That’s “appearing on” not “talking about”. This week on Free Will, I chat with philosopher Geoffrey Sayre-McCord about the nature of metaethics in general and moral realism in particular. Since metaethics was, at one point, my academic specialty (I went into the Ph.D. program at Maryland with a mind to work on the nature of moral concepts), I really, really enjoyed this chat. I hope to have Geoff back on to talk about issues of naturalism and evolutionary thinking in moral philosophy.

In the comments below, David Stearns asks:

Is there any room left in the concept of ‘patriotism’ for the deep appreciation of the freedoms and independence of thought that the states are at least supposed to embody, and that they do embody in their finer moments?

I don’t think so. Freedom and independence are general features of a place or people and are valuable wherever they occur. I may love America for it’s freedom, but then I should love Canada for its freedom, too. And I do! To love a place because of its general features implies that love may wane or disappear as the manifestation of those valued qualities change. But Patriotism, the love of country, is particularistic. It is a “monogamous” sentiment. If you claim to be an American, Canadian, Danish, and Japanese patriot all at the same time, because you love qualities all these societies excellently exemplify, people will look at you funny. Patriotism requires that you “pick one,” which implies that it is not about the general features of a place, but about special attachment. (Dual citizens may get away with picking two, but that’s just because there are two attachments, and even this is suspect.)

If you meet a women with all the attributes you claim to love about your wife, only better, and you run off with her because of their excellence, then you never really loved your wife. You loved her attributes. You can rightly claim never to have been unfaithful. Indeed, to stay would have made you untrue — to your values. But to fully love a woman, or a country, is to love some one particular thing. Now, it is surely better to love a woman than to love her qualities. But when it comes to countries, it is better by far to give your heart to freedom, and to love countries themselves incidentally and faithlessly.

I liked Ross Douthat’s first post on prostitution. He identifies the real question at issue, which is the truth or falsity of this claim:

[R]enting out your body to satisfy another person’s sexual needs is a form of self-inflicted violence serious enough to merit legal sanction …

The whole case for banning trade in sexual services stands or falls on the defense of this claim and the assumption behind it. Even granting the assumption that paternalistic efforts to protect adults from the consequences of their own choices are justified, which I certainly don’t, the claim that prostitution is, by its nature, a kind of self-harm is pretty clearly false.

Again, it bears emphasizing that absolutely every form of labor involves renting out your body. The language of “selling your body” is generally intended to elicit a “wisdom of repugnance” disgust response, but it just doesn’t when you consider that folks like Ross and me get paid for things we do with our bodies — thinking, typing. Surgeons rent out their brains, and steady hands, to meet people’s health needs. Construction workers rent out their arms, legs, backs, brains. Etc. I sell my body for a living. So do you.

I think the real claim is not about bodies, but about vaginas and penises in particular. These should not be rentable. (Do note, however, that it is legal to rent a uterus and vagina for the purposes of surrogate gestation and childbirth, but no one really enjoys that and a lot of conservatives don’t like it anyway. And there is always porn, which is nothing without genital rental.) But bracket your intuitions about the commercial use of genitalia for a moment and consider that a good volume of trade in sexual services involves renting an expert hand. Could using your hand to give another person an orgasm possibly be a form of self-inflicted violence? Delivering manual relief is a great kindness, a sweet thing to do … unless you do it for money! At this level, Ross’s claim is evidently ludicrous. Sweet charity cannot be transformed into self-inflicted violence by a twenty dollar bill.

Does Ross think that loaning out your body, for free, to satisfy another person’s sexual needs is a form of self-inflicted violence? Should all sex outside of marriage, or outside a serious relationship, be subject to legal sanctions? If not, then using your body to satisfy another person sexually is not the problem. It is renting it. Again, bringing sex inside the cash nexus is thought to work some kind of profound psychological alchemy, which is plain nonsense.

There is a huge amount of question-begging going on in this debate. The degree to which sex work may be reasonably seen as self-inflicted violence is mainly due to the immense legal and social stigma attached to it. An honest inquirer cannot take the humiliation and loss of esteem connected to the status quo legal and social sanctions as evidence of the necessity of those sanctions. That is the purest logical shenanigans.

Moreover, the effects of this paternalism, enacted specifically to protect women from making the “wrong” choices about how they will use their bodies, inevitably bleed into broader cultural attitudes toward women and women’s sexuality. I can’t possible do better than Kerry when she says:

Just as the drug war contributes to the broadly held assumption that young black men are inherently violent and must be restrained, the criminalization of sex work reinforces the idea that sexually active women are damaged and deranged. In both cases, the activities themselves are surrounded by all manner of tragedy, abuse, and violence. In neither case is the liberal humanitarian policy response: Ban it harder, further reinforcing our worst assumptions about entire classes of people.

All this collective action problem debate is delightful. Here are some not-very-structured musings….

The topic of my unwritten dissertation was how solutions to “the contractarian compliance problem” (the fact that an individual can often do better for herself by ignoring moral constraints on self-interest that, if generally heeded, more than compensate for the short-term sacrifices moral constraints require), and the boundary between ideal and non-ideal political theory, turn on assumptions about human motivation that are open to empirical investigation. My position was (and is) that both pure rational choice (as represented by James Buchanan) and modified rational choice (as represented by David Gauthier) are less satisfactory as a matter of empirical psychology than a more deeply-moralized conception of motivation (as represented by John Rawls), but that rationalist accounts of the “moral capacity” or “sense of justice,” like Rawls’s, are also inadequate (in part because of the failure of the Universal Grammar analogy and in part because of naivete about the power of the moral sense to regulate self-interest in many contexts, especially politics).

Anyway, the point is that I don’t accept strict rational choice reasoning about collective action problems. Indeed, I think the fact that we do successfully solve so many of them basically refutes strict rational choice assumptions. (Even if coercion needs to come in to solve a coordination problem, you’ve got to ask why the guys with the guns are doing what they are supposed to, and not just using their powers to plunder, etc.) But if we’re talking about whether or not a certain constraint on self-interest ought to be normatively binding, I think you have to ask: Why? Because I’m a soulless, reductive, naturalist, I think there’s a good answer to that: because heeding the constraint will tend to make the person who heeds it better off, conditional on others heeding it, too. This is where a lot of people will part ways from me. They feel uncomfortable seating normativity in individual flourishing. However, I find all the relevant alternatives to be basically religious.

I am entertained by the examples at hand — gifts to the U.S. Treasury, meat avoidance, and carbon minimization — largely because I see people fighting over whether or not to try to establish or reinforce a moral norm, and that is really interesting. I found Henry’s rational choice-style answer to the question of gifts to the government amusing, because it suggests that he is not interested in reinforcing a moral norm that would motivate us to give money voluntarily to the Treasury. But if he wants the government to have more money, why not? Perhaps such a norm of voluntary giving might undermine a sense of the necessity and/or moral legitimacy of coercive taxation, which he believes it is important to maintain. Perhaps he thinks that this is an area where we cannot realistically expect the moral sense to sufficiently regulate self-interest, and so appealing to morality to do a job only coercion can do will be self-defeating. A new set of moral norms might crowd out a more effective coercive solution.

