficient—but simply because you choose. The choice doesn’t stem from any feature of you; it just happens. Hume puts it well…

Fremachia pulls an old book from her back pocket.

Domilivra: Do you always walk around with Hume in your pock—

Fremachia: SHH! It says:

According to the principle, therefore, which denies necessity, and consequently causes, a man is as pure and untainted, after having committed the most horrid crime, as at the first moment of his birth, nor is his character any wise concerned in his actions; since they are not derived from it.1

Fre: So, with your principle, it makes no sense to say that you’re a bad person if you run a red light and hit someone. Your decision has no explanation in your character, and thus cannot be the result of negative traits in you.

Dom: I can’t see what’s so problematic about that. The choice springs from me precisely because it is my choice. It doesn’t have its full explanation in my character, but it is nonetheless partly explained by my character, and whatever explanation is missing has its source in me rather than in external circumstances.

Fre: How can you not find that strange?! Let me give an illustration: Imagine that you’ve now chosen to drink the coffee. And after observing this, God decides to rewind the universe back to just before you made this choice. What do you think will happen?

Dom: Hmm… I think I’d choose to drink the coffee.

Fre: And after observing this, God decides to rewind the universe back to just before you made this choice. What do you think will happen?

Dom: Hmm… I think maybe I’d choose not to drink the coffee.

Fre: He then repeats this exercise thousands upon thousands of times.2 What’ll we see? That it varies! Since the conditions are not sufficient to determine your choice, you sometimes choose one thing and sometimes the other. But there’s no difference between you in the two scenarios—so the difference must be due to chance. How is that your choice?

Domilivra: I just recalled that the buttons at pedestrian crossings often don’t actually work.

Fremachia: Amusing.

Fremachia: But why should I believe that the concept of free will you’re presenting is actually what we mean by ‘free will’?

Domilivra: Well, I think it’s simply very fundamentally intuitive. It grates to say something like: ‘I freely chose to drink my coffee, but I had no possibility of choosing otherwise.’ I find it hard to escape the feeling that genuine alternative possibilities are fundamentally constitutive of what the concept of freedom even—

Fre: Yeah yeah, that’s fine, but abstract intuitions don’t clarify a concept—concrete scenarios do. No matter how intuitive the JTB analysis of knowledge seems in your abstract reflections, it’s refuted by Gettier cases.3

Dom: So you think there are analogous scenarios that refute my position?

Fre: Yes! Let’s say that Pam is really fed up with her colleague Stan. Pam has her desk right next to his in the office, and he constantly picks his nose—I mean really digs in. No number of performance review meetings has managed put a dent in his persistence, and Pam has had enough! There’s only one way out, and Pam decides to bring her hunting rifle to work the next morning. Come what may, she will not bear witness any more nose-picking!

Dom: I can’t say I don’t get her.

Fre: Stan also has another neighbour, Jimothy, who is just as fed up with Stan as Pam is. Jimothy discovers what Pam plans to do and is delighted, but doubts that she’ll actually go through with it. Fortunately, he has a hobby as a virtuoso neurosurgeon. So he develops a chip, which he somehow manages to implant in her brain. The chip usually does nothing, but if it detects the slightest hesitation, it activates and forces her to go through with the murder. On the fateful day, Pam proceeds without hesitation, so the chip never activates.4

Dom: Good grief! What happened then?

Fre: Well, it’s just a thought experiment, so you decide.

Dom: Right, of course.

Fre: So what do you think? Did Pam act freely? Was she responsible for her action?

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This is quite surprising. Not just because I'm unusually lewd—I wouldn't say I am. But there’s a very tempting line of thought which would tell you that all anyone would ever care to do was: Fuck Bitches, Get Money.

After all, humans developed through the process of evolution. If you want to do well in this process, I hear having sex is a pretty good starting point—that and surviving. So since humans were shaped through this process, which has the “end” of reproduction, humans must also ultimately just care about survival and reproduction. In other words, the terminal end of human action must always secretly be surviving and reproducing.

On paper this sounds nice, but if you’ve spent any time being a human, you probably also have some issues with this. Specifically the fact that it is false—something I hear is generally quite damning for theories of any kind. As I mentioned at the start, it happens that people do stuff just because it’s fun, or because they care about it intrinsically, or what have you.

You might of course chalk this up to the small ways in which evolution was not able to nip every single defect in the bud. Sure, people might play games for fun every once in a while, but generally they only care about fitness. The problem with this is again that it’s still not true. Non-fitness desires aren’t just marginal bugs—people routinely dedicate their lives to projects like art or career, often at the expense of getting lucky.

Finding the core argument logically watertight, you may stick to your guns and add an epicycle or two. These things may look like they’re not about sex. But trust me, they are! It’s just in a secret roundabout way that you wouldn’t understand. It’s just subconscious, but trust me it’s there! I’m a philosopher look at my big beautiful beard!

The problem with all of this is of course that the argument isn’t good to begin with. I suspect most people understand where the flaw is by now: The inference conflates different levels of explanation for human actions.

1. On one level, human action is explained by microphysical laws: You drank coffee because such and such forces moved these and those particles in such and such ways.

2. On another level, human action is explained by brain processes: You drank coffee because these sensory inputs caused these patterns of neuron activation, which sent those signals to various muscles, etc.

3. On our familiar everyday level, human action is explained by beliefs, desires, and whatnot: You drank coffee because you wanted coffee.

4. Finally, on a very broad level, human action is explained by evolutionary pressures: You drank coffee because creatures with the sorts of preferences that led you to drink coffee generally did better at having surviving offspring.

Laying out like this, the mistake is obvious. Each level has its own “goals”—a word probably only appropriate for level 3. At level 1, the “goal” is to follow physical laws, at 2 it is to minimize free energy1 or something like that, at 3 it’s to get what you want, and finally at 4 it’s to maximize fitness.

