28. Moral Realism

Note: This post is the twenty-eighth in a series. Click here for the full listing of the series.

"If you're right," said Armbruster, "you've been systematizing a stratum of behaviour that underlies what we conventionally accept as morality. Some of your precepts obviously correspond with legal or ethical views of right and wrong. Other's don't. Yet you've put them all on more or less a par. I think that's what sticks in our craws, Kate. Or anyhow, it does in mine."
"Maybe the syndromes are existential morality, Armbruster," said Kate. "That's rather what I mean by survival systems. I like your metaphor of a substratum."

from Systems of Survival, by Jane Jacobs.



While doing some googling today, I ran across an interesting essay¹ on morals by Steven Pinker.

Pinker's writing suffers a bit from freakotrarianism² but he's a smart guy and he excels at writing clear explanations of complicated topics. His essay covers a lot of ground, but what I wanted to highlight here was his explanation of the notion that is guiding this whole series of blog posts, the notion of 'moral realism' or the idea that there are moral facts in the world that really exist (i.e. that morals aren't purely subjective),

"The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.

Moral realism, as this idea is called, is too rich for many philosophers’ blood. Yet a diluted version of the idea — if not a list of cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts, then at least a few If-Thens — is not crazy. Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.

One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other's children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other's child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.

The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it."

I'm not sure the second point (about not being able to privilege one person's interest over another) is necessarily true in all cases, but it is the broader point - that morality exists in a form of a group of if-then postulates that have universal application like the laws of mathematics - that I agree with. And the point of these posts is to record my (in all likelihood, entirely futile, but hopefully interesting all the same) efforts to track down what these laws might be, using Jane Jacobs' empirical observations of which morals and professions tend to be linked together as a roadmap.


Some links on moral realism:

Wikipedia
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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¹The essay is titled ' The Moral Instinct' - a reference to Pinker's book, 'The Language Instinct' which argues that humans have an instinctive biological adaptation to learning language.

²Freakocontrarianism? See here, for an explanation.

More Progress

"CanWest Global Communication Corp's., proposal to transfer the National Post newspaper to one of its subsidiaries which already contains the firm's other assets such as the Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen, has been given approval by both the court and lenders.

In the documents filed by CanWest in the court this week, the company stated that if the required shuffling does not happen, it will have to axe the publication of the National Post. It was revealed that creditors at the parent company were no longer willing to cover any more losses at the newspaper.

After the ruling was passed, Paul Godfrey, president and CEO of the Post, said "The Post has found its logical home, and hopefully these doomsday scenarios we have been hearing for more than a decade will soon disappear. This is another step on the path to profitability".

I guess closing the paper would mean the end of any potential 'path to probability' so a move that staves off closure of the paper technically is on the path to profitability - assuming there is one, of course. Given that the primary purpose of the National Post's existence is to further the policies and the political party that are supported by the convicted felon that founded it - a party and policies that I personally oppose and consider harmful to the country, I'd naturally be happy enough to see the National Post just disappear.

Progress

I see that Bank of Montreal just completed spending a pile of money to renovate their Vancouver Main branch, moving the teller lines from the basement to the main floor. Meanwhile, two blocks away, HSBC is spending a pile of money to move the tellers from the main floor to the basement...

File Under Bad Ideas

In case you didn't know, the B.C. government is planning to spend $458 million dollars to build a retractable roof on B.C. place. Maybe I'm biased because I consider B.C. place an outdated eyesore that should be torn down and replaced with an open air natural grass stadium (which could be done for less than $458 million), but it has to be a bad sign that I'm a big sports fan (and a bigger soccer fan - the soccer community is behind the upgrade, which seems unwise to me, B.C. place is a bad venue and artificial turf isn't right for serious soccer) and I consider this one of the worst uses of taxpayer dollars I've heard about in recent years.

Seriously, upgrade some more schools so they are earthquake proof, buy medical equipment to reduce waiting lists, buy some buses for municipal transit companies, replace the Pattullo bridge, - almost anything would be better than spending half a billion dollars putting a new roof on a crap stadium.

27. Ethics and Words

Note: This post is the twenty-seventh in a series. Click here for the full listing of the series.

"Don't tarry in the Marshes," Orddu, while from within the cottage Taran heard loud and angry noises. "Else you may regret your foolish boldness, or bold foolishness, whichever¹"

In this post, I'm going to describe a behaviour between two people and then ask you to think about what word you would use to describe this behaviour. Simple enough?

First case: Two people work together to achieve something that benefits them both that they couldn't do on their own.

Second case: Two people work together to find a place to live, where they can share living expenses

Third case: Two people work together to fight off a bear that attacks them

Fourth case: Two business executives from different companies work together to prevent prices from dropping in their industry due to an unproductive price war

Fifth case: A home inspector and a home owner work together to reach an agreement that benefits them both more than issuing a citation for a violation of local bylaws would.

Sixth case: A businessman reaches a deal with the head of an invading army not to raise trouble as long as the invading troops don't disrupt his business.

Seventh case: Two anarchists work together to form a plot to kill all the members of the Canadian government

Eighth case: Two Taliban soldiers work together to ambush and a kill a group of Canadian soldiers.


