Is everyone equal?

It's a fundamental tenant of modern liberal societies that all humanity is equal in some major sense of the word. Perhaps this means that their lives are of equal worth etc. Obviously people are different when it comes to things like intellectual ability, physical ability, physical morphology, and psychological profile and disposition. These are clearly not up for debate. But the law and traditional morality has always considered one life as equal to another in some set of moral senses.

However, in this post I'd like to question this assumption. What can these qualities be? Some ineffable sense of humanity which everyone has in mere virtue of their humanity? This is not plausible for aliens or artificially created conscious beings may lack humanity yet their lives have all the value of humans lives. So that suggestion of some nebulous "humanity" which all humans have and makes it so that all of us are equal seems dubious. For whatever quality one may have, it may vary between people. With regard to virtues and vices, people are different like anything else. Think about animals. Must liberal egalitarians maintain that animals are not equal to humans in basic worth; that a human's life is worth more, that it is a bigger tragedy for a human to die or to suffer than an animal. I suspect that even most animal rights activists believe this. Given the choice to between an arbitrary human being and an arbitrary cat or lobster to avoid some great harm but not both, most animal rights activist will choose the human to avoid the harm. Human lives are simply worth more they will say which isn't to say that non human animal lives are worth nothing. Now people probably think this because humans have more capabilities more potential or have richer mental lives than other creatures. Thus they reason, human rights are more important. Human lives are more important. Human suffering etc. Of course this is not always the case; some intelligent animals such as great apes and dolphins and elephants probably have more capabilities and richer inner mental lives than severely retarded people.

However, if the value of a life is dependent on these factors (capabilities, richness of mental lives, etc) and not some intangible "humanity" then human beings individually vary in these qualities from one person to the next just as humanity vary from other species though in smaller degrees. So it seems that at least somewhat plausibly that human lives can vary in their basic value with some lives worth more. This seems more plausible to me given certain examples. Surely the lives of moral saints are worth more than Nazis? Gandhi's life, his suffering, his basic well-being is of more concern than Hitlers is it not?

However, though this may be all well and true, it doesn't mean that the law ought to respect it for practical concerns. Because it is too difficult to judge the worth of lives, the law may nbot be the right place to adjudicate and all lives ought by the law to weigh all human lives equally. Things like organ donation, allocation of health, economic and other resources ought to follow the egalitarian basic rule of thumb despite acknowledging that it is morally false.

Is pain "intrinsically" bad?

In the last post, I mentioned that Shelly Kagan said (in passing) in his article published in the Chronicle that pain was an intrinsic bad. I've seen other philosophers say this too but I have yet to see a defense of it.

What about for very very evil people? Is pain intrinsically bad when experienced by these people? Maybe intuitions defer here but I think mine suggest that pain maybe intrinsically good for the very evil. Perhaps that's because I tend to have more retributive intuitions than most?

Why is death bad?

This question seems like it would have an obvious answer and yet philosophers have struggled to provide an adequate answer. This is because many of the answers that common sense and from traditional philosophy has supplied gives incoherent or very problematic answers.

Shelly Kagan works in this little studied area of ethics. See here for an interesting article by him published in the the Chronicle which tries to general outline the problems for the different accounts of why death is bad. He supplies and defends a deprivation account of death in his latest book but does not offer significant defense of his own views in the Chronicle article.

The deprivation account is a comparative account. It basically says that what is bad about death is all the goods that one would not get to enjoy when dead (similar to the opportunity cost of the economists).

Kagan says that unlike pain which is intrinsically bad, death is a comparative or relative bad. He then provides some challenges to this view which I think are quite damaging to that view and I am not sure how Kagan is able to surmount them in his book since he does defend it. I also think that if you are to gives such an account, you may have to also supply a calculus which includes the bads and goods of life instead of just adding up all the good one misses in death. I haven't seen anyone do that so far in talking about the badness of death which is odd. The negatives may outweigh the positives for many people in the world but it is hard to say that death is not bad for these people. The death seems to be bad even if the accounting of the positives versus the negatives in their lives would have came out in the net negative unless that net negative is so unusually bad that they themselves wish they had not gone on living. Some philosophers have argued that for almost all human lives, the bad far outweighs any good of living. So not being born is preferable but on a deprivation view, this may imply (with some additional supporting arguments of course) that death is preferable to life.

I have my own rough views on this topic which I'd like now to sketch out. It is a very tentative view and I'm not sure if people have advanced similar views before as I'm not familiar with the literature.

I will call my view the fractured-self view (I wish I was a better poet because the name sounds clumsy to me). It is similar to the deprivation view in that it is also a comparative conception of death but it does not focus on the goods that are deprived from death.

Rather it focuses on what the death does to the self. I believe that much of our conception of ourselves are grounded in our core principles and values and our most valued projects. In fact, I believe that our major life projects fundamentally encapsulate our principles and values and thus are expressions of the self.

Our major life projects are to fulfill certain roles, professional, familial, moral, artistic, spiritual, etc. When we die, these projects which reflect our principles, our values and thus expressions of our most fundamental self go unfulfilled. We have no prospects of completing them; indeed, not even the opportunity to attempt to.

That is what is tragic about death. It fractures us in a most fundamental way. Had we lived we would have sought to complete these life projects. So the reason death is bad is because it is bad compared to a counterfactual (the life had the dead individual survived). I believe this view avoids some of the major problems Kagan says have outlined and that of his own views. For example, if non existence is bad because it deprives us of the goods of living, why do we not view the nonexistence before death as just as bad as the nonexistence after? On my view, because the nature of life projects are always future oriented, non existence in the past does not matter because for the simple fact that we cannot complete a project in the past (backward causation notwithstanding) but we can for future projects if we are alive. It is not the time of our birth that prevents us from completing "projects" before we are born; it is the fundamental causal and nomological structure of the world that does that. There's no tragedy in not being able to do the impossible. That's what accounts for the temporal asymmetry. However, on Kagan's view, this objection is problematic because goods in the past are as good as goods in the future (at least ontologically there doesn't seem to be any reason to view them as different from a value perspective).

