At first glance this seems to be a truly stupid question. After all it’s bad when people die early. Isn’t it? Well, I certainly don’t want to die and neither do most people but that misses the point. We all die eventually and even if we personally want to put off death as long as possible can we truly say that a society where the average life span is 90 years rather than 70 is a better place? Would a society where the average life span was 200 years be even better? What sort of life span would be optimal?

It’s tempting to answer ‘infinite’ and certainly it would be wonderful if we could all retain our youth for forever and never have to grieve over lost friends and family. However, for the immediate future this simply isn’t possible. No healthy diet or prudent lifestyle can reduce the (average) number of friends we must mourn¹ and no amount of yoga or wheatgrass smoothies can prevent old age from taking it’s toll. Moreover, suppose we really could increase our lifespan indefinitely. At least for the next century or so we would have to virtually stop reproducing to avoid outgrowing our resources.

Ultimately we can’t simply say ‘life is good so we want more of it.’ Almost certainly such a policy would actually demand we divert money from healthcare into programs encouraging reproduction. As a society we’ve already reached the conclusion that it’s better to maintain a relatively small population that can live well than to expand into a great multitude that can barely make do. But rationally applying this insight to this question suggests that investing in longer life spans might not make sense.

Certainly we feel greater pain when someone is snatched from life too early and so we certainly shouldn’t stop pursuing more effective treatments to save people who might otherwise be struck down in the prime of life. Nor would we want to create distress or anger by denying people treatment. However, researching ways to further prolong our life span would likely introduce greater variability (some people die of heart attacks at 65 others make it to 130) and thus prolong the time people would have to endure the loss of loved ones as well as the sense of tragedy and anger at their deaths. Other things being equal a society is better if people spend a smaller proportion of their lives old and frail and since extending old age is unlikely to make people substantially happier (on average²) investing in technologies to lengthen our lifespan seems counterproductive. Of course we should look for technologies that let people be healthy and fit for a greater fraction of their lives and if we are able to make 80 feel like 55 that might justify more investment in keeping people alive till 80.

The observation that merely putting off death is not necessarily a desirable end in and of itself also has substantial consequences to what kind of charity and aid is best to give to the third world. However, that will have to wait for another post.

Now the only reason we shouldn’t toss moral philosophy out as useless is that we believe that by formulating simple unifying theories about what’s moral we can refine our judgements. In other words moral theorizing only makes sense if you believe that by rational considerations we can identify and discard the sort of things we now recognize as moral superstitions (like objecting to autopsies). Yet if we know that the same unjustified instinctive reactions that demand punishment without deterrent value or cringe at pure hedonic pleasure are responsible for the misguided morals of the past surely these sorts of emotional pulls must be discounted in our moral theorizing. Given the further evidence that people fall back to being utilitarians once the misleading effect of these emotional reactions has been swept aside it would seem that utilitarianism is the only real candidate for a good moral theory.

In other words if we believe in moral philosophy at all and join with the rest of society in rejecting many of the odious moral notions of the past we must explain what caused these prior moral beliefs to go bad and avoid applying the same methods in the present. If the scientific work shows that what the beliefs we now find objectionable had in common was their grounding in this emotional part of the brain this gives us good reason to discount these emotions as a basis for our current moral theories. If science also tells us that in the absence of these misguiding emotions we end up being utilitarians then it seems we must either repudiate moral philosophy as a reasonable inquiry or accept some form of utilitarianism.

For concreteness sake let’s assume that every time you take MDMA² you have an outflowing of love and sympathy which makes the death penalty or any retributive (as opposed to deterrent or preventative) punishment seem to be a horrible moral abomination³. Or even just that you know that if you were to take the drug you would feel this intuition. Now intuitively one wants to say in these cases that such a drug induced intuition doesn’t count or at least counts much less but why? Well one reason we might wish to exclude such intuitions is the worry that there would be too many of them. Indeed if you believe experiences (or whatever intuitions are) supervene on local physical state (e.g. brain state) then your likely to think that some kind of brain intervention could create any moral intuition desired⁴. But this isn’t a (sound) argument that these intuitions aren’t equally valid it’s merely a wish that they aren’t. It would be nice to have access to moral facts but we can’t discredit the possibility that none of our intuitions, drugged or otherwise, give us any evidence just because we don’t like it.