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The first case, two people working together to achieve something they both benefit from, generally, as far as I know, goes by the name 'cooperation' and is generally held to be a 'good thing' or virtuous.

But all 8 cases involving two people working together for mutual gain yet not all would typically go by the same name.

Cases 2 and 3 are still standard cooperation.

But case 4 would normally go by the name 'collusion' which is considered unethical and is illegal in many places/contexts.

Case 5 typically goes by the name 'corruption' or 'bribe-taking' and is also considered unethical.

Case 6 goes by the name 'collaboration' and is even more unethical.

Case 7 might go by the name 'conspiracy' and is (arguably) most unethical of all.

Finally, case 8 seems similar to case 7, but here I suspect that we would normally be back to using the phrase 'cooperation' since there is no ethical condemnation of the act because it is understood that, in war, attempting to kill the enemy is what you are supposed to do.

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In Systems of Survival, after listing out the ethics in the guardian and commercial syndromes, Jane Jacobs explains the absence from the lists of some typical ethical values,

"Where's cooperation, courage, moderation, mercy, common sense, foresight, judgment, perseverance, faith, energy, patience, wisdom? I omitted these because they're esteemed across the board, in all kinds of work."

But based on the 8 cases I've listed above, I can't agree that the simple act of cooperation is universally esteemed, unless we include that esteem as part of the definition of cooperation.

When it comes to ethical values, there is both the denotation (what behaviour is described by the value) and the connotation (whether that behaviour is considered good or bad) to consider².

In the extreme case, a word like 'good' is all connotation, no denotation.

Interestingly, even though 'cooperate' has a strong positive connotation such that a different word is used for 'bad' cooperation, it's opposite, 'competition', does not have a strong connotation. Whether in a good sense, 'our business is a lot more competitive than it used to be' or in a bad sense, 'Bobby needs to learn to not be so competitive with the other children' the same word is routinely used (although it's interesting to note that a quick review of the thesaurus, shows that most of the synonyms for 'competitive' carry negative connotations - 'aggressive', 'antagonistic', 'combative' etc.).

This leaves open the question of whether there actually are any behaviours that are universally supported, or just words with strong positive connotations such as 'wisdom'. Even something as universally admired as perseverance gets recast as stubbornness when it seems that no good will come from the perseverance. In more severe cases (i.e. when perseverance is not combined with moderation), it might even start to be referred to as obsessiveness. A google search of the word 'perseverance' finds nothing but praiseworthy behaviour, but a google search of 'perseverance' and 'obsessive' brings up a gallery of mental disorders and destructive behaviour patterns.

Anyway, I'm sure that was all no-longer-fashionable hat to linguists and ethicists, but it's new to me, at least in terms of my awareness of the extent to which ethical terms contain a mix of both a descriptive and a positive/negative component. We need to be careful not to assume that a certain behaviour is universally praiseworthy just because it goes by a less common name in its non-praiseworthy context.

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¹from Taran Wanderer, by Lloyd Alexander

²This is true for a lot of words, of course, but it applies particularly to ethical values.

The Trouble With Normal...

..is it always gets worse.

Back in 2006, I wrote that, "one of the things which I find annoying about the 'right-wing' these days in North America, is an inability to distinguish being things which should be partisan, and things which shouldn't." and complained about, "the politicization of the Government of Canada webpage, which, since the election, has become an extension of the Conservative Party site."

Somewhat naively, I offered that, "Perhaps now that the Globe and Mail has picked up on this story, with a well-written article by Ivor Tossell, the Conservatives will be shamed into making the taxpayer funded website less of a marketing tool for one particular party."

So now we see that, far from improving, things have steadily deteriorated on the inappropriately partisan front. In addition to disproportionately funneling federal stimulus funding to Conservative ridings, Conservative MP's have been running around the country passing off taxpayer money as being provided by the Conservative party or its MP's.

With the instinctive 'yeahbuttheLiberals' response rising from the Conservative side, not to mention the recent stacking of the senate by Harper, it's a pity Arzt is no longer with us to point out that the pigs are walking.

Back Home

So I'm back from vacation in Tibet/Nepal and just about ready to re-engage with the series on ethics. One encouraging sign while I was gone was the shared Nobel Award for Economics awarded to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson - encouraging because they are two of the people whose theories I was already planning to cover as part of my blog series.

One thing I haven't noticed in any of the commentaries I've read so far, beyond the general comments from the Nobel committee itself that, "Both scholars have greatly enhanced our understanding of non-market institutions," is people commenting on the similarity between their work. Williamson is primarily known for his work on explaining how corporations (firms) exist in part to help overcome market failure due to monopolies caused by the specific nature of many production processes (i.e. people who make engines that only work in Ford cars can only sell them to the Ford company and vice-versa), while Ostrom is known for her work on how local groups of people can overcome market failure due to shared ownership of limited local resources.

In my Sytems of Survival-coloured view, both Ostrom and Williamson's work represent efforts to understand how people have developed innovative ways of coping with situations where guardian ethics (that deal with monopoly and limited resources) come into conflict with commercial ethics (that deal with trade of goods and resources).

More on both of these folks at some point in the future...