Morality is subjective preference, but it can be objectively wrong

People are often unwilling to think of ethics as their own preferences, rather than demands from something more transcendent. For instance it's normal to claim that one really wants to make one choice, but it's only ethical to make the other. My feelings agree, but my thoughts don't. If I follow something I call ethics, that demonstrates that I want to. It's not a physical law. So what's the difference?

Just that. Ethics is a preference for fulfilling preferences attributed to some other source. Popular external sources of values include Gods, nature, other people, transcendent moral truth, group norms, and leaders. If I prefer for your house not to burn down I will turn on the hose. If I think it's moral to stop your house burning down I will turn off the hose if I find out that you want to burn it down to collect insurance money. I care about your values, not the house.

One demonstration that having an external source is important for ethics is the fact that invented ethical systems (such as, 'playing video games is virtuous') seem illegitimate and cheaty. Crazy seeming practices can be ordained by religion and culture, but if you decide independently that it's only ethical to eat cereal on Thursdays and most will feel you are missing the point and some marbles.

While ethics is a matter of choice then, it implies the existence of your preferred outside source of values. This means it can be wrong. The outside source of values might not exist, or might not have values. This is why evidence about evolution can influence whether a person likes gays marrying, despite it being an apparent value judgement.

This means moral intuitions aren't as useful as they seem for information about how to be moral. Gut reactions are handy for working out what you like, but if you find that you like serving someone else's purposes there is factual information about whether they exist or care to take into account. We have better ways to deal with facts than our emotional responses in most realms, so why not use the same here?

The only things that exist and care that I know of are other people and animals. Gods and transcendent values don't exist, and society as a whole and the environment don't care, as far as I know. So if I want to be ethical, preference utilitarianism (caring about other people's preferences) is my only option. Of course I could prefer not to be ethical at all. And I could prefer to follow what pass for other moral rules; being honest, protesting interference in the environment, keeping my dress long. But if these things benefit only my feeling of righteousness, I must admit they are no different to normal personal preferences. If you want to be ethical, these are probably not what you are looking for any more than 'it's virtuous to play video games' is.

The origins of virtue

I read Matt Ridley's 'The origins of virtue' just now. It was full of engaging anecdotes and irrelevant details, which I don't find that useful for understanding, so I wrote down the interesting points. On the off chance anyone else would like a summary, I publish it here. I recommend reading it properly. Things written in [here] are my comments.

***

Prologue

The aim of this book: How did all this cooperation and niceness, especially amongst humans, come about evolutionarily?

Chapter 1

There are benefits to cooperation: can do many things at once, [can avoid costs of conflict, can enjoy other prisoners' dilemmas, can be safer in groups]

Cooperation occurs on many levels: allegiances, social groups, organisms, cells, organelles, chromosomes, genomes, genes.

Selfish genes explain everything.

Which means it's possible for humans to be unselfish.

There are ubiquitous conflicts of interest to be controlled in coalitions at every level.

2

Relatedness explains most groupishness ( = like selfishness, but pro-group). e.g. ants, naked mole rats.

Humans distribute reproduction, so aren't closely related to their societies. They try to suppress nepotism even. So why all the cooperation?

Division of labour has huge benefits (trade isn't zero sum)

[cells are cool because they have the same genes, so don't mutiny, but different characters so benefit from division of labour]

Division of labor is greater in larger groups, and with better transport.

There is a trade-off between division of labour and benefits of competition.

By specialising at individual level a group can generalise at group level: efficiently exploit many niches.

Division of labour between males and females is huge and old.

3

Prisoners' dilemmas are ubiquitous.

Evolutionarily stable strategies = nash equilibria found by evolution.

Tit-for-tat and related strategies are good in iterated prisoners' dilemmas.

This is because they are nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear.

If a combination of strategies play against one other repeatedly, increasing in number according to payoffs, the always-defectors thrive as they beat the always-cooperators, then the tit-for-taters take over as the defectors kill each other.

Reciprocity is ubiquitous in our society.

Hypothesis: it's an evolutionarily stable strategy. It allowed us to benefit from cooperation without being related. This has been a major win for our species.

Reciprocity isn't as prevalent between related individuals (in ours and other species).

Tit-for-tat can lead to endless revenge :(

4

Reciprocity requires remembering many other individuals and their previous behavior. This requires a large brain.

Reciprocity requires meeting the same people continually. Which is why people are nastier in big anonymous places.

