Senior Thesis copypasta

DEADNAME

Senior Thesis

Stewart

Fall 2011

Towards a Grand Unified Theory of Ethics:

Long-sighted Self-effacing Consequentialism

This paper is meant to sketch a survey view of ethics as a field of study, and articulate a unified consequentialist theory that explains the historical disagreement between competing normative theories in light of recent findings in the studies of the human brain.  I aim to show that our moral intuitions do in fact pick out genuine good and bad, but these intuitions are often wrong.  What these intuitions attempt to identify are long term benefits, but by indirect means which betray their ad hoc evolutionary origins.  The argument will proceed in stages:  first, I will discuss the practical strengths and shortcomings of the three broad classes of normative theory.  In the second section, I will articulate a long-sighted self-effacing consequentialist theory which can explain these strengths and shortcomings by tying these theories together.  Third, I will attempt to explain the strengths and shortcomings from Section 1 in light of the past hundred years’ investigations into the functioning of the human brain.  The fourth and final section will address possible objections to my theory.

Section 1:  Practical Strengths and Shortcomings

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle addresses two fundamental questions:  what is a good person like, and how can any person become a good person?  Generally, these are questions of descriptivity, or defining the good, and prescriptivity, or commands to do good.  Virtue theory is a good start, for it allows one to point at role models for emulation.  Mythic storytelling is capable of illustrating moral lessons by showing, in a momentarily plausible setting, how genuine goodness may overcome evil and how a tragic flaw may prove to be a person’s undoing.  And we see everywhere in Greek culture that excellence was a desired characteristic.  Aristotle also calls for an element of balance with his Doctrine of the Mean, since the continuum of courage (for example) runs from the deficiency of cowardice to the excess of rashness (Aristotle 1107a).  This robust concept of goodness is broad-based, and requires practice and consideration to translate into action, in keeping with Aristotle’s conclusion that virtuous character is a hexis rather than a mere habit (Aristotle 1105a-b).

Kant, similarly, addressed both the questions of what the good is and how to achieve it, but after a fashion of his own.  Kant describes morality as fundamentally rational and names his standard of rationality the “Categorical Imperative” (Kant), prescribing that we think rationally about our duties, to the end that this will bring us to act from a good will (Kant).  Kant’s contribution to ethical discourse takes an important step orthogonal to Aristotle’s analysis.  Kant advocated that each person, when 

      

Figure 1 Figure 2

acting from a good will, could be motivated to fulfill duties for duty’s sake (Kant).  Since duties apply to all creatures with moral dignity, these duties could be known a priori by understanding our nature as moral beings and applying our rational faculties correctly.  ‘Correctly’ means ‘consistently’ here, for all 3 formulations of Kant’s categorical imperative share one element in common:  do not make an exception just for yourself (Kant).  This prohibition is simply the imperative prescription to problems posed by questions of the form, “What if everybody acted like that?”  Kant’s answers are of the form, “Justifying your actions suggests a logical inconsistency,” and so to be fully rational, we must fulfill our duties more or less cheerfully (qua “from a good will”) because it is right to do so.  Kant expanded upon Aristotle’s concept of virtuous character, providing a foundation for virtuous motive born of the faculty of reason which all humans share.

But sometimes things can go wrong even when you follow all of the rules, and this is where consequentialism steps in.  A person of virtuous character may act from a virtuous motive and still have things come out badly, and consequentialism provides the theoretical framework to say why the outcome is bad:  just because it is a bad consequence.  From the simple observation that one is less than

two, Bentham’s principle of utility proceeds from the principle that any amount of evil is less bad than twice that amount of evil, and inversely that any amount of good is twice as good as half that amount of good.  From this simple notion of quantifiability, the utility calculus was born.  Morality is described, on a utilitarian analysis, in terms of pleasure vs. pain; add up these two quantities and compare them in various ways to determine a situation or event’s moral cast (Bentham).  Consequentialism prescribes, aptly enough, that we pursue the best consequences in terms of maximizing the good.  For all its problems with fine-grained and long-term analyses, it certainly serves as a reliable, rough-and-ready guide that agrees with both arêtaic and deontological analyses in a broad swath of cases.  Consequentialism’s quantifiabity represents another orthogonal step in the moral idea 

space, away from both Aristotle and Kant while still remaining thematically related.

