feotakahari

Assuming a liberal audience, the easiest way to argue this is to gesture in the direction of the anti-immigration crowd. Jeff Sessions will never run out of horrible shit to do to illegal immigrants to “deter” them, and it will never fucking work, because what else are they gonna do, stay in their home countries and wait for the gangs to murder them? Even when the border patrol destroys water supplies so people will die in the desert, sufficiently desperate people will see it as a lower risk than staying.

But a surprisingly large fraction of liberals think doing horrible shit is a deterrent when you do it in wartime. They say that if you murder enough people, no one will want to fight a war with you. This only proves that liberals need to read more fantasy novels, because recruiters and terrorists have clearly been reading them. “Join us to become a hero and avenge all the people our enemies horribly murdered!” The more horrible shit you do, the stupider the things people will do in response, so long as they can fit it into a revenge narrative.

Honestly, I think there’s a cachet factor. People like the idea of being a strong-minded person who makes tough choices, and that means they need to come up with a tough choice that they can take. But before you talk about what must be done for the greater good, you should consider what actually works.

“I can detect little concern within the psychiatric community, or indeed the general public, over the ethical probity of restoration and integration. To the best of my knowledge, no discussion of moral status has even raised the question of whether alters might qualify for a right to continued existence. But proponents of the purely psychological accounts of full moral status ‒ accounts that tend to deny neonates a right to continued existence ‒ would be committed to condemning integration and restoration should the strong model it seems, be vindicated. On the face of it, this would appear to be an objection to such accounts of full moral status.”

This is what I’m imagining here:

“I can detect little concern within the slaveholding community, or indeed the general public, over the ethical probity of slaveholding. To the best of my knowledge, no discussion of moral status has even raised the question of whether slaves might qualify for a right to freedom. But proponents of the purely psychological accounts of full moral status would be committed to condemning slavery should the model be vindicated. On the face of it, this would appear to be an objection to such accounts of full moral status.”

If you’re gonna reach a moral conclusion, then fucking own it.

This interests me, because I was also bullied in school, and I turned out very untrusting of social contracts in general.

At the school I went to, there was always one student in each class who was the unofficial designated victim. So long as the bullies only targeted this one student, they would never be punished or made to stop, and the victim would often be punished if they tried to speak up. I think my homeroom teacher chose me because of my different cultural background–I wasn’t used to figurative language and commands phrased as questions, and she interpreted my misunderstanding as deliberate defiance and mockery. When I left, my friend switched to being the new victim because she wore cheap clothes, and I’ve heard of other victims who probably had behavioral disorders.

To be clear, there were students who would have at least attempted to be bullies in any school. But in a healthier environment, they would have been made to stop, as opposed to only being reprimanded when they targeted students other than me. And in a healthier environment, students who were nice and friendly wouldn’t have internalized the idea that bullying me was okay. Even if they never showed any inclination towards bullying, they still targeted me sometimes, because they were acting within a social structure where bullying me seemed like a fun and harmless thing to do.

In retrospect, I suppose I could have distinguished between explicit and implicit contracts like OP did. But that was never a thought that crossed my mind! To me, the system that allowed me to be bullied was a social contract, just as if the teachers had created an explicit rule saying “It’s okay to bully Feo.” Instead, I dug into the idea of the students who bullied me despite not normally being bullies, and the ways in which their normal instinct not to be bullies was stifled. I wouldn’t learn the term until years later, but I was trying to build a moral code that would be resistant to the Lucifer effect.

This is how someone who’s fundamentally against sacrificing one person for the good of the many arrived at Utilitarianism, which is so often criticized for allowing the sacrifice of one person for the good of the many! When you take it for granted that any system of specific rules can potentially lead to sacrificing someone, and that people won’t even consider it a bad thing so long as the sacrifice follows the rules, then the only thing you’re left with is a system where sacrificing people is always worse than helping everyone.