My view explains why it is often believed that death for a 90 year old is not as worse as death for a 20 year old. The 20 year old is likely to have many more life projects unfulfilled. The 90 year old, on the other hand, likely would have fulfilled many major life projects and would have very few remaining. She is nearly whole upon her death at 90 whereas the 20 year old's death fractures him in a way that leaves him less than whole. Of course, the 90 year old may still have some projects that go unfulfilled and thus that would explain why it is still somewhat tragic for that nonagenarian to die but just not as tragic as the 20 year old. In short, death prevents us from developing our full selves, being a whole.

But what about newborn babies? Isn't it tragic for them to die even though they are too young to have any projects in mind? Maybe it is the potential life projects that matters most in evaluating the tragedy of a newborn baby's life. A baby has no life projects but they do have the potential or propensity for developing lots of life-projects and the extinguishing of that potential or propensity by death is what is tragic about death for it.

There may be lots of problematic issues for this account of life but prima facie, it seems very plausible to me. I need to think more and harder about what the potential problems are and if they can be overcome. This is a very tentative view for me now. One objection may go on to ask the further question why being less than "whole" or developing into "our full selves" is really that bad? I can only think of responding with what was basically hinted at above; that it is bad because our most fundamental values cannot be realized and that is certainly bad. There's no more explaining that needs to be done to explain why things going contrary to our basic values and principles is bad (for us). We've hit philosophical rock bottom. But this may seem circular or question begging but I can't think of any further justification for my view.

Evolution of morality and money

What does money have in common with morality? Think about money. The original purpose of money may have been as a tool. It is used symbolically and as a stand-in or proxy for more useful items, items that people desire and need. Its sole purpose was a fungible item. Its utility was instrumental. It provides ways to do things that otherwise would be difficult or impossible.

But we all know that today, many people view money as an end in itself (such as misers). Many greedy people take pleasure or utility in making money, hording it, etc. Even some regular people may value some of this money-is-a-good-in-itself trait. They have no plans to spend it, to buy things they desire but the money itself gives them pleasure and happiness. Likewise, loss of that money may constitute grief even if some people have already got all the material items and services they could ever want. Most of us, though, still primarily view money as a means to an end, that is, as a means to obtain goods and services which we directly desire.

Now consider the evolutionary purpose of morality. It may have also served an evolutionary end; that is, the propagation of our species (more specifically our genes). But we have come (and by we, I mean those of us especially concerned with morality such as philosophers and other morally conscious people) to see morality as an end in itself. In other words, we have categoricalized morality (in the sense that Kant was using "categorical"). In viewing it as such, we may have even altered the structure of morality itself. So instead of seeing morality as instrumental (whether it may be as a tool to propagate the species or to propagate our own utility or the utility of the whole human society, etc) we see it as a good in itself. But some of our intuitions about the instrumental aspects of morality are still in play which is why I suspect gives some of the appeal of consequentialist ethics. That appeal may have some evolutionary roots.

But I also suspect that the categorical appeal, perhaps newer as an evolutionary development, may also have its roots in the same way that appeal for money has for the miser, that is, it is also culturally instilled. It becomes the end in itself, the good will of Kant or his categorical imperative, is good regardless of the consequences because morality shifts its values the same way that society shifts their values for goods so that some people value money in itself instead of the things it could buy. Morality becomes categorical instead of hypothetical in the same way that money becomes a direct source of good for many people (misers) and not a means to other ends. A tension between these two different ways of looking at morality is most clearly seen when the categorical and the hypothetical comes apart in practical deliberation as infamous philosophers' examples have often focused on such as in trolley problems and other thought experiments pitting our categorical values against our hypothetical values. I wonder how much of the rift in ethics can be explained by this analogy with money?

In this way, we may feel the tug in two directions. On one hand, we feel the appeal of consequentialism because we still see the instrumental value of morality (the hypotheical imperatives) but we also see that at the other end is categorical value that some actions/character traits/motives are good in themselves the consequences not even relevant to their goodness (an extreme example of this is the famous dialogue between Kant and his friend, Benjamin Constant regarding the morality of lying to save an innocent person's life).  

In saying the things I just said, I want to make clear that I believe that both our categorical and hypothetical intuitions are a result of both evolution and culture unlike perhaps with money. The miser's value in having money is likely purely a cultivated value. He wasn't born with the disposition to value money though he probably was born with the disposition to value certain things that money could buy (food, status, power, shelter, attention from the opposite sex ,etc). But those who favor the categorical values in morality likely have their intuitions both as a result of dispositions given by evolution and culture. Evolution perhaps helped instill values that favored a categorical outlook to avoid certain kinds of rationalizations of immoral behavior (see The Myth or Morality for a defense of this evolutionary perspective on the categorical). But cultures also can instill categorical values (reading Kant can enforce one's innate dispositions to value them, e.g.). Whereas reading, say, Bentham, may enforce our hypothetical values even though we may have some of these intuitions given us by our natural dispositions from evolution.  

So in this way, we may have intuitions both natural and cultivated that pull in different directions and perhaps this may explain why meta-ethical debates are so difficult to resolve.

Weird puzzle about infinite utility

Found this on another blog. The blogger writes:

Imagine a universe containing infinitely many immortal people, partitioned into two "spheres". In one sphere, all the inhabitants live a blissful existence, whereas the members of the other sphere suffer unbearable agony. Now compare the following two variations:

1) Everyone starts off in the blissful sphere. But each day, one more person gets permanently transferred across to the agony sphere, where they reside for the rest of eternity.

2) Everyone starts off in the agony sphere. But each day, one more person gets permanently transferred across to the blissful sphere, where they reside for the rest of eternity.

Which scenario is better? The answer, paradoxically, appears to be "both". At any moment in time, there will be infinitely many people in the original sphere, and only a finite number who have been transferred across. So option 1 is better.