Well, I can buy that as a real possibility. But then I become very interested in how to apply this kind of reasoning to other similar cases. A lot of people seem to want to pursue a joint moral-coercive strategy to carbon emissions. Might that be self-defeating? Or is it supposed that an optimal carbon tax is politically infeasible without some moral ground-softening? Ethical vegetarians can be very evangelical but don’t seem to be very interested in banning or taxing meat at all. Why not? Maybe all these subjects are more dissimilar than I’m assuming. Then how so?

My philosophy leaves me very skeptical that norms about any of these things (much less coercively-enforced rules) would have any justified normative force — would be rationally binding. I don’t think higher taxes in the U.S. will leave the average person better off over time, much less the person who pays them. I have no idea how to tote up the net externality of carbon emissions (I don’t even know if the sign is positive or negative) and neither does anybody else. And since I think morality is for enabling human flourishing, I care about animals only insofar as our attitudes toward them affect patterns of interaction that bear on human well-being.

“Culture wars” are largely ongoing fights about what the governing norms are going to be. Certain kinds of arguments are useful in discouraging people from adopting or internalizing a new norm. I think a lot of rational choice arguments are like that. Because I think a lot of fledgling moral norms are likely to be harmful if they go viral, I like to encourage people to think like an economist, both to help them understand why the norm may not do any good as a matter of fact, but also to promote a generally inhospitable psychological climate for faddish moral memes.

Did you really read this far?

Here’s a question and answer from AskPhilosophers that bears on the question of individual moral obligation in matters where only coordinated collective action can make any meaningful difference.

If I don’t fly from London to my sister’s wedding in New Zealand she will be upset, I will cause her pain and so that’s morally bad.If I do fly to my sister’s wedding in New Zealand I will put about four tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which will contribute to climate change, which, according to the World Health Organisation, already causes about 150,000 deaths every year. Clearly that’s also morally bad.Which is the morally correct thing to do?

December 4, 2007

Response from Thomas Pogge on December 7, 2007

In dilemmas of this kind, always start by thinking about whether they are really inescapable. One escape in this case it to speak with your sister. If she likes New Zealand, she is unlikely to be indifferent to the environmental degradation that is already so much in evidence elsewhere. Plus you can offer to donate the flight cost to a good cause of her choice, in honor of her wedding. In any case, it is much easier for her to understand and accept the decision if she was herself involved in making it or at least in thinking it through.

BTW, I checked your numbers because 4 tonnes seemed like a lot. But you are basically right. A Boeing 747-8 takes a bit over 200 tonnes of fuel (over half its take-off weight), roughly 137 gallons of fuel per passenger. Each gallon produces 20 lbs of carbon dioxide. So that’s about 1.3 tonnes per person. But then one tank does not get you there, plus you’ll have to fly back as well. So 4 tonnes is a very good estimate. Way too much, indeed.

Well, I sure wouldn’t have given Thomas Pogge’s answer, which I think is really quite silly. Even granting what I’d guess are the underlying extreme AGW assumptions, surely the correct answer is this:

Your choice is very unlikely to determine whether or not a airplane leaves London for New Zealand. So, chances are extremely high that the same amount of carbon will be emitted whether or not you choose to go. Staying or going will make no difference at all to the condition of the atmosphere. But even if your choice quite improbably keeps that plane in the hangar, the effect of that flight is infinitesimally small in the overall scheme of things. Your choice is also likely to do nothing whatsoever to improve the probability of enacting some kind of future global climate treaty or some kind of scheme for incorporating the cost of the environmental externality into the cost of plane tickets. So, if not being a horrible selfish brat of a brother matters to you at all, then you should go. In fact, you sound suspiciously like a shit trying to find a bogus, holier-than-thou excuse to wriggle out of ponying up for a flight to your sister’s wedding. If you’re broke or cheap you’ve got to tell her the truth about why you won’t go. You are emphatically not allowed to hide behind Al Gore.

Thomas Pogge is an eminent moral and political philosopher, and not a complete idiot, so what’s going on here?

Megan’s debate with Henry Farrell over voluntary taxation is fun to watch. Megan says if you think you are not paying your fair share in taxes, then you can always write a check to the government. She is correct. Henry says that when people say that they want to pay higher taxes, generally they mean that they want to pay conditional on other people also paying higher taxes. It may be well worth $x to me to increase government revenue by $10,000,000x, e.g., but not to increase it just by $x. He is correct.

I accept Henry’s reasoning. But a lot of folks with roughly his politics don’t. I’ve heard any number of ethical vegetarians reject the claim that the irrelevance of any individual’s choice to the aggregate demand for meat renders the individual’s obligation not to consume meat moot. Likewise, there is no change in my behavior that could possibly have a causally appreciable affect on the aggregate output of carbon. But there are evidently many many people who think I am under a strong moral obligation to bicycle, buy local produce, etc. whether or not a credible scheme of global carbon regulation is ever implemented. And aren’t a lot of the people who think they should not eat meat whether or not other people do, and a lot of the people who think that they should reduce their carbon footprint whether or not other people do, the same people who think tax rates ought to be higher as a matter of distributive justice? If so, then it seems like those people are logically committed to sending big checks to the government, or directly to poor people, whether or not other people are forced to. And so it does seem that many people who should think they ought to are avoiding sending checks to the government.

Maybe if there was a special “tax patriot” armband you got to wear around for paying extra taxes that allowed people to signal, and take public credit for, an otherwise invisible act — a Prius of taxation — we’d see more of it.

The argument between the moral chauvinist and the moral universalist is an argument over the standard for moral justification. For the chauvinist, if a rule or policy benefits the group to which the chauvinist happens to be a member, then it is justified. One of the chauvinist’s many problems, besides getting morality fundamentally wrong, is that she is a member of many groups. She may be a Catholic, of Chinese origin, and an American citizen. She may be a loyal Michigander, a stalwart of the local community, and a member in good standing of clubs and associations. The chauvinist who prioritizes the nation needs to provide some justification for choosing this membership as especially salient.

I don’t find communitarian conservatives confusing, but I do find communitarian nationalist conservatives confusing, especially when the nation in question is something so sprawling, diverse, and abstract as the United States of America. The USA is already more like, say, a North American Union than it is like the kind of tightly-knit gemeinschaft traditionalists crave. The massive, pluralistic, modern state is already so far down the anti-communitarian slippery slope that communitarian moral chauvinism asserted at the level of the state seems patently ridiculous, like a steam-powered laptop.

What I really think nationalist, anti-immigration conservatives would like is to establish some kind of strong right of cultural preservation without at the same time getting caught in a morass of relativistic identity politics. Well, good luck. At bottom of that desire, I think, is the conviction that cultural and moral chauvinism are necessary conditions for a rich and deeply meaningful life. But if you, like me, have actually been persuaded by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment about the universal nature of morality and rights, then this basically amounts to the claim that meaning in life requires immorality. Of course, it won’t do to baldly assert that the good life requires systematically harming outsiders and violating their rights as human beings, so the chauvinist generally answers the “Why be moral?” question be redefining morality as group partiality, or denying that it is even intelligible to recognize moral obligations simply in virtue of our shared humanity rather than in our shared sectarian identities.