In retrospect, I wonder how I would have turned out if I’d concluded that we just needed explicit rules saying that bullying was always wrong. I don’t think that’s a conclusion I would come to now, though. There are people in this world who are very good at interpreting rules to mean whatever they want to mean, and there are other people who listen to their interpretation and think following that interpretation means they must be morally pure. The only thing I can think of to do is to take their rules away.

Haidt’s argument, which he supports through studies, is that human beings do not create logical arguments before they decide whether something is moral or immoral. Each person has various “tastebuds” that react to the nature of a specific action, and these determine whether your emotional reaction is positive or negative. If it “tastes bad” to you, you’ll try to create a logical argument for why it’s wrong, but you’ll keep insisting it’s wrong even if all your arguments are proven false.

As an example, suppose you’re told the story of someone who used an old flag to clean a toilet. If your “tastebuds” say that disrespecting tradition is bad, you’ll immediately decide that this is wrong, regardless of any logic involved. If you don’t have a “tastebud” for disrespecting tradition, you won’t see a problem at all. To the “tasteful” person, the “tasteless” seems blind, while to the “tasteless” person, the “tasteful” person is reacting to nothing.

Haidt outlines six scales, but observes that different people put different values on different scales. According to his research, people who are very liberal often value only one scale, care vs. harm. (In other words, Utilitarianism.) People who are very conservative often value all six, and they rank care vs. harm lower than other scales like authority vs. subversion. Hence why conservatives have so many values that make no sense to liberals, and why they’re so baffled that liberals don’t share those values.

From there, Haidt does a stupid, stupid thing. He jumps from describing what is true (different values exist) to saying what he thinks should be true (all values should be equally treasured.) He says conservatives are the ones with the right morality, and liberals have it all wrong because their morality is incomplete. David Hume rolls over in his grave as yet another philosopher flings himself headlong into the is-ought gap.

Myself, I go the opposite route. Utilitarianism places its value on a scale that almost everyone agrees is important. It creates a common ground for what people say “ought” to be true, which they can build off of without having to jump across what “is” true. If you and I both think that it ought to be true that people are made happy, and I say that marriage rights make gay people happy, you can at least understand where I’m coming from. But if you say that it ought to be true that people respect religion, and your religion says it’s wrong for gay people to marry–well, I can’t help but find that statement to be in questionable taste.

To be fair, stealing inherently reduces social order and security. You can’t feel comfortable saving money if you expect that this money may someday be stolen. It’s also true that people who steal from “the wealthy” are often stealing from people who are also economically struggling (e.g. poor people in Nigeria who think they’re morally justified in ripping off poor people in America, because Americans must be capable of recovering from financial loss, right?) I also have no particular grudge against wealthy people, and there are people who put their wealth to good use helping others.

On the other hand, I can’t reasonably argue that a dollar for a man who has a million dollars is worth as much as a dollar for a man who only has one dollar. If you can’t afford to pay your rent, having just a little more money means a big increase in your happiness. If you’re in a stable position and have satisfied your basic needs, there are only so many things you can do with a little more money in order to become happier. In that sense, free trade commonly produces situations in which resources are not optimally distributed for maximum happiness.

This doesn’t mean I’m encouraging you to go out and try to be Robin Hood. It’s admirable to be Galileo, but a lot of the people I’ve seen invoke Galileo have been misusing and abusing him. And while I admire Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts to be a “gadfly” and create situations where people were forced to acknowledge and think about racism, a lot of the people on Tumblr who try to imitate his style go too far. Yet still, if you want to go rip off Martin Shkreli, I can’t really argue that you’re doing the wrong thing. Just create more utility with the money than he is.

Side note 1: This is where I really struggle with Internet piracy. Assume you have finite spending money for either a restaurant or a video game. I can argue that pirating the video game is immoral because the game developers might go out of business. But I can also argue that buying the game is immoral, because not spending money at the restaurant may make the restaurant go out of business. Maybe Utilitarianism just isn’t meant to handle artificial scarcity.

