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Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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Full text from Substack:
Nietzsche's Morality in Plain English
In 1924, Clarence Darrow’s eight-hour plea for Leopold and Loeb blamed the universities and scholars of Nietzsche (who died in 1900) for their influence on Leopold:
He became enamored of the philosophy of Nietzsche. Your honor, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote. A man of wonderful intellect; the most original philosophy of the last century. A man who had made a deeper imprint on philosophy than any other man within a hundred years, whether right or wrong. More books have been written about him than probably all the rest of the philosophers in a hundred years. … Is there any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life on it?
Nietzsche is popularly associated with Nazism and even before this with “the superman … free from scruple” that Darrow describes, but he was also popular among the left-anarchists and the Left generally. Meanwhile, Tyler Cowen reports that “if you meet [an intellectual non-Leftist, increasingly they are Nietzschean” (whatever that means). Common sense demands that some of these people are misreading him.
Pinning down a moral theory that we can engage faces some initial hurdles:
- Nietzsche’s views changed over time. His works appear to make contradictory claims.
- His writing is notoriously poetic and obscure.
- Huge volumes of notes left behind after his 1889 mental collapse were compiled into The Will to Power and the Nachlass notes. It’s unclear how to consider these since he wanted his notes destroyed after his death.
I favor Brian Leiter’s approach and conclusions in Nietzsche on Morality. He offers practical solutions: identifying his works starting from Daybreak (1881) as “mature work,” working to extract philosophical content from even his esoteric output, and avoiding claims that depend on unpublished notes, in part just because they’re low-quality.
Nietzsche’s overarching project is the “revaluation of all values”: a critique of herd morality (which he typically just refers to as “morality”) on the grounds that it’s hostile to the flourishing of the best type of person.
First his broad outlook. Philosophically, he supports a methodological naturalism where philosophy aspires to be continuous with natural or social scientific inquiry. Metaethically he’s an anti-realist about value and would ultimately admit to defending his evaluative taste.
His psychological views can be strikingly modern. He argues that our beliefs are formed from the struggle of unconscious drives which compete in our mind so that our conscious life is merely epiphenomenal. He advances what Leiter calls a “doctrine of types” where everyone is some type of guy and the type of guy you are determines the kind of life you can lead, and that you’ll hold whatever philosophical or moral beliefs will favor your interests. He doesn’t hold any extreme “determinist” position but is broadly fatalistic about how your type-facts circumscribe and set limits on the kind of person you’ll be and the beliefs you’ll hold, within which you can be influenced by your environment and values.
From here we can proceed to herd morality, the general class of theories associated with normal morality. Nietzsche criticizes three of its descriptive claims (quoting exactly from Leiter):
- Free will: Human agents possess a will capable of free and autonomous choice.
- Transparency of the self: The self is sufficiently transparent that agents’ actions can be distinguished on the basis of their respective motives.
- Similarity: Human agents are sufficiently similar that one moral code is appropriate for all.
In line with Nietzsche’s theory of psychology, these empirical beliefs are held in support of herd morality’s normative beliefs: free will is needed to hold people accountable for their actions and transparency of the self is needed to hold people accountable for their motives. Without invoking any strict determinism, Nietzsche’s fatalistic view of human types contradicts (1). His beliefs about the epiphenomenalism of consciousness attack the transparency of the self. Against (3), Nietzsche holds that what is good for someone must depend of their interests, and therefore on the type of guy he is.
In particular, herd morality is harmful to the “higher type” of man in service of the lowest. This concern is more essential than the descriptive claims. A few points:
- Who are these higher men? They’re mostly creative geniuses exemplified by Goethe, the person mentioned most in Nietzsche’s writings—Beethoven, Napoleon, and Nietzsche himself also qualify. Besides their genius, they share attitudes: they’re solitary and self-interested, using others for their benefit while maintaining a dignified and superior bearing; they demand great responsibilities; they’re resilient, energetic, and not pessimistic. Importantly, they would support the “eternal recurrence,” the repetition of their life forever.
- How does herd morality hinder their flourishing? a. It tells them that suffering is bad, so that otherwise great men who might suffer and create pursue pleasure instead. b. It encourages altruism, while really the higher men should pursue their demanding obsessions instead. c. It advocates for equal regard and treatment, which removes the motivation to improve and create since even if you do you’ll be no better than you were.