However, each particular person will spend only a finite amount of time in the first sphere, whereas they will spend an eternity in their post-transfer home. So option 2 is better.

[A clarification is in order. As stated, it remains possible for some people to remain forever in their original sphere. (Suppose we assign each person a natural number. Each day we can transfer across the next even-numbered person. Then the infinitely many odd-numbered people never get transferred at all!) So let us stipulate that no-one is "skipped" in this way, and that every individual will indeed get transferred at some point.]

How are we to evaluate the options without falling into paradox?

(I owe this problem to recent discussion with ANU grad students. I think they in turn got it from Alan Hajek)

Here's my solution which I posted on the comments section:

It's an interesting problem that I think has a solution. First of all, as to the question which is "better," the term is ambiguous. "Better" can be used to mean which world has more total utility (from a "god's eye view" or from sub specie aeternitatis). In that case the two worlds are identical. But it could also mean that which world is more rational for one to choose to live in. In that case I think it's the second world. Here's my reasoning.

No matter who you turn out to be in the second world, you will eventually be transferred into the sphere where you will experience an eternity of positive utility. Your experiences of negative utility, no matter how large up to that point just before transfer, will be finite whereas your experiences in the world with positive utility will be infinite so it's rational to choose the second world.

If you had chosen the first world, this would be reversed. No matter who you are, you will eventually be sent to a sphere with infinite negative utility for you. So no matter how much positive utility you experienced prior to being sent there i while still in the first sphere, you will experience an infinite amount of total negative utility.

So choose option two. The paradox as I see it comes from the fact that the two ambiguous uses of "better" can come apart in such scenarios. But that's not surprising for me. There is a similar situation I talked about on my own blog before.

Consider this scenario:

An immortal who has alternating good and bad days (sum of his utility on those days are either positive or negative). His bad days all come on odd numbered days. So days 1, 3, 5, 7,... are all bad and the rest are good days for him where he has +1 utility.

But let's also say that on his bad days, they are a diminishing sequence, say on his first bad day, his summed negative utility is -1 and on his second bad day, -1/2, 3rd bad day, -1/3, 4th day, -1/4 and so on. So we will have a sequence (-1 + -1/2 + -1/3, + -1/4...). As the negative days approach infinity, his negative utility approaches infinity as that series is a divergent series increasing without bound. Thus there will be the same amount of positive vs negative utility in the end for him (both infinite) but only a fool cannot see that this is a very good world to live in. For *any* continuous finite span of time beginning with the first day and is longer than two days, the sum of his utilities for those days will be positive. The longer than span, the more positive it will be. The further he is along his life span, the more positive benefit he will have accrued.

Is life worth living?

This is a provocative article arguing that it is not (at least for humans). I touched on similar topics (here, here, here and here) arguing that the premise David Benatar uses that the accounting of happiness and pleasure versus pain and suffering are the only things to consider in evaluating life is wrong. Benatar's conclusion is that we should stop producing successive generations and effectively end our species's time here on the planet. His argument is surprisingly Schopenhauerian (and even more pessimistic for at least Schopenhauer had a soteriological component to his philosophy!)

But even if we concede for argument sake with Benatar that that accounting is the only criteria for judging the value of life, I still have reservations about his specific supporting arguments in the article. He uses much empirical data from psychology and personal reflection to support his claim that there is bound to be far more bad than good in just about every human life. Consider this extended passage:

Consider pleasures and pains. Most lives contain both, to varying degrees, but there is an unfortunate asymmetry between these that seems to apply to even the best of lives. The upshot of this is that there is much more pain than pleasure. For example, while the most intense pleasures, such as sexual or gustatory ones, are short-lived, the worst pains have the capacity to be much more enduring. Indeed, pleasures in general tend to be shorter-lived than pains. Chronic pain is common, whereas there is no such thing as chronic pleasure.

This is a one dimensional account of pleasures and pains, only looking at duration and not intensity. It is not clear that when intensity is taken into account, the shorter periods of pleasure will make up for the longer but less intense periods of desire/pain. Also, Benatar ignores the fact that people tend to relive (and relish) their sexual conquests and great meals. I've known people, several gourmands, who will go on and on in the most vivid detail about their best meals, reliving them in their minds and displaying with, no doubt to my mind, the highest satisfaction of those memories. The memories of a good meal or a good romp with a fine woman/man last for a life time for many people.

Now consider this passage from Benatar:

Moreover, the worst pains seem to be worse than the best pleasures are good. Anybody who doubts this should consider what choice they would make if they were offered the option of securing an hour of the most sublime pleasures possible in exchange for suffering an hour of the worst pain possible.

This seems positively false. Some drug addicts will endure long periods of intense misery (some have even sold their own children for example) for brief periods of intense pleasure. Also athletes also must endure a long period of pain, exhaustion and let-downs lasting for many years for the small opportunity to experience a relatively brief period of intense pleasure. I'd wager that the calculus of pleasure versus pain is made worthwhile because of the intensity of the pleasure of succeeding in athletic events at the highest level.

Now consider this passage:

Consider how an injury can be incurred in a split second and the effects felt for life. While it is true that we can also avoid an injury in an instant, we do not gain benefits that are comparable in their magnitude and longevity in a mere moment.

I think this passage ignores the psychological literature showing that even the worst injuries, the kinds that we normally think devastating for all those afflicted in regards to their quality of life such as paralysis and blindness are not as devastating as one may think. People who suffered those harms almost always recover their previous level of life satisfaction and happiness after 2-3 months. People are also remarkably resilient in the loss of their children or spouse or other loved ones recovering previous levels of happiness in only 2-3 months and this is common in all cultures. Here's a good paper detailing the research so far on this topic.