Two issues stand in the way of practically applying a consequentialist ethics in any kind of principled way.  First, the utility calculus is fundamentally fuzzy math, insofar as the quantifying of others’ pleasures and pains does not yet resemble anything approaching an exact science.  Second, self-effacing consequentialist theories (Parfit) acknowledge the shortcomings of consequentialism and attempt to resolve the problems these shortcomings raise by more or less appealing to another normative theory to serve as an inductively reliable “rule of thumb” for obtaining the best consequences.  In other words, the first issue is a problem of tripping over details, while the second ignores this problem by leaning explicitly on other theories for support.  Both prevent consequentialism from being a complete practical theory, for it is either ill-suited to everyday events or it shores up this shortcoming at the cost of admitting its incompleteness.

Here “practical” means “straightforward in its application,” and self-effacing consequentialism is a little convoluted on this account.  What the self-effacing consequentialist believes is that consequences are still of paramount importance, but better consequences will be more reliably achieved if we think and act like deontologists or virtue theorists.  Or in other words, acting like duties and virtues matter tends to work out best for everyone in the long run.  Ultimately, I think this analysis is correct:  we should attend to our duties and cultivate personal excellences, precisely because that tends to work out best for everyone in the long run.

Importantly, although consequentialism is correct, the fact that it is self-effacing means that we should not think like consequentialists all the time – as I intend to show, we’re not equipped to do so.  Indeed, precisely the places where we balk or fail at consequentialism are where deontological and arêtaic theories seem poised to pick up the slack.  Consequentialism, for its part, is good at dealing with big-picture issues where catastrophe aversion may require the bending or breaking of a principle from another theory that is simply not equipped to deal with a problem of sufficient scale (e.g. treasonous lying to save the lives of Jews in Third Reich Germany).  But the principles themselves are of consequential value and so should still be embraced.  Having illustrated the general shape of the idea space in which all three normative theories operate, I shall now argue why a long-sighted self-effacing consequentialist theory is best at navigating this idea space.

Section 2:  Long-sighted Self-effacing Consequentialism

I propose that all three of the aforementioned theories of the good pick out an aspect of intuitive goodness:  what is intuitively good on this analysis is that which satisfies all three of these aspects.  Moreover, insofar as these aspects of intuitive goodness apply to real phenomena, this is a realist theory.  And the goodness or badness of anything evaluated in this idea space will be ultimately grounded in an assessment of its consequences.

Deontological judgments pick out fairness as of moral import (if clumsily – more on this in Section 3), and we can refine our instinctual judgments with the application of reason, e.g. with the Veil of Ignorance (Rawls).  Fairness applies to rules, and we can evaluate the fairness of those rules apart from their actual effects.  This fairness is complex and hard to define precisely in common-sense language, but we can judge its degree with a few moments’ consideration (though we may be mistaken) along a continuum from totally unfair to totally fair (or between zero and one on the D axis in figure 2).  A child’s complaint of, “That’s not fair,” may sometimes seem to be code for, “I don’t like how that works out,” but the child is still demonstrating a grasp of fairness (if a poor one).

In a similar way, virtue judgments pick out valuable traits, and the value of these traits is contextual.  We might think highly of people who are trustworthy, but we think measurably higher of those who are tall than those who are short (Anderson); both trustworthiness and stature are valuable traits in the right context.  While physical stature can contribute to making a person a good warrior or a good worker (we tend to think it makes a person a good leader [Murray]), trustworthiness more obviously contributes to a person’s being a good citizen regardless of the person’s stature or station.  In this way, some excellences are more valuable than others in certain contexts.  While some traits may be hard to quantify, they are clearly real and each is a spectrum of personal idiosyncrasy.

Consequentialist judgments are the most straightforwardly rational of all in their application, directly comparing outcomes as they do.  But the conceptual machinery brought to bear in doing so is also quite complex in its own right.  For example, a proposed highway bypass might save commuters time and money, but this benefit must be balanced against the harm of noise pollution for those living in the area.  While the benefit and the harm may be incommensurable, these outcomes are certainly deserving of attention when considering whether to construct the bypass or not (Parolin).  And again, these benefits and harms are real phenomena which we are able to identify, just as real as déjà vu or pain.