- How does this benefit the lower men? People believe things that serve their interests, and so per Nietzsche, the “lowest order” makes these rhetorical moves (quoted from Leiter): a. their impotence becomes “goodness of heart”; b. their anxious lowliness becomes “humility”; c. their “inoffensiveness” and their “lingering at the door” becomes “patience”; d. their inability to achieve revenge becomes their unwillingness to seek revenge; e. their desire for retaliation becomes a desire for justice; f. their hatred of the enemy becomes a hatred of injustice.
- Why is the flourishing of higher men important? Life is hard to justify with all of its suffering and striving interspersed with brief respites of pointless satisfaction. Nietzsche rescues life only by appeal to the aesthetic spectacle of genius, which he elevates to the most important business, the only thing making life worthwhile.
This straightforward description of his thinking sheds light on some aspects of his work. Some notes:
- Nietzsche’s pessimistic view of human rationality helps explain the poetic and rhetorical style of his writing.
- His metaethical views support his esoterism. He sometimes says outright that he’s writing for a particular kind of person and not for everyone.
- Nietzsche’s higher man is an archetype well-suited specifically for artistic and creative work (Leiter describes “a penchant for solitude, an absolute devotion to one’s tasks, an indifference to external opinion”). He may also be unhappy, though Nietzsche seems a bit unclear about this.
- Nietzsche explains past philosophers’ views with their alleged psychology and self-interest, so it’s tempting to subject him to a similar analysis based on his disruptive health issues and unrequited love.
The initial puzzle of which supporters are misinterpreting Nietzsche seems answered. Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind argues that the kind of life that Nietzsche values is compelling enough to be absorbed by different ideologies.
But in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, the latest models of modern democratic or egalitarian man find much that is attractive in Nietzsche's understanding of things. It is the sign of the strength of equality, and of the failure of Nietzsche's war against it, that he is now far better known and really influential on the Left than on the Right.
I thought the Origins of Woke was a great book personally, although I shared a few of Scott's criticisms. Namely I thought it was a little weird how focused Hanania was on making sure workplaces be more conducive to finding sexual partners, and how much he cared about funding women's sports received. But overall I thought the book was great and captured a major causative factor of how Woke is so incredibly strong.
When people aren't allowed to acknowledge the flaws of Wokeness in the workplace or their employees will get sued, it creates an immense chilling effect. That's probably not the sole cause of wokeness, there are other factors like supporting impoverished minorities being a very convenient luxury belief to signal how much of a good person you are, but Hanania convinced me it was a major factor.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Special Issue: The Whiteish Question
Contributions for the week of April 1, 2024
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@clo:
Contributions for the week of April 22, 2024
Contributions for the week of April 29, 2024
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Recruiting for a cause.
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In short…
- Forecasting platforms and prediction markets are partially making the pie bigger together, and partially undercutting each other.
- The forecasting ecosystem adjusted after the loss of plentiful FTX money.
- Dustin Moskovitz’s foundation (Open Philanthropy) is increasing their presence in the forecasting space, but my sense is that chasing its funding can sometimes be a bad move.
- As AI systems improve, they become more relevant for judgmental forecasting practice.
- Betting with real money is still frowned upon by the US powers that be–but the US isn’t willing to institute the oversight regime that would keep people from making bets over the internet in practice.
- Forecasting hasn’t taken over the world yet, but I’m hoping that as people try out different iterations, someone will find a formula to produce lots of value in a way that scales.
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The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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I'm sorry HighSpace, I love you, I really do, but something about this project has been calling my name.
It all started with an idea for a decentralized recommendation engine in the vein of stumbleupon.com (I posted about it, but I think it got sucked into the vacuum of that database stroke we suffered a while back), but it has since took on a life of it's own. Originally the idea was to collect all the content I'd normally click “like” on, across various platforms, and present it as a curated feed of cool stuff I saw. The decentralization would come later on, as other people would hopefully join in, and we'd aggregate the results, and present them to each user according to their preferences. I wasn't convinced it's that great of an idea, so it languished for a while, until I remembered an old setup I had with Miniflux and Nitter that I'd use for keeping up with some people I followed, without opening a Twitter account. I thought Miniflux would provide a nice scaffolding for what I wanted to make, and Nitter would be a good start for a source of recommended content.
Nitter's dead, long live Nitter!