The error lies in plugging the goal from one level into another. Specifically putting the goal from 4 into 3. When we talk about what humans want or desire, we’re talking on level 3. But it’s easy to also talk metaphorically about evolution “wanting” high fitness, or brains “wanting” to minimize free energy. And from there it’s easy to confuse metaphor for reality and conflate levels.

In reality, a creature being fit for a certain goal entails nothing automatically about its attitude towards that goal. Actively trying to sleep is a poor way of falling asleep; wanting not to think about pink elephants is just about the worst way of achieving your goal. And as a utilitarian I’m obligated to mention that believing in deontological principles is a much better way of being a utilitarian than trying directly.

It might often be useful to have creatures care about the thing optimized for, but that’s contingent—you can’t trust it as a general principle. So it makes very good sense that evolution would have creatures care about intermediate goals intrinsically: Being successful in your career is often a good way of ensuring that you can survive and get a mate, so it makes sense that you’d care about that. It’s just unlucky when you start caring about it so much that you forego having children to be able to focus on it.

Why aren’t we tempted to say that we ultimately only care about minimizing free energy or following the laws of physics though? My guess is that evolution just looks so much like a teleological process that it’s very easy to read that into it. We notice that it makes sense to talk as though evolution has a “goal.” And wouldn’t you know: The creatures created by evolution also have goals. So it’s very natural to take the final step and put the peg into the hole.2

There’s a version of the crackpot argument we just looked at, which is not dismissed as obviously wrong by most people: That AIs are nothing more than “stochastic parrots” or “next token predictors.”3 The idea seems to be that AI systems—specifically LLMs—are trained to predict what will be the next token, given some string of text. And the way they do this is by finding patterns in existing corpora of text. Hence AI systems are next token predicting stochastic parrots, and nothing more.

Never mind that this is a gross simplification of the training process, it’s also deeply confused, for the reasons we have just learned. We can describe AI on several levels:

1. The microphysical level (again).

2. On the level of circuits.

3. On the level of programming—the neural network/model weights.

4. ???

5. On the level of the training process.

The stochastic parrot style critique seems to either view AI systems from level (3) or level (5). From level (3), all AI systems do is statistically predict the next token, making AI systems next token predictors. From level (5), all AI systems do is minimize their loss function (again a huge simplification), making them stochastic parrots (or at least fitting a possible precisification of “stochastic parrot”). So in a sense it’s true that AIs are next token predictors and stochastic parrots.

But we don’t just want the truth and nothing but the truth—we also want the whole truth! And just like “caring about” sex or free energy are true descriptions of what you are, they’re certainly not the whole truth. In fact, they arguably miss the most important part, which is the level of your thoughts!

Similarly, we have that mysterious “???” level of the AI. I’m no expert, so I won’t pretend to know what to say about this. But from cursory reading, it seems like interpretability research is finding things like representations of semantic concepts and world models at this level.

Besides, it’s just striking that AI systems are seemingly able to understand the contents of a text, argue about them, come with novel coherent points related to the text, etc. This is baffling if they have nothing like understanding, but are “just” mechanistically predicting tokens.

Now, whether or not this is a good reason to think that AIs “understand” in any meaningful sense, I won’t hang my hat on. But if aliens came to earth, they could look at humans and think “wow, these guys are just minimizing free energy,” or “these guys are just optimizing fitness.” Whether or not they’d have good enough evidence to know that we have understanding, we can at least say this much: If they ended their analysis at those two statements, they’d be making a huge mistake. You can’t infer from the fact that a system cannot be described as “understanding” at some level to its not understanding simpliciter.

The people who end the conversation at “stochastic parrots” are making the same mistake as the aliens. To know whether AIs can understand, we have to find out what’s going on at the “???” level,4 and no amount of inane table-pounding will settle that.

Finally, let me separate two questions that are often run together in these kinds of discussions:

1. Whether AI systems Understand in the deep sense in which humans do.

2. Whether AI systems do something that’s as good as understanding for practical purposes.

The first question is hard. It requires answering questions about meaning, intentionality, and philosophy of mind more broadly—as well as questions about AI systems and their architecture. The second question is a lot easier, and the performance of AI systems in various tasks seems to give hefty evidence for an affirmative answer.

And it’s almost exclusively the second question which is relevant to any practical discussions regarding AI—except perhaps concerns about AI welfare. To use an old adage: If it looks like a duck swims like a duck and quacks like a duck then we should treat it as a duck for all duck related decisions and policies, and take seriously duck-safety concerns,5 whether or not it contains some deeper Duck-essence.

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5

I’m aware that this sounds cynical and edgy, like I don’t appreciate the fullness of human value. Au contraire! I think human life is as valuable as the next guy—and not just because he’s a human life too. The problem is not that people have too high a view of human lives,1 but too low and confused a view of what the value of money consists in. The value of money is, in an important sense, the value of a human life.

To be clear, there is also the problem of what exact price tag to put on a human life is. I am not answering that here. My aim is just to establish the more principled point that there at least is some amount of money out there that could outweigh the value of a human life.

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Carzeli: Oh, so you’re one of those?

Vegixa: One of which?

Carzeli: Algaeans! You don’t inject human fluids?

Vegixa: Ah yes, that’s right, I prefer to stay algae-based.

Carzeli: Oh yeah? And why is that? Are you worried about global greening?

Vegixa: Well, of course I am—who isn’t? With all the crap those humans dump out their rear ends, it’s no wonder we are having a hard time keeping those “plants” from taking over. But that’s not my main worry. The main reason I don’t want human fluids is because I’m worried about human welfare.

Carzeli: Human welfare?! Well, I never… So you feel sorry for the little humans?

Vegixa: Yeah.

Carzeli: That’s ridiculous! How can you empathize with them? For one, they just look weird. Plain old weird. They have some sort of long vestigial growth coming out of their heads, many times larger than the thing itself. Not to speak of their, their… [*shudders*] their tentacles—if you can even call them that! They’re all hard and rigid, and they split into several smaller tentacles at the ends.