I think low-brow, right-wing pop ideologues are rather more up front than most would-be right-wing intellectuals. They see the world as a place of irreconcilable conflict. Our culture is the best one. Our people are the best people. We are at war to preserve our culture and people against the interlopers, which requires keeping them away. The very presence of people speaking other languages in public threatens our culture, the best culture. And mixture of cultures and genes threatens to lead our people, the best people, to extinction. We may impose almost any cost on outsiders to preserve our culture and our people, because our culture and people are best, and those people are not us. Liberty, free association, dynamism, cosmopolitanism: these are code words for our destruction and those moralizers who rely on them are traitors.

So…, James Poulos had said:

The big problem with Gerson’s ‘moral internationalism’ is not that it has a big heart or a goofy smile. The big problem is that it’s inimical to citizenship. Gerson and his ilk long for the day that Americans don’t get a better shake in life just because they’re Americans.

I was a bit confused by the possibility of a decent person denying the fundamental moral equality of human beings, so I asked in comments:

Just to be clear, you think Americans ought to get a better shake in life just because they’re Americans?

In the comments, James ends up endorsing this view, from J.A.:

Whether you subscribe to the notion that America’s prosperity and stability are undeserved accidents of a less-than-honorable history, or, alternatively, happy results of the Constitution and better than average leadership — or, in fact, if you believe neither or a combination of these — do other peoples, less fortunate in their circumstances, have legitimate moral claims on us for access to them? If you take as a given that America is, comparatively speaking, a really good place to live, work, and raise a family — which I think is obviously a true statement — then the question is not whether Americans should get a better shake in life; they do get a better shake in life by virtue of being citizens in a “really good place to live, work and raise a family.” The question isn’t even one of just deserts. The question is, what moral claims can non-citizens make on American citizens given the fact of American prosperity and stability?

Yes, Americans get a better shake in life than most people in the world in virtue of having had the good sense to get born in the United States, which does have relatively excellent institutions. Yes, those institutions are a main reason so many people come to live and work here. But I cannot make sense of the concluding question. Does J.A. think that the fact Americans are so rich weakens the obligations of Americans to non-citizens? I guess that would be an… interesting thing to think.

There is no need for confusion about the question at hand, which is clear enough: What justifies state-imposed limits on the human rights to movement and free association?

A country is not a big plot of land owned by its citizens. It is a jurisdiction of government within which there are many free people and many pieces of privately-owned property — at least if the government is decent. But suppose one is simple and thinks citizens own countries in much the way a family can own a farm. What then?

First, back up to the question of the justification of a system of private property. The division of the commons into parcels, and the use of government coercion to enforce private claims over these parcels — which include the right to exclude — requires a justification. Dave Schmidtz provides that justification here [doc]. In short, dividing the commons leaves each with more than had it remained open. The right to exclude enables general prosperity.

So, think of the Earth as a big commons, and imagine borders as fences. Can we justify the system of nation-states and its migration controls in the same way? Evidently not. The welfare gains that would come from even a mild decrease in coercive limits on travel and free association are awesomely huge, which of course implies that the status quo system of limits does not leave most people better off than they would be in a feasible alternative system. And this suggests that the global-level system of division and exclusion lacks moral justification.

Citizens may have stronger claims on one another than they have on non-citizens. And they may have stronger claims one another than non-citizens have on them, because they share the burdens and benefits of a set of common institutions. But everyone, no matter who printed their passport, has equal claim to the respect of their basic rights. Citizens are under a strict obligation not to harm or violate the rights of non-citizens. The status quo system, which limits the freedom to travel and cooperation without benefiting most of those whose freedom is limited, amounts to both a substantive and moral harm; it denies some basic conditions for human flourishing and a thereby constitutes a violation of basic rights. What non-citizens have coming to them, is the recognition of their rights, moral respect as persons.

Limiting basic rights to travel and associate may be justified if it is necessary to maintain the integrity and stability of instutitions that tend to make people better off overall. The United States economy and its supporting institutions are hugely beneficial not only to those who live and work within them, but more broadly. I am open to serious, empirically-minded arguments about the location of the point at which additional openness to migration leads to diminishing benefits. But, I’m afraid, one sees very little of this.

Nice overview. But I found the ending part on why the Haidt calibration view doesn’t imply relativism a bit shady—a bit Straussian even!

Pinker struck me as arguing that there are real external facts about human flourishing that help underpin the authority of the harm and reciprocity dimensions of the moral sense, whereas the new science of morality helps us to see that we are subject to all sorts of “illusions” when it comes to the authority, in-group, and purity dimensions.

Now, I agree about a trillion percent with what I imagine Pinker is going for here: improving real human well-being by establishing the cultural dominance of a distinctively liberal calibration of the moral sense. That is, in fact, the ticket. But I simply don’t see how this stands as an adequate reply to someone who says that it is better that millions suffer and/or die for the greater glory of the tribe, or the Prophet, or to prevent the defilement of the blood of the Motherland. Yes, it is an objective fact of the world that if the well-being of each is our aim, then liberal morality, and its concomitant institutions, such as the extended order of market cooperation, are the necessary means. But, tragically, we do not all share this aim.

Must we? From the perspective of morality per se and not just from the perspective of one among many moralities? Is human flourishing of overriding importance–does it get greater weight than alternatives—because of it’s very nature. Or are those of us with an already liberal moral sense simply willing to go to the mat for the idea? To my mind, Haidt’s views do leave us with relativism. And the obviously correct thing to do is to fight and win a global culture war for a liberal morality. The ongoing fight against liberal morality is sometimes so savage because, well, because the people fighting it are not liberals for one thing, but also because the advantages of liberalism—greater wealth, better health, longer lives, more deeply satisfying individuation, etc.—are so attractive, so enticing, and therefore so dangerous to those whose sense of meaning is bound up in an illiberal calibration of the moral sense.

Why not just say that a more thoroughly liberal calibration of the moral sense will deliver a huge list of incredibly attractive goods for everyone in the world, and leave it at that? If some can’t be persuaded to care about those goods, then their kids can be. And their happy, health, wealthy, long-lived kids will little lament the loss of their backwards ancestral codes.

My unpublished essay on Haidt and politics, here.

I am an American with two sisters. Suppose that, for whatever reason, one is a French citizen and one is an American citizen. Do I weigh my American sister’s interests more highly, in virtue of our shared citizenship? (Start from an egalitarian baseline, then give both a bonus for being my sister, and then give one a bonus for being a co-national?) Or do family relationships trump political relationships, so I must treat them equally, as sisters. What if our countries are at war?

If you think it is permissible to weigh the interests of countrymen more highly that of foreigners, and it is permissible to weigh the interests your family more highly than your non-family, is nepotism permissible? To be encouraged? If you’re a congressman and land a sweetheart government contract for you incompetent criminal brother, does that make you a bad American but a good brother? If you had to choose, which is it better to be?