Next, Benatar says:

Second, even when desires are fulfilled, this usually occurs only after the exercise of effort. This means that there is a period of time in which the desire is not yet fulfilled. Finally, when desires are eventually fulfilled, the satisfaction is typically only transitory. Satisfied desires give way to new desires. (For example, one is hungry, eats to satiety, but then becomes hungry again.) Thus a relatively small proportion of life is spent satisfied.

I think the argument here ignores the fact that often, the effort and striving in obtaining a goal or object of desire is pleasurable. The details are complicated but it has been known that the act of willing and the active pursuit of a goal that is considered desrable produces the same neurochemicals as when the goal is achieved. These neurochemicals are similar to cocaine (especially dopamine). Consider a artist at work. The act of working towards the production of a piece of art itself produces pleasure independently of the end result. A child's play also produces pleasure in a similar neurochemical pathway. There is no end result here, just the act itself. Often when we desire and actively pursue a goal, the journey is more meaningful and produces far more pleasure than the end result of obtaining the goal. See this book which covers the dopamine mechanism of desire and desire satisfaction.

I also think that Benatar misses all the ambient pleasures of life most notably expressed by the insights of Nietzsche and Zen monks. When Nietzsche says that even the act of willing bodily muscle movements in doing many humdrum actions produces trace amounts of pleasure, he notices something subtle and truthful. There is a small amount of pleasure for example, even in dish washing and floor sweeping or talking before the experience of the pleasure of a job well done or the end satisfaction of a clean house as many house wives and even Zen Monks have noticed and attested to. These pleasures in performing bodily actions in some humdrum action and of speech add up and may cancel or even surpass the persistent ambient (but also mild) dissatisfaction in not getting most of the things one wants Benatar uses to argue his case.

Empirical psychological literature today also suggests that there are some events that give many people a consistent source of pleasure such as a happy marriage, a good education and good friends. It's the gifts that keeps on giving.

I think in the end, Benatar makes interesting points throughout despite my disagreement to the points he raised above. I only want to show that there are considerations that could be made to show that Benatar's accounting is off and that an accurate accounting may be far closer to break even or even on the positive side for many.

Puzzle of the self-torturer revisted

One other thing I want to mention about the "puzzle" is that it assumes that pain is continuous and not noticeably discrete. However pain may have various threshold "steps" and experience of pain as it gradually increases may jump to the next step once it reaches certain thresholds. This would also need to be taken into account and it may be one objection raised to the possible rejoinder to my original response that the increments instead be in increases of pain levels (as opposed to external electric currents in the example).

Also see here for evidence of what I alluded to earlier in that blog about the psychological factors which come into evaluation of pain.

Dimensions

In 1968 Melzack and Kenneth Casey described pain in terms of its three dimensions: "Sensory-discriminative" (sense of the intensity, location, quality and duration of the pain), "Affective-motivational" (unpleasantness and urge to escape the unpleasantness), and "Cognitive-evaluative" (cognitions such as appraisal, cultural values, distraction and hypnotic suggestion).^[40] They theorized that pain intensity (the sensory discriminative dimension) and unpleasantness (the affective-motivational dimension) are not simply determined by the magnitude of the painful stimulus, but “higher” cognitive activities (the cognitive-evaluative dimension) can influence perceived intensity and unpleasantness. Cognitive activities "may affect both sensory and affective experience or they may modify primarily the affective-motivational dimension. Thus, excitement in games or war appears to block both dimensions of pain, while suggestion and placebos may modulate the affective-motivational dimension and leave the sensory-discriminative dimension relatively undisturbed." (p. 432) The paper ends with a call to action: "Pain can be treated not only by trying to cut down the sensory input by anesthetic block, surgical intervention and the like, but also by influencing the motivational-affective and cognitive factors as well." (p. 435)

The old children's story of the frog in the pot who is slowly being boiled alive reminds me of this self torturer puzzle. The frog may suddenly feel a sharp rise in pain once some threshold (psychological or otherwise) is reached and jump right out instead of being boiled alive. That would seem realistic and explanatory and thus dissolve the puzzle of the self torturer as well.

Indeed there is some evidence from animal experiments that verify the threshold answer.

In 2002 Dr. Victor H. Hutchison, Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma, with a research interest in thermal relations of amphibians, said that "The legend is entirely incorrect!". He described how the critical thermal maximum for many frog species has been determined by contemporary research experiments: as the water is heated by about 2 °F, or 1.1 °C, per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if the container allows it.^[3][21]

Puzzle of the self-torturer?

Look at this passage from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on dynamic choice.

Suppose someone — who, for reasons that will become apparent, Quinn calls the self-torturer — has a special electric device attached to him. The device has 1001 settings: 0, 1, 2, 3, …, 1000 and works as follows: moving up a setting raises, by a tiny increment, the amount of electric current applied to the self-torturer's body. The increments in current are so small that the self-torturer cannot tell the difference between adjacent settings. He can, however, tell the difference between settings that are far apart. And, in fact, there are settings at which the self-torturer would experience excruciating pain. Once a week, the self-torturer can compare all the different settings. He must then go back to the setting he was at and decide if he wants to move up a setting. If he does so, he gets $10,000, but he can never permanently return to a lower setting. Like most of us, the self-torturer would like to increase his fortune but also cares about feeling well. Since the self-torturer cannot feel any difference in comfort between adjacent settings but gets $10,000 at each advance, he prefers, for any two consecutive settings s and s+1, stopping at s+1 to stopping at s. But, since he does not want to live in excruciating pain, even for a great fortune, he also prefers stopping at a low setting, such as 0, over stopping at a high setting, such as 1000

This passage as stated states that the increments to be increased are of the devices settings (i.e. amount of electric current). But the "puzzle" seem to arise when we consider increments of degrees of pain.

But pain is dependent not simply on one factor such as external stimulation from electric currents. It is a function also of psychological factors. Psychological experiments over the years have shown that individual's pain tolerance and subjective evaluation of the degree of pain vary considerably based on the individual's state of mind at the time. People may experience more pain and tolerate more pain such as electric shocks or having their hand immersed in ice water simply by changing a state of mind either self-induced or by the experimenter or through some uninduced capricious change of the state of the mind. Thus the agent may experience two shocks with very small differences in electric current as drastically different in subjective pain.