Vegixa: What about your house-man, Jerry? Would you like it if we treated him like we treat our humans? What if someone put him in a small box, forcefully harvested his penis-fluid—

Carzeli: I think he’d like that part!

Vegixa: —and then sucked everything out of him to inject? What if the fluid in your injector were Jerry’s? wouldn’t you think that was wrong?

Carzeli: I’d probably have something against it, yeah. But that’s also different. House-men are designed to be companions to Martians, so they have special relationships to us. That means we should care about them. But humans are meant to be extracted. Besides, caring about Jerry is probably just a sort of martipromorphizing; it seems like Martians often project Martian-like characteristics on their house-men.

Vegixa: And why not think it’s the other way around? After all, you spend much more time with your Jerry than with humans, so why not think that all homo sapiens—humans and house-men alike—have recognizably Martian characteristics, and you only notice them with the ones you spend time with?

Carzeli: Maybe, who knows. But we also have to keep in mind what “Martian” characteristics we’re talking about here. I’ve sometimes seen Jerry read philosophy; one time I even saw him figure out a proof that the Weierstrass Function is non-differentiable at all points. That’s cute and all, of course, but he’d obviously flunk even the most basic hypercoherent topology classes.

Vegixa: What about the, uh, less gifted Martians among us? Or newgrown Martians? The ones that even humans can keep up with intellectually? Is it okay to extract their fluids?

Carzeli: No, of course not! But they’re Martians, and humans are humans.

Vegixa: Hard to deny that! When you were talking about mathematics before, I took you to be pointing to a relevant difference between Martians and humans, though. Now that it turns out that some Martians lack the relevant characteristics, you appeal to the category itself. Then what was the point of bringing up intelligence to begin with?

Carzeli: The point was that Martians are an intelligent kind, and humans are not. Our intellectually restricted fellow Martians may be on par with humans in actual cognitive capabilities. But they have the potential or the capacity to be as smart as us, although it goes unactualized. Humans are fundamentally different, and humans don’t have intrinsic moral worth in the same way as Martians.

Vegixa: Why should it matter what kind someone belongs to? If you twisted my tentacles, what would make it bad is not that I technically belong to this kind “Martians,” but that it feels bad. If it turned out that I were secretly a filthy Venusian who happened to be qualitatively just like a Martian, my pain would not be any less bad just because I belonged to some different kind.

Carzeli: Yeah, well if you were exactly like a Martian, you’d just be a Martian for all intents and purposes. But there are big differences between intellectually impaired Martians and humans—namely the former have Martian bodies, AND, jeans, etc., and humans don’t. They still have latent Martian capacities.

Vegixa: But how is that relevant if it’s never realized? In what sense do they have the capacity in a way that’s morally relevant? It just sounds like you’re pointing to any difference you can think of between Martians and humans, and not considering whether it’s plausible that it makes a moral differe…

Carzeli [Immediately]: Hello? You were saying?

Vegixa: Err… Oh yeah… Anyways, I’d say this intelligence stuff is a red Mars-herring. What matters is not how intelligent someone is, but whether they can suffer.

Carzeli: Well I don’t know, but let’s suppose that’s right. Why should we think that humans can suffer?

Vegixa: Isn’t it obvious? Because they act exactly as though they suffer! When humans in factory farms get anal-probed without anesthetic, they scream, writhe, cuss, etc.—presumably exactly what we’d do in that situation, if we had anuses.

Carzeli: True enough.

Vegixa: It’s not only immediate physical suffering they seem to exhibit, though. In the farms they also have to cut off the tongues of most humans. The reason is that the stressful conditions take such a psychological toll that their minds break and they end up spending all day arguing about whether moral realism is intuitive in increasingly heated and unproductive ways.

Carzeli: That does sound horrible! But you’re assuming that they’re doing these things because they suffer, or are psychologically damaged. I just don’t think we have any good grounds to believe this!

Vegixa: We do have good grounds, don’t we? Namely that they act exactly like we’d expect if they could suffer.

Carzeli: Yeah they do, but that doesn’t imply that they suffer. They could just be very complicated stimulus-response mechanisms. There are perfectly good evolutionary stories we could tell for why they would develop these sorts of aversion reactions to pain—doing that is immensely beneficial in terms of fitness. We don’t have to posit that they also suffer!

Vegixa: Okay, doesn’t that make you pretty worried about how we can know that others are conscious? You could say all the same things about me.

Carzeli: I could—and I’m not perfectly confident that you are conscious. But I do have good reason since you’re very similar to me, and I know I’m conscious.

Vegixa: Right, but it’d be pretty convenient if you were only justified in thinking that creatures similar enough to you are conscious, and not creatures with the capacities that would seem to be relevant to consciousness (such as higher order thoughts, or something like that). Why be very confident that Martians are conscious, but be almost certain that humans aren’t? In fact it almost seems suspicious!

Carzeli: I don’t think it’s suspicious at all! We have to draw the line somewhere. In nature many things follow a sigmoid-curve. For example if you’re exposed to radiation for a few minutes, almost nothing will happen. If you’re exposed for an hour or two, it can be very damaging. But if you’re then exposed for many hours on end, the damage does not increase drastically. Similarly, we should expect moral worth to be like this: Simple creatures almost don’t matter, then there’s a steep incline as creatures become more sophisticated, which flattens out somewhere around Martians.

Vegixa: How is that any less suspicious?! Why in the world would we be very confident that the huge chasm in moral worth is between humans and Martians, rather than between humans and cows—or even somewhere between Martians and even more intelligent species?

Carzeli: We can motivate it perfectly well! All this time you’ve been talking as if you’re relying on very modest moral principles. But there’s a huge cost to your view that you’ve not made clear!

Vegixa: And that is?