Other strategies beat tit-for-tat once tit-for-tat has removed nastier strategies. Best of these is pavlov, or win-stay/lose-shift, especially with learned probabilities.

In asynchronous games 'firm-but-fair' is better – similar to pavlov, but cooperates [once presumably] after being defected against as a cooperator in the last round.

In larger populations reciprocity should be less beneficial – most interactions are with those you won't see again.

Boyd's suggestion: this is the reason for morality behaviour, or punishing those who don't punish defection.

Another solution: social ostracism: make choosing who to play with an option.

A strategy available to humans is prediction of cooperativeness in advance. [Why can we do this? Why don't we evolve to not demonstrate our lack of cooperativeness? Because others evolve to show their cooperativeness if they have it? There are behaviours that only make sense if you intend do be cooperative.]

5.

We share food socially a lot, with strangers and friends. Not so much other possessions. Sex is private and coveted.

Meat is especially important in shared meals.

Hypothesis: meat hunting is where division of labour was first manifested.

Monkey males share meat with females to get sex, consequently hunting meat more than would be worth it for such small successes otherwise.

Hypothesis: humans do this too (some evidence that promiscuous natives hunt more), and the habit evolved into a sexual division of labour amongst married couples (long term relationships are usual in our species, but not in chimps). Males then benefit from division of labour, and also feeding their children.

Hypothesis: sexual division of labour fundamental to our early success as a species – neither hunting or gathering would have done alone, but together with cooking it worked.

Hypotheses: food sharing amongst non-relatives could have descended from when males of a tribe were mostly related, or from the more recent division of labour in couples.

Chimps share and show reciprocity behaviour, but do not offer food voluntarily [doesn't that suggest that in humans its not a result of marriage related sexual division?]

Why do hunter-gatherers share meat more, and share more on trips?

Hypotheses: 1. meat is cooperatively caught, so have to share to continue cooperation. 2. High variance in meat catching – sharing gives stable supply.

What stops free-riding then?

6.

Mammoth hunting introduced humans to significant public goods. You can't not share a mammoth, especially if others have spear throwers. [mammoth hunting should have started then when it became easier to kill a mammoth than to successfully threaten to kill a tribesman who killed a mammoth]

Tolerated theft: the idea that people must share things where they can't use all of them, and to prevent others from taking parts is an effort. That is, TT is what happens once you've caught a public good (e.g. mammoth). Evidence that this isn't what happens in reality; division seems to be controlled. Probably reciprocity of some sort (argument over whether this is in the form of material goods or prestige and sex). Evidence against this too; idle men are allowed to share (if the trade is in sex, they aren't the ones the trading is aimed at, and miss out on the sex trade).

Alternative hypothesis: is treated as a public good, but so big that it's possible to sneak the best bits to girls and get sex.

Trade across time (e.g. in large game) reduces exposure to fluctuations in meat.

Hypothesis: hunter-gatherers are relatively idle because they have to share what they get, so stop getting things after their needs are fulfilled.

Hypotheses: when people hoard money they are punished by their neighbours because they are defecting in the reciprocal sharing that usually takes place, yet they have no incentive to share if they have an improbably large windfall – the returned favours won't be as good. Alternatively can be seen as tolerated theft: punishment for not sharing is an attempt to steal from huge good.

When instincts for reciprocity are in place, gifts can be given 'as weapons'. That is, to force future generosity from the recipient.

Gift giving is less reciprocal (still prevalent, just not carefully equal) amongst human families than amongst human allies.

Gifts can then also signal status; ostentatious generosity demands reciprocity – those who can't lose face. The relative benefit of buying status this way depends on the goods – perishables may as well be grandly wasted. In this case reciprocity is zero sum: no benefits from division of labour, status cycle is zero sum.

7.

Humans are better at solving Wason test when it is in terms of noticing cheating than in terms of other social contexts, or abstract terms.

Hypothesis: humans have an 'exchange organ' in their brains, which deals with calculating related to social contracts. This is unique amongst animals. Evidence: brain damage victims and patients who fail all other tests of intelligence except these, anthropomorphic attitudes to nature heavily involve exchange, anthropomorphizing of objects heavily involves exchange related social emotions (anger, praise).

Moral sentiments appear irrational, but overcome short term personal interests for long term genetic gains.

