William MacAskill is Nice Guy, but Morally Confused

I wrote recently about Sam Harris and William MacAskill's discussion in Harris' podcast Being Good and Doing Good.  During that discussion, MacAskill revealed himself to be an ostentatious altruist, which is little surprise since he is the author of Doing Good Better - Effective Altruism And a Radical Way to Make a Difference.  MacAskill gives away a large proportion of his earnings and he actively encourages others to do so (also here).  He reports feeling rewarded by his carefully targeted altruism and there's nothing particularly wrong with his largesse, in itself.  I don't however see him as "morally superior".  In fact, I see him as morally confused.

One thing that I aimed to explain with the notion of an ethical structure was the broad range of morality, from people who are obsessed with doing the right thing at all times to those who simply don't give a toss about the rules, but more importantly those of us somewhere in the middle who are generally good but, given the right circumstances, can be tempted to do wrong (i.e. when we think that no-one is watching or that we might just get away with it).  In the Morality as Playing Games series, I concluded that every one of us is the descendant of a person who, when it became necessary, abandoned their morality and betrayed others in order to survive - but, to have been successful, this ancestor of ours didn't abandon their morality before it was necessary, at least not to the extent that they were deemed dangerous and unsuitable members of society before they could produce at least one child.

In order to be able to survive tough times, each of us must strike a delicate balance between the imperative to fit into our society (and be moral) and the capacity to betray our fellows at precisely the right time - not too early and not too late.  We seek a balance between the impulse to cooperate in a group and need to react appropriately when it is time to defect from that group.  In the modern western world, the times we live in are not particularly tough, even among the more disadvantaged (gone are the days when we might break a window to steal a loaf of bread in order to heroically save our starving nieces and nephews).

In good times, we are biased towards morality and we now have huge industries built around punishing defectors.  Given our increased wealth, it could be argued that the modern western person is less likely to defect than someone from, say, 200 years ago (which would explain the decline of violence).  This certainly has positive sides, but it can go too far to the extent to which our "morality" leads to self-harm, especially when we factor lost opportunity into the harm calculus.

MacAskill, I suggest, verges on self-harm when he carves away at the economic margin between modern comfort and survival.  By doing so, he pushes himself towards a situation in which he would not survive should his conditions deteriorate.  The rational approach is to look towards increasing your economic margin, while taking into account other relevant factors - for example, for the purposes of survival there comes a point at which being richer just increases the risk that you will be killed for your wealth.  As an academic, unless his books are spectacularly successful, MacAskill will not be in a situation in which his wealth is so huge as to be unconducive to his on-going survival.

So, on the surface, what I read into his unbounded willingness to aid others is an indication that his morality is poorly calibrated for survival in extremis.  He does talk about preserving yourself so as to not burn out too quickly (as an altruist) and to maximise your longer-term altruism, for example an expensive suit might prevent money being donated to worthy causes if you bought it today, but your ownership of it may permit you to secure a well-paying job thus allowing you to donate much more in the future. 

MacAskill is saved from actual self-harm in a couple of ways.  Firstly, there is the framing of his legacy survival.  Who MacAskill is and how he behaves is an essential part of his legacy and therefore children (should he have any) would not necessarily be his sole method of ensuring legacy survival.  Others who follow his example, however, and who won't have their names and legacy attached to the organisations that MacAskill has created would likely be self-harming should they donate as much of their earnings as he seeks to - if that level of donation puts their other legacy survival efforts at risk.

The other way he is protected from self-harm is that he would be building up a certain amount of good will, should times turn tough and he finds himself in financial straits he could likely cash in that good will and make it through - but only so long as he hasn't convinced all his friends and colleagues to ruin themselves financially.

Aside from self-harm, there is another concern that I have with his efforts, involving the concept of moral self-licensing.  It is a known feature (some might say a bug) of psychology that when we have done something good, particularly something very good, we may feel entitled to either do something bad or forego doing something else that is good.  Alcohol advertising, for example, highlights this idea when it is suggested that by having put in a full day's work or prevailed in some sporting event, you have somehow earned the right to get drunk (in moderation).

My concern is two-fold.  Firstly, this altruism movement may trigger bad behaviour and act as an enabler for ongoing bad behaviour.  The idea that large numbers of people might feel entitled to behave poorly due to their altruism is worrisome.

Secondly, there is the issue of perception.  We are naturally inclined to see others as largely neutral (mythical saints aside) and so, if people were as ostentatiously "good" as MacAskill strives to be, the more cynical among us would wonder what they were compensating for.  Therefore, if altruism were to go too far, it could paradoxically lead to reduced trust within our societies.