As we've all heard Nitter is dead, or is it? At one point I saw someone here link to privacydev's instance and after the core Nitter team gave up, I was using it every once in a while. It sure got slow, and it sure got unreliable, but not unreliable enough for me to believe the core functionality is completely crippled. I suspected it's a question of them not having enough accounts to make all the requests to Twitter, to serve all the people using the instance. Lo and behold, turns out I'm right, even though guest accounts are gone, you can still use it with a regular account, and there's even a script for fetching the auth tokens necessary to make nitter run. So I set the whole thing up, at first mostly just to have a Twitter frontend that's not absolute garbage, and it works like a charm! It's probably a good idea to add a few more accounts to avoid rate-limiting, but I've been using it on a single login without really running into issues.
Nitter's fine and well, but one of it's annoying limitations is that you have to look up an account directly. Timeline support is on it's roadmap, but they never got around to it, and it looks like now they never will. But what they do have is an RSS view, so you can add all the accounts you're interested in, and put their tweets together into a single timeline. For this, as already mentioned, I've used Miniflux. This has a lot of advantages that I really like. First, the tweets are in chronological order, and you can use an “unread” feed to only check the stuff you haven't seen yet. I find it much better than Twitter's “slotmachine” feed that shuffles tweets, lies to you about new content being available, and promotes people you haven't even followed. Secondly the tweets are automatically archived. Some people delete their spiciest takes, and even on Elon's Twitter accounts get occasionally yeeted, but since you're storing the content locally, all their bangers are safe with you. Thirdly - searchability. Twitter's search isn't even that bad, but what's missing for me is the ability to search the stuff I followed or liked. My memory is decent, but vague - “I saw that in a tweet I liked around X time”, “someone I followed used a phrase Y”, etc. Limiting the search to only people I follow, or to bookmarked RSS entries helps a lot.
I also had some issues with the setup. Miniflux only renders the titles of tweets, not their content. On the other hand, for some reason, Nitter renders the whole Tweet in the RSS entry title, which you'd think is a solution to the previous problem, but if you add a feed from non-nitter source, you end up with inconsistent rendering - you can read the tweets without clicking on each entry, but you have to check every entry from other feed types manually. So I made some adjustments! Nitter only renders basic info in the title (tweet author, who they're replying to / retweeting) and Miniflux actually renders the entire content on it's feed pages. The commit also includes the script to get the auth tokens. You can now happily scroll through all your content.
But wait, there's more!
So as I was happily using this setup, it occurred to me that images are quite important in the Twitter ecosystem. Sometimes people post memes with very little comment, sometimes they post screenshots of articles, sometimes they post images of text to get around the character limit. That's not an issue, it all renders fine, but since archiving is an important feature for me, I thought I need to do something about the images in case of banger deletion / account yeeting. So I made further adjustments! When the RSS entries are downloaded, their content is scraped for image tags, and they're automatically saved to Miniflux' database.
But that's not all! Since search is also an important feature for me, I thought “what if someone posts one of those wall-of-text images containing something interesting, and I'll only remember a phrase in the image, but nothing about the text of the tweet or it's author?”. Don't fret, another adjustment I made was to use gosseract, a Golang (which Miniflux is written in) OCR package, to automatically scan and transcribe the images, and to extend the search feature to look up the transcriptions as well! No spicy screenshotted headline will be able to hide from you now!
We're quite far from the original “p2p recommendation engine” idea, but I'm quite happy with the result. Back during one of the dotcom booms there was a saying to the effect of “just make an app you'd want to use”, and by that criterion I feel like I struck gold, so I thought I'd share it. There's potential to develop it further, both Substack and Youtube (still) offer RSS views of their content, and both have relatively-easy-to-access transcriptions. Automatically downloading audio or video content might be a tall order storage-wise, but it definitely will help with my chronic “I know I heard this on one of the several 5-hour long podcasts I listen to daily, but don't know which one" problem.
Now, if you're thinking, "that all sounds nice in theory, but I fell asleep reading the README of the repositories you linked to, and there's now way I'll bother setting any of this up" - you're in luck! For my next performance, if anyone's interested, I might set up a demo server.
If you want to take a stab at setting it up for yourself, and need help, I'll be happy to assist.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
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Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
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Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
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Recruiting for a cause.
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Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
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Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
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Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
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Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
By rule utilitarianism, here I will mean, roughly speaking, the moral stance summarized as follows:
- People experience varying degrees of wellbeing as a function of their circumstances; for example, peace and prosperity engender greater wellbeing than for their participants than war and famine.