Commitment problem: when at least one side in a game has no credible threat if the other defects, how can cooperation occur? The other can't prove they will commit. e.g. kidnap victim can't prove she won't go to police, so kidnapper must kill her even if both would be better off if he let her go in return for her silence.

Various games have bad equilibria for rational players in one off situations, but emotions can change things. e.g. prisoners' dilemma is solved if players have guilt and shame. Where player would be irrational to punish other for defection (punishment costly to implement, loss already occurred), anger produces credible threat (will punish in spite of self).

Many emotions serve to alter the rewards of commitment problems, by bringing forward costs and benefits.

For this to work, emotions have to be hard to fake. Shouldn't defectors who are good at faking emotions invade a population of people who can't? No, because in the long run the people who can't find each other and cooperate together. [that's what would happen anyway – you would cooperate the first time, then don't go back if the other defects. Commitment should be a problem largely in one off games – are more emotions shown in those things? In one off games can't have the long run to find people and make good liars pay].

Emotions make interests common, which stops prisoners' dilemmas. Interests of genes are not common, so emotions must be shared with other emotional ones.

Ultimatum game variations suggest that people are motivated more by reciprocity than by absolute fairness.

People lacking social emotions due to brain damage are paralyzed by indecision as they try to rationally weigh information.

We like and praise altruism much more than we practice it. Others' altruism and our looking altruistic are useful, whereas our own selfishness is. [why aren't people who behave like this invaded by slightly more altruistic ones who don't cooperate with them? Why is the equilibrium at being exactly as selfish as we are? Signaling means that everyone looks more altruistic than they are, so everyone is less altruistic than they would be if others were maximally altruistic?]

Hypothesis: economics and evolutionary biology are held in distrust because talking about them doesn't signal belief in altruism etc. Claiming that people or genes are selfish suggests that you are selfish.

8

Cooperation began (or is used primarily in monkey society) in competition and aggression.

The same 'tricks' will be discovered by evolution as by thought [if their different aims don't matter], so if we share a behaviour with animals it's not obvious that it's evolved in our case, though often it is.

Our ancestors were: social, hierarchical (especially amongst males), more egalitarian and with less rigid hierarchies than monkeys.

Differences between primates:

Monkey hierarchies rely on physical strength more than chimp ones, which rely on social manipulation.

Baboons use cooperation to steal females from higher ranking males, chimps use it to change the social hierarchy.

Chimp coalitions are reciprocal, unlike monkeys.

Power and sexual success are had by coalitions of weaker individuals in chimps and humans.

Bottlenose dolphins (the only species other than us with brain:body ratio bigger than chimps): males have coalitions of 2-3 which they use to kidnap females. All mate with her. These coalitions join to form super-coalitions to steal females from other coalitions. This is reciprocal (on winning, one coalition will leave the female with the other coalition in the super-coalition, in return for the favor next time)

Second order alliances seem unique to dolphins and humans.

Chimp males stay in a troop while females leave, with monkeys it is the other way around. Could be related to aggressive xenophobia of chimp males. Seems so in human societies: matrilineal societies are less fighty.

Chimp groups, rather than individuals, possess territory (rare, but not unique: e.g. wolves).

Hypothesis: this is an extension of the coalition building that occurs for gaining power in a group. Alpha males prevent conflict within the group, making it stable, which is good for all as they are safer from other groups if they stick together.

Humans pursue status through fighting between groups, whereas chimps only do it within groups [how do you know?]

9

Group selection can almost never happen.

Large groups cooperating are often being directly selfish (safer in shoal than alone).

50:50 sex ratio is because individual selection stronger than group selection. A group would do better by having far more females, yet a gene to produce males would make you replicate much faster, bringing ratio back.

Humans appear to be exception: culturally, not genetically, different groups compete.

Conformism would allow group characteristics to persist long enough that there would be group selection before groups dissolved or were invaded by others' ideas.

Why would conformism evolve?

Hypothesis: we have many niches which require different behaviors. If you move it's beneficial to copy your behavior from your neighbors.

Imitation should be more beneficial if there are more people doing it; better to copy something tried by many than the behavior of one other. How did it get started then?

Hypothesis: seeing what is popular amongst many gives you information.

Hypothesis: keeps groups together. If receptive to indoctrination about altruism we will find ourselves in more successful groups [I don't follow this].

Humans don't actually live in groups; they just perceive everything in terms of them.

A persons' fate isn't tied to that of their group. They don't put the group's wellbeing first. They are groupish out of selfishness – it's not group selection.

