Posts on: Ethics
In "Quasi-Realism is Fictionalism" (Lewis 2005), Lewis seems to
suggest that Blackburn's quasi-realism about moral discourse is a kind
of fictionalism. The suggestion is bizarre. Has Lewis made silly
mistake? (Spoiler: No.)
Let's compare what quasi-realism and fictionalism say about moral
discourse.
Blackburn's quasi-realism (as presented, e.g., in Blackburn 1984,
ch.6 and Blackburn 1993) is a brand of
expressivism. According to Blackburn, moral statements like (1) don't
serve to describe special facts, but to express moral attitudes.
Standard decision theory studies one-shot decisions, where an agent faces a single choice. Real decision problems, one might think, are more complex. To find the way out of a maze, or to win a game of chess, the agent needs to make a series of choices, each dependent on the others. Dynamic decision theory (aka sequential decision theory) studies such problems.
There are two ways to model a dynamic decision problem. On one approach, the agent realizes some utility at each stage of the problem. Think of the chess example. A chess player may get a large amount of utility at the point when she wins the game, but she plausibly also prefers some plays to others, even if they both lead to victory. Perhaps she enjoys a novel situation in move 23, or having surprised her opponent in move 38. We can model this by assuming that the agent receives some utility for each stage of the game. The total utility of a play is the sum of the utilities of its stages.
Suppose there are no objective moral facts. It's tempting to think that this calls for a special semantics for moral language. Perhaps moral statements somehow express moral attitudes rather than describe the world. The trouble is that moral statements seem to behave like ordinary descriptive statements. Not only can we freely conjoin moral and descriptive statements. We can even use the same words – say, 'you ought to leave' – to express a moral attitude but also to report the implications of some contextually salient norms. It would be nice if we could use a standard descriptivist semantics for 'ought' statements even if we don't believe in objective normative facts.
A common worry about mathematical platonism is how we could know about an independent realm of mathematical facts. The same kind of worry arises for moral realism: if there are irreducible moral facts, how could we have access to them?
Benacerraf (1973) put the problem in terms of causation. Knowledge of maths, he suggested, would require some kind of causal connection between the mathematical facts and our mathematical beliefs, but modern platonists typically don't believe in such a connection.
Let's return to my recent explorations into the formal structure of reasons. One important approach that I haven't talked about yet is that of Dietrich and List, described in Dietrich and List (2013a), Dietrich and List (2013b), and Dietrich and List (2016).
A few thoughts on Sher (2019), which I found advertised in Nair (2021).
This (long and rich) paper presents a formal model of reasons and their weight, with the aim of clarifying how different reasons for or against an act combine.
Sher's guiding idea is to measure the weight by which a reason supports an act in terms of the effect that coming to know the reason would have on the act's desirability.
Often there are many reasons for and against a certain act or belief. How do these reasons combine to an overall reason? Nair (2021) tries to give an answer.
Nair's starting point is a little more specific. Nair intuits that there are cases in which two equally strong reasons combine to a reason that is twice as strong as the individual reasons. In other cases, however, the combined reason is just as strong as the individual reasons, or even weaker.
To make sense this, we need to explain (1) how strengths of reason can be represented numerically, and (2) under what conditions the strengths of different reasons add up.
Harsanyi (1955) famously showed that a few seemingly harmless assumptions, when combined, entail the utilitarian doctrine that the goodness of a state of the world is the sum of the state's goodness for each individual. In other words, moral value is additive across people.
Recently, I've argued that value is additive on the grounds that its components are "separable", in the sense that if two states s and s' differ only with respect to some components, then the betterness ranking of s and s' does not depend on the respects in which s and s' agree. Debreu (1960) showed that, under some modest further assumptions, separability entails additive representability. I've never had a close look at Debreu's theorem, since the result isn't surprising.
If some ideal is impossible to reach, should we get as close to the ideal as we can?
It's easy to come up with apparent counterexamples. Lipsey and Lancaster (1956) are sometimes said to have proved that getting as close to the ideal as we can is not the best option. Have they really?
Wiens (2020) helpfully summarizes the main result of Lipsey and Lancaster and explains how it applies outside economics. (The Lipsey and Lancaster paper is all about tariffs and taxes and Paretian conditions.)
A few thoughts on Brown (2014) and Brown (2020) and the composition of value.
Some propositions (or properties, but let's run with propositions) have value. They are reasons to act one way rather than another. We may ask how this kind of value distributes over the space of propositions.
Since logically equivalent propositions plausibly have the same value, we can picture the propositions as regions in logical space – sets of possible worlds. Now how is the value of a region related to the value of other regions – to its subregions, for example? This is the question Campbell Brown raises in Brown (2014) and Brown (2020).
When something is good, or desirable, or a reason, then this is usually because it has some good (desirable, etc.) features. The thing may also have bad features, but if the thing is good then the good features outweigh the bad features. How does this weighing work? I'd like to say that the total goodness of a thing is always the sum of the goodness of its features. This "additive" view seems to be unpopular in both ethics and economics. I'll try to defend it.
I first need to state the view more precisely.
To begin, I assume that there are ultimate bearers of value. If we're talking about personal desire, this means that there are some things an agent desires "intrinsically" or "non-derivatively". Being free from pain might be a common example. If you desire to be free from pain then this is typically not because you really desire something else, and you think being free from pain is either a means to the other thing or evidence for the other thing. You simply desire being free from pain, and that's the end of the story.