Each of these things – character traits, fairness, and outcomes – are morally evaluable, as the body of ethical literature attests.  But these are all translatable into outcomes vis a vis the long term benefits or harms they are likely to cause; they are even translatable into each other.  They are complementary:  each picks out something real, something of practical import, which we in common parlance call “good.”  While our instincts may frequently lead us astray and can be fiddled with in all sorts of interesting ways, they are still shortcuts (if crude ones) to what works out best for all in the long run.  As for how we can know when our intuition is deceiving us, I should think that the act of rationally scrutinizing these various intuitions and consistently applying any principles derived therefrom is more or less exactly what we should expect a practical ethics to look like.

To summarize so far, what our three normative theories pick out are traits, fairness, and outcomes, all of which may be good or bad and all of which can be talked about in terms of each other.  For instance, fair rules and good traits are germane to good outcomes.  Likewise, good traits and good outcomes are often said to be fair – for example, a well-balanced competitive game will be fair when equally skilled opponents are just as likely to win as lose.  Fairness and the generation of good outcomes are also admired as good traits in a person (or a system, for that matter – the example of a game is once again helpful).  Importantly, these do not necessarily “go together,” in the sense that they are not one and the same thing that can be increased or decreased along a single continuum; rather, these are independent aspects of the same thing that can be increased or decreased independently along three axes (as described in figure 2).

Fairness is always in relation to some agent, there can only be fairness when there is “fairness to someone.”  Similarly, the evaluation of consequences presupposes agents whom those consequences shall affect; consequences with no import to moral agents are, quite simply, of no consequence.  And virtues can only be evaluated with respect to those who have them, or fail to have them, as the case may be.  In this way, good or bad will always be good or bad from some perspective, but in another way there is also an objective fact of the matter.  This is relativistic in the sense that velocity judgments are relativistic:  while there is no such thing as absolute velocity and velocity can only be measured with respect to a frame of reference, velocity is still a real thing that we are able to judge and those judgments may be accurate or inaccurate.

So what frame of reference should we use?  The widest one possible:  questions of fairness should consider all affected, consequential evaluations should extend to all affected, and judgments of arêtaic virtue should be applied to everyone.  While these issues are complex and subject to honest disagreement, there is nevertheless an objective (qua decidable, in Grover Maxwell’s sense of “quickly decidable sentence” [Maxwell]) fact of the matter.  Just who we include in “all affected” and “everyone” will define our moral community, which brings with it issues of its own (Railton) such as theories of personhood; but the largest moral community possible ipso facto provides the proper perspective for determining what is fairest for all, what works out best for all, and what everyone should strive to be like.  So we should adopt this broad perspective, since any perspective that excludes persons from the moral community will be aimed wrong from the start.

The following section will discuss in more detail just what is being picked out, and how, when we make moral judgments.

Section 3:  Explaining the Theory with Reference to Research

In the first section, I modeled an idea space with three axes:  each axis represents a continuum of agreement with a normative theory (an arêtaic, dentological, or consequentialist one), and a situation’s degree of agreement with a theory is plotted by analyzing that situation according to the theory in question.  Thus, a situation which fits a theoretical definition of “good,” “right,” “permissible,” etc. is placed far from the point of origin along this theory’s axis, while a situation that does not fit any of those theoretical definitions is placed nearer or on the origin (in the case of forbidden actions, e.g. treating a moral agent as a mere means is explicitly forbidden by the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative).

A pattern emerges from this manner of arranging our ethical analyses:  there is a line along which all three theories are in simultaneous agreement.  What this “axis of agreement” represents in reality are those situations which lend to similar verdicts on all three theories.  That is, situations that come out good on all three analyses will cluster around one corner of the idea space (the pointy end of the arrow in figure 2), while situations that come out bad on all three analyses will cluster around the opposite corner near the origin of all three axes.

Moral dilemmas will serve to explain why ethics has been in such a state of disagreement over fundamental principles as documented in the literature:  it is because one theory is clung to, with no attempt to reach out in the directions suggested by other theories, that disagreement arises between ethicists on the moral cast of a situation.  Principled and sufficiently educated ethicists of all persuasions would be able to agree on at least the fact that there is disagreement between a consequentialist analysis and a deontological analysis in certain cases.  These disagreements will fall into the hotly contested border regions of the moral idea space; that one theory will output an analysis disagreeing with another theory’s analysis is just what it means for a situation to occupy a border region.

On my view, a situation’s position within the idea space just is its moral cast, theoretically speaking.  We can explain this model with reference to what we know about how our brains make moral judgments, and this explanation will cash out the three theoretical axes of analysis in terms of long term benefits to the agent’s moral community.  I shall attempt to justify and clarify this claim by showing that all three kinds of theoretical judgment correlate with psychological or neurological processes which are at least relatively well-documented in the literature.  Furthermore, these processes all pick out something real that is going on in the world which is valuable to all three normative theories, and so have clear practical value.