A more promising approach is to observe that we don’t credit the sensory experiences of inebriated people to the same degree we credit those of sober folks and argue that philosophical intuitions work similarly. While this sounds good the problem is that it’s just not true that we always trust sober perceptions more than chemically altered ones. For instance if a perceptual task requires great focus we very well might prefer the observation of someone taking a small dose of amphetamines than that of a sober person⁵. Certainly imagine drugs or other brain alterations that would improve our perceptual accuracy in some ways even while they might impair it in others. Thus it’s not that we have a blanket rule about trusting sober observations more, rather, we merely induct on prior observations about perceptual accuracy in different states. Without an independent check on moral facts we don’t have any reason to take our normal sober brain states as more reliable in this regard than others⁶.

More broadly one might observe that even without knowing anything about drugs or the effects of brain injuries one would probably believe that most modifications to the brain would degrade, rather than improve our perceptual abilities. However, we only believe this because we have reason to believe that evolution has tuned our brain for perceptual accuracy. Given a situation where we have reason to believe evolution would have tuned our perceptions to get an incorrect, rather than correct, result⁷ we should believe that random alterations to our brains would be likely to improve the result. After all if your brain is a reliable mispredictor (when X occurs we perceive ~X) then any alteration in that behavior would have to be an improvement. Thus whether or not we should assign a higher probability to our normal sober intuitions being correct or those induced by brain changes depends on whether or not we have reason to believe evolution favored accurate or inaccurate intuitions.

When our intuitions are not subject to an external check I really don’t think we have any reason to give more weight to our actual intuitions than those we would have if our brains were altered. In the particular case of moral intuitions I would argue that if anything we have reason to believe that our intuitions are, if anything, less reliable than those selected at random. We have plenty of meta-moral intuitions like ‘all people deserve equal moral consideration’ yet there seems to be no shortage of examples where evolution has favored more concrete intuitions in conflict with these principles, e.g., people tend to have different moral reactions when it’s a family member’s life on the line than a strangers. Thus any analysis that gives more weight to our actual intuitions than other possible ones must acknowledge the existence of evolutionary pressures to have inaccurate moral intuitions while their are both in principle (moral facts would seem to lack causal powers) and pragmatic (continued failure to show otherwise) reasons to think there isn’t any evolutionary pressure for our moral intuitions to match up with true moral facts.

I think this actually establishes an extremely strong negative result. In the absence of a plausible naturalized epistemology of morality (or philosophy of math, or knowledge of possible worlds) it’s irrational to use our intuitions as evidence. Without any justification of why our actual intuitions are more likely to be valid than any of those intuitions we could have had it’s an outright error to treat them as stronger evidence for their claims than the fact that we could have had some other intuition. However, even if you aren’t willing to take it this far it raises some very interesting questions. One that seems particularly challenging for the meta-ethicists is the following:

Suppose theoretical analysis (or survey of galactic civilizations) reveals that our moral intuition about the importance of life is actually an improbable fluke and evolution tends to equip any sentient being with the intuition that it’s the future of someone’s genetic line (or their happiness) that is morally salient not whether they live or die. Does that give us reason to believe that death isn’t morally salient? If not how can it be rational to believe something about moral facts on the basis of an accident without any connection to these facts?

In particular many liberal’s beliefs about Iraq consist of the following two views:

• Invading Iraq was a horrible mistake that made the average Iraqi much worse off than they were under Saddam, often with the clear implication that a civil war or some other sort of massive bloodshed is inevitable.
• If we could do something for the Iraqis we should but we can’t so we should just leave now.