So the agent may not be able to predict when his state of mind changes for the worse making him vulnerable to experience an intransitive and unbearable rise in pain in that incremental series of electric current. When it does happen it will be experienced as a pain that is noticeably greater than the pain resulting from the shock administered immediately before.

I think that many philosophical puzzles of rational choice such as Slote's "Satisficing maximizer" can also be solved by appealing to principles of unpredictability and context instability like I have here.

The value of philosophy

The best response I have heard to the question of why study philosophy, why study questions that have not been adequately answered for thousands of years matter, is given by Michael Sandel. "Because we live the answers everyday."

There are many values to studying the subject. I think the most important on are ethical reasons. But the common objections given include the "fact" that philosophy has not contributed to human knowledge and or human society's development. This is clearly wrong. Here's a list of all that philosophy has contributed in terms of knowledge both directly and indirectly (through methodology developed) and through social change.

Philosophy's contribution to our knowledge:

-Modern economics was first developed by the moral philosopher Adam Smith.

-Psychology, sociology political science all originated from the minds of philosophers.

-Modern work in logic was heavily influenced by philosophers. The truth table in logic e.g. was first seen in the work of a philosopher (1919 by Wittgenstein) which eventually lead to the electronic revolution of the 60s. The earliest development of modal logic is by Aristotle, C.I. Lewis, Ruth Marcus and Saul Kripke, all philosophers.

-Cybernetics, the science of regulatory systems was started by someone with a philosophy PhD (Norbert Weiner).

-Modern linguistics bases much of its work on formal semantics almost exclusively on the works of philosophers of language such as Frege, Russell, Kaplan, Montage, David Lewis and many others.

-The 2005 Nobel Prize for economics went to mathematician Robert Aumann who based his work on economic conventions on the work of David Lewis's notion of "common knowledge".

-The development of modern cognitive science, both its inception and developments within to this day to philosophers.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_scientistsAnd much of decision theory have been developed by philosophers as well.ser.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-are-some-physicists-so-bad-at.html?commentPage=2

This is not mentioning all the knowledge developed in more traditionally understood philosophical areas.

To the shape of society and course of human history:

-Development of democratic theory

-Development of legal theory

-Various economic theories (capitalism, communism etc)

And so forth.

It's not only a myth that philosophy has not contributed to society, it seems to be one of those myths that's the opposite from the truth. Philosophy has had massive influence as my examples show.

Original sin and why it's all hopeless

Imagine a nation of people, call it Eveville. They are a powerful nation with powerful military and are a notoriously cruel people who enjoy torturing their enemies and those under their subjugation. Now this nation is adjacent to another far more peaceful nation, called it Switzerland. Despite the fact that one is aggressive and the other is peaceful these two nations get on well and have forged close economic, cultural, political and social ties (this is made less unlikely by the fact that both countries may share the same religion, culture, language etc).

Eveville wants to invade, subjugate and enslave some small nation in another part of the world which we will call Utopia. However Eveville's evil intentions are found out by Utopians before it takes place. Utopians clearly have a right to protect themselves against such an attack and subsequent gross violation of their rights even if it resorts to deadly force. The freedom lost from slavery is worth dying and killing for I think most will agree. However the people of Utopia are peace-loving and lack the means and weaponry to adequately defend themselves in case of such an attack.

Through some black market dealings, the Utopians were able to attain a nuclear missile. But Unfortunately the only nuke they could get was a cheap one and thus not accurate and it has a .5 chance of exploding in Switzerland.

Let's also say that the Utopians have tried all possible means to 1. resolve the issue diplomatically, 2. tried all means at getting international support to solve the crisis and to shield them, 3. use of threats, 4. tried all means to obtain either less deadly but equally effective weapons or more accurate weapons. All these attempts have failed and they are left with the last resort: either launch the bomb, their only means of defense that will no doubt kill hundreds of thousands of Evevillians if hitting its target, or become slaves to them. Let's also say that if they launch the missile, the aggressive war waged by Eveville is guaranteed to end with a defeat for them. Let's also imagine that the Utopians have only a small window of opportunity to launch because Eveville has nuclear ability and is about to take out the only means of defense available to Utopians through a strike on their only nuclear stockpile but that Utopians have preemptive justification through credible threat from Eveville that they will invade and can now strike at Eveville.

Switzerland obvious does not want to be nuked and if Utopians launch, there's a 50% chance they will be the one's who get fucked. Switzerland is a neutral country and though against Eveville's intentions to enslave others, do not wish to try and force them to stop their practices of enslaving others because that will put them at deadly a conflict with their neighbors.

Since the Swiss are not involved in the threat to Utopians, and are (indirectly) threated by them despite the fact that Utopians do not mean to, it would seem that the Swiss have a right to defend themselves against being potentially attacked by a nuke. They may even be permitted to use deadly force against the Utopians to prevent them from defending themselves against the Evevillians by using the only means which happens to also seriously risks the lives of others.

So now we have a situation, and a tragic one indeed if there ever was one, in which two peaceful nations may, in some weird sense, be permitted to attack each other and commit massive atrocities against each other through no fault of either countries (rather it all stems from the fault of the Evevillians). Knowing that the Swiss may try and prevent them from defending themselves through force, the Utopians may now justly attack the Swiss in turn and vice versa.

Moreover, since the Swiss and the Evevillians are close allies, are the Evevillians now justified in attacking Utopia on the reason that they are protecting their allies from harm? Notice that the original sin in which this vortex of spiraling potential violence spiraled out of is not an actual violation of rights but simply an intention (to enslave and subjugate a people).

I have exaggerated the details obviously but I think many real world situations not only in international law of peoples but also more generalized in common everyday moral situations are analogous to this. That is, from an original sin, we have magnifier effects that affects everyone. As the old Jewish saying goes, when you save a man, you save the whole human race but this seems to be the converse, when you harm a man, you harm the whole human race (or at least many others not apparently associated with that man).