If my theory works, then we should be able to examine how judgments are made in these border cases by pitting one normative theory against another.  For instance, suppose we were to take fMRI images of subject’s brains while they contemplate a moral dilemma that forces them to choose between violating a duty and permitting a catastrophe (Greene).  This choice is illustrated in figure 3:

Figure 3

subjects can either choose to remain at point A by inaction and permit catastrophe, or make the move to point B by taking action and violate a duty (for the sake of argument, we will consider any serious trolley driver who gives the matter due consideration to be a virtuous person).  Note that point C is not a permitted move, since the dilemma is set up specifically to force the choice between duty and catastrophe; the dilemma arises because there is no choice near the pointy end of the axis of agreement and the available choices are equidistant from the origin.

We should also be able to investigate how character judgments are made, and what perceptions influence them.  For instance, we have seen that a person’s height influences our perception of their character, and influences our willingness to give them money to do a job (Persico).  What’s more, we also exhibit a cognitive bias called the “Halo Effect” (Thorndike), which causes us to unconsciously ascribe specific traits to a person when we may only have information on their general traits.  In Thorndike’s first experiment to test the halo effect, he found that commanding officers rated their subordinates in highly correlated ways:  a subordinate who was rated highly on physical qualities would also be rated highly on intellect, leadership skills, and personal qualities; the correlation held strong, with subordinates being neatly subdivided into generally high and generally low scorers, when we know that the true spectrum of human variation is far more continuous.  What’s more, the halo effect can be triggered by likeability alone (Nisbett):  in one experiment, ratings of a professor’s qualities correlated strongly with how much the subjects liked the professor, and the subjects even demonstrated ignorance of how this liking (or disliking) triggered the halo effect when asked about it.

So what’s going on here?  On my theory, human brains are identifying phenomena just as concrete and relative as motion.  Our arêtaic assessments are emotional reactions which identify and react to personal traits relevant to someone’s fitness as a member of the moral community.  Our deontological intuitions are fueled by emotional responses, and what we identify is a situation’s fairness.  While our first gut instinct might sometimes lead us astray, I maintain, contrary to Norcross’ writing on the subject (Norcross), that evolution has come up with a good first approximation, and we can apply our reason to flesh out the gaps.  We can also look at outcomes to see who benefits and who is harmed by an action, event, or situation; while we might include questions of fairness in this analysis, this kind of thinking uses a different part of the brain to generate a different solution to the problem, as Greene suggests, and this is why we are conflicted on such judgments.  Judgments of character have not yet been pinned down to specific regions of the brain, yet we may assess someone’s trustworthiness or generosity as surely as we may assess their mood or motives – while these assessments may be mistaken, they nonetheless assess something that’s actually there.

Of course, there’s plenty of counterintuitive weirdness going on in our heads as well.  Phenomena as seemingly irrelevant as smells (Li) and as mundane as decision fatigue (Vohs) can affect our decision-making processes, muddying the waters.  Even an increase in academic status may make you appear physically taller to others than you otherwise would (Wilson).  While this may be troubling, it comes with the territory:  even our ability to distinguish colors is determined in part by culture (Caparos), so it should come as no surprise that our estimations of others’ prestige can interfere with our estimation of their physical characteristics.  We can also see how our perceptions of people influence our opinions of and behavior towards them.  Being nice correlates with being liked, for we have been honed by evolution to assess people’s personality quickly and accurately from their appearance and demeanor (Naumann).  While it is easy to point to these quirky patterns of human response as evidence of irrationality, I think it is more constructive to view them as pre-rational heuristics that are hardwired into our brains:  they are not perfect guides to what will benefit us as individuals, our local communities, or the whole moral community (as wide as that might be), but they are decent starting points which provide us with some kind of reference.

This brings us to objections, where I shall first deal with the matter of what this reference point is worth.

Section 4:  Objections

It might be objected that while I spend plenty of time talking about fairness, virtues, and outcomes, it’s not clear that any of this is “really good.”  To this I can only say:  imagine a civilization that was fair, encouraged virtuousness in its citizenry, and in which everyone prospered; can anyone deny that this would be a good civilization?  At the risk of being blunt, any normative theory that judges such a civilization as less than good strikes me as profoundly broken in some way.  And I assert that any civilization possessing all three of these characteristics (fairness, a culture of virtue, and prosperity for all) is clearly and obviously better off than one possessed of only two of them.  These characteristics are not good in some rarefied, abstract sense, but good for all who live in such a society.