I realize this doesn’t summarize all liberal’s beliefs about the war (certainly not mine). Some people believe (unreasonably IMO) that things will get much better once we leave and there might be some who even believe the Iraqis are better off now than they were under Saddam but I get the sense that the two views I summarized represent at least a significant percentage of mainstream liberals.

Don’t they entail that we should stay in Iraq but just clamp down just like Saddam did? For those of you who doubt we could do this all we would need to do is pick some local strongman and use our troops as muscle to help him establish himself as Saddam 2. Heck, maybe we could even keep our hands clean by just giving him implicit support and training his forces.

So why shouldn’t we kill a few innocent people now to save many more from a potential civil war? Or was the initial invasion actually a good thing?

Compare the following situations:

Case 1:

A mother of Siamese twins is dedicated to seeing that they have the chance to live a normal life. When doctors in the US refuse to attempt separation surgery because they think the chance of success is too low this mother flies them to a country where they will attempt the operation. If asked she defends her choice by saying, “Any chance, no matter how small, of giving my kids a normal life is worth it.”

It’s my intuition that most people wouldn’t hold this person morally culpable if their children end up dieing. Especially if the mother was a former Siamese twin herself who has strong feelings about how bad it is to grow up that way.

Case 2:

Same situation except in this case the mother can’t find any doctor willing to perform the surgery (the babies only have one hear) so the mother carefully researches painless ways to induce death and eventually gives the babies an overdose of Valium and morphine killing them. Here she defends her actions by saying that her kids are better off dead than growing up as conjoined twins.

It is my intuition that most people would find the mother to be morally blameworthy in the second situation, no matter how genuienly she believes she is doing a kindness. Yet these two reactions seem impossible to reconcile in any plausible (consequentialist) moral theory that tries to only tweak our moral intuitions.

What seems odd about the situation is that standard (my intuition is that case 2 is fine) intuitions are apparently drasticly discontinuous in this case (I’m sure there are better standard examples that illustrate this better). So long as their is a realistic chance of successfully separating the children it doesn’t matter how small this chance turns out to be. Yet any rational individual who prefers any wager between S and D to U, no matter how bad the odds for S must prefer D to U. Surely it can’t be right that taking every instance of the wager between living separated and dieing is morally acceptable but that actually taking the straight out trade between death and an unsuccessful operation is a huge moral harm.

Of course people are likely to object that the ‘realistic’ requirement effectively functions as a bound on how bad a wager you can take. Perhaps it does but not in a way that is particularly useful. For starters this realistic requirement doesn’t seem sensitive to the badness of the condition being avoided. If we make the lives of the Siamese twins 10 times worse the realistic chance threshold doesn’t seem to shift. So long as the act seems like a plausible attempt to separate the children people are okay with it but as soon as it is a clear preference for death rather than this sort of life people reject it. Worse, the realistic requirement doesn’t seem to track real probability. Even if we had a statistician come on TV and explain that in reality the chances for success were astronomically low so long as one of the common cognitive biases we have in evaluating probability made it feel plausible that the operation might be a success I suspect people would still be okay with the choice.

While it’s not a convincing argument these points strongly suggest that what matters is the mother’s intention rather than anything about the actual chances for success or failure that our moral intuitions are tracking. So long as the mother is intending to take a big risk with her children’s lives so they can have a brighter future we are okay with it but once it becomes clear the mother prefers her children to die we reject her actions. Already this seems troubling, how can it be morally acceptable for the mother to have the intention to take any bet of this form no matter how bad but not to accept the rational consequence of these beliefs? Even taking the ‘realistic’ restriction seriously this means the mother is implicitly valuing death as only a slightly worse consequence than living with the disability. But then what happens if her next pregnancy results in children who face a life that is significantly more horrible than these children? Surely we can’t combine the acceptable belief about the first children, with a fact about how much worse the lives of her new children will be to get the ‘unacceptable’ conclusion that she should kill these children.