I think there are many real examples of instances where no apparent rights were initially violated or even things obviously wrong committed but that some actions responsible by some peoples created situations in which it was inevitable two groups of people would come to commit massive atrocities against each other and furthermore, it is not clear if any principle of justice will be capable of having a say in the matter.

Consider the ethnic conflicts in Darfur during the early part of the 21st century. Most scholars of the region consider that these ethnic conflicts occurred because the people in the region experienced the worst drought in their recorded history. Moreover, the reason for that drought is mostly agreed to be global warming caused by the carbon emissions mostly from wealthy nations. Due to this drought, many people had significantly reduced agricultural productivity and many groups that relied on raising livestock had to encroach on the land of other groups to maintain their livestock and feed their own people.

Many of the wealthiest nations that have contributed the most to global warming also were the ones that denied these groups assistance when they asked for it before it all came to violent conflict. They argued that they were not obligated to give and offer assistance (which they weren't at least under current international law). This example is slightly different than the one involving Utopians but there is an underlying thread. 1, that often violence spirals out of control and 2. that what makes them spiral in the first place, an original sin, may not actually be a outright obvious rights violation; it may merely be the credible threat of or even less obvious, the gluttonous use and abuse of a public commons (natural resources in the Darfur case) e.g. But the underlying theme is similar; that sometimes hopeless situations where massive atrocities are committed by groups against each other and there is no moral fact of the matter as to who is in the right and who is in the wrong among certain groups and how to begin to solve such a problem. It's just a sad situation for all.

Values and perspectivism

There was once a famous person (forget who) long ago that remarked that if music could some how be recorded and available to everyone, life would be all glory and rose petals for everyone. It would be utopia. But we know that ain't so. The universal availability of music has not made life heaven on earth. As soon as something desired is widely available, its value in our eyes seem to diminish according to some pattern or other of diminishing return. I think behavioral economists have names for this but I don't know what the literature on it is.

Now consider if we are to solve all of the world's most pressing issues of global injustice, energy problems, racism, sexism, etc. Maybe other problems which we may not see as that pressing now would take their place in our valuation systems. We might develop irrational fears of death even from old age or disease, etc. We may even develop whole new neuroses we can imagine fretting over now. Our value structures would change and problems once that pressing might not be seen as such and problems not so pressing relatively speaking. Alternatively people in the future may see our present concerns as neurotically intense or even irrational compared to theirs.

My question is that does this perspectivism threaten the claim that values are objective and non arbitrary? If so How far does it go in that direction? Will we see all our current worries as just neuroses? Maybe all of our values are arbitrary and largely determined by perspective. That would harm claims that go to the heart of the good life it seems by making all conceptions seem trivial.

Life's worth

It seems to go against many of our egalitarian and liberal sensibilities for someone to say that a person's life is inherently more valuable than another's. However, some of our intuitions seem to suggest that we do hold this. Mine for example, in a hypothetical where Confucius's life is compared to the typical Nazi's. I will choose Confucius's life and moreover, I believe that my decision is justified. That is, that Confucius's life is worth more. There may be many situations, plausible ones, that may obtain in real life where lives are in the balance in such a way that we may have to choose (consider who gets a rare vaccine for some disease) which is more worthy of being saved even apart from practical or consequentialist considerations. Now many of us are hesitant to value lives but this may be because of limitations on epistemological considerations and for the fact that most people are relevantly equal on many aspects up for consideration in valuating lives. I suspect that moral worth is paramount in such weighting. If souls were more transparent, our intuitions may not be so egalitarian.

Short story

Inspired by a conversation with Carl on the comments section on one of the posts.

When Cantor was on his death bed, still haunted by the ghost of the continuum hypothesis, the Devil appeared by his bedside. The Devil wanted Cantor's soul and offered him this deal: your soul for the truth of the continuum hypothesis. Cantor agreed on the condition that he stipulates the condition of his time in hell. He wrote his demands in a sealed envelop and gave it to the Devil only to be opened after the Devil tells him the secret that has racked Cantor's professional life. The Devil knew that hell was a place of infinite durations of suffering and knew that Cantor knew this as well so what can Cantor stipulate in his demands that would make this deal not go terribly bad for Cantor? Because there are few logicians and philosophers in hell to enlighten him, the Devil agreed.

The Devil tells Cantor the truth of the Continuum Hypothesis which the Devil stole from God's math notebooks (the Devil could not have came up with the truth of it himself due to his lack of mathematical and logical training). Cantor then dies a happy man with the truth of the CH. While in hell, the Devil sees Cantor and is about to stick his pitchfork into him. Cantor reminds him of their agreement so the Devil opens the envelop to see what stipulation Cantor had for his permanent stay. It read:

1. I am to have one minute of joy without being tortured for every 100 years of being tortured.

2. I am to have all my moments of joy consecutively.

3. I am to start on a minute of joy.

Infinite lives

Imagine a race of immortals. Nothing can kill them; not disease, old age, etc. They are invincible and they also do not go through the normal aging process of decrepitude of the body and mind associated with mortal aging. If they live forever and these beings are like us in all other ways, they will go through the normal vicissitudes of life, the ups and downs, highs and lows, good times and bad times. So such a life in total will include an infinite positive utility and an infinite negative utility. No matter how good a life one lives, so long as some significant repetition of periods of bad times, they will go through an eternity of suffering as well as good times. Do these times cancel out since both times in bad and in good are infinite in duration? Will such a life ever be worth living if we are to believe that what makes life worth living is experiencing as much good (defined as pleasure or happiness here or "utility") and as few bad (sadness, misery, suffering, etc) as possible? In a finite life, once can experience far fewer bad times than good and vice versa but an infinite life, all experiences, good and bad are equal in amount: both infinite in duration.