Carzeli: Let me ask you: Given that you think that Martians should go out of their way to reduce human suffering, you presumably think that Martian and human suffering are in some way commensurable?

Vegixa: Yes that’s right.

Carzeli: That would seem to imply that there could be some amount of human suffering that could be as morally weighty as one Martian death? That there’s some number of human lives that are as important as a Martian life?

Vegixa: I don’t think that follows directly, but it’s certainly one way to go—and I think that’s plausible enough.

Carzeli: What? I mean, that’s just ridiculous! To think that you could justify one Martian death with saving the lives of 1000 humans or something like that? But that’s not even the worst part. Because if you grant that, then it’s hard to see how you’re not committed to saying that recent Martian civilization has been a turn for the worse. While Martian living standards have been on the rise, so has the extent of human farming. Would you not then be committed to saying that this progress has been negative?

Vegixa: I can’t rule it out at least.

Carzeli: Insanity! How can you even seriously suggest that? If anything is obvious, it’s the fact that recent Martian progress has been good. If your moral views imply that this might not be the case, just because human farming has drastically expanded, you’re beyond the pale, I’m afraid. Have you ever heard of G.E. Zmoorex?

Vegixa: Yes, the famous Martian philosopher.

Carzeli: Right. He has an argument against external world skepticism that goes:

1. Here is a tentacle.

2. Here is another.

3. Here is another.

4. Here is another.

5. Here is another.

6. Here is another.

7. Here is another.

8. Here is another.

9. Here is another.

10. Here is another.

11. Here is another.

12. Here is another.

13. Here is another.

14. Here is another.

15. Here is another.

16. Here is another.

17. At least sixteen tentacles exist at this moment.

18. Therefore there exists an external world.

Carzeli: The idea is that the premises are more plausible than any abstract argument a skeptic might give—we can be more confident that we have tentacles than that the skeptic’s arguments work. Hence we’re justified in believing in the external world. I propose a similar argument:

1. Martian progress has been good.

2. If human suffering is morally comparable to Martian suffering, then Martian progress has not been good.

3. Therefore human suffering is not morally comparable to Martian suffering.

We both agree with the second premise. I just hold that the first premise is much more obvious than any abstract argument you might give to the contrary. Thus I’m justified in thinking that the sharp incline in the moral worth-curve happens between humans and Martians—anything else would lead to ridiculous consequences!

Vegixa: You don’t think that there’s something wrong here?

Carzeli: No, those arguments appear very strong to me.

Vegixa: But the only reason that you think that the first premise is plausible is that you had not yet considered the possibility that human suffering is bad when you came to that judgement. You just grew up in our society, noticing all the wonderful benefits and improvements. When you then came upon the dark underbelly of human farming, your judgements were already shaped by your previous experience, and your initial judgements just seemed too obvious. But in fact discovering that we are potentially undertaking a moral atrocity should undercut your initial confidence!

Carzeli: It’s a little uncharitable to psychologize me like that, isn’t it?

Vegixa: I don’t mean it as a psychological diagnosis! It’s more like a story about how you have confused the epistemic order of your beliefs: Your belief in the goodness of Martian society is implicitly based on the assumption that nothing horrible is secretly going on behind the scenes. So when you figure out that something horrible really might be going on, you can’t just stomp your feet and cling to your intuitive judgement—it’s the basis for that intuitive judgement itself that is being called into question.

Carzeli: I don’t know. It’s just really obvious to me, and I don’t think any amount of abstract argumentation could persuade me more than this basic judgement! Also, wouldn’t what you say equally apply to Zmoorex’s argument, which would mean that we can’t prove that we’re in an external world just by holding out our tentacles?3

Vegixa: There’s a recurring pattern in the way that you think, which has cropped up several times in this conversation now. It feels like you always evaluate all your beliefs from within. But you never try to take the step out of your own perspective, and evaluate how much you can trust it as a whole.

Carzeli: Of course not! I really am in my own perspective, and it’d be a fool’s errand to try and step out of it.

Vegixa: Yeah, obviously you can’t escape it fully. But you should still be able to ask yourself: “Okay, I have such and such beliefs, and give these and those arguments for it. But what if someone had different views to mine? Could they give exactly the same arguments, but for a different conclusion, and find them equally convincing?” If the answer is yes, then that should make you very reluctant to trust the baseline foot-stomping judgements that separate you from that hypothetical reasoner.

Carzeli: But I have nothing else to work with! What else can I do except trust my initial judgements?

Vegixa: Let me try another way. Suppose that some superintelligent alien race came and invaded and enslaved us. They might even discuss whether Martians have moral worth, and whether it’s wrong to inject them. If they came to the conclusion that it’s fine to farm and inject Martians, do you think they’d be wrong?

Carzeli: Well, yeah, of course! But it’s also perfectly obvious that Martians have moral worth. They’d have to be pretty damn dense to not realize that! If they were as bright as you say they would be, I don’t see how they couldn’t figure out that we matter.

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I’m very partial to the scalar option. Here I’ll try and give a short motivation for why.

Sidenote: The reason this post exists is that PhD-holder of First Principles fame asked me some questions about why I prefer the scalar option, in preparation for a post of his arguing for the deontic view. I got a little carried away with my reply, and so decided I might as well turn it into a post for the drama. So subscribe to his blog to see his response when it eventually comes:

First Principles

First principles thinking applied to the chaos of modern life.

By Lorenzo Elijah, PhD

I.

Before going on, we should be precise about exactly what the dispute is. We have these two types of categories—deontic and scalar—what exactly are we arguing about regarding them?

What we’re arguing about are which are fundamental, or what can exhaustively answer questions regarding what to do. There are basically 3 options:1

1. Deontic categories are exhaustive.

2. Scalar categories are exhaustive.

3. Both categories are legitimate, but neither is exhaustive.

By “exhaustive” I mean something like that category being all there is to say about what to do. If deontic categories are exhaustive, then once you have said everything there is to say about what is right, wrong, obligatory, etc., there’s nothing more to be said—there isn’t any further question as to whether you have such and such strong reason to do X, Y, and Z. There might be other ways of spelling this out, such as what reduces to what or whatever, but I feel like this is good enough.