Now while these intuitions don’t seem to make any sense as serious moral considerations (even in a deontic sense as they seem to punish rationality) they make perfect sense as applied social rules. As a pragmatic manner we aren’t going to be able to agree on risks and harms well enough to second guess the trade offs people choose. However, there is a strong need to prevent people from doing dastardly things under the guise of moral tradeoffs. We don’t want people to get away with putting their aged rich father down when he is unconscious with probably correctable problem on the grounds that any chance of brain damage is worse than death.

If this was an isolated example that would be one thing but this seems to be characteristic of our moral intuitions. Our intuitions just don’t seem to make sense as guides to abstract moral rules, rather they are pretty clearly rules of thumb that when applied in common situations give good results. The upshot of this is that it seems deeply mistaken to try to closely track these intuitions in developing our moral theory. Rather then trying to avoid clashes between our moral theories and intuitions in unlikely cases (killing depressed people on isolated dessert islands) we should be trying to come up with the moral theory with the best theoretical virtues (simplicity etc..) that explains what our moral intuitions have in common when applied in standard circumstances.

In other words we should be looking at very simple theories (like utilitarianism) that capture our intuitions at an extreme level of abstraction (don’t hurt people) rather than trying to closely track each twist and turn of our intuitions. The fact that our theory disagrees with intuitions in uncommon cases is really no problem at all. There was no hope that our moral intuitions could be a close guide to any ‘real’ theory so the fact that our theory radically disagrees with our intuitions in uncommon situations isn’t a failure at all. In particular it seems deeply wrong to twist our theories like Rawls does to make sure they don’t disagree too much with intuition. The explanation that perhaps what morality is about is making the best selfish decision if you were to be randomly assigned to be some individual in society is a good start but we should then take that theory and see where it goes (I think it implies utilitarianism) not try to back fit it to our intuitions so it comes up with the ‘right’ answers.

However, what motivated this post was the idea (brought to my attention by the same commentator) that ‘well-being’ could play a substantive role in our moral reasoning. I find this claim quite suspicious as there just don’t seem to be objective facts in virtue of which well-being would be one thing rather than another. Of course I don’t dispute that we have intuitions about well-being and that in depth analysis can be performed on the word. However, unless we are willing to postulate some sort of metaphysical fact which (semi-directly) determines the nature of well-being it would seem that any reference to well-being in our moral theories could be eliminated and replaced with our analysis of the term. Thus the debate over the nature of well-being is ultimately an entirely linguistic one that should have little consequence for our moral theories. Or to put it differently it seems entirely possible that two people could agree on every fact about the world (including moral facts) yet disagree about what well-being meant.

Since most moral philosophers seem to look at me with great puzzlement when I make this claim I will try to clarify what I mean below. My point can be summed up in two quick slogans, “propositions are justified not sentences,” and “a dispute over meaning is just a disagreement over the corresponding proposition.” Unless that’s entirely clear to you I’m afraid you’re going to have to read the rest of the post.

An Alternate Example

To illuminate my claim about well-being let me draw an analogy to the term chair. Like well-being the notion of chair is clearly subject to analysis. We can come up with examples that clearly seem to be chairs and ones which clearly are not chairs and even debate about which features of an object are relevant to its chairhood. If the issue was of importance we could even imagine a raging philosophical debate between functionalists who believe chairhood was dependent on the function of the item and formists who believed chairhood was determined by the form of the item. It is even reasonable to believe that in our particular time and culture that ceteris paribus every table in a normal house should be surrounded by chairs#[should].

[should]: So as not to confuse things with various kinds of should take this as a moral should. Say it increases the enjoyment of house guests. Sure it’s trivial but hopefully it makes the point.

Despite this it would be absurd to think we had good reason to believe the rule that every household table should be surrounded by chairs without any commitment to what notion of chair we mean. If the motivation behind the rule is ultimately aesthetic we might support the rule on the understanding that the form of the purported chair is important while if it is guest comfort it might instead be form that matters. In any case we could only have a justification of either the rule that every household table should be surrounded by chair shaped object or the rule that every household table should be surrounded by objects functioning as places to sit we could not have a justification of the rule agnostic about the meaning of chair. That is because chair is just an arbitrary linguistic convention it could have meant either of the two possible interpretations. If we are unsure of which one chair really means then the sentence, “every household table should have chairs,” is just ambiguous capable of being sharpened in either direction. However, it is ultimately one of these sharpened versions which we have a justification for not the sentence so we couldn’t (without weird appeals to authority) have reason to believe the sentence prior to any particular interpretation of chair#[word].