I don't think that MacAskill is covering up some moral culpability, merely that he is morally confused.  His approach is a very nice idea, in the hypothetical, and one that, in the hypothetical, we should all strive for (meaning that it is beneficial to persuade others that, in the hypothetical, such ostentatiously good people are what we would want to be).  In practice, however, such ascetic extremes of goodness are a bit weird, relatively few of us could comfortably approach emulating them and we are left with an impression that the person involved is, at best, somewhat naïve.

It is this naivety that is possibly most problematic, when we consider MacAskill's zeal in spreading the word.  All traits which have survival implications have a range of expression in the relevant population.  There are benefits in being big and strong and there are benefits in being small and flexible, depending on the conditions.  If a population became entirely big and strong due to the prevailing conditions and those conditions changed, then the entire population could fail.  We are protected from this by a sort of regression to and variance around a mean, so that the small flexible still exist in times that are best for the big and strong and when being big and strong is no longer optimal, the small and flexible take over (while not dominating entirely so that a swing back doesn't wipe out the population).

The same applies to variations in morality.  Today, in relatively good times, we have people who are more inclined to steal and kill than we are willing to accept and we punish them.  But under extreme conditions, these are precisely the sort of people who would ensure the continuation of our clans while people who are too touchy-feely starve to death or are slaughtered in their beds.

To be able to survive, which I argue is what morality is really all about, we have to be able to be bad when conditions call for it.  We need to be able to look out for ourselves and while doing maximum good in the world, simply for its own sake, sounds like a brilliant idea in principle, turning our minds to this sort of thing in practice risks disarming us at the very moment when we are most vulnerable, making us miss the signs that conditions have changed for the worst and we may soon be required to reap the benefit of our morality – or be erased from the Earth.

Ethical Structures, Non-Identity and the Repugnant Conclusion

Derek Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion results from a consideration of welfare and population.  In essence, the conclusion is that a world in which a very large number of people have lives that are barely worth living is preferable to a world in which a much smaller number of people have significantly better lives.

My attention was brought to this ethical conundrum by Sam Harris and William MacAskill in one of Harris' podcasts - Being Good and Doing Good.

The Repugnant Conclusion is reached in a step wise fashion with certain assumptions, primarily the idea that we should maximise "quality of life" (with a further assumption that we can quantise "quality of life" or at least think about units of "quality of life", which are even further assumed to be positive).  Also tied into this is the idea of future persons, who don't currently exist (hence their non-identity, which leads to other considerations which I'll get to shortly).

Imagine one person, A, existing with a total of 100 units of "quality of life" (let us call these UQL) and say that 100 units of UQL is pretty damn good.  If we are maximising UQL, then it follows that 101 people existing with 1 UQL each is better than this one person existing with 100 UQL, where having 1 UQL is equivalent to having a life that is barely worth living.  With the leap to the conclusion, this seems bizarre - many people living what is only slightly better than a life that is not worth living doesn't intuitively feel better than A living the bliss of a 100 UQL "pretty damn good" life.

(Note that our intuitions associated with this are likely to be faulty.  As I write, the 2016 Paralympics have opened and the whole and healthy among us would probably find it difficult to think that someone who is eligible to enter these Games would not want to swap their stumps for real legs, or to be able to see, or to not be confined to a wheelchair.  However, these people would not see themselves as a life that is barely worth living - and this applies to more the mundanely handicapped, not just Paralympians.  Some even claim that they would turn down the hypothetical option to turn back the clock and not be handicapped.  This notion has important links to the "non-identity problem".)

The Repugnant Conclusion, however, is not reached by a leap, it is reached step-wise.  Consider, rather than 101 people living a 1 UQL life, two people living lives that are only slightly worse off than A's life, even 99 and 99 UQL.  This is clearly better than just one person living a life with a total of 100 UQL, it's very close to double the total UQL.  Keep doing this over and over again and you eventually reach the conclusion that a very large number of people living lives that are barely worth living can be better than any significantly smaller number of people with significantly better lives.

Converting this into a real world situation, this would mean that it would be better to keep producing more and more humans until all of us are living lives that are barely worth living, but we'd do it one baby at a time where each new baby would not significantly degrade the average UQL and would slightly raise the total UQL.  There are few among us who do not realise that if we were all to continue to produce large numbers of children, as we did in the past, then the future will look bleak indeed, but few of us choose not to produce any children at all in order to not contribute to great suffering on the part of our potential descendants - noting that our population increase shows little sign of slowing down (at least globally) and may in fact increase if we are so foolish as to eradicate malaria, cure cancer, prevent heart disease, stroke and diabetes and provide universal first world medical care and clean water to the third world without modifying their family structures - so even if we restrict ourselves to one child, we may still thus produce descendants who will be born in to a world with a vastly increased population.