Notice what this doesn’t commit you to: It doesn’t commit you to being an eliminativist about the other category. Contrary to my outrageously provocative clickbait title, I think it makes a good deal of sense to talk about things as being “right” or “wrong” in many ordinary circumstances. I can say that it’s true that you ought to do X, and false that it’s right to do Y. All I have to insist on is that insofar as this talk will pertain to what to do, it’ll have to boil down to being some sort of roundabout way of talking about what you have more or less reason to do.

And—I might add—there aren’t any “deep” facts about how to map deontic categories onto scalar categories. Just like how there isn’t any “deep” fact about whether a man is going around a squirrel, or both are going around the tree—you can’t be correct or incorrect in your choice.2

As you can probably guess, my position is then (2): Scalar categories are exhaustive.

II.

I’ll argue in a bit of a roundabout way. In epistemology there’s a very similar dispute. We have the category of belief, which is discrete (you either believe P, disbelieve P, or withhold judgement), and the category of credence, which is basically a continuous degree of belief.

We can plot out the same 3 options for how these relate. Now, in this case I think it’s very obvious that credences are exhaustive! Belief-talk is just rough contextually dependent approximation of certain credence-talk.

We might think that an epistemology would have to give us a clear answer as to what to believe, what to disbelieve, and what to withhold judgement about. But once you actually start thinking about it a little more carefully, this starts to seem implausible. If your theory of epistemology can tell me everything about what my credences should be, and how they should change over time, I’d be satisfied.

You might want to ask “well, it’s fine that my credences should be so and so, but what should I believe?” To this I would say that that’s a purely pragmatic matter of how we want to convert credence-talk into belief-talk. Once we’ve agreed on everything about credences, there’s just nothing left to say! You can choose to carve the credences into beliefs, but if we agree on the credences and disagree about which beliefs to have, we’re not actually in any substantive disagreement! We’re just talking past each other.

III.

Similarly, I think it’s very obvious that we definitely have degrees of reason to do different things. I have strong reason not to punch someone in the face, but I have even stronger reason not to stab someone. I have reason to donate $100 to charity, but I have even stronger reason to donate $200.

So let’s suppose we fix all the facts about how strong reason I have to take various actions. Having done this, you might ask, “okay fine, but what would be right, what would be wrong, what would be obligatory, etc.” This strikes me as a very similar question to the one about beliefs and credences, and my answer will be the same: You can choose to talk about right and wrong as discrete categories, and it might even be quite useful to do so. But what’s really fundamental are degrees of reason, and once you’ve fixed those, there is no substantive question left.

So being good and austere theorizers, we should throw away dead weight. It’s very obvious to me that what to do comes in degrees. And you can’t really express these degrees with the discrete language of deontic categories, so I think option (1) (that deontic categories are exhaustive) is clearly wrong. Additionally, deontic categories add nothing—they don’t pay rent. Hence we should drop (3), unless we have some very good reason to think that there’s some job that degrees of reason can’t do by themselves.

IV.

You might object: When I decide what to do, I think about what’s right or wrong, not about degrees of reason—my moral judgements pertain to deontic categories, not scalar ones. Similarly you object: When I decide what to assent to, I think about what to believe, not about credences—my epistemic judgements pertain to beliefs, not credences. In fact I often think about wrongness and beliefs, but I only started thinking about degrees of reason and credences once I made the horrible mistake of opening my first philosophy textbook, sucking me into this miserable debate.

Fine, fine. I agree. I just disagree that this shows that scalars and credences are not exhaustive. To keep things confusing, let me introduce another analogy:

What do you think of the relation between chairs and arrangements of matter? I think facts about arrangements of matter are exhaustive, and I don’t think there are any “deep” chair-facts beyond the arrangement-of-matter facts.

For any particular chair, you can identify it with some set of matter. Still, I don’t think there is any clean identity between arrangement-of-matter-facts and chair-facts, no matter how complicated, since our concept and talk of chairs is simply too vague and fuzzy to be able to get this kind of treatment. This is not because chairs are distinct irreducible metaphysical entities, but because chairs are useful but vague ways of thinking.

I also wouldn’t want to be an eliminativist about chairs. And I would grant that chair-talk and chair-beliefs are very useful, and perhaps indispensable. In fact, they might seem primary in an important sense. I encounter things as chairs before I encounter them as arrangements of matter (Heidegger cheering from his grave). In questions of sitting, what is important is whether something is a chair, rather than the exact arrangement of its matter. [Insert response to whatever other parody argument you might find persuasive.]

I hope everyone agrees that arrangements of matter are exhaustive in this case. But I also hope you can see that judgements about chairs might seem primary in the same way that judgements about wrongness or beliefs might. In this case, however, it’s perfectly obvious why this doesn’t show anything.

V.

What of the relation between the scalar vs. deontic debate, and questions in normative ethics? There’s an obvious affinity between utilitarianism and the scalar view. Utilitarianism evaluates actions by how good consequences they produce. So since goodness of consequences comes in degrees, it seems like you should say that answers to what to do should as well.

This is why I don’t like maximizing consequentialism (the view that it’s obligatory to do the optimal thing): The verdict that anything less than what’s strictly optimal is wrong is clearly faulty to me.

Not only that, but it’s not even clear why in the world one would think that as a consequentialist! There’s no sharp difference between doing what’s optimal, and doing what’s very very very close to being optimal—there’s no reason to draw a sharp boundary between these two.

So since I also think that scalar talk is perfectly adequate—in fact more adequate than deontic talk—at capturing normativity, I see no reason to be a maximizing consequentialist. Besides, when I put consequentialist judgements in talk of what I have more or less reason to do, rather than what is right or wrong, it seems a lot more plausible. For instance compare:

It’s wrong to not sell all your belongings and donate the proceeds to charity—it’s wrong to keep an extra pair of shoes for yourself.