- As a matter of fact, some value systems yield higher levels human wellbeing than others.
- Moral behavior consists in advocating and conforming to value systems that engender relatively high levels of human wellbeing.
Varieties of this position are advocated in academic philosophy, for example, by Richard Brandt, Brad Hooker, and R.M. Hare -- and in popular literature, for example, by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape and (more cogently, in my opinion) by Stephen Pinker in the final chapter of his book Enlightenment Now. I do not believe that rule utilitarianism cuts much ice as a moral stance, and this essay will explain why I hold that opinion.
1. The problem of speciesism
In his book Enlightenment Now, psychologist Steven Pinker hedges on proposition #3 of the utilitarian platform, which I will call the axiom of humanism. Pinker writes, "Despite the word's root, humanism doesn't exclude the flourishing of animals" [p. 410]. Well, professor, it sho' 'nuff does exclude the flourishing of animals! If the ultimate moral purpose is to promote human flourishing, then the welfare non-human animals is excluded from consideration in the ultimate moral purpose. To be charitable, I suppose Pinker means that it is consistent with (3) that there is a legitimate secondary moral purpose in maximizing the wellbeing of animals. However, (a) I cannot be sure that he means that, and (b) it is unfortunate that he did not say what he meant, especially since this point is central to a weakness in the humanist position.
In The Moral Landscape, and in his TED talk on the same thesis, Sam Harris spends most of his time defending propositions (1) and (2) of the utilitarian position --- which is unfortunate, because I believe they are self-evident. To his credit, Harris does briefly address issue of "speciesism" (that is, assigning greater moral weight to the wellbeing of animals than humans), saying, "If we are more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it's because we think they're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering." What Harris does not do is to place the range of animal experience on the scale with that of human experience to compare them, or give us any reason to think bottom of the scale for humans is meaningfully (if at all) above the top of the scale for other animals. Moreover, he gives no reason why we ought to draw a big red line at some arbitrary place on that scale, and write "Not OK to trap, shoot, eat, encage, or wear the skins of anything above this line." Perhaps that line reaches well down into the animal kingdom, and perhaps the line falls above the level of some of our fellow men. As a matter of ultimate concern, I cannot imagine an objective reason why it should not.
Perhaps Pinker and Harris don't spend much effort on the issue of speciesism because it is uncontroversial: of course human wellbeing has greater moral gravity than animal wellbeing, and the exact details of why and how much are not a pressing moral concern of our day. I submit, on the contrary, that accounting for speciesism is the one of the first jobs of any moral theory. I am not saying that perhaps we ought to start eating our dim-witted neighbors, or that we should all become vegans; I am saying that if you purport to found a moral theory on objective reason then you should actually do it, and that how that theory accounts for speciesism is an important test case for it.
To wit, either animals count as much as humans our moral calculus, or they do not. If animals count as much as humans, then most of us (non-vegetarians) are in a lot of trouble, or at least ought to be. On the other hand, if animals don't count as much as humans, then the reason they don't, carried to its logical conclusion, is liable to be the reason that some humans don't count as much as others. Abraham Lincoln famously made a similar argument over the morality of slavery:
You say A is white, and B is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be a slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? — You mean whites are intellectually the superiors to blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you. [From Lincoln's collected notes; date uncertain]
In the spirit of Lincoln's argument, for example, do non-humans count less, as Harris claims, because they allegedly have less varied and vivid emotional experience? It is not clear to me that they do in the first place, or, if they do, that they do by a degree sufficient to make cannibalism forbidden and vegetarianism optional. Do non-humans count less because they are less intelligent? In that case, the utilitarian is obliged to explain why the line is drawn just where it is, and, indeed, why, in the best of all possible worlds, deep fried dumbass shouldn't be an item on the menu at Arby's.
The fact that Pinker and Harris do not resolve the issue of speciesism is important -- not because their conclusions on the matter are or ought to be controversial, but because it is the first sign that they are not deriving a theory from first principles, but instead rationalizing the shared common sense of their own culture.
2. And who is my neighbor?
John Lennon famously sang, "All you need is love". Perhaps love is all you need, but, as Bo Diddley famously sang, the hard question remains: Who do you love?