Ritual is universal, but details of it are particular.

Hypothesis: Ritual is a means to conformity keeps groups together in conflict, and they survive [How would this begin? Why ritual? Why do they have to be different? Why is conformity necessary to keep groups together? Seems just that we are used to conformity being linked to staying together we assume one leads to the other].

Music and religious belief seem to have similarly group grouping properties.

Cooperation within groups seems linked to xenophobia outside them [cooperation for safety in conflict is of course. What about cooperation for trade? Has that given us non-xenophobia induced cooperative feelings? Earlier chapters seemed to imply so].

10

Weak evidence of trade 200,000 years ago – not clear when it started.

Trade between groups is unique to humans.

Trade is the glue of alliances between groups; it appears that some trade is just an excuse for this.

Trading rules predate governments. Governments nationalize preexisting trading systems. e.g. 11^th C Europe merchant courts [is this a general trend? why is everything in anecdotes? aargh].

Speculation isn't beneficial because there is no division of labour [?].

11

Natives are not ecologically nice. They do not conserve game. They sent many species extinct.

We tie environmentalism up with other morality [is it pro-social morality, as the book has been about, or purity?].

As with other morality, we are more programmed to preach than to practice.

It doesn't look like people have an instinctive environmental ethic [it's a big prisoners' dilemma – can't we make use of something else in our repertoire?].

12

Property rights emerge unaided where it is possible to defend them [if you see a tragedy of the commons coming, best to draw up property rights – no reason you will be the free rider].

Nationalization often turns property-divided 'commons' into a free for all, as the govt can't defend it and nobody has reason to protect what they are stealing from.

Ordered and successful systems can emerge without design. e.g. Bali subak traditions could have resulted from all copying any neighbour who did better than them.

Lab experiment suggests that communication encourages a lot of cooperation in tragedy of commons games (better than ability to fine defectors)

If humans can arrange property rights unaided, why all the extinctions last chapter?

Hypothesis: property rights can't be enforced on moving things. Animals that could have property rights asserted on them did have in some cases. e.g. Beavers.

Hoarding taboo (as a result of reciprocity instinct) is to blame for environmentalist dislike of privatisation as a solution.

Hoarding isn't allowed in primitive tribes, but as soon as more reliable lifestyle allows powerful individuals to do better by hoarding than relying on social insurance, they do. Yet we retain an aversion to it.

13

Humans are born wanting to cooperate, discriminate trustworthiness, commit to trustworthiness, gain a reputation, exchange goods and info, and divide labour.

There was morality before the church, trade before the state, exchange before money, social contracts before Hobbes, welfare before rights, culture before Babylon, society before Greece, self interest before Adam Smith and greed before capitalism.

Also tendency to xenophobic groups is well inbuilt.

How can we make use of our instincts in designing institutions?

Trust is fundamental to cooperative parts of human nature being used.

This has been part of an endless argument about the perfectability of man, famously between Hobbes and Rousseau. Also about how malleable human nature is. [The book goes into detail about the argument over the centuries, but it's an irrelevant story to me].

To say that humans are selfish, especially that their virtue is selfish, is unpopular because saying so encourages it supposedly.

Big state doesn't make bargains with the individual, engendering responsibility, reciprocity, duty, pride – it uses authority. How do people respond to authority?

Welfare state replaces existing community institutions based on reciprocity and encouraging useful feelings, having built up trust over the years. Centralised replacements like the National Health Service. Mandatory donation → reluctance, resentment. Client feelings changed from gratitude to apathy, anger, drive to exploit the system.

:. Government makes people more selfish, not less.

We must encourage material and social exchange between people, for that is what breeds trust, and trust is what breeds virtue.

Our institutions are largely upshots of human nature, not serious attempts to make the best of it.

Dying for a donation

The most outstanding feature of organ markets is that most people hate the idea. This is a curiosity deserving a second glance. There are organ shortages almost everywhere, with people dying on waiting lists hourly. To sentence them to death based on a cursory throb of disgust is not just uncivilised but murderous.

First I should get some technical details out of the way. An organ market can involve buying from living donors, or selling rights to organs after death, or both. Organs needn’t go to the rich preferentially; like any treatment, that depends on the healthcare system. The supply of organs available won’t decrease – if free donations dropped as a result of sales, the price would rise until either enough people sold organs or relatives and friends felt morally obliged to donate them anyway. A regulated market needn’t lead to an increase in stolen Chinese organ imports. It would lower the price here, making smuggling less worthwhile, while stopping Australians going on desperate holidays to seek organs in the under-regulated Third World.