Now we turn to the "non-identity problem".  This problem revolves around hypothetical people, who might exist (or not exist) based on decisions we make.  In essence, the question is whether it is better for a person to exist than not exist, given that their existence might not be perfect.  Such moral dilemmas are faced (or ignored) by people who are aware of the risk of defects in their unborn child and choose to get a check.  Say an unborn child is found to have Down Syndrome and the parents decide to abort the pregnancy.  In this situation (at least in a sense), an existent person stops existing and a life that was probably worth living is not lived.  (There's a complex calculus that could conceivably be conducted to determine what the overall UQL would be with the introduction of this Down Syndrome child and it is arguable that the total UQL would go down, but this would possibly be the case anyway with the decision to go with an abortion since such a decision is rarely an easy one.  Other arguments could be made that humanity is held back by its weakest links, but such arguments would veer close to eugenics and are probably repugnant in themselves.)

We could step back a little and think not of an abortion, but of a decision to not conceive.  We make these decisions all the time and have few qualms about them, because they involve acts of omission rather than commission - the omission of an emission in the case of the withdrawal method, and the occlusion of an emission in the case of condoms and similar devices, such that both methods result in sperm and ovum not meeting.  However, in each decision to avoid conception, we are effectively denying the existence of a person who could have existed and who could have lived a life worth living.  If we have the potential to bring into being a person who could live a life worth living, how do we justify not doing so (assuming that any reduction in our quality of life is marginal and we can continue to live a life worth living)?

If we cannot justify choosing to not bring into being a child with UQL of greater than 1, then the conclusion is that we should just keep producing children to the greatest extent possible, until we would otherwise start producing children with an UQL of less than or equal to zero.  And this does not seem right.

So how could we justify to not create such a child?

Selfishness seems a common (albeit post hoc) justification.  I like my life as it is, I don't want to compromise it by introducing children into it.  However, this is making the assumption that my marginal quality of life (the slight difference between the quality of life that I have as a single, unencumbered person and the quality of life I would have as parent) is more important than the hypothetical quality of life of this potential child (which would not exist in the world if the child did not exist).

Another justification is that any child is a link towards a future descendant living in a bleak, overpopulated world.   But this argument only works if you have decided to never reproduce.  It disappears as soon as you produce your first child and then you seem committed to produce as many children as you can, paradoxically rushing towards a situation in which your descendants are consigned to living in a world which is barely worth living in (and who may in turn have descendants living in a world that is not worth living in).

These linked problems, the Repugnant Conclusion and the Non-Identity Problem, have not been conclusively solved by ethicists.  Attempts to avoid the conclusions tend to result in other paradoxical outcomes, or other ethical problems (for example, if we think about UQL in terms of an average rather than a sum, we can arrive at a conclusion that it is better to eradicate those with low UQL and keep doing so until there is one single blissfully happy person with very high UQL - presuming that this person doesn't mind the genocide going on around her).

What does the Ethical Structure approach lead us to think about these problems?

Careful readers will probably have picked up on stilted wording above.  It's not easy (for me) to breeze past a statement that "X is better than Y" without commenting on the fact that the term "better" isn't securely grounded.  What exactly is a "better life"?  In what way is 100 UQL vested in one person "better" than 101 UQL spread across 101 people?  What does it mean to say it is "better" (or even simply "good") to keep producing children?

A "better" life is merely a life that is more good, but good for what?  And having quality of life is again ungrounded.  Does this mean happier, more productive, containing more puppies, what?  Even if we allow that quality of life need not be defined precisely, we are left with a begged question as to whether a life with high quality is a good thing.  Good for what?  The unabated production of children is good for what?

The answer, if the logic behind the Ethical Structure idea is correct, is survival - but survival on a few levels.

Firstly, to survive we each need to have lives that are worth living, in order to prevent ourselves from self-terminating (or at least so that we put serious effort into not dying).  We need to have both lives that are worth living and the expectation that our children's lives will be worth living in order to survive through them (so legacy survival as opposed to physical survival).  We do not, however, necessarily need to have a quality of life that is very high - merely sufficiently high.  Similarly, we don't need to expect more than that our children should have a sufficiently high quality of life - where "sufficiently high" is a value judgement that will vary from person to person.