Also consider that such an immortal, no matter how virtuous he or she is unless she is perfectly virtuous, will inevitably commit an infinite amount of evil as well as good. Will such evil acts and thoughts be canceled out by her good acts and thoughts? It would appear so as well.

Now consider the human race. If the human race lives on forever (and there is almost no chance of that) then the human race will achieve the same amount of overall collective good and bad. It will achieve (unless it all becomes perfectly virtuous after some period of time continuously) an infinite amount of evil and good collective virtue.

Meaning of life again

I posted earlier that what I take to mean when people talk about the "meaning of life" is either the value (or highest significance, etc) of life or, on the other hand, the purpose of life. But sometimes people may have another meaning in mind.

Some may think when they say things like "life does not have meaning" is that there is no non arbitrary or objective narrative structure to life, no grand story of life. More specifically, I've heard that many people who believe in god may think that life has a "narrative" structure created by God and that it is our job to find out what this narrative structure is. It is there independent of our interpretation. It is a grand story of life, complete with beginning, middle filled with some kind of conflict (between good and evil etc) and teleological end. I will call this the hermeneutical understanding of the meaning of life. Finding out this meaning is analogous to finding out the correct interpretation for a Shakespearean play only we are the actors and stage directors that are to be in it. Shakespeare may very well have intended his plays to be interpreted in certain ways as opposed to others. Knowing it helps us to know our roles well perhaps: how to act, what to say, how to say it, etc.

Some people would be deeply upset by the fact that there is no such absolute hermeneutic meaning if it turns out revealed that there's no god-author and they will not be consoled by the existentialists' advice that we should, in some sense, be the authors of our own life story. Those not satisfied with that advice may see this as arbitrary or a "projection" without the absoluteness if divine meaning or some kind of absolute principle that we don't impart on reality.

This kind of thinking makes a linguistic analogy (hermeneutical). However, this understanding of life's meaning simply pushed the problem one step back for even if there is a god and he has intended life be lived and interpreted in a certain way, we may still ask if that way of understanding and living is absolute or arbitrary. In other words, there is a "further question problem." Notice this is analogous to the problem Plato posed about morality in the Euthyphro. As Socrates allegedly said:

"Is the pious (τὸ ὅσιον) loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

This is a moral direction-of-fit problem. Philosophers seem to universally agree that if there is a god or gods, they cannot choose to make whatever they want moral (or pious) much as they cannot make it so that 2+2=5. Anyone, even if god, doubts the truth of that mathematical claim seem not to understand mathematics or be communicating in a different language from us when they doubt that claim. Analogously, they cannot make it so that torturing babies for fun is right. If torturing babies for fun is wrong, it is wrong whether the god(s) believes or loves the fact that it is it is or not. If anyone denies that moral fact, it seems they also not know what moral terms and claims mean or they seem to be using a different language altogether.

If god made the world with an intention in mind as to its hermeneutic meaning, we can always ask if this meaning is arbitrary and if god could have made it otherwise. If it is arbitrary then it is, in a real sense, not absolute and we are back to the arbitrariness of life. The theist does not escape arbitrariness in meaning by appealing to god. If god put in some meaning because it is valuable and not because it becomes valuable by the mere fact of him endorsing it, then god simply factors out of the equation. It is valuable on its own. Even if god had never lived, it would still be valuable to live life according to that interpretation.

Is life worth living for the hedonist?

Those who see life as worth living only if it is a good pleasurable life must ask themselves if they could start over again with life, they would do it again. Life may begin over for them if reincarnation is true. More profanely, will they have good reason to continue to live life as they know it? I take it that just about everyone desire deeply a happy, pleasurable life and few are willing to sacrifice their happiness and pleasure for the life of a moral saint or martyr. But look at history and the world. Is there good probability that you will live such a good life? Though just about all people have tried, there does not seem to be a preponderance of such lives over miserable or boring lives. In fact, the desired life of the hedonist seems to be a rarity and its not a matter of not trying.

Most have tried; but it seems that living such a life is a matter largely of luck. If so, the honest-with-herself hedonist must admit that it would be unwise to go on to live another life (or even to continue with her current life) as prospects that it will turn better for her so that she will live such a life or if she is lucky enough to currently live such a life, not turn bad at some later time is slim. She will also refuse to have children on such conclusions.

But is life worth living? Who will still want to go on living? Who will still have purpose under such bleak prospects? Who will still have meaning and value? It is precisely the Moral Saint or those who try to be one through cultivation.

Be good but not too good

Many wise people like Kant have known that the good tend to suffer far more than their fair share in life. It often costs considerably in terms of suffering to live a just life in an unjust world. People have gone to prison, suffered social costs, lost all their positions, been tortured, and even lost their lives to further a just cause.

This claim that the good tend to suffer far more than is their fair share is not just a cliche but has some odd moral implications. There seems to be some limits to how far we ought to live a virtuous life if that life will harm us. If as many philosophers have thought, we have a moral duty to ourselves to be good to ourselves there may be limits to how moral we ought to be from morality itself. This would be one way morality limits itself. Many philosophers have given such an argument against suicide. We have duty to ourselves to not only be good to ourselves, to treat ourselves fairly but to maintain our lives. If some people are living lives at terrible costs to themselves because they are trying to be the best people they can be in the face of evil, do they have a moral obligation to not live a life that is so harmful? In other words, how much does their moral obligation towards themselves to be fair factor into consideration when deciding what kind of life they should live? Should they be martyrs? That seems to be asking too much if we are to take their obligations to their own lives seriously. Their obligation to their just cause may have to be balanced against their obligation to themselves.

But how do we respond to those who would use this as an argument that we ought to live a virtuous life that would not cost anymore than it is expected of the average person (or no less). If anymore, it would be "unfair" to us. If less than it would be a life that is in some way a life of "moral freeloading." How are we to become better people if we only ought to seek moral mediocrity?