It’s as wrong to kill someone as to let someone die.

You have strong (moral) reason to sell all your belongings and donate the proceeds to charity—you have less strong reason to sell everything except an extra pair of shoes.

You have as much reason to not kill someone as to not let someone die.

Not only do I think the latter are more accurate, but they also just strike me as a lot more plausible. However, it should also be clear why talk of right and wrong is often useful: Talking about strengths of reasons quickly becomes a tangled mess.

VI.

But you might think that deontologists have good reason to think that deontic categories have a shot at also being fundamental in an important sense. After all, they’ll think that there are some sharp boundaries in what to do. For instance, there is a clear difference between doing and allowing harm. But I’m not actually sure how far this gets you—at least if you’re not an absolutist deontologist.

Let me introduce some machinery from Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. In it, he talks about theory-given aims. Call a theory T. Your T-given aims are then just whatever the theory tells you to do. For consequentialism your T-given aims are to promote the good.

We can spell out what deontology tells you to do by asking what your T-given aims are, and grading how well you follow these on some scale. Doing harm will count very strongly in the negative, and allowing harm will not count as much—and doing good will count a little positively, but not as much as doing harm counts negatively, etc. Never mind whether this is a plausible way of representing the theory, or one that appropriately captures what the deontologist takes to be normatively fundamental or whatever—all we need is that it’s a way of representing the duties given by deontology.

Unless you’re an absolutist deontologist, there will be some amount of doing good that can outweigh cases of doing harm. Saving a billion people might outweigh killing a single person. If that’s right, then doing harm can only count a finite amount against your T-given aims, and the more good the doing harm causes as a side effect, the less the action will count against your T-given aims. That means that the wrongness of even a paradigm “wrong act” like killing a person will come in degrees, and can ultimately turn out to be barely wrong, or even slightly positive, depending on external circumstances.

The point of this exercise was to show that even though we might initially think that there are clearly right and wrong actions for a deontologist, this is not the case! Unless they’re an absolutist deontologist, everything can be put in degrees of wrongness—and talking about degrees of wrongness captures normative reality more precisely than simple talk of “right” and “wrong” does.

So even if you’re not a utilitarian, I think you should be a scalar.3

VII.

Now, this conclusion is a little uncomfortable. It would be very nice to be able to just say definitively what actions you should choose and what you shouldn’t, and leave it at that. But I just think that’s sadly not a plausible picture. Rather you just have more reason to choose some courses of action, and we can’t tell you what you “should” do, or what would be “wrong” to do *per se*. All we can tell you is that it’d be better if you did this than that.

But as I argue here, this is just a result of any theory that cares about beneficence, whether utilitarian or not. Once you’ve accepted this disconcerting consequence in one case, I just think it’s not that much worse to accept it across the board.

Anyways, that’s my attempt to make the case for being scalar. It’s maybe not so much an argument for the unconvinced, as a report of the considerations that convince me. I haven’t read what Lorenzo will write yet—no matchfixing—so I look forward to seeing what he’ll say.

First Principles

First principles thinking applied to the chaos of modern life.

By Lorenzo Elijah, PhD

Dr. John “No-Good” Evil has trapped Alice’s trusty friend Bob in one of his two Boxes Of Doom (patent pending), which will gruesomely kill him to death, unless Alice acts fast. She can stop one of the Boxes of Doom from carrying out its horrible task by pressing one of two buttons in front of her—but doing so will disable the other button, mutilating whatever’s inside the corresponding box. Luckily Alice has a hint: Before setting up this moral dilemma for Alice, Dr. John “No-Good” Evil rolled a six-sided die. If he rolled 1 to 5, he’d put Bob in the left box, but if he rolled a 6, he’d put him in the right. Oh, and one more detail: On the fateful roll, Dr. John “No-Good” Evil did in fact roll a 6, meaning Bob is in the right box.

What should Alice do? Should she stop the left box or the right box?

There are perfectly good arguments for either option:

1. She should stop the left box. After all, her rational credence in Bob being in the left box is 5/6, so for all she knows, it’s much more likely that she’ll save Bob by stopping the left one. Anything else would be irresponsible.

2. She should stop the right box. After all, Bob is in fact in the right box, so stopping that box will save Bob. Since what she should do is save bob, she ought to stop the right box.

Compelling cases! However, I hope the reader shares my sense that two people arguing over this question would not really be disagreeing much, but would be engaged in a sort of verbal dispute. Specifically, they’d each be operating with a different sense of the word “should”:

The first sense tracks an idea of responsibleness. You should do what it’d be morally responsible for you to do—what you should do for all you know.

The second tracks an idea of accuracy. You should do the things that actually best achieve morality’s aims, whether or not you know what it is.

To be sure, you might think that one of these is more correct than the other—that there is a preferred sense of should. In that case people can disagree about which sense this is, making the verbal dispute substantive. Still, it’s valuable to disambiguate these senses. Especially when we turn to epistemology.

II.

There’s a debate in epistemology that resembles this one quite a bit: The debate between Internalists and externalists about justification.

Internalists hold that justification supervenes on internal states of agents. In other words, that your degree of justification in any beliefs depends only on what you “have access to” in your own mind or internal states, and if we hold this fixed, whatever goes on outside you doesn’t matter. So you and a brain in a vat copy of you will have the same degrees of justification, even though one of you is a lot more accurate than the other.

Externalists deny this, and claim that justification also depends on external factors—such as accuracy—at least to some degree. The paradigmatic case here is reliabilism, which holds that a belief is justified to the extent that it’s formed by a reliable belief-forming process—i.e. one that generates a good ratio of true to false beliefs.