That they ‘commodify the human body’ is the main objection to organ markets. They certainly do that, but why is commodification terrible? Well, a commodity is generally an object subordinated to the goal of making money. Treating other humans in that way leads to abominable actions. Slavery and organ theft are examples of human commodification that rightly repulse us. This doesn’t generalise however. The horror in these examples is that people are being made miserable because they don’t want to be sold. This is a completely different scenario to people voluntarily commodifying themselves.

After all, if commodifying people is inherently wrong, why allow paid labour? Renting out a portion of your time, mind and body to a company or government is surely commodification in the same vein. Or is selling body parts just too much commodification? It doesn’t seem so to me – you can lose more of your most personal possession, your limited lifespan, working than you would selling a kidney. Regardless of how we personally answer that question, there is no reason for the public to decide where the line on commodification should be drawn rather than the people choosing to be involved.

Perhaps anyone who wants to commodify themselves must necessarily be insane and unable to make good choices. To decide that somebody with an alternative idea must not be of sound mind is a big step. The fact that someone disagrees with your opinions, especially ones without arguments behind them, hardly proves they are insane. To all of those who use their gut reaction of disgust to produce policy, Alex Tabarrok asks, “Is it not repugnant that some people are willing to let others die so that their stomachs won’t become queasy at the thought that someone, somewhere is selling a kidney?”

But can people in desperate poverty be considered to be making free choices? Many say no. So, is the choice between starving and selling one’s kidney really a choice? Yes; an easy one. One of the options is awful. To forbid organ selling is to take away the better choice. If we choose to provide an even better option to the person that would be great – but it is no solution to the problem of poverty to take away what choices the poor do have absent outside help.

A related argument is that even with better choices, poor people will be so desperate as to be irrational. However even if we accept that poor people are irrational, for anyone desperate enough to become irrational, selling an organ is probably a great idea. Given the ubiquitous human aversion to being cut up, poor people are more likely to underestimate the merit of that cash source. Should we intervene there?

Another argument regarding poverty is that organ markets are highly unegalitarian; they’re another way to exploit the poor. However, there are two inequalities involved in this market. People have differing amounts of money, and people have differing numbers of functioning organs. Which of these inequalities is worse for those with less? The most pressing egalitarian action would be to redistribute the organs more fairly. By happy coincidence the most effective way to do this is to simultaneously redistribute wealth as well. If poor people sell organs, all the better; the money is redistributed to them as organs are also redistributed to those with least.

The alternative to a market is ‘altruism’. If a brother needs an organ to live, how can you refuse? Unlike the disconnected poor person who benefits from an extra option, this family member loses their previous option of keeping both their organs and their family relationships. The latter are effectively held to ransom. This system leaves the patient with the stress of traipsing around making such awkward requests. Instead of loving support, they get to watch the family politics as everyone tries not to be left with the responsibility, everyone hiding their relief when their blood type is incompatible. Often people offer an organ, then ask the transplant team to judge them a poor match. This gets them off the hook, but leaves the ill person in a cruel cycle of hope and despair. It’s analogous to telling cancer patients ‘come for chemo on Tuesday’, then refusing them any every week till they die. If the patient is fortunate enough to find a donor, there is potentially the stifling lifelong obligation to them. People have refused organs over this. The troubling emotional dynamics surrounding ‘donation’ led Thomas. E Starzl, a great transplant surgeon, to stop doing live transplants.

My favourite argument against organ markets is ‘it will create a distopic world where an underclass exists to replace body parts of the rich’. This is flawed in a multitude of ways. Most people would be in neither category. It would create as much of a split as ‘people who make donuts’ vs. ‘people who eat donuts’. The exchange of money makes the parties more equal in the transaction than if one is the unfortunate victim of a request they cannot refuse. Individual people can’t be used as organ factories. Number of organs is a hopeless basis for discrimination, due to the effort involved in actually finding out which organs somebody has.

‘Altruistic giving’ is more coercive than a market, unnecessarily cruel to the patient, the donor and their family and friends, and leaves thousands to die on waiting lists. Organ markets can save lives without us having to sacrifice morality and should join the ranks of life insurance and money lending; markets we once thought unthinkable.

Originally published in Woroni. 

What's worse than coercion?