Side note 2: In theory, a progressive income tax redistributes money from the rich to programs that can help the poor. Since the tax is expected, it doesn’t reduce social order. Good luck trying to close all the loopholes in the current American tax code, though.

Omelas needs little in the way of a plot summary, inasmuch as it has little in the way of a plot. It proposes a society in which every person save one is happy and content, but that one lives in pain and agony. Without that one’s suffering, it would not be possible for the others to live so happily. Most people accept this, but a few choose to leave the city rather than live under such a contract. 

A scene in Guardians finds the protagonist in the sewage pit of a wealthy and opulent city. Living so finely produces a tremendous amount of waste, enough to overflow the pit were it not somehow disposed of. In place of laborers, a single baby dragon is chained in the pit, forced to burn away the waste day and night so that it does not drown in sewage. The people of the city seldom go near the dragon, nor do they listen to what he has to say. But the protagonist breaks the dragon’s chains, letting him free and allowing the city streets to fill with waste.

Omelas is light and airy, a thought experiment without context. There’s no explanation of why one person needs to suffer, because an explanation isn’t the point. Guardians, by contrast, is grounded in knowledge of exactly what’s happening and exactly why it’s tolerated. This means that Guardians can make a point Omelas isn’t equipped to discuss: creating utility is not the same as moving utility around.

Maybe you would be unhappy if you had to pick fruit in the hot sun. But if someone else picks the fruit for you to eat, their utility loss doesn’t become zero just because it isn’t your utility loss. It’s not necessarily a gain in utility if someone other than you washes your clothes, or if someone other than you cooks the food that you eat. You’re not assembling your own iPhone or mining the diamond for your wedding ring, but you still have to remember that there are actual human beings doing those tasks, and that it matters whether those people are exploited.

There’s no solution for Omelas, but Guardian’s city is fixable, and that starts with letting the streets flood. When the citizens are reminded that waste exists, they can discuss why there’s so much waste and how to have less of it. There will always be some waste that needs to be burned, but if citizens of the community are burning it, there can be an actual discussion about how much waste should be made and what level of consumption will lead to the most total happiness. It’s not as tidy and out-of-sight as a chained dragon, but it means no one has to suffer as much as the dragon had to suffer–and maybe, just possibly, our own lowest-paid laborers don’t need to be as poor and ill-cared-for as they currently are.

(Side note: this is one of the few points where I see eye to eye with Jessa Crispin. She makes some great points about how “self-care feminism” often means paying poor people a pittance to care for you, then pretending you don’t have or need support from anyone else.)

A problem we’re currently facing: Football players give themselves brain damage for the entertainment of the masses. What methods, ranging from improved safety techniques to bans on particular tactics, should be used to minimize injury?

A problem in philosophy textbooks: Several people have been murdered, and a mob is seeking vengeance. People will die if they’re not satisfied. Is it moral to accuse some random stranger of the crime, letting him be killed so others won’t be?

A problem we’re currently facing: People are murdered by terrorists, and the public demands protection. This may involve anything from bombing the living hell out of random uninvolved brown people, to outreach and awareness in communities where terrorists might be recruited, to bribing known terrorists so they’ll spill info on their colleagues. What actions should be taken to ensure that citizens both feel safe and are safe?

A problem in philosophy textbooks: a trolley is out of control and will kill six people. You can pull a lever to redirect it, killing one person. Do you pull the lever?

A problem we’re currently facing: Hospitals need funds to treat their patients. Police need funds to try to reduce the crime rate. Funds are needed for pollution cleanup, for fire prevention, for schools, for supporting the unemployed, for everything you can imagine. How should we distribute the money? For that matter, what moral values should we use to determine the best way of distributing the money?

This is one of the reasons I don’t put much stock in ethics thought experiments. The typical approach is to create an extreme situation, without any room for alternate approaches, and then say the code of ethics that’s “right” is the one that gives the most normal, everyday answer. But those aren’t the questions that matter. Regardless of what values you follow, the questions you need to address are the ones you actually have to deal with.