Suppose we were to grant (which I do not) that it is objectively evident that the wellbeing of humans is categorically more valuable than that of other animals. The fact remains the wellbeing of some humans might count more than that of others, from my perspective, as an ultimate moral concern. Indeed, some humans might not count at all except as targets and trophies -- and many cultures have taken this view unashamedly. For example, the opening stanza of the Anglo Saxon poem Beowulf extolls the virtues of the Danish king Sheild Sheafson for the laudable accomplishment of subjugating not just some but all of the neighboring tribes, and for driving them in terror -- not from their fortresses, not from their castles, but from their bar stools:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
A wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
As his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
Beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
And begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.
[translation by Seamus Heaney, emphasis added]
The literature, monuments, and oral traditions of the world are replete with examples of this sentiment, but for the sake of space I will give just one more example. The inscription on a monument to honor the Roman general Pompey in honor of his 45'th birthday reads,
Pompey, the people’s general, has in three years captured fifteen hundred cities, and slain, taken, or reduced to submission twelve million human beings.
In the West today, people tear down monuments claiming that the men they honor were enslavers or imperialists -- but evidently other cultures put up monuments to glorify their leaders for those very characteristics. So it is not a no-brainer -- that is to say, not at all self-evident -- that the welfare of members of foreign tribes ought to play any role in our moral calculations at all -- or indeed that the subjugation and exploitation of foreign tribes is not a positive moral good from our own perspective. That is how the Romans and the Saxons saw it. If you or I had been born into those cultures we would probably would have felt the same way -- and so, I dare say, would Sam Harris and Steven Pinker.
I imagine the utilitarian response would that we are all better off if we take the modern Western view (of course) that exploiting foreigners is inherently immoral. Sam Harris asks us to imagine two people who are forced to choose between (a) cooperating to build a better society, or (b) smashing each other in the face with rocks. If those are the options, I would certainly choose (a) -- but those are not the options. Harris left out the salient option (c): I smash you in the face with a rock and take your wallet. This is not a straw man, and it has been the position of many honest, intelligent, and upright people. If one suggested to Alexander the Great -- a student of Aristotle -- that "we all" are better off if "we all" lay down our weapons, he might ask, "who is we all??" He might say that he cares little for what makes barbarians (that is, non-Greeks) better off, any more than he cares what makes apes or pigs better off -- and that your way of drawing the circle of love, so as to include all humans but exclude apes and pigs, is no better than his. I imagine the utilitarian response to that would be, "You fiend!", and that the Greek response to that would be "Get out of my sight, you womanish punk". So, from a logical perspective, who won the debate? Nobody did.
Pinker almost concedes this, writing "If there were a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath who could exploit everyone else with impunity, no argument could convince him he had omitted a logical fallacy" [Enlightenment Now, p. 412] -- but it is not clear whether he means that the sociopath could not be convinced because he has a thick skull, or whether he is actually not committing a logical fallacy. I emailed Dr. Pinker for a clarification, and he was kind enough to reply, acknowledging that the megalomaniacal sociopath is actually not committing a logical fallacy. Note that (1) this is a second example of Pinker's writing being vague exactly where the argument is weakest (the first being the issue of speciesism), and (2) a Roman general is not a megalomaniacal sociopath or anything of the sort, and whatever we claim to be objectively self-evident ought to be evident to him as well as us.
In fact, Pinker considers something like the argument with a Roman general in his book. His imagined response (in his version to Nietzsche, a Romanophile, rather than an actual Roman) is as follows:
I [Steven Pinker] am a superman, hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without conscience. As you recommend, I will achieve glory by exterminating some chattering dwarves. Starting with you, shortly. And I might do a few things to that Nazi sister of yours, too. Unless you can think of a reason why I should not [Enlightenment Now, p. 446].
But now that Professor Pinker himself has switched gears, from the strictly logical to the ad baculum, I submit that he is obviously bluffing, and the Romans were not bluffing at all. Someone would win that debate -- and that the Roman argument might have something to do with a crucifix.
In any case, an allegedly universal and self-evident regard for "human wellbeing" leaves unanswered the central question of morality: in the words of the great moral philosopher Bo Diddley, Who do you love? Speciesism is only the thin end of the wedge: not only do I generally value the wellbeing of people more than that that of cows and rabbits, I also value the wellbeing of my people more than I value that of other people -- and, in my view, rightly so. Thus, premises (1) and (2) of the humanist/utilitarian position do not imply conclusion (3) because, as an ultimate concern, I value the wellbeing of people in my identity group over that of people outside my identity group, and it is only right that I should do this. Thus, maximizing human wellbeing -- in the sense where all humans count equally -- is not something I am actually interested in. Moreover, I do not feel it is something I ought to be particularly interested in.
