Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

Steven Pinker wrote an interesting article in the New York Times magazine this Sunday. I’m not a big Pinker fan. I think he tends to simplify a little too much, and sometimes falls into the classic error of evolutionary psychology: thinking that a plausible explanation is the right explanation. This was a good article, though, discussing research on what our instinctive moral judgements might be. As I’ve written before, I think that it is an interesting possible grounding for a universal ethics. In fact, I don’t know of a better one.

I’m not going to discuss the whole article, which you can read for yourself, but I’m going to pick out one quote: “In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?” The point is not, in fact, expressed fairly: we do not expect people to favor perfect strangers, we expect them to recuse themselves to avoid conflicts. Since people often fail to recuse themselves, we threaten them with punishment to force them to do so.

The real point is that we enforce the idea that the interests of society take precedence over personal interests. Some other societies (apparently) do not. Where did this idea come from historically? How many societies adopt it? Can we make an argument for it based on any sort of moral instinct, or must we argue for it based on beneficial results?

OK, I’m going to mention one more point. Pinker suggests that some people dislike research into moral instinct, on the grounds that finding a natural basis for morality will discredit the more philosophical basis. I would be more sympathetic to that argument if we had any grounds to believ that we will in fact find a more philosophical basis, one which is not grounded on an argument from the authority of God.

Where do physical laws come from? Of course we can not know. We don’t even know if the physical laws are the same everywhere in the universe–we assume they are, but there is no way to be sure.

In the absence of knowledge, we have to give up, or guess. My current favorite guess is the landscape theory. In this theory, there are a vast number of universes, of which ours is just one. Each universe can have its own set of physical laws. Our universe is not special. The fact that we exist to observe it proves merely that the physical laws in our universe suffice to support our form of life (the weak anthropic principle).

This theory appeals to me because it satisfies the Principle of Mediocrity: we are not special. If we were special, we would have to understand how and why. Since we don’t understand, I think it makes more sense to assume that we aren’t special.

I argued earlier that we can base a universal ethics on human nature, or biology. Is there anything we could use? Many universal ethical systems are based on some form of the golden rule or the categorical imperative. That itself tends to be taken as an axiom. Utilitarianism is based on a utility function, which is an axiom.

I think one way to consider whether these ethical systems are truly universal is to consider whether they would apply to any imaginable alien race, and to consider whether they would apply to a solipsist.

We tend to assume that any given person is about as ethically valuable as any other person; we certainly don’t think it is OK to kill 100 random people to save one person’s life, though the reverse may be acceptable in some cases. For an intelligent ant, on the other hand, thousands of ants would happily die to save the queen. Do these ants violate the golden rule? It seems like they do. Utilitarianism is OK if we define the utility function appropriately, and the categorical imperative is OK.

A committed solipsist could ethically take just about any other action, since no other person exists. Is there any way to show that the solipsist is wrong in doing so? Only by showing that he or she is mistaken. These ethical theories don’t help with that, though.

An ethics based on biology does show that a solipsist is mistaken–nobody can really believe in solipsism. And such an ethics doesn’t say anything about alien races, except that they will have their own ethics.

Where does this get us? I’m not sure. I like the idea of finding some sort of grounding for ethics, but grounding it in biology gives us all the problems of evolutionary psychology: we mistake what is for what should be. How can we avoid that?

A couple of times I’ve alluded to an idea I first saw from Peter Singer, that the structure of society creates a great deal of the value which flows to the wealthy. Our legal system and our stable system of property ownership is crucial for building successful companies. Yet the value gained from companies flows largely to company management and partially to dividends to shareholders. None of goes to the operations which support the company: the courts, the police, the schools which train the workers, etc. Instead, we tax profits, and use the tax money to pay for the infrastructure.

This naturally suggests that we could arrange matters differently. Instead of using taxes to pay for the courts, companies could pay the courts directly. And likewise for other social services. This would match my understanding of how libertarians think society should work. It would bring the benefits of free competition to the court system: the best courts would get the most money.

Of course, there is an obvious so-called moral hazard: if you choose whether or not to pay the fire brigade, then if you chose not to pay, the fire brigade has a pretty strong incentive to burn down your house as an example to encourage others to pay. And if you pay the court system, then the judges have a very strong incentive to issue findings which favor whoever pays them the most.

Also, if different court systems compete, then how do you pick which court system to use when two parties in a dispute pay for different ones? While this could be negotiated, in extreme cases the winner will be the most powerful party, which will normally be the richest party.

So as far as I can tell such a system degenerates reasonably quickly into control by the wealthiest. Of course they would normally hide their power in a velvet glove, but it would be there when needed.

Is that any different than our system? I think there is a difference, which is that we can vote people out of power. Voting does not require a great deal of commitment, it just requires making a decision. So we have a way of derailing powerful people, a way which would not be available if societal infrastructure were privatized.

Of course there are many very powerful people in our society who are not elected. But even those people can be controlled by the masses, via the court system. It doesn’t happen all that often–the lawsuits which followed the stock market crash are over now–but it does happen, and it does constrain people to obey the rules to some degree.

The opposite of privatizing societal infrastructure is nationalizing private property. The U.S. does this in a very limited way via eminent domain. It has been done effectively on a larger scale in countries like South Africa. But too much privatization leads to a state socialist system like the U.S.S.R., which we could see was a disaster.

So there is some sort of balance to strike, or perhaps a third way to find, in the ideal society.

The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a short piece by Jim Holt on the idea of universal consciousness. The idea is that consciousness can be found everywhere in the universe, even in rocks.

This is based on the premise that “physical properties alone cannot account for subjectivity. (How could the ineffable experience of tasting a strawberry ever arise from the equations of physics?)” The argument is logical: if we accept that premise, and we accept materialism, then we pretty much have to conclude that consciousness must be in everything.

Now, if this were a sane world, that would be a nice reductio ad absurdum, demonstrating that the premise is false. Yet somehow sensible people are so attached to that premise that they are willing to believe in conscious rocks rather than give it up.

Astonishing stuff. Some people need to apply a little more reasonable thought and a little less ineffability.