You are the star quarterback of your high school football team. The state championship game is this evening, and your team cannot win without your gridiron virtuosity.  But you discover your twin brother, who was adopted by another family and whom you have never met, is in jail, and in danger. You can go bail him out and save him from being imminently beaten in jail by a gang he has crossed, or make the big game and give your team (which contains your best friends) a shot at the championship, but not both. What do you do? What if you were raised together and joined at the hip until he got mixed up in a bad crowd? But you’re not genetically related? What if he is a French citizen? What if you have another brother on the football team? A cousin?

You are American. I have joined the French Foreign Legion and renounced my American citizenship. I have (a) betrayed you, (b) erased our prior mutual obligations as citizens, (c) both. Now, imagine you are French.

You are a Delaware patriot. Some guys from your state, who you certainly never got the chance to vote for, votes to incorporate Delaware into the United States of America. Do you now owe additional regard to the interests of Pennsylvanians? Suppose you did vote for your “representatives”? What then? Suppose you are an American patriot. A constitutional amendment is passed incorporating the United States of America into the North American Union. Do you now owe additional regard to the interests of Mexicans?

Three people are drowning in a pool and you can save just one. One is a fellow American. One is a fellow devout Catholic. One is your son’s French atheist girlfriend. Is it permissible for any of these attributes to play a role in deliberation over who will save and who you will let drown? If so, which? If more than one, which weighs most heavily, and why?

I ask because I cannot fathom a set of general principles that could possibly govern these cases. Which leads me to suspect that those who endorse the moral centrality of duties based in egocentric attachment generally have no argument, rational or moral, against policies that seem to them to run afoul of their imagined special affiliative duties, but are merely asserting an unwillingness to accept them. This amounts to little more than an affirmation of one’s prior commitments.

A principled particularist would give us something like a complete schedule of prices: how many countrymen one brother is worth; how many Frenchmen one countryman is worth; etc. We’d then know, say,  how serious a transgression must be before breaking the “thin blue line” and ratting out a fellow cop, and just how many hours one is obliged to spend with one’s “bros” relative to one’s new girlfriend. We could then know how much immigrants must benefit to offset costs to natives, and thus what an acceptable (to the principled particularist) level of increase in immigration would be. However, a principled particularist is something like a contradiction. I suspect I will be told that these things can’t be measured in terms of one another with any precision. So all we can know for sure is that candidate duties to others we do not presently recognize cannot really be our duties, since they are not rooted in attachments we already take ourselves to have, and may even conflict with ones many of us are sure we do have. The easiest way to adjudicate the possible conflict is simply to ignore the possibility of new duties it would be inconvenient to have. And, thus, everything is left as it is.       

I have a lot of objections to Yuval Levin’s Haidt post at NRO. Both Ross and Andrew Sullivan seemed to have been impressed. So let’s look closer:

I think Haidt’s thesis and book are fascinating, but suffer from the general tendency of modern science to turn the study of the nature of something into a study of the history of that thing.

Hmm…. This sounds to me like Levin thinks Haidt’s work suffers from studying its subject in the right way. Post-Darwin, we understand that the nature of an animal is the consequence of the history of its lineage. Humans are animals and the human moral sense is a part of our evolved nature. Studying the natural history of the moral sense is almost the only truly illuminating way to study it. It’s a whole lot better than simply trying to tease out the implications of our moral judgments from the first-person perspective — from the “inside” — and I say that as someone who has spent a huge amount of time employed in the process of reflective equilibration. I’d say Levin’s post suffers from the general tendency of conservatives to do a lot of handwaving about what’s wrong with real science in the attempt to preserve a sense of the authority of our moral judgments — and a sense of the legitimacy of the social order built around them — in the face of the scientific evidence for their biological and cultural contingency.

More:

Not everything about our moral life can be rationalized, because important pieces of it derive from (and serve) the complicated set of moral obligations that arise out of our unchosen social relations. No one chooses to be born into the world, and no one chooses into which family and country to be born, but these unchosen relations nonetheless impose inescapable moral obligations on us.

This straightforwardly begs the question. Haidt’s whole program has to do with explaining cultural variations regarding which perceived obligations arise from our unchosen social relations. Levin seems to want to think that there is some external fact about what the obligations of our social relations are. But the theory under discussion is precisely that both (a) social structure and (b) the sense of moral obligation experienced by those embedded within it depends on the culturally variable settings on the five posited dimensions of the moral sense. These settings not only change from place to place, but also change over time. That’s part of the theory. So what’s wrong with the theory?

My sense is that there has been a huge shift in the cultural consensus in the West about, say, the autonomy parents owe their grown and even adolescent children, and, conversely, the obedience and material assistance grown children owe their parents. You probably wouldn’t be a conservative if you witnessed such a change in norms and failed to diagnose it as a failure of people to meet the “inescapable obligations” that arise from their unchosen social relations. If you were to accept the mutability of these obligations, it would be pretty hard to characterized them as inescapable. Once we no longer feel an obligation’s normative gravity, we stop believing that it has any. And an obligation whose normative pull no one feels stop being considered an obligation. When it stops being considered an obligation, the pattern of individual behavior changes, and, ipso facto, the society is changed. For conservatives, this kind of social change comes as one moral crisis after another. When we in fact arrive at a better place after the change, as we generally do, the conservative mostly just makes peace with it while insisting that we all panic about the next moral shift, which will surely bring down all of society along with it.

Part of what it means to have a thoroughly liberal moral sense, in Haidt’s terms, is to see the claims of ingroup solidarity as weak and easily defeated by competing considerations. For example, this liberal finds the claim, implicit in much of the immigration debate, that I ought to heavily discount the welfare gains to non-citizens simply because they belong to a different national coalition morally abhorrent. I don’t doubt that many people take themselves to have an “inescapable” moral obligation to treat outsiders unfairly, or to even positively harm them (even kill them!), if it redounds to the benefits insiders. But I deny that there is any such obligation to escape in the first place. Haidt’s theory is extremely illuminating because it explains in part how heated cultural and political conflict can flow from opinions that evidently incompatible, but all of which are distinctively “moral” in character. Many of Levin’s claims, such as the claim that “some of our most important obligations—particularly those in the family—remain unchosen yet binding and essential” fail entirely to engage Haidt’s thesis about the underpinnings of variation in moral judgment and sound like little more than hollow, if pious, exhortation.
Levin:

This means we have one way of moralizing—the contractual way—which makes for more freedom and justice but has nothing to say to the deepest truths of our human experience (and therefore can dangerously distort our society); and we have another—the one grounded in continuity and generation—that helps us make sense of our place in the world but cares too little about avoidable injustices. The first is highly artificial, and so is also better suited to highly rational and verbal defenses. The second is highly sentimental—it is geared to those areas of our life about which we have the least explicit knowledge and so can say the least—so it sometimes expresses itself in unspoken shudders more than organized arguments. This leaves it at a great disadvantage in our time, of course.