[word]: Of course it is also possible that our real commitment is to having whatever people are willing to call a chair around our household tables. In this sense we certainly could have a commitment to the sentence without any commitment to the notion of chair involved. However, in this case I think it is just disingenuous to phrase the claim as being about chairs. What we would really mean in this case is that, “every household table should be surrounded by things people are willing to call chairs.” This distinction might seem trivial in the case of chairs but it is decidedly important in the moral arena if we start imagining situations where we give people drugs which remap their notions, e.g., a drug which makes people call couches chairs.

Philosophical Analysis

So let me phrase that example in terms of a philosophical argument about well-being. Basically my contention is that sentences involving well-being such as, “we should try and maximize total well-being,” are ambiguous. The various competing interpretations of well-being argue that this sentence corresponds to different propositions. However, it is propositions which we ultimately have justifications for and reasons to believe so it can’t be that we have a good argument for some moral claim which talks about well-being without having an equally good justification for some disambiguation of that claim with a particular notion of well-being. In other words we can set aside the linguistic dispute about whether well-being is about pleasure or desire satisfaction and talk about moral theories which directly mention these notions with no less of power and considerable loss of confusion#[concept].

[concept]:Of course it is possible that we might support some moral theory which says we ought to maximize whatever concept people call well-being or more plausibly whatever concept people use to judge if their life is going well. However, as I mentioned in the other footnote it would be misleading to actually talk about well-being in our theory rather than just talking about the concept which plays such and such role. Since to my knowledge the notion of well-being in moral disputes is not used in such an indirect manner I think this entire issue is irrelevant.

I suspect the idea that well-being could play a substantive notion in our moral theories arises from a confusion of two types of analysis. In one type of analysis which we apply to ‘chair’ and ‘well-being’ we attempt to decipher our linguistic commitments about the word. This type of analysis can reveal what we mean when we talk about the word but ultimately can’t hope to draw out new consequences of a philosophical theory except in unusual circumstances (the theory actually talks about the word). In the other type of analysis we suppose we know (or at least pretend to know) what the word means and attempt to work out what is true of whatever the word means.

This later type of analysis is what we do when we come up with moral examples. We pretend (at least in moral realism) that we have some common shared conception of what moral truth means, i.e., we agree there are some abstract things out their called moral facts and that for a moral statement to be true just means it agrees with these moral facts. Then, assuming our intuitions are some kind of guide to moral truth, we use examples and analysis to work out the moral facts. Unlike the first kind of analysis this kind of analysis can yield substantive results as it is not just a debate over what to call something but instead an argument over what actually holds out in the world.

Anyway I was watching “Total Recall” tonight and it reminded me of this blog post and suggested a good example which causes problems with any desire-satisfaction theory of morality, i.e., one should try and satisfy desires, or even a desire satisfaction theory of hedonism. Basically I’m going to argue that any theory which asks the individual to act so as to maximize desire-satisfaction either has unpalatable consequences or devolves into utilitarianism. I’m sure the argument has already been made somewhere out in the literature, it’s too obvious not to have been, but I thought I might contribute to the discussion by giving it a clever movie name. Besides several people I know seem to take such a theory