Now in response to this, you might say that I am a scoundrel and a villain. In response to that, I say that's just, like, your opinion, man. Philosophers such as Peter Singer, and popular writers like Stephen Pinker, insist that I must be impartial between the wellbeing of my people on the one hand, and that of homo sapiens at large on the other. For example, Pinker writes, "There is nothing magic about the pronouns I and me that would justify privileging my interests over yours or anyone else's" [Enlightenment Now, p. 412]. To that I reply, why on Earth would I need magic, or even justification, to privilege my own interests over yours as matter of ultimate concern? Of course I privilege my interests over yours, and almost certainly vice versa. In fact, unless you are a friend of mine, not only do I privilege my own interests over yours, I privilege my dog's interests over yours. For example, if my dog needed a life-saving medical procedure that costs $5000, I would pay for it, but if you need a life-saving medical procedure that cost $5000, I probably would not pay for it -- and if an orphan from East Bengal needed a life-saving medical procedure that costs $5000 (which one probably does at this very moment), I would almost certainly not pay for it, and neither would you (unless you are actually paying for it).
I must not be alone in caring more about my dog than I do about a random stranger. The average lifetime cost of responsibly owning a dog in the United States is around $29,000 -- while, according to the Givewell organization, the cost of saving the life of one unfortunate fellow man at large by donating to a well chosen charity is around $4500 [source]. If those figures are correct, it means that if you own a dog, then you could have allocated the cost of owning that dog to save the lives of about six people on average (and if the figures are wrong, something like that is true anyway). Now, Steven Pinker himself once tweeted that dog ownership comes with empirically verifiable psychological benefits for the dog owner. In his excitement over those psychological benefits, I suppose, he neglected to mention that it also comes with the opportunity cost of six (or so) third world children dying in squalid privation. If Pinker really believes, as he claims to believe, that "reducing the suffering and enhance the flourishing of human beings is the ultimate moral purpose," he sure isn't selling it very hard. But then again, no one in their right mind is.
Not only do I actually value my dog's wellbeing above that or a random human stranger, I submit it is only right that I should. That is to say, it would be immoral of me not to privilege my dog's wellbeing over that of a human stranger. Indeed, if a man let his family dog pass away, when he could have saved the dog's life for a few thousand dollars, and he spent that money instead to save the life of a foreigner whom he had never met, then, all else being equal, I would prefer not to have him as a countryman, let alone a friend.
In one talk, Pinker has said, "You cannot expect me to take you seriously if you are espousing moral rules that privilege your interests above mine." But, professor, if I have more and better men on my side, it does not matter whether you take me seriously; it only matters whether they do. Again, I am not saying that it would be right to take advantage of that situation of having more and better men on my side; I am saying that the Pinker and Harris's egg headed argument yields no objective reason why I shouldn't.
3. Degrees of neighborship
One of Sam Harris's favorite examples to illustrate the objectiveness of values is "the worst possible misery for everyone", which he claims is self-evidently and objectively bad situation. I think this is an egregious misdirection, because moral questions are not about the choice between win-win and lose-lose. If iron axes work better than bronze axes, for everyone, at every level, all things considered, then by all means let us use iron -- but that is not a moral decision. I have a moral decision to make when, for example, (1) I have the opportunity to gain at your expense, all things considered, and (2) I don't care about your wellbeing as much as I care about mine.
But not all moral tradeoffs are one-on-one. Human nature being what it is, groups at all levels split into factions which then try to have their way with each other -- from nuclear families, to PTA boards, to political parties, to nations, to the whole of humanity. A code of conduct that is good for my community at one level might subtract from the good of a smaller, tighter community of which I am also a member -- so, real which of those codes should (should, in the moral sense) I advocate and adhere to?
As a matter of fact, the wellbeing of different groups, of which I am a member, often trade against each other in moral decisions -- and the purpose of moral precepts, largely if not mainly, is to manage tradeoffs between our concerns for the welfare of different groups, with different degrees of shared identity, of which we are a common member. What looks like the same group from afar, or in one conflict, may look like different ethnicities or religions when you zoom in, or look at a different conflict. This is nothing new. For example, the Book of Joshua, written at the latest around 600 BC, records nations being formally subdivided into hierarchies of tribes, clans, and families:
So Joshua got up early in the morning and brought Israel forward by tribes, and the tribe of Judah was selected. So he brought the family of Judah forward, and he selected the family of the Zerahites; then he brought the family of the Zerahites forward man by man, and Zabdi was selected. And he brought his household forward man by man; and Achan, son of Carmi, son of Zabdi, son of Zerah, from the tribe of Judah, was selected.