No. The “contractual way” of moralizing is no less (or more) sentimental, nor is it more (or less) artificial. That is one of Haidt’s central points. All the calibrations of the moral sentiments are calibrations of the moral sentiments. All the dimensions of sentiment naturally evolved. All the calibrations of those setting are conventional and culture-bound. I’m not surprised that Levin, who worked under Leon Kass at the President’s Council on Bioethics, wants to defend the normative authority of our “unspoken shudders.” But I do think Levin is right that the liberal dimensions of the moral sense are uniquely amenable to defense by rational argument, which is no doubt why liberalism is part of our rationalist Enlightenment heritage — why the societies that most value reason are also liberal societies and contain the least suffering and oppression. Levin wants to defend the shudder when it comes to, say, cloning, but (I trust) not when it comes to the subhuman treatment of the Dalits. So, those of us armed with reason inevitably ask: “What’s the difference?” And he doesn’t have a good answer. Which is why, once we hit a certain threshold of sensitivity to harm and injustice, we just keep on getting more and more liberal, despite the best efforts of folks like Levin to get us to see our prejudices as “inescapable” and “essential.”

My reaction to this online “Moral Sense Test” (take it now if you don’t want ”science” to be tainted by prior knowledge of the experiment) was basically the same as Munger’s (who freaks out about the fact that Drezner assigned any fines at all):

THE PREMISE OF THE TEST IS THAT GOVERNMENT SHOULD FINE PEOPLE FOR ACCIDENTS, AND TAKE THE MONEY AT GUN POINT FOR USE IN THE GENERAL FUND!

These are TORTS, not criminal offenses. It is important that the victims do not receive the payment. An average of $129? GOTT IN HIMMEL! I had an “average payment of $0.00! I thought that several of the scenarios (like the peanuts in the allergist’s office) were clear negligence, and that there was a cause of action for a law suit. Any allergy sufferer knows, or should know, that peanuts can be deadly, and in an allergist’s office one expects to encounter people with…..ALLERGIES!

But not a fine! Why put government in charge of collecting fines when one private person harms another accidentally? You are in favor of criminalizing private mistakes, when there is a private remedy. There is no deterrent effect here, and no pretense of making the damaged party whole.

(Sorry for the yelling. Mike is, well, special, and can’t help it.)

I really, really hope that this is one of the experiments that pretends to be one thing while really studying another. For example, I hope they are really studying how many people are so morally stunted that they are willing to have the government fine people for causing pain through mostly unforeseeable, mostly non-negligent accidents, and not even as compensation to the persons pained! Or maybe they’re studying how people’s ordinary good moral sense can be railroaded into sharing some set of idiotic assumptions by embedding them in the instructions of an “experiment” run by “scientists” at a trusted brand-name institution like “Harvard.” Let’s hope! (I would like to hear from Mixing Memory Chris on this one. Chris?)

Random thought about online experiments. I bet “Harvard” has a moralized aura for many people, it being the bastion of “right-thinking East Coast haute bourgeousie liberalism.” Do volunteers, seeing “Harvard” seek to please the moral arbiters therein? Seek to screw them over? Would you get the same results if the test was hosted at Bowling Green State? At Oral Roberts? 

John Holbo’s brilliant post explains exactly why I always found Rorty puzzling.

His reformist reach exceeds his justificatory good conscience. He really thinks he’s right, but doesn’t think he can give his opponents rational grounds that they are compelled to accept. The one point he’s got is that, if the sort of change he wants comes, it will come as a sort of ‘conversion’ to a new way of thinking (cultural shift, call it what you will). This is true, but – again – not exactly a reason to convert. But what else can he say? Rorty ends up more or less boxed into a narrow hortatory row: not even straight preaching to the unconverted. Instead, preaching the meta-possibility of conversion to the unconverted.

Which seems to me to be a way of saying that Rorty was a dismally bad pragmatist. If he really cared about reducing cruelty, he would have availed himself of the most muscular and effective modes of persuasion — i.e., empirical argument about and vivid demonstration of what actually reduces suffering – rather than “preaching the meta-possibility of conversion to the unconverted.” Rorty seems to have knee-capped himself with his undermotivated epistemic convictions, which is indeed ironic, since those very convictions say he shouldn’t take them seriously. But he does; he evidently takes them more seriously than his professed moral aims. I was amused reading Achieving Our Country when Rorty says, quite explicitly, there is no fact of the matter about the past, and now I am going to try to convince you of a story about our history that I think it would be good for us all to believe! If you thought it was so important for people to believe it, why would you start out by telling them that you yourself don’t, actually? Here’s one completely conjectural suspicion: Rorty was in love with the idea of social democratic justice, but did not think that he had any warrant for the belief that it actually would make people better off. A child of committed communists, he saw that passionately loved moral ideals can be completely disastrous. But he believed what he believed, damn it. Knowing it might be false, and even harmful, he was ironic about it. And he effectively reduced suffering by arguing for his political ideals in such a painfully narcissistic and completely ineffectual fashion that they never actually affected the world. For this, he deserves our thanks.

By way of contrast, if Lant Pritchett succeeds in even slightly opening up wealthy labor markets to workers who lost the passport lottery, he will have done more to end needless cruelty than a million Rortys. But then, Lant Pritchett believes that the effectiveness of his favored means to that end of reducing suffering is a fact of the external world. And it is. That’s powerful.     

From Anne Phillips’s “Defending Equality of Outcome” [pdf]:

When differences in outcome are explained retrospectively by reference to differences in personal preference, this assumes what has to be demonstrated: that individuals really did have equal opportunities to thrive. In many case, moreover, these explanations reproduce ideologically suspect stereotypes about particular social groups: that ‘women’ for example, care more about children than men, or have less of a taste for political power. When outcomes are “different” (read unequal), the better explanation is that the opportunities were themselves unequal.

I haven’t read the whole paper yet, but this strikes me as forcing a false alternative. Phillips makes an excellent point about not just assuming that differences in outcome reflect a simple difference in preference. This point cuts especially deep when we acknowledge that preferences are not formed in a cultural vacuum, but can and often do reflect entrenched prejudices and social expectations at odds with a decent measure of individual autonomy, a requirement of equal opportunity. (Which is why, if you care about autonomy, it is insane to think sexism and racism are non-problems just as long as there are no legal barriers.) I think this is pretty well undeniable.

That said, it may also be the case that men and women, say, would tend to have differences in preference even when their preferences are sufficiently autonomously generated and reflectively endorsed — even in a climate of truly equal opportunity. Indeed, I think it would be pretty surprising if they didn’t. And these no doubt will tend to affect patterns of outcome. Furthermore, unless we assume, bizarrely, that autonomous preferences must be either uniform or random, then there will be autonomous, reflective, culturally correlated preferences, again generating different patterns of outcomes for different groups.

Whether inequality in preference or inequality in opportunity is a better explanation for inequality in outcome is an empirical issue. And we should try to figure out what’s going on in various cases. There is lots of evidence for heteronemous social pressure and unequal opportunity in all kinds of cases. And there is also plenty of evidence for sex differences and benign cultural variation that could effect outcomes. In most cases, it’s not clear how much weight to put on either consideration, but it really is something we ought to just go ahead and dig into and fight about. That’s how you find out. (There is also a matter of sex-, population-, and culture-based variations in skill, which is whole other question that bears on differences in outcome.) 