So I’m sure all of you who have seen “Total Recall” have already guessed the nature of the example, it’s about someone whose memory or personality is changed and thus their desires change as well. However, if you want to see it spelled out in full detail read on. I don’t know all that much about moral philosophy so I apologize if I get some terms wrong. If I make a substantive mistake please tell me I’m full of shit, though of course you should always do this. So my example differs somewhat from the plot of “Total Recall.” Similar to the movie we have a captured enemy agent, Arnold, whose memory is about to be wiped and replaced turning him into someone else, Quad. This is being done just as an experiment to test if the procedure works so no one else really cares if Arnold stays Quad after the procedure or someone changes him back. Arnold knows his memory is about to be wiped and he communicates a message to you indicating his strong desire for you to make preparations to help him return to his ‘true self.’ Say he wants you to hire kidnappers who will abduct him and reverse the mind wipe, since your agency doesn’t give a damn about Quad/Arnold helping or choosing not to help won’t cause you or anyone else any problems (Arnold is a friendless bachelor). However, once changed into Quad Arnold will no longer wish to be returned to his former self. In fact Quad may desire very strongly to stay himself.

So if you believe you have a moral obligation to satisfy people’s desires what should you do? Prior to the procedure this rule would prescribe that you hire the kidnappers and make other preparations to return Quad to being Arnold. However, as soon as the procedure is completed it would seem your moral obligation it to sabotage the plot so you can satisfy Quad’s desire to stay Quad . Note that if you really believe it is desire satisfaction that one should maximize you can’t just tell Arnold your going to make the preparations you need to really make them. However, this result can’t be right. It’s absurd to think that morality requires you to waste time and resources on a project that you know you will be morally obligated to prevent in the future.

This is only one small example of a much wider problem for desire-satisfaction theories. In general they are going to have a difficult time dealing with desires that do not yet exist whether it be from brain wipes or yet to be born children. It seems incorrect to just conclude that only currently existing desires need to be satisfied, certainly we would have a moral responsibility to the next generation even if no living person had a desire to help them. Or in terms of the above example what happens if instead of being in on it from the beginning you discover your acquaintance Quad was really Arnold but was experimented on when he was 18. Even if the eighteen year old Arnold had expressed a strong desire to be returned to his self no matter what if he has been living a pleasant life as Quad for 40 years and would be much less happier as Arnold if seems wrong to say we have an obligation to return him to his original state.

Of course one can deal with this concern by deciding to maximize present desire satisfaction. That is you do something like take the integral over time of the percent/total number of desires currently satisfied. However, this very likely would result in a moral obligation to dispense desire eliminating or changing drugs to make it so the current world satisfies people’s desires. Yet this is exactly the sort of situation we wanted to avoid by turning to utilitarianism.

One might also try to say that we should count both Quad’s and Arnold’s desires and treat the two men as we would any other pair of individuals with conflicting desires. At first blanch this seems almost plausible, after all we really do want to think of the desires of future generations. Yet unless we want to abandon any consideration of the strength of desire this account too runs into problems.

In particular it seems that we should give strong desires more weight than minor ones. If we don’t want absurd situations where one man’s vague preference counts the same as another mans desperate need we need to count stronger desires more. Indeed this even matches our intuition (well my intuition is actually to favor whichever is happier but this is someone’s intuition) in the Arnold/Quad case. If one of the two personalities is mostly indifferent about continuing as itself then it does seem like we should stick with the personality which really cares about being itself. However, this once again leads us into the same kind of problems the other solution caused.

If the strength of desire matters then pleasure machines and other means of happiness without satisfying our original desires can be used morally by including a feature which makes the current user want to desperately continue using the machine. As this is essentially the Arnold, Quad situation the same reasoning should apply and the preferable choice should be the one with the stronger desires getting satisfied. Thus so long as our machines are strong enough to make your desires to stay in the happy machine stronger than your previous desire to accomplish things in life once again it is morally preferable to engage in accomplishment free happiness.

I have no problem with happy machines. I think we have good reason to believe our intuitions about them are flawed. However, half the point of messing around with desire satisfaction is to offer a moral notion which doesn’t require us to stubbornly refuse to lie or kill even when we could save millions yet doesn’t have the ‘unpalatable’ consequences of utilitarianism. However, this total recall argument suggests that these ‘unpalatable’ consequences are much harder to avoid than we may have thought.

I suspect this argument has already occurred in the literature. If you are familiar with it I would love to hear what the responses to it are.