Consider a world where eating doughnuts is illegal and where everyone
thinks it is OK to torture animals for fun. Suppose Norman at w is
eating doughnuts while torturing his pet kittens. Is he violating the
laws? Is he doing something immoral?
In one sense, yes, in another, no. His doughnut eating violates the
laws of w, but not the laws of our world. Conversely,
his kitten torturing violates a moral code accepted at our world, but
not a code accepted at w.
I've been reading about objective consequentialism lately. It's
interesting how pervasive and natural the use of counterfactuals is in
this context: what an agent ought to do, people say, is whichever
available act would lead to the best outcome (if it were
chosen). Nobody thinks that an agent ought to choose whichever act
will lead to the best outcome (if it is chosen). The
reason is clear: the indicative conditional is information-relative,
but the 'ought' of objective consequentialism is not supposed to be
information-relative. (That's the point of objective
consequentialism.) The 'ought' of objective consequentialism is
supposed to take into account all facts, known and unknown. But while
it makes perfect sense to ask what would happen under condition
C given the totality of facts @, even if @ does not imply C, it
arguably makes no sense to ask what will happen under condition
C given @, if @ does not imply C.
Many accounts of deontic modals that have been developed in response
to the miners puzzle have a flaw that I think hasn't been pointed out
yet: they falsely predict that you ought to rescue all the miners.
The miners puzzle goes as follows.
Ten miners are trapped in a shaft and threatened by
rising water. You don't know whether the miners are in shaft A or
in shaft B. You can block the water from entering one shaft, but you
can't block both. If you block the correct shaft, all ten will
survive. If you block the wrong shaft, all of them will die. If you
do nothing, one miner will die.
Let's assume that the right choice in your state of uncertainty is to
do nothing. In that sense, then, (1) is true.
In chapter 8 of Doing Good Better, William MacAskill argues
that we should not make a great effort to reduce our carbon emissions,
to buy Fairtrade coffee, or to boycott sweatshops. The reason is that
these actions have at best a small impact on improving other people's
lives and so the cost and effort is better spent elsewhere.
From a strictly utilitarian perspective, there is nothing to
complain about this. But strict utilitarianism is a highly
counterintuitive position. In fact, MacAskill himself rejects it when
he says that it would not be OK to consume meat from factory farms and
"offset" by donating to animal welfare organisations, even if the net
result would be less animal suffering. I agree. Whether a course of
action is right or wrong is not just a matter of the net difference it
makes to the amount of suffering in the world. But then we also have
to reconsider MacAskill's conclusions about carbon offsetting,
fairtrade, and sweatshops.
Let's say that an act A is subjectively better than an
alternative B if A is better in light of the agent's information; A is
objectively better if it is better in light of all the
facts. The distinction is easiest to grasp in a consequentialist
setting. Here an act is objectively better if it brings about more
good -- if it saves more lives, for example. A morally conscientious
agent may not know which of her options would bring about more
good. Her subjective ranking of the options might therefore go by the
expectation of the good: by the probability-weighted average of the
good each act might bring about.
Plausible moral theories should be agent-relative. They should
permit us to care more about close friends than about distant
strangers. They can prohibit killing ten innocent people even in
circumstances where eleven innocent people would otherwise be killed
by somebody else. They might say that it would be right for Alice to
dance with Bob, but wrong for Bob to dance with Alice.
But how should we think about agent-relative values? It may seem
that the state of affairs in which Alice dances with Bob is either
right or not right. How could it be right relative to Alice but wrong
relative to Bob? Or consider a case where I can prevent you from
killing eleven by killing ten myself. If it is wrong that you kill the
eleven, then surely I have a moral reason to see to it that you don't
kill the eleven, just as I have a moral reason to see to it that I
don't kill the ten. Moreover, presumably it is worse if you kill
eleven than if I kill ten. So shouldn't my reason to prevent you from
killing the eleven outweigh my reason to not kill the ten?
In a large election, an individual vote is almost certain to make
no difference to the outcome. Given that voting is inconvenient and time-consuming,
this raises the question whether rational citizens should bother to
vote.
It obviously depends on the citizen's values. For a completely
selfish person, the answer may well be 'no'. Different election
outcomes typically don't matter too much for an ordinary citizen's
selfish interests; and a miniscule chance of a medium-sized gain does
not offset the cost in time and inconvenience.
If I'd make a list of how people should behave, it would include
things like
- avoid killing other animals, in particular humans
- help your friends when they are in need
etc. The list should be weighted and pruned of redundancy, so that it
can be used to assign to every possible life a goodness value. Suppose
that is done. I wonder if the list should contain (or entail) a
rule that says that good people see to it that other people are also
good:
My fellow Germans have donated very generously to the tsunami relief effort. That's good. But it's remarkable that we have donated so much to this cause, and far less to other good causes. 100 Euros given to the tsunami victims could also have been spent, say, to help the refugees in Darfur, or to support the reconstruction of war-torn Uganda or Sierra Leone, to provide medical care for people in Ethiopia or Bangladesh, to prevent deforestation, overfishing and soil erosion, to fight climate change, and so on. Donations are urgently needed all the time.
I've been thinking about yesterday's problem from Brian Weatherson's
interactive philosophy blog. Instead of a solution I've found a name:
"Forrest's Paradox" (see §2.5 in Lewis, On the Plurality of
Worlds).
Knowing the name, it is now easy to create even stranger problems of the
same kind. First a reformulation of the original problem.