Desperation is coercive, or so it is said. The analogy between having a gun to your head and starvation at your door is a good one, as far as decision making is concerned.

So why do we always state this just before doing the last thing we would do to someone with a gun to their head? 

Our reasoning goes: 

1. She's only working for nothing/selling her kidneys/poisoning her water supply because she has no other option.
   
2. Therefore she's effectively being coerced.
   
3. That's terrible. 
   
4. We won't allow it. We won't buy her t-shirts or her kidneys.
   
5. Now she can't be coerced. Hoorah!

So we take away the 'not getting shot in the head' option. 

This would be fine if we also gave another choice. However if we did that that the person would no longer be desperate, and thus no longer 'coerced' anyway (and so there would be no need to interfere). There should never be a need to prevent coercion by taking away choices.

In our analogy, there is a difference between preventing coercion by forcing someone to be shot and by giving them a safe exit. 

Processing people

Some of my friends think that a random process of deciding who should live or die is more important than the lives of those people, because lives should all be valued equally (and a process can ensure approximately random choice).

For example, this would mean it is better to make sure the life rafts are filled by a random selection of women and men and rich and poor and so on, even if that means that half of them drown while you flip the coin.

If lives should be valued equally, then why is a process of choosing between identically valuable things worth more than even one human life?

Also, even if you value this process more than another person's life, why shouldn't the person who's life is at stake's opinion on their relative value come into it? That is, if we are attempting to follow any ethical system other than egoism (of course your preference is of absolute importance if you are trying to be purely self interested). Try out the veil of ignorance!

For other readers, no this isn't a purely theoretical debate, I'm just not going to tell you what the context is.

Don’t change your mind, just change your brain

The best way to dull hearts and win minds is with a scalpel.

Give up your outdated faith in the pen over the sword! With medical training and a sufficiently sharp but manoeuvrable object of your choice, you can change anyone’s mind on the most contentious of moral questions. All you need to make someone utilitarian is a nick to the Ventromedial Pre­frontal Cortex (VMPC), a part of the brain related to emotion.

When pondering whether you should kill an innocent child to save twenty strangers, eat your pets when they die, or approve of infertile siblings making love in private if they like, utilitar­ians are the people who say “do whatever, so long as the outcome maximises overall happiness.” Others think outcomes aren’t everything; some actions are just wrong. According to research, people with VMPC damage are far more likely to make utilitar­ian choices.

It turns out most people have conflicting urges: to act for the greater good or to obey rules they feel strongly about. This is the result of our brains being composed of interacting parts with different functions. The VMPC processes emotion, so in normal people it’s thought to compete with the parts of the brain that engage in moral rea­soning and see the greatest good for the greatest number as ideal. If the VMPC is damaged, the ra­tional, calculating sections are left unimpeded to dispassionate­ly assess the most compassionate course of action.

This presents practical oppor­tunities. We can never bring the world in line with our moral ide­als while we all have conflicting ones. The best way to get us all on the same moral page is to make everyone utilitarian. It is surely easier to sever the touchy feely moral centres of people’s brains than to teach them the value of utilitarianism. Also it will be for the common good; once we are all utilitarian we will act with everyone’s net benefit more in mind. Partial lo­botomies for the moralistic are probably much cheaper than policing all the behaviours such people tend to disapprove of.

You may think this still doesn’t make it a good thing. The real beauty is that after the procedure you would be fine with it. If we went the other way, everyone would end up saying 'you shouldn't alter other people's brains, even if it does solve the world's problems. It's naughty and unnatural. Hmph.'

Unfortunately, VMPC dam­age also seems to dampen social emotions such as guilt and com­passion. The surgery makes utili­tarian reasoning easier, but so too complete immorality, mean­ing it might not be the answer for everyone just yet.

Some think the most impor­tant implications of the research are actually those for moral phi­losophy. The researchers suggest it shows humans are unfit to make utilitarian judgements. You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to figure that out though. Count the number of dollars you spend on unnecessary amusements each year in full knowledge peo­ple starving due to poverty.

In the past we could tell moral questions were prompting action in emotional parts of the brain, but it wasn’t clear whether the activity was influencing the deci­sion or just the result of it. If the latter, VMPC damage shouldn’t have changed actions. It does - so while non-utilitarianism is a fine theoretical position, it is seemingly practiced for egoistic reasons.