Maybe this is the big complication: If there are cross-culturally robust, non-culturally-constructed sex-based tendencies in preference, for example, then cultures may not only reflect but harden and exaggerate the differences in tendency, creating cultural expectations that exert pressure on men and women at the tails of their respective distributions to form preferences not fully “theirs.” Another way to put it: “naturally” emergent cultural expectations that reflect the average ”natural” preferences of a group may raise the social cost of expressing statistically deviant preferences past the point that most people are willing to pay. So you get broad conformity in preference expression, but lots of people would have expressed non-conforming preferences had the price of expressing them been lower. If the problem of empirically determining whether or not different preferences determined different outcomes requires distinguishing between preferences that were supressed by the price of non-conformism, then we’re probably in trouble.

Now, by “equality of opportunity” do we mean that everyone faces the same cost of expressing their “natural” preferences? I don’t, since people with statistically deviant preferences will almost always face a higher cost of expressing them, unless they’re also statistically deviant in not having a preference for conformity. Further, some preferences just aren’t compatible with a desirable social order, so we need to keep the cost of expressing them high.

Via Leiter, Jeffrey Brand-Ballard’s review of Frances Kamm’s Intricate Ethics is a gorgeous example of killing (letting die?) with kindness. This is, I think, a brutally dispositive review, effectively tearing to shreds the brand of autobiographical moral phenomenology in which Kamm deals. But it’s so nice in between slicings and dicings, which makes it hurt all the more. Here are some good bits:

Kamm does not claim otherwise, but she sometimes seems to slide from the observed near-universality of some deontological intuitions to the conclusion that everyone would share her intuitions about the complicated cases she invents, if only he would reflect upon them as carefully as she has.

Of course, one should not begrudge a philosopher a few appeals to her own intuitions, but Kamm makes these appeals with a vengeance.  This is especially worrisome because she so often draws moral distinctions between cases that others might see as morally indistinguishable.  Her intuitions are exquisitely sensitive to the specific physical properties of trolleys, bombs, bridges, pills, knives, doctors, transplanted organs, sore throats, headaches, bathtubs, Lazy Susans, life-support machines, snow shovels, islands, yachts, et cetera. 

[...]

Kamm is exceptionally good at inventing hypothetical cases that isolate the factors that interest her, and she has a similarly prodigious talent for identifying and characterizing those factors in general terms.  She has yet to discover in herself an intuition for which she cannot formulate a covering principle.  However, I am not sure why anyone with Kamm’s level of confidence in her own moral intuitions about difficult cases would need to contemplate general moral principles in the first place.

[...]

Kamm uses her formidable imagination to consider outrageously unrealistic hypothetical scenarios, but she does not consider what her intuitions might be if she had lived in other possible worlds.  I am not sure her indifference to such counterfactual intuitions comports with her ambition to identify ultimate, universal moral principles, rather than derivative, local ones.

[...]

I can also imagine the social and natural sciences supplying persuasive “debunking explanations” for the deontic intuitions to which Kamm appeals.  For example, some of my deontic intuitions may be explicable as heuristics that are highly adaptive in statistically normal situations, but that misfire in unusual situations, as when pushing one man in front of the trolley is necessary to save five.  Kamm does not, apparently, take principled objection to the project of offering an error theory to account for recalcitrant moral intuitions (pp. 188n92, 379-85).  She is merely unimpressed with all such efforts to date. 

[...]

Even readers who do not share her intuitions will come away from the book inspired to formulate principles that capture their own, and she will have provided them with dozens of new philosophical resources for doing so.  Professor Kamm is in a class by herself. 

 I hope never to receive such praise.

Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has joined the blogosphere. Welcome! I’m glad, because he seems like a thinker well worth disagreeing with. For instance, in this post on why people get riled by economic dislocations caused by trade, but not by technology, Rodrik writes:

[Economists conventionally] do not ask whether the trade opportunity involves an exchange that most people would consider unacceptable if it took place at home. So it is immaterial to our story if the gains from trade are created, say, by a company shutting down its factory at home and setting up a new one abroad using child labor. . . .

The thought experiment clarifies, I think, why the archetypal man on the street reacts differently to trade-induced changes in distribution than to technology-induced changes (i.e., to technological progress). Both increase the size of the economic pie, while often causing large income transfers. But a redistribution that takes place because home firms are undercut by competitors who employ deplorable labor practices, use production methods that are harmful to the environment, or enjoy government support is procedurally different than one that takes place because an innovator has come up with a better product through hard work or ingenuity.

I think Rodrik is either thinking too hard or not hard enough. First, I suspect many people don’t really grasp how it is that the surplus from trade is increased by either comparative advantage or technological advance, so a change in the allocation of the surplus intuitively strikes these people as involving a new winner and a new loser. The main concern, then, is who the winner is: us or them.

The key word in Rodrik’s anaylsis is “home” and the key phrase is “home firms,” members of our national coalition. If you watch Lou Dobbs for about five minutes, you’ll see that the animating emotional force behind his protectionism is simple in-group/out-group coalitional solidarity. If it turns out that the other, who is so much poorer than us, happens to employ labor practices less luxurious than ours, or pollutes at a higher rate than we do, then so much the better for illustrating and reinforcing the differences between the enlightened at home and those miserable, dirty, slave-driving foreign savages who want to steal our jobs and undermine our way of life. Never mind if their next best alternative to the factory is worse for them. Never mind that they are making the same kind of trade-off between growth and environmental quality we made at a similar stage of development. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, we don’t actually care about them.

The “archetypical man in the street” doesn’t blink in the face of technology-driven distributional changes not because those changes are less procedurally unfair, but because there is no apparently competing out-group against which to galvanize visceral coalitional sentiments. Different states within the U.S. have different labor laws and environmental regs. When a firm in one state is undercut by a firm in another state, the difference in regulatory environments is often a part of the story. But this tends not to get anyone keyed up about “procedural fairness,” and I think that’s largely because Minnesotans don’t see Oklahomansthe same way Lou Dobbs’s American audience sees the Chinese — as a threat. So there is no need to dress up tribal ugliness in the language of fairness.

Learning to “not ask whether the trade opportunity involves an exchange that most people would consider unacceptable if it took place at home,” is part of moral progress, not moral blindness, because our judgments of what is “acceptable at home” are myopic, reflecting our constraints, and the tastes that flourish within them, not theirs. But it is the constrainsts and desires of the people actually entering into the exchange that matter. If we aspire to be cosmopolitan humanitarians, instead of narrowly parochial self-serving moralizers, we will not attempt to see their choices through the lens of our circumstances. No doubt many people consider it “unacceptable” to exchange sex for money, because they cannot imagine any circumstances in which they would find that anything but degrading. But a failure of sympathy and moral imagination is not the way to a winning moral argument.