And these various hierarchies were well known to endure conflicts of interest, if not outright enmity, at every level of the hierarchy, from civil war between tribes (and coalitions of tribes) within a nation, right down to nuclear families:
Then the men of Judah gave a shout: and as the men of Judah [Southern Israel] shouted, it came to pass, that God smote Jeroboam and all [Northern] Israel before Abijah and Judah. [2 Chronicles: 15]
And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. [Genesis 4:8]
So what your "ingroup" looks like depend on the particular conflict we are looking at, and the level of structure at which the conflict takes place. These conflicts can be life and death at all levels, and someone who is in your ingroup during a conflict at one level may be in the outgroup in a conflict at another level on another occasion. This phenomenon is a major theme -- arguably the major theme -- of the oldest written documents that exist on every continent where writing was discovered. Thus is a mistake in moral reasoning to conceptualize a code of conduct that benefits "the community": each person is, after all, a member of multiple overlapping communities of various sizes and levels of cohesion, whose interests are frequently in conflict with each other.
Now hear this: when we are looking for a win-win solution that benefits everyone at all levels without hurting anyone at any level of "our community", this is an engineering problem, or a social engineering problem, but not an ethical problem. It is the win-lose scenarios, which trade the wellbeing of one level of my community against that of another, that fall into the domain of ethics. Of course we are more concerned for the welfare of those whose identities have more in common with our own -- but how steep should the drop-off be as a function of shared identity? Should it converge to zero for humanity at large? Less than zero for our enemies? How about rabbits and cows? As an ultimate concern, who do you love, and exactly how much, when it comes to decisions that trade between the wellbeing of one level of your community and another (self, family, clan, tribe, nation, humanity, vertebrates at large)? That is a central problem, if not the central problem, of ethical discourse -- and it is a question about which utilitarianism has nothing to say, and about which humanism begs the question from the outset.
4. No Moral Verve
At the end of the day, the conversation on ethics should come to something more than chalk on a board. When the chalk dust settles, if we have done a decent job of it, we should bring away something that can inspire us to rise to the call of duty when duty gets tough. The fatal defect of humanism in this regard is that practically no one -- neither you, nor I, nor Steven Pinker, nor Sam Harris, nor John Stuart Mill himself -- actually gives a leaping rat's ass about the suffering or the flourishing of homo sapiens at large. Such was eloquently voiced by Adam Smith, and his statement is worth quoting at length:
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened. [Smith (1759): The Theory of Moral Sentiments]
Here is the point. As C.S. Lewis wrote, In battle it is not syllogisms [logic] that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment ["The Abolition of Man"]. Lewis was right about this -- and, while we are making a list of things that do not inspire people to rise to call of duty when duty gets tough, we can include on that list any concern they might claim to have for the welfare of human beings at large.
5. Mumbo-Jumbo
Be careful what you do,
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,
And all of the other
Gods of the Congo,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.*
[ Vachel Lindsay: The Congo]
In a discussion with Alex O'Connor, Sam Harris invites us to imagine two people on an Island, who can choose either to cooperate and build a beautiful life together, or to start smashing each other in the face with rocks. It is immoral to smash someone in the face with a rock, he infers, because if we all started smashing each other in the face with rocks, we would all be miserable. Indeed, I agree that if I had a choice between everyone smashing everyone in the face with a rock, and nobody smashing anyone in the face with a rock, I would certainly choose nobody smashing anyone. But in reality, I do not get to choose whether everybody smashes everyone in the face with a rock. The decision I get to actually make, in which my ethics actually plays a role, is whether I smash you in the face with a rock, and take your wallet in the bargain, which, say, has $5,000 in it. With that, it is suddenly not so clear why that wouldn't maximize the satisfaction of my ultimate concerns -- especially if I value $5,000 more than I value your life (which again, unless you are a friend of mine, I unashamedly do).