To your great surprise, I’ll now suggest that what we have here is a verbal dispute; and one that parallels the one from above. The Internalists are operating with an idea of responsible believing, where you should believe what’s most likely to be true given what you have access to. And of course, externalists have an idea of accurate believing, where you should do what will actually land you the best ratio of true to false beliefs (or something along those lines).

Once we see this, we can see that both positions can be true at the same time. It really is the case that you and your BIV twins are Justified_internalist in believing the same things, even if you’re not Justified_externalist in believing the same things. Both can be true at the same time, and it just comes down to what standard we’re operating with.

Read more

I was originally just gonna comment on the post, but my comment grew and grew, and at some point I decided “screw it, let’s just exploit this for Content.”

I.

Anyways, BSB offers an analogy from Philippa Foot to address the argument:

For any particular oak tree out there, we can ask if it has good roots. [...] whatever that answer is, we can be sure it’ll have something to do with the positive role those roots play in the health and flourishing of oak trees as a species. At the very least, good roots will need to fully penetrate the soil, absorb water and nutrients, keep the tree stable, and otherwise help the oak tree thrive.

[...] imagine a pair of oak trees growing on the site of an old chemical factory. The first has robust roots that can draw plenty of water from deep underground, while the second has stunted roots that barely reach below the surface. [...] the aquifer below is now highly toxic; as a result, the oak tree with deep roots ends up being poisoned, while the one with shallow roots can hang on by surviving exclusively on fresh rainwater.

Does the oak tree that survived have good roots? Intuitively, it seems like the answer is still no. Having withered roots turned out to be good for the tree, of course, but that doesn’t mean the roots themselves were good. [...] when you judge the roots as roots, they’re still bad ones, even if their badness just happened to stave off something worse.

He then goes on to argue that virtue ethics just involves extending this commonsense judgement to actions as well: Just as we might say that roots are good when they are strong and deep, whether or not contingent circumstances make such roots counterproductive, we can say that actions are good insofar as they're virtuous. What constitutes a good tree doesn't depend on what leads it to survive in some random marginal case, but what generally promotes its flourishing. Similarly, we shouldn't judge acts by what outcomes they happen to secure, but by whether they're good as acts.

II.

Now, I of course don’t think this works. My most fundamental disagreement with this whole approach is that it just seems to have a much too inflationary view of normativity, and takes our metaphorical and shorthand talk at face value as fundamentally true.

Sure, I can say that good oak tree roots are good insofar as they’re sturdy and strong, etc. That’s a very natural way to speak about oak trees, as it’s quite rare for this not to be true, and so we’ll naturally build a strong association. But it’s no more than a generally useful way of talking!

Similarly I can say that it’s good for a pencil to be sharp. I can imagine a case where I’m writing on very soft paper, so that a sharp pencil would poke through it, meaning a dull pencil would be better for writing here. In this case it might feel weird to say that the dull pencil is the better pencil. But surely we wouldn’t say that this is because the sharper pencil is really better in some deep sense! I hope we can all agree on that? The reason we make pencils is to write with, and to the extent that some pencil is better for writing on soft paper, it’s better for being a pencil in that situation, whether or not it feels weird to say that it’s the better pencil

That’s the most glowing endorsement I can give of the virtue ethical judgements in these cases: That it feels weird to say the other thing. But that’s a purely linguistic pull. I wouldn’t want to base my ethics on what feels weird to say in certain circumstances. In ethical deliberation, I base my judgements on what I intuitively judge to be right or wrong, not what I intuitively judge that it would be weird or not to call right or wrong—not on my intuitions about word use.

This has always been a stone in my shoe when I listen to virtue ethicists explain their views: It seems to me that we are equivocating on what we mean with “good.” There is one sense of “good,” which is judging how well something satisfies a certain goal. I can say that a fan is good to the extent that it can cool me down efficiently and quietly. Similarly, to the extent that I’m inclined to read teleology into nature, I can say that organisms are good to the extent that they satisfy their biologically given goals or whatever.

But these kinds of judgements are at best metaphorical in comparison to what I take myself to be talking about in ethics. In ethics I’m talking about what’s good and right in itself—not relative to some stipulated goal, but simpliciter. Saying that a pencil is good is something like a metaphorical extension of this concept—like how I might say that a river has a mouth. And that’s the virtue ethicists conceit! It runs with our intuitive linguistic judgements about what makes sense to say.

III.

A deflationary view can explain why we’d come to these judgements perfectly well: In the vast majority of circumstances, having deep solid roots is “better for the tree” (in the sense of promoting its health, survival, and reproduction or whatever). But we don’t have to say that there really are any deeper facts about the goodness of tree roots other than these ways of talking, and I just don’t see why you would.

Similarly, a consequentialist can give a perfectly good account of why we should think that virtuous characteristics are good: They are generally good, and insofar as someone tries to achieve greater good by being vicious, chances are they’ll fail. So our intuitive judgement that being cruel to achieve greater good constitutes a bad action is correct in one sense. It really is a bad action according to the generally useful heuristic generalization. But it’s also wrong in another sense, since it’s false according to the underpinning theory.

I’m sort of reminded of Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Similarly when the heuristic becomes the theory, it ceases to be a good theory. And that seems to me to be exactly what’s going on here. Virtue ethics taps into our heuristics about what’s a good X, and when we come to consider some out of distribution case, a conflict arises: The heuristic tells us that we have a bad X, but the reasons that actually ground that heuristic theoretically tells us that it’s a good X.

I suspect that someone sympathetic to virtue ethics will insist that there is importance to the sense in which we can say that the oak tree is good, beyond being a useful linguistic generalization—and they might even accuse me of question-begging and assuming the deflationary view for good measure. That’s well and good, and what I have said is not really a direct rebuttal of the virtue ethical judgements. Rather it’s a kind of debunking or undercutting story: We can account for all of these judgements without invoking them as fundamental. And so, if you have a deflationary temperament like myself, you should not take them to be fundamental.