Commenting on Tyler Cowen’s post reporting on Hans Peter-Kohler’s paper [pdf] on the the effect of children on subjective well-being, Ross Douthat (subbing for Andrew Sullivan) writes:

Europe seems to have this pretty well figured out. And I don’t mean to be flip — the European “let’s stop at one” approach to childbearing really is well-calculated to maximize a certain kind of parental well-being, narrowly defined. Of course, it’s also calculated to seriously diminish the “subjective well-being” of all the second and third children who don’t get conceived because their parents decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. And while the theory that parents have children “either for the benefit of the firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them happy, the second one will, too” may be true in many or even most cases, it also reflects a certain degree of deplorable solipsism. The chief reason parents should take on the trouble of conceiving and raising a child is that the child is a good in and of itself - one of the greatest goods there is, in fact, in any moral scheme worth considering - not because they think that it will make them or their already-existing offspring happier.

That bringing a child into existence is “one of the greatest goods there is” may be a truism in Ross’s moral scheme, it somehow figures into none of the major moral philosophies in the history of moral philosophy, as far as I can tell. Does Ross think that the entire history of moral philosophy is not worth considering? That he is a moral innovator of the first order? I think he’s just not making sense, and insulting low-breeders on the way.

First, you just can’t “diminish the ’subjective well-being’ of all the second and third children who don’t get conceived because their parents decided it wasn’t worth the trouble,” because it is a logical impossibility, an embarrassment to reason. Ross is saying that there exists a person who is harmed by the fact that it has not been made to exist. It refutes itself.

Second, setting aside the logically impossible theory of harms, what is Ross’s moral scheme? We know this much: there is more than one thing that is objectively, non-instrumentally good, producing new human beings is one of them, and is one of the most valuable. Let’s just suppose this is true. Now, it is possible to acknowledge that some things are objectively good without falling under an obligation to produce them. That a state of affairs is valuable is almost always a reason to bring it about, but it does not create a duty to do so. Does Ross think there is a general moral duty to maximize the quantity of such objective goods, like blushing babies? If so, why?

And even if we do have some such amazing duty, it appears that there are other goods in Ross’s moral universe. Do we have similar duties to create beauty? Truth? Even if babies approach the summit of Ross’s taxonomy of goodness, surely some quantity or combination of other goods outweighs the value of an additional baby. A life spent realizing one’s potential, achieving one’s valuable ambitions, say. Certainly Ross understands that pregnancy and motherhood often require the sacrifice of a woman’s other ambitions, other values she could have brought to the world. Surely there are things, even inside this fantastic moral taxonomy, that men and women could do with their lives to compensate for their choice not to have children. Surely not all childless lives are deplorably solipsistic. Surely living a happy life is of some value and must weigh something. Would a mostly unhappy world swimming in billions upon billion of children really be better than ours? Ross seems to think so.

Anyway, I doubt Ross’s deplorably thoughtless moral scheme (”the only kind worth considering”!) merits being taken even this seriously. What Ross seems to have offered us is a little bit of autobiography: he thinks he has some kind of duty to sire a big family. I don’t mind that, and I’m sure the future mother of his future children will know what she’s getting herself into. I do, however, mind the implication that those of us who believe our lives may produce more good by having just one child, or by having none, are spoiled monads who do too little of value to compensate the universe for our existence.

Richard Rorty’s review of Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds is pretty good. Hauser argues for a fairly strong moral nativism, involving a dedicated moral capacity, analogous to a Chomsky-style linguistic capacity. (Rawls floats the idea in Theory of Justice.) Rorty’s pretty widely known, but not a lot of non-philosophers know he was a top-flight philosopher of mind back when he was a philosopher (one of the first eliminative materialists), and he makes a pretty good case against the Chomsky analogy:

Hauser thinks that Noam Chomsky has shown that in at least one area — learning how to produce grammatical sentences — the latter sort of circuitry [i.e., general purpose] will not do the job. We need, Hauser says, a “radical rethinking of our ideas on morality, which is based on the analogy to language.” But the analogy seems fragile. Chomsky has argued, powerfully if not conclusively, that simple trial-and-error imitation of adult speakers cannot explain the speed and confidence with which children learn to talk: some special, dedicated mechanism must be at work. But is a parallel argument available to Hauser? For one thing, moral codes are not assimilated with any special rapidity. For another, the grammaticality of a sentence is rarely a matter of doubt or controversy, whereas moral dilemmas pull us in opposite directions and leave us uncertain. (Is it O.K. to kill a perfectly healthy but morally despicable person if her harvested organs would save the lives of five admirable people who need transplants? Ten people? Dozens?)

According to Chomsky, the parameters of the universal linguistic capacity can be set in different ways to produce the grammars of the various natural languages. But any setting of the parameters produces grammaticality, and is fully on par linguistically speaking. No language is better qua language, or more authentically languagey. Now, it may be that Yanomamo warriors, queer-stoning Islamists and gay Dutch vegans are all living out various dialects of morality, but if so, then it turns out that morality is a pretty useless category. The liberal morality of sympathy, reciprocity, and fairness, isn’t just an equivalent way of deploying moral judgment and emotion. It’s better than the alternatives. That’s basically the problem I’ve had with moral psychology based on Chomsky, such as John Mikhail’s and Sue Dwyer’s [pdf]. Rorty sums it up nicely.

Now, I’m a fan of Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist theory according to which specific moral emotion and moral judgment is a function of different settings on several general dimensions of moral emotion. This is also a kind of parameters approach, but, unlike Chomsky-based theories, it is grounded in emotion rather than a kind of innate knowledge (or “cognizance” to use Chomsky’s dodge word.) But the same critique applies. Certain ways of calibrating the dimensions of moral emotions are evidently, and seemingly paradoxically, immoral. Obviously, if you’re going to say that, you’re assuming the authority of one calibration as a secure basis for passing judgment on the others. Isn’t that arbitrary? Well, I think one thing to say is that it is possible to determine, in evolutionary terms, what moral capacities are for. As the environment of human interaction changes through history, certain ways of calibrating the moral sense fail to function in the appropriate way. So while we can say that a certain calibration is “a morality,” in the sense that it a way of deploying the moral capacity, it is not authoritatively moral, in the sense that it violates the principles of a calibration that does serve the proper function of morality given the present social/institutional setting.

Now, I don’t actually think that’s quite right. Because it’s not clear why the proper biological function of the moral capacity ought to have normative force. But I think it’s a place to start when trying to think through the bindingness of morality in a non-spooky natural world.

For a different view, John Mikhail defends Hauser’s book (which I haven’t read yet, by the way) on the Georgetown Law blog.

I’ve made this point a number of times, but apparently I’m not tired of making it, because I’m about to make it again. One of the tenets of Objectivism is that adherence to the principles of Objectivism is a necessary condition for true happiness and maximum longevity. I am completely confident that this is false. So I am also willing to bet that Mormons, for example, are on average both happier (measured according to any standard method) and longer lived than Objectivists.

Any takers? How much you wanna bet?