Another possible objection is that I am being overly dismissive of centuries of philosophical discourse, and oversimplifying the debate in my presentation of normative pluralism.  To the contrary, I would say that normative pluralism actually goes a long way towards explaining these deep and divisive disagreements in ethics.  A proponent of a normative theory, when confronted with a situation which the theory evaluates counterintuitively, is left with two basic options:  to retool the theory in order that a more intuitively satisfying verdict is reached, or to abandon intuition and say that the theory is correct and our intuitions are wrong when they disagree with it (even when those intuitions are founded on an equally consistent and coherent rival theory).  Both of these options are rather unpalatable, but my pluralistic theory of ethics recolors the situation in a satisfying manner:  our normatively single-minded proponent is now seen as advocating one aspect of the good even at the expense of other aspects of the good, and it is no wonder that this should give unsatisfying results when one aspect of the good is pitted against another.

Finally, it might be said that there are defeater cases to any consequentialist theory, even a long-sighted self-effacing theory, as evidenced by any action we would find reprehensible despite its guarantee of bringing about the best consequences.  The paradigm case is Philippa Foot’s trauma surgeon variant on her famous trolley problem:  given a doctor with the ability to harvest a patient’s organs during a routine checkup to save five other dying patients, what should the doctor do (Foot)?  The best consequences would obtain from saving five lives by killing one, all other things being equal, yet we find this course of action appalling.  In reality, if word ever got out that there was a non-zero probability of having one’s organs harvested during routine checkups, then nobody would go to routine checkups and otherwise preventable diseases would run rampant, which is a worse consequence than saving a few lives with a non-consensual organ harvest.  But this is merely a contingent fact about our world, and ignores the stipulations of the gedankenexperiment:  this surgeon can cover it up sufficiently, negating the risk, and it is only we humans who have to worry about our plans going awry.

Here I must bite the bullet and say that, according to the terms of the thought experiment, the organ harvest is the right course of action for the doctor to take because it is stipulated to yield the best consequences.  The reprehensibility of such actions simply speaks to the fact that our intuitions are crude approximations that evolved to deal with our world, not the various counterintuitive possible worlds that we can dream up.  I say, “So much the worse for our intuitions,” and agree that any principled theory of ethics will have counterintuitive assessments that disagree with our instincts; but it is precisely the principled nature of the theory that should lead us to reject our intuitions in these cases, and hopefully we can practice at this to hone our instincts into better ones.

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Footnotes

1 By this I mean that Kant was still talking about the good in a way that is thematically similar to Aristotle’s while remaining independent of it.  The two approaches could be considered to be at 90o angles in the idea space of ethical discourse (see figure 1):  while lots of ground in the idea space is overlapping territory around an “axis of agreement,” where the two approaches would arguably arrive at the same moral verdict on any given problem, there are “border cases” which can be identified by pitting one against the other.  This is how gedankenexperiments are conjured up – find a situation that comes out “good” on an arêtaic analysis and comes out “bad” on a dentological analysis, and you will discover a respondent’s ethical intuitions by asking them to rate the situation as morally good or bad, overall.  More on these, later.

2  While the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes Kant as saying that the three formulations of the categorical imperative “are basically only so many formulations of precisely the same law, each one of them by itself uniting the other two within it,” neither it nor he says precisely what the uniting principle is.  I propose that the uniting principle is that we, as moral agents, are not to make exceptions to the moral law for ourselves.

3  Figure 2 represents graphically the sort of orthogonal move I am describing:  it is a 90o turn away from both deontological and arêtaic analyses.  If it is any help, Trolley Problems (Foot) occupy much of the ‘border space’ where consequentialist analyses disagree with deontological/arêtaic analyses, and vice versa.  For instance, region A represents resolution of the first scenario by consequence-based action:  taking action to kill one rather than letting five die by inaction is consequentially ethical, but violates the duty not to kill one’s fellow moral agents (lest one act inconsistently with one’s own desire not to be killed in such a fashion).  It is unclear how an arêtaic analysis would evaluate such a person, so the event could be anywhere along the V axis.

Figures

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