Secondly, there is the need to continually signal to other members of our communities that we are obeying the rules and not threatening the welfare of others.  In this context, the unabated production of children is not good because flooding of the population with my children (my legacy) is potentially deleterious to your legacy and even to you personally, if my children were to displace you.  The rules, in the form of social norms, tell us how many children are appropriate and any significant divergence from this number (positive or negative) is generally frowned upon, which is to say you could thus be a suspicious character as a rule-breaker who had too many children.

These are, however, practical considerations and they don't address the more abstract notion that we should want to increase the total quality of life in the world (at least among humans) nor do they explain that we are appalled by the idea of large numbers of people that have lives that are barely worth living.  These, I suggest, derive from our consideration of the people that we want to be or, more accurately, the people that we want other people to think that we are, the nature of which follows from an internalisation of the ethical structure.

The second tier of the structure is the injunction against harm.  This is generally applied to existent people (most importantly ourselves), but in order to be consistent and to convey our reliability to fellow community members in quite a cost-effective way we may also apply it to potential or hypothetical people.

Consider person A, the one with 100 UQL.  We compared this with 101 people with 1 UQL each.  Note that the injunction is against doing harm, rather than being a commandment to do good (since we can more reasonably demand that people not harm us as opposed to demanding that others do good for us).  With the 101 people with 1 UQL each, we either have one person who has been harmed by losing 99 UQL - or who has been eliminated entirely (thus losing 100 UQL and her existence!)  This is a level of harm that we cannot countenance, especially if A is supposed to represent "me".  (This is a difficult conclusion to avoid, since if there were one single person in the universe, hogging all the UQL, then that person would obviously "me" from their own perspective and there would be no other perspective.)

We can accept an incremental decrease in our quality of life, especially if it is hypothetical, because by doing so we are affirming to ourselves and advertising to others that we hold the survival (and thus existence) of other people to be of more importance than maintaining a high quality of life for ourselves.  Remember though that when it gets down to brass tacks, the purpose of my ethical structure is to aid my survival, not yours, and that means I have a point at which I will abandon the "charade" of morality in order survive (as do you).  This means that while I might accept a gradual decline in my quality of life, there is still a point at which I will no longer accept it - not that I necessarily know precisely where that point lies, but it how it is set will probably be related to how I view my legacy in relation to my physical survival, I am likely to call a stop to the diminishment of my quality of life when it threatens my legacy.

When thinking about population increase, this manifests as a hypothetical willingness to sacrifice a little quality of life in order to allow another person to come into existence.  As we don't want people to suffer (or rather we don't want anyone to think that we would not care about people suffering), our preference is that hypothetical and newly existent people should a similar level of quality of life to ours (or slightly better, or slightly worse, it doesn't really matter particularly since it's hypothetical).  But we are not willing (even hypothetically) to significantly decrease our quality of life, nor to posit into existence people with a quality of life that is substantially below ours.  This might in part be because we don't really deal in absolutes, we deal in comparison, so a single "positive" UQL would be counted as negative when compared to our notional 100 UQL.

An example which came up frequently in the Harris-MacAskill discussion was Singer's drowning child in a lake.  In this thought experiment, you are walking past a shallow lake, one that you can safely enter to extract a child that is drowning.  However, you're wearing a nice set of clothes and the lake, while safe, is dirty or muddy, so while saving the child, you would be ruining your outfit.  Do you risk the expense of getting a replacement outfit and save the child?

The argument goes that you would be a moral monster if you were to fail to save the child simply because you wanted to save your clothes.  Taking your clothes off and rescuing the child naked is apparently not an option, nor is laundering them afterwards, although interestingly enough, it seems a common that people do want to save the child, but they also consider how they might prevent damaging their clothes in the process.  We could instead imagine a hypothetical imperative to drive off the road, thus destroying your car, in order to not kill a small child that had strayed onto the road - a dispassionate choice to prioritise your car over the child would make you a moral monster.  This scenario makes killing the child somewhat more active, rather than passively letting it drown.  In a sense, the drowning child dilemma is more like a variation of the trolley problem, in which you can choose to inconvenience yourself slightly in order to redirect the trolley onto a track that will destroy some of your stuff and thus save the life of a child.

Reframing the dilemma slightly, we could say that by not saving the life of a child on the grounds of a relatively small cost and minor inconvenience we become moral monsters.