IV.

Anyways, let’s suppose that all of what I’ve said so far is wrong, and there really is a true, good, and deep sense in which an oak tree is good insofar as it has roots, beyond that just being the natural linguistic generalization. And let’s also say that this goes for actions: Actions are good insofar as they’re virtuous.

I don’t think this lands us virtue ethics. It does land us the view that actions are good just in case they’re virtuous. But in that case I’ll just say that we should not always take the good actions. The sense of “good action” that virtue ethics has developed here is separate from what we should do, basically.

Let’s consider the oak example again. We might accept that “yeah, the stunted oak tree is a worse oak tree.” Fine. But if I’m deciding what tree to plant, I’d better plant the stunted one. The other tree might be better as an oak tree, but insofar as I care about oak trees, I should just plant the worse one. Being a good oak tree isn’t worth a whole lot in this case.

Similarly, let’s grant that the virtuous action is the action that’s best as an action, and that virtue doesn’t overlap with consequentialism. Still, we can then just say that I should take the bad action because that actually brings about the best consequences. As with oak trees, being a good action qua action just seems to me to come apart from what action we should take, and if the point was quelling our worries about why we should prefer to be virtuous when it leads to worse consequences, it seems like more has to be said.

Again, one might be tempted to repeat the philosopher’s favorite mantra and say that I’m begging the question, since I’m assuming that we’re already on board with the consequentialist judgement. But this would be misreading the dialectical context: BSB was supposed to offer us a reply to the objection that it’s strange why we would do the thing that brings about worse outcomes, just because it’s virtuous. I strongly assume that anyone posing this objection would at least already be a little bit inclined to agree with the consequentialist principles. I have given a reason to think that BSB’s sense of “good act” misses what we were talking about when we were inclined to consequentialism, meaning we should just stick to our consequentialist guns. Obviously if you were not already inclined against virtue ethics, this won’t be that persuasive to you.

V.

I also have an almost entirely separate line of objection. BSB mentions that what constitutes good roots shouldn’t depend on external circumstances, but just on the roots themselves. At the same time, the sort of virtue ethics he proposes would pretty clearly have to say that what’s good and right depends upon external circumstances too in some sense. At least, anything else would be pretty implausible. If God created the universe with no history and just a bunch of matter arranged oak-tree-wise, I’d think it crazy to say that it’d be better for it to have one sort of roots rather than another. In that case what’s good for something really does depend on external circumstances--specifically the evolutionary history of the thing.

Now obviously I assume he wasn’t intending to be absolutely strict when he said that it shouldn’t depend on external circumstances—that’s not my objection. Rather it’s that saying that goodness depends on species or something like that will require some very arbitrary-seeming line-drawing.

If oak trees had lived for 1 million years in the toxic waste world, it’d presumably start being good for them to have short roots. Being short would be constitutive of being good oak roots. But then you’re gonna have to give some rules for when beneficial traits start to become good in themselves—what’s long enough, what population do we take as a reference class, which percentage of that population has to be benefitted, etc.?

My point is not that this can’t be done in a way that will capture our intuitive judgements more or less, but that—to me at least—it’s maximally implausible that normative reality would fundamentally depend on these sorts of rules for drawing the boundaries of species and what’s “typically good” for them. How we classify beings into species or whatever just doesn’t matter for what’s good for them.

Suppose I turned out to be an alien from a species with a very different evolutionary environment where having short crooked legs and foul breath was very “virtuous” according to our criteria. I had just been planted here on earth when I was very young. Would it then be good for me to get short-crooked-leg surgery, and to start eating raw garlic all day long? Should I do these things? No! Obviously not! But I don’t see how the sort of account of virtue that BSB is proposing wouldn’t fall prey to this kind of case.

A deflationary view can give a perfectly principled account of this: It just depends on our vague linguistic heuristics for when we judge that something has gone on “long enough” to be the new normal, or something like that. The trouble starts when we have to accept that our judgements here are true in any deeper sense than linguistic convention.

BSB also seems to suggest that the consequentialist judgement depends on external circumstances in a bad way, but I actually think the consequentialist judgements depend on them in a virtuous way (badum).

Any theory should say that what you should do depends on external circumstances in this sense: The descriptive circumstances you find yourself in should be taken as input in your moral deliberation and affect the output of what you should do. This is the reason, we might say, why a consequentialist would say that the roots being short for the toxic tree is good strictly speaking (running with the metaphor.

There is also another way in which moral deliberation can depend on external circumstances, which is that the principles of moral deliberation themselves depend fundamentally on external context factors. Virtue ethics will, it seems, also have this sort of dependence, and I think it’s a much more vicious sort. Obviously you can have context-sensitive mid-level heuristics, and consequentialism would support that, but I find it extremely implausible that the fundamental moral principles would be context-dependent in this way.

The reason it would be implausible is exactly due to the alien-style cases from above. Having moral principles depend intrinsically on external context means that you can create cases where everything about an action or a creature stay the same, but we change some of the external factors in a way that doesn’t bear on these. And this would affect what would be right or good in the case. Bonkers!

VI.

As mentioned, this post is more an overgrown comment than a proper post, and was quite quickly slapped together. So excuse me if there are some sloppy parts, or if there are good virtue ethical responses to these objections that I haven’t considered.

BSB’s post was good and worth reading—I definitely thought it gave a good exposition of some of the motivations behind virtue ethics—and I think it’s fun that there’s a small wave of virtue ethics Discourse going around. That said, you can probably tell that I don’t find virtue ethics particularly compelling. I can see how one might find the arguments convincing, and I can see how the theory can be made internally consistent and plausible and whatnot. But honestly I don’t personally feel the pull towards it at all, and it just seems to be talking about a different kind of normativity than what I take myself to be talking about when I’m deliberating about ethics.

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Fake Noûs

Reasonable thoughts about philosophy, politics, and other interesting stuff.

By Michael Huemer