My suggestion against this is that we ought to change our fundamental value structure so that we derive happiness and pleasure from being virtuous itself and displeasure at not being virtuous as much as possible for us individually. In this way, we change, and the pleasure we derive from doing good for its own sake is balanced out by the negative consequences of being virtuous in a unjust world. The burden on our shoulders is lightened by the mere fact of us reorienting our fundamental values so that the costs are balanced by some benefit to ourselves. Many people when they take up a cause reorient their values so that they come to derive pleasure from contributing to a just cause automatically. But often this does not work as many people, I think, do not further just causes as much as they know they should because they are afraid of the social costs. But if they work on consciously valuing certain ethical values in themselves more than they do, they would change their fundamental outlook. Society can further this as Kant suggests by creating and endorsing certain kinds of moral parables that show and celebrate people who have lived virtuous lives all to no benefit to themselves but at considerable costs (they were not rewarded or even recognized for their actions either in their life times or in the after life and suffered greatly). Too often will tell children lies that being good will be rewarded with some benefit when that is often the opposite of the truth. Instead, they should learn to value doing good for itself.

However, no matter how much we try, I believe there are limits to the "wiggle room" in how much we can change our value structure. We are, for the most parts (except for those rare people capable of being happy martyrs), simply constrained by our nature to not go behind certain limits and be too selfless coming at a cost to ourselves. To each his own, but I have no doubt that most people are capable of far more reevaluation of their fundamental values than is the case.

The parable of Jesus

Many secular people who admire the story of Jesus will point out that it is a moral parable. It is the story of someone that gave his life for the sins of others and was kind despite the huge costs incurred to himself. It is about redemption. But can our sins be redeemed by punishing someone else, even someone who is purely good? It seems immoral top punish innocent people on behalf of the guilty. Sins don't seem to be transferable. Sometimes some minor sins are for example, fines can usually be paid by the friends and family of the guilty and thus, the guilty incur no harm as a result of the punishment. We seem to have no problem with that kind of transferability of punishment. David Lewis wrote an interesting paper on the topic called Do We Believe in Penal Substitution?. I personally find the redemption parable uninteresting and quite morally barbaric. Punishing a good man for the sins of the sinful seem to be a immoral act.

That aside, however, I believe that there is an alternate interpretation of the story that warrants moral attention. I make an analogy to the ubermensch of Nietzsche. The ubermensch is someone that would choose, out of his own will, a life of great challenge and struggle, if only to exercise his strength, courage and engage in a creative life if only for the sake of the challenge. There is triumph in the struggle and it's more important in Nietzsche's scheme of things to live a beautiful but tragic life than a happy or pleasant life if the later life does not offer the opportunity for struggle and greatness. The virtues of strength and courage and creativity are paramount for Nietzsche. Being all powerful might even prevent someone, say a god, from living such a great life because omnipotence forbids the possibility of true struggle and the exhibition of heroic courage which comes in the face of one's own peril when one struggles against something greater than himself. This is why Nietzsche always thought the Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus's claim that the gods have good reason to be jealous of man to be insightful and true. This is one kind of paradox which I will call a "paradox of omnipotence." Jean-Luc Godard explored another similar theme in his Hélas Pour Moi. In this film, God takes over the body of a man in order to seduce his wife. It seems that only a man, in all his finitude and imperfection can truly win the love of a woman. A god may manipulate her or coerce her into loving him but he cannot win her love the old fashioned way, i.e., through charm, conversation, etc, all the mere mortal appeals.

Now let's imagine a perfectly moral being. He happens to be all powerful as well. Now I suggest that there is a similar paradoxical limiting of one's virtues by being omnipotent in moral virtues as well (instead of the Nietzschean virtues of strength, courage, and creativity which are not traditionally thought of as moral virtues). How does being omnipotent limit oneself here? Well, it seems to me that only the mortal, the finite, are truly capable of things like moral courage, free will, moral responsibility and so on. An all powerful and all good god cannot be truly morally courageous (what has he got to be justifiably afraid of? What can possibly harm him?). Courage is the overcoming of justified fear through strength of character and will. Without the possibility of justifiable fearing anything, courage is impossible. God may only be "courageous" in a irrational sense that he overcomes an irrational fear. God can seem to do no wrong either and may not seem to have a choice in doing evil as he is determined by his omnibenevolence and his other attributes.

Thus it seems to me that God, or any moral ubermensch, if he is truly all powerful and all good, would necessarily choose to limit his powers by some kind of incarnating himself into mortal form and suffer through the (moral) trials and tribulations of someone that is put into dire situations to test and practice his own moral virtues. This would then be a parable to show that the possibility of being truly good and decent necessarily rests on our finitude. I think that this is an extremely far fetched interpretation of the Bible and it is likely not how it was intended to be read by any of its writers. But for me to see any value in the Bible at all, with all its barbarity, I would have to see it this way.

Does ought imply can?

Some philosophers think so. After all, what would be the point of demanding someone ought to do something if he can't? But it seems to me that the story of Sisyphus at least interpreted by Camus challenges this. There are somethings you ought to do even if it is doomed to failure. Perhaps building a perfectly just society or becoming a moral sage are two of these impossible ends.

"flourishing metric"

In the previous post I suggested that what I called a "flourishing metric" be used to compare when something is over or under valued in the market outside of the value or price set by supply and demand forces in the market. I realized that one way to do with may be to work off of Martha Nussdaum's "capabilities approach" which is built on original Sen's idea. Both Nussbaum and Sen are influenced by the Aristotelian notion of flourishing.

So I decided to look up Nussbaum's capabilities approach to refresh my memory after having been years since I've read her "Frontiers of Justice." Nussbaum has a open list of ten or so "capabilities" that defines human flourishing. I wikied "capabilities approach" and it turns out that economists are actively trying to obtain such a metric.

Perhaps things like housing can be assessed to their objective quantifiable value based on the contribution they contribute to flourishing or, relatedly, our "capabilities". Any value over and above that value may be construed as over evaluation (such as due to greedy profiteering, etc)