I anticipate that some will object that happiness measurement techniques are unreliable. Fair enough! But I worry some Objectivists will insist on defining happiness a bit circularly. Rand said happiness is “the successful state of life… that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.” I like it. Elsewhere we get “noncontradictory joy,” by which she means guilt-free joy. Anyway, how can we tell we’re there? By noticing that we’re in that joyfully guilt-free state of consciouness. It seems like if you were in it, you’d know it. That sure sounds to me like something strong enough to show up on surveys or experience sampling diaries. Still, I think Mormons will report feeling better. The trick is that happiness, by definition, comes from achieving one’s (objective) values, and objective values are the necessary conditions for life (”man qua man”). Reason, the capacity of non-contradictory identification, is our primary instrument of survival and happiness, and faith is the abdication of reason. Mormons believe, well, lots of weird things, by faith, totally at odds with reality. So whatever state of consciousness Mormons are achieving, it can’t really be happiness, now can it, since it violates allegedly practically mandatory values. 

But you’d think the “philosophy for living on Earth” would buy you some extra longevity, so it’s hard to see how you would explain away Mormon dominance in life-span, if such a thing were shown to be true. (And I’ll bet you it is!) Since one man’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens, we might infer from the fact that adherence to some belief system leads to the longest, happiest lives, together with the premise that reason is our capacity of non-contradictory identification  aimed at survival and flourishing, to the conclusion that the most life-promoting belief system must be endorsed by reason. So if Mormons really are happier and longer-lived, should Objectivists become Mormons? Or should they rather acknowledge that reason isn’t necessarily for survival and happiness, but worth caring about all the same, and believing in Kolob or whatever isn’t worth it, even it would make you happier and add a couple years. 

Tyler writes of Nozick’s most famous thought experiment:

Is the experience machine example so compelling as a refutation of hedonism? I think it puts pleasure squarely on the map as one value which matters and which is even undervalued in many circumstances. Many of us are too reluctant to step into the machine rather than too ready. Isn’t our general tendency to overvalue the illusion of control?

Surely it is not meant to rule out pleasure as “one value which matters.” Hedonism is the view that pleasure is the only value that matters. The experience machine is pretty compelling in making us feel the force of competing values. Control is one. I imagine Tyler meant to say we overvalue control, which is often (always?) an illusion. But sometimes it’s not. In any case, a sense of control and self-efficacy gives us pleasure, which is one reason why we are hesitant to relinquish control, but not the only reason.

That’s not quite what the experience machine is about anyway. It’s not about hedonism or control: it’s about subjectivism about value broadly. The value of many things don’t require them to be experienced. They are valuable because of what they are and they way they relate to our lives. That relation is sometime experiential, but sometimes it isn’t. In many cases we think of pleasure as a response to a value; it’s how the value registers, but isn’t the value itself. Nozick is drawing that out, together with the fact that we often see the real relationship between value and its experience as a value in its own right.

Don’t marginalist arguments require a common currency? I think Nozick’s argument is that there isn’t one here. How good must an illusory life seem in order to compensate for the cost of actually losing all values that are not seemings. Nozick’s plausible intuition is that the currencies generally aren’t tradeable. Tyler is right that this is wrong. If in fact the circumstances of your life are such that it is hardly worth living, or your demise is imminent anyway, such that expected future value approaches zero, the pleasures of illusory experience may make life objectively better for you by being, at least, subjectively good.

I agree that pleasure is undervalued in some circumstances. It is also overvalued in some circumstances. Like every other value. Isaiah Berlin and Aristotle helps us a great deal more than silly monists like Bentham. Values are values. The trick is how to correctly balance them in the context of a lifeplan without recourse to a mythical common currency, or a stable and predictable exchange rate between values. The ideal balance is not the one that gives you the most pleasure; it is the one the gives you the best life. What that is is your problem, and is not answered for you by any theory. Good luck! Now, a phronimos would know at what moment to step into the experience machine. But if you are not a phronimos, his reasons are not yours.

Tyler’s quick & dirty summary of the problems with orthodox welfare economics put me in mind of some further problems of economist folk morality.

So, in the formal theory, the highest ranked preference has the highest utility. And the highest ranked preference is revealed by the agent’s actual choice. (If something else had been more preferred, it would have been chosen instead.) Now, the folk theory adds a substantive hypothesis that is no part of the formal theory: preference satisfaction is involves a kind of psychological satisfaction as well as abstract semantic satisfaction (i.e., a fit between the semantic content of the preference and the state of the world.) That is to say, preference satisfaction is satisfying. And the satisfaction of the most preferred option is most satisfying. Economist folk theory envisions a kind of pre-established harmony between formal utility and hedonic utility, and that’s how it is supposed to work. (I blame Bentham.)

Pre-established harmony is a key component of the folk-normative appeal of orthodox welfare theory. Nobody but a bullheaded nettle-grasper will claim that semantic satisfaction by itself has anything to do with well-being. (If I prefer that Saturn have a number of moons greater than five, and it does, I am not therefore better off. Etc.) But the idea that well-being has something to do with the quality of experience is immensely appealing. If preference satisfaction is satisfying, then preference satisfaction might have a lot to be said for it.

The problem is that pre-established harmony is false. The neuroscience shows that satisfaction of the highest ranked preference does not imply the greatest hedonic satisfaction. It does not imply any hedonic satisfaction. Take a look at this paper, “Parsing Reward,” [pdf] by Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson. They report that “wanting” and “liking” have “are in fact dissociable and have different neural substrates.” Roughly, the dopamine system is more about wanting–”incentive salience”–and liking or hedonic satisfaction has more to do with opioids.

Experiments show that morphine addicts will repeatedly push a button to deliver a dose of the drug that is too small to have any experiential effect whatsoever. But they’ll keep pushing it, because the drug is doing something, just nothing you can notice subjectively, and the wanting system keeps you wanting it, even though you get nothing at all experientially out of getting what you want. Berridge argues that a lot of addiction is like that. People who are addicted to cigarettes, for example, may not much like smoking, but they want to smoke anyway. (There is a nice breezy overview of the wanting/liking distinction in Daniel Nettle’s, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile.)

And that pretty much demolishes pre-established harmony. What choice reveals is what we most want. But what we most want need not correspond to any kind of representation of what we expected would produces the best hedonic outcome, and doing what you want need not produce any hedonic payoff at all.

This will trouble a lot of people, mostly economists, who buy into economist folk morality. Without pre-established harmony, some libertarian economist folk wisdom falls apart. It will be possible in many circumstance to make people better off hedonically by decreasing their budget–by taking alternatives away. The hedonically ideal choice set will be the one in which the most preferred option corresponds with the biggest hedonic payoff. But that will be a choice set in which all the options that you want more, but which satisfy less, have been removed.

That, in a nutshell, is the basis for a powerful post-harmony, neo-Benthamite, crypto-Marxist, argument for the restriction of advertising and marketing. All Madison Ave. does is create wants that do not satisfy us. Good policy will restrict our choice sets to only truly satisfying options, like watching public television, paying higher taxes, and attending deliberative democracy summits in the local junior high gymnasium, instead of allowing the market to, in effect, addict us to junk. A system that allows us to self-defeatingly generate and satisfy “false” desires hardly constitutes a realm of true freedom, now does it?

Any economists out there wedded to the folk morality that want to tell me how to avoid this conclusion once pre-established harmony falls?