Can this insight into cognition settle the centuries of philosophical debate and show utilitarianism is a bad position? No. Why base your actions on what you feel like doing, dis­counting all other outcomes? All it says about utilitarianism is that it doesn’t come easily to the hu­man mind.

This research is just another bit of evidence that moral reasoning is guided by evolution and brain design, not some transcendental truth in the sky. It may still be useful of course, like other skills our mind provides us with, like a capacity to value things, a prefer­ence for being alive, and the abil­ity to tell pleasure from pain.

Next time you are in a mor­ally fraught argument, consider what Ghandi said: “Victory at­tained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary’” He’s right; genetic modification would be more long-lasting. Un­til this is available though, why not try something persuasive like a scalpel to the forehead?

....
Originally published in Woroni

Drawing lines and tigers

There is a problem that catches the light occasionally, and is pushed off into political correctitude, but one day will have to be met. Humans are all as good as one another. If they are stupid or disabled or anything this doesn't detract from their worth as people. This is fine - I'm not disagreeing. Animals are worth less than humans. Dead humans are worth less than humans. This is also fine, and I'm not disagreeing. However there's an inconsistency.

These views can only work as long as the gaps between these things and humans are not filled. Humanity isn't binary. There is, at least potentially, a sliding scale between characteristic humanness and, say, characteristic antness, involving variations in many characteristics. Similarly for living and dead. At what point as you travel away from normal human characteristics do you suddenly draw a line and value a creature/person a little less?

In practice as soon as you stop relating to them, but this is hardly the basis for a moral distinction. Wherever you draw a line, it must be admitted that it is arbitrary. So while we might take pride in our fair treatment of all mankind, regardless of their characteristics, we must agree that we could just as legitimately draw the line elsewhere and treat our celebratedly cared for lowest-capability people as animals.

Aside from where to draw the line is the question of why to have one. Why does a characteristic (such as intelligence or 'level of consciousness') varying among animals vary their moral worth, while the same characteristic varying among humans doesn't? Their differences are judged using different rules, but not because of relevant inherent differences.

This problem hasn't fully emerged with animals yet (perhaps more with dead people, and very little with robots), but that does little to the argument: our ethics are inconsistent.

Some half-serious, half-formed thoughts on existing and so on

So I've been banging my head against a wall (metaphorically, almost not) for about a week and a half (or years on and off) about the apparent meaninglessness of anything and the difficulty of finding anything to do that is mildly satisfying next to the absurdity of existing. This is what I've come to:

On lack of inherant meaning in anything:

- Whether there is value inherent in the universe or not (by the way there's not) doesn't matter (nothing does! lol. But that's not my point). Value that you choose to place on something is as legitimate as that which 'God' or anything else does. It would be impossible for a God or anything else to allocate value to things in any more legitimate a way. If they did, and you disagreed with them, why would their values have precedence? To give them precedence would be a value judgement. There is no better possibility than what we've got (similar to how there is no better version of free will than determinism).

- Really it's not that bad. You have the freedom (yay) to value what you think should be valued. If there were some fundamental ones one had to stick by, I'd probably whinge heaps more about that (and anyway, if not comfy with it you can probably find some place to live where some government will be willing to choose values for you - such as Australia it seems)

- It is objectively better to value things, and to value things that other people's values aren't mutually exclusive with. 'Better' is defined in terms of the value placed on stuff (yours and others') - if you value things more, there will be more value. So it will be better. If you value killing people etc. you will impinge on their (probably less messed up) experience of value quite considerably, so it will very likely not be better. In the end the goodness of anything is a practical question of whether the values of the individuals involved are fulfilled. Potential for this depends on them having values, and them not being contradictory.

Note: there is a difference between indifference and not valuing things. You can just indifferently value whatever comes along, without caring what it is (though there are still other people's fixed values to watch out for). This can kind of work.

- You probably get on alright having your own values - knowingly chosen/based on biological and environmental effects - for things like wallpaper and lunch. Just do it for everything else (I don't like AIDS because it doesn't go with my sofa).

On how to behave when the absurdity of existing at all is just so crazy that anything else seems incredibly unsatisfying in comparison:

- Violence? Tried it this arvo for a bit. Distracting, yes. Fun, hell yes. Incredibly satisfying? Not really. A viable source of income? Possibly, but would have to find richer people to mug :)

- If you really feel like hurting yourself just to feel something, physical violence is probably not the best bet. Before it hurts enough you will damage yourself, which isn't useful. Try psychological torment ;D Some good bits of emotion can be had from just thinking about this kind of thing...satisfaction from the horror of dissatisfaction...mmm it's even pleasingly recursive (I like recursion and I don't care if God does). I had some other ideas, but I edited them out, as I feel bad about depressing people, ironically enough.