On top of ignoring the multilayered, competitive nature of the human condition, and on top of having no practical motivational force even for its professed adherents, another problem with rule utilitarianism is the voodoo it invokes to connect (a) performing a particular action with (b) what would happen, counterfactually, if everyone followed the salient rule that permits the action. For a simple example, let us imagine that I steal a tootsie roll from a convenience store. In this scenario, let us imagine that I am poor and the convenience store owner is rich, and that tootsie roll does me more good than it would have done the store owner if it had remained in his store. In the world of mystical utilitarian counterfactuals, if everyone stole everything all the time, then everyone would clearly be worse off -- but in the actual world, me stealing a bite of candy is not going to cause everyone to steal everything all the time, or, probably, cause anyone else to steal anything else ever. Even if an individual tootsie roll pilferage did have some miniscule ripple effect on society, I would still expect the material impact on me personally to be less than the cost of the candy I stole. To put it more generally, when someone steals something and gets away with it, they do not reasonably expect to lose net income as a result. So, why on Earth should I care about what would happen in the sci-fi scenario where everyone stole everything all the time? I cannot imagine an objective reason why I should.
Perhaps there is some deep metaphysical argument that establishes, on an objective basis, that one ought to behave in the way they wish others in "their community" to behave (if, again counterfactually, there were such a thing as "their community") -- or perhaps there is some kind of cosmic karma stipulating that what goes around invariably comes around on this Earth, but (1) I cannot imagine what that metaphysical argument would be, (2) the world doesn't look to me like it works that way, and (3) neither Pinker, nor Harriss, nor Singer, nor Benthem, nor Mill actually give such metaphysical arguments, nor attempt to show that the world does work that way.
Let me repeat once again that I am not advocating nihilism here. What I am saying is this: if utilitarians claim to base their moral theory on objective reason -- indeed, if they claim to do anything other than manufacture a flimsy rationalization for the moral common sense of their own culture -- then it is precisely the Devil's advocate that must contend with, and it seems to me they are in a hopeless position to do so.
Conclusion
When I say that utilitarianism has nothing useful to say about real world ethical problems, I mean it. Of course one might give evidence about the impacts of some rule or policy, which might then inform whether we want to adopt that rule or policy -- but I doubt the following words have ever been uttered in a real debate over policy or ethics: I conceded that your policy/rule/value-premise, if adopted, would benefit every level of our community more than mine does, but to Hell with that. The fact is that everyone prefers policies that benefit their communities when they are a win/win at every level -- whether or not they have read one fancy word of John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Peter Singer, Sam Harris, or Steven Pinker. Thus, to the degree that utilitarianism has any force in the real world, it adds nothing to the conversation that wasn't already inherent in common sense. On the other hand, to the degree that utilitarianism is not redundant with common sense, it has no motivational force, even for its professed adherents -- especially if they own a dog.
I submit that the position of utilitarianism is not only weak, but so evidently preposterous that its firm embrace requires an act of intellectual dishonesty. I can say this without contempt, because less than ten years ago I myself espoused utilitarianism. I knew then and I know now that I was not being intellectually honest in espousing this view. To my credit, I could not bring myself to write a defense of utilitarianism, even though I tried -- because I could not come up with an argument for it that I found convincing. Yet, I presumed that I would eventually be able to produce such an argument, and I did state utilitarianism as my position, without confessing that I could not defend the position to my own satisfaction.
I further submit that programs like utilitarianism are not only mistaken but harmful. They are not just a little bit harmful, but disastrously harmful, and we can see the engendered disaster unfolding before our eyes. The problem is not that utilitarians are necessarily bad people; it is that, if they are good people, they are good people in some sense by accident: reflexively mimicking the virtues and values of their inherited traditions, while at the same time denigrating tradition, and mistaking their moral heritage for something they have discovered independently. As John Selden wrote,
Custom quite often wears the mask of nature, and we are taken in [by this] to the point that the practices adopted by nations, based solely on custom, frequently come to seem like natural and universal laws of mankind. [Natural and National Law, Book 1, Chapter 6]
The problem with subverting the actual source of our moral norms and replacing it with a feeble rationalization is this: each generation naturally (and rightly) pushes back against their inherited traditions, and pokes to see what is underneath them. If the actual source of those traditions has been forgotten, and they are presented instead as being founded on hollow arguments, the pushback will blow the house down. Sons will live out the virtues of their fathers less with each passing generation, progressively supplanting those virtues with the unrestrained will of their own flesh. That is what we are seeing in our culture today -- and impotent, ivory tower theories of morality are part of the problem.
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