-Seek satisfaction from the absurdity of existing, without doing anything about it? Just think about it and see how amazed you can be. I suspect not enough to seem appropriate, but what's appropriate?

- Try to be nice and save the world and stuff? As mentioned earlier, I think this is the inevitable conclusion I must come to, regardless of the source of it's preferability. However I'm slightly inclined not to. On further introspection, I think this is merely because I just don't want to follow all the people who are lefties or righties or whatever because they haven't thought about any of this and are just engaging in smugness about their smugness about what they blindly assume is right. It's just kind of lonely - I feel like a hipocrite and an outsider to their sentiments, which makes me angry, which makes me more right wing. This is a bad reason, and anything is going to be lonely, with or without other people to misunderstand me. So this one isn't written off - in fact I think it is still going to be the inevitable conclusion.

- Something that hasn't been done before? Hard to find and once you've done it, it's been done. Also, it is unlikely to be terribly satisfying. Things that are particularly satisfying have probably been done. The best candidate for 'something that hasn't been done and might be satisfying' is something horrendously idealistic and difficult, like saving the world (from whatever, it's irrelevant here). Which solves the problem in the last point, because when smug people with the same end goal as me talk to me I can at least say I want to save the world because it would be 'kind of post-modern'. This will at least make it clear to them if we probably can't relate to each other, and they will go away.

- Hang around and think more about it? I am probably stupid enough to be wrong about how I'm even looking at these problems. Almost cerainly in fact - to my knowledge, nobody exists who isn't impressively stupid. This is one of the more interesting things to read/think about anyway.

- Wait until one day I give up caring about whether things matter inherently or not, and be back to square one...until I stop caring about that...fuck...

- Be relieved that as a the kind of complicated biological and social thing you are, you have a good few pre-programmed preferences for things. You could chuck them all out the window, on the basis that they are arbitrary upshots of evolution. However so are you, and they are the arbitrary upshots you like, and you probably won't find much satisfaction in not having them particularly. Also it's hard to do properly and you probably can't keep it up for that long ('...it is inevitable to be drawn back into human drama...').

So there. I think I'll go for a combination while I look for other things to think.

God is irrelevant

Philosophically that is. Psychologically he fulfils an important role - to distance us from philosophy.

In no way would the existence of a God alter the important properties of the universe. Most of the problems a God supposedly solves are merely shifted to the other side of him - a step further away from humans, where we can comfortably ignore them.

Some solutions God doesn't really provide (presumably all thought of before by various philosophers, but I don't know which ones, and it's irrelevant, so please excuse the plagiarism) :

Creator of the universe: An obvious one. Where did God come from then? If he's existed forever then so could a universe. If you think something as complex as a universe couldn't come from nothing, how complex would God have to be to be able to make universes?

Source of morality: Where does God get his moral principles from? If he invents them himself they are just as arbitrary a set of restrictions on behaviour as any other (such as an atheist's morals are feared to be by the religious). Why follow them? If they are inherent in the universe, related to other people, or a matter of choice then God isn't needed.

Morality is a set of value judgements. If God and I both have a set of value judgements (a moral code), to say that God's takes precedence is a value judgement in itself. Who judges? God? Why?

Provider of free will: For reasons discussed in the previous post, Free will isn't a concept (unless you mean determinism), God can't have - or give humans - free will which isn't deterministic. The absence of God's 'free will' is even more apparent if he must be good all the time (unless he invents his own changeable moral code as he goes, but is that the kind of morality God should subscribe to? Well yes, if he does! But there's still the old problem of free will not existing - he can't escape).

If he's all powerful as well, then he just ends up as another natural law - one that makes good things always happen. Anyone who's been alive can tell you there's fairly solid empirical evidence against such a law existing, but my point isn't to draw attention to the problem of evil so much as to point out that natural laws are nothing new.

The final picture? A God who may well exist*. But who cares? Yeah, if he's all powerful perhaps you should follow his moral laws just to stop him smiting you, but that's politics, not metaphysics.

*except perhaps for the whole problem of evil bit - but goodness is hard to define, so let's give him a break on that one for a moment