Therefore, using Singer's extrapolation, we become moral monsters when we fail to send money to sub-Saharan Africa to help buy mosquito nets, at least those of us who have discretionary funds that we waste on such things as iPhones, summer holidays or food that we don't need (given that if we are overweight it's almost certainly because we eat more than we need).  Harris and MacAskill used the phrase "we're back standing by the lake" or the like to suggest that by failing to help distant people, or by reaching a conclusion that is repugnant, we would be doing the equivalent of letting the child drown (while noting that salience, or immediacy, is absent by virtue of the distance involved).

I agree that if we let the child drown while we stand passively at the lake's edge or as we walk away, we could be considered to be moral monsters.  I'd find it difficult to forgive myself if I failed to act in such a scenario, because I would not be the person I would want to be, and I'd be deeply suspicious of anyone else that I knew to be willing to let the child drown.  However, I don't agree that we run the same risk of being considered moral monsters due to any responsibility to save distant people.  I do, on the other hand, agree that we have precisely the same responsibility to save distant people as we have to save the child - but by that I mean that we have no responsibility to save any of them, none at all.  Yes, I meant to write that. 

As an ordinary person walking past the lake, we have no inherent obligation to save the drowning child.

Before I get accused of being a moral monster, let me try to explain the thinking behind this.  If I don't care what sort of person I am, and I don't care what you might think of me or do to me if I were to fail to react the way you think I should, then I would have no motivation or obligation to save the child (for the sake of saving the child) even if I could do so at no cost or inconvenience to myself.  However, none of us, perhaps not even psychopaths, live in that sort of world.  We live in the sort of world in which a real, if not inherent, obligation emerges when there is a pressing, obvious and reasonable demand for our assistance - because we do care about what sorts of people we are and we do care about what others think of us and what they might do to us.  So take on board an expectation that we should attempt to save a child drowning in a lake if we can do so safely

What is not expected is that we should go out of our way to address a vaguely defined need for assistance that is largely invisible.  This is partly why the crystallisation of that need, via advertising or someone knocking on your door, tends to work.  A level of expectation is only established once we are aware of the need and, to be really effective, there should be some threat of shaming involved, meaning that someone else must know that I am aware of the need.  If I can avoid donating time or money without feeling bad about myself or being shamed for my selfishness, why shouldn't I?

(As an aside, the donation of time and money is more obvious in the US than it tends to be in other countries - acts of charity are certainly more ostentatious.  Charity is simply not expected to the same extent in most other countries, and people will rarely ask as to whether you volunteer time and/or money to any worthy causes.  Spending quality time in your garden may well be more highly regarded than being a "busybody" or "do-gooder".)

So, getting back to Harris and MacAskill's discussion of Singer's drowning child argument, I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that the reluctance to donate to worthy-but-distant causes is related to a lack of immediacy or salience.  But I disagree that this is a truly moral issue, since we have no more objective obligation to save the child drowning in the lake than we have to save the child being bitten by mosquitoes in Africa, any obligation we do have is subjective and dependent only on how much we care about our place in the world.

As a society, we might choose to build into our ethical ruleset the notion that ostentatiously donating to worthy causes irrespective of distance is a requirement - and there may well be survival and quality of life benefits in doing so - but until then, our reluctance to donate time and effort to distant causes is no more than a psychological issue that charities need to deal with.

The Problem with Multiverses

In The Multiverse & You (& You & You & You…), Sam Harris talks about multiverses with Max 'Mad Max' Tegmark.  Sadly, Harris didn't take the opportunity to ask Tegmark about his foundation, Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), being funded by Templeton.  To be fair, the FQXi website has a page on their finance arrangements which make huge efforts to distance the Institute from their financiers.  Even so, they are playing with Templeton money which is always disappointing when proper science is involved.

But this is about multiverses.  In their discussion Harris and Tegmark (although possibly more so Harris) make much about the idea that if there is a multiverse, noting that they only got to Level 2 Multiverses, then there will be an infinite number of Harrises and Tegmarks doing slightly different versions of the podcast.  At one point the googolplex is mentioned, a number which although not infinite is officially considered to be very big - 10 to the power of 10¹⁰⁰.  Apparently, someone worked out that the number of possible arrangements of the original particles in the universe is in the order of a googolplex.  Not quite infinity but, you know, a lot.  The idea is that out of those arrangements, even if a relatively small fraction of them would result in us, that would still be a lot of arrangements with beings indistinguishable from us in them.

Take that one step further and say there is the possibility that there were more or fewer particles in the initial arrangement of the universe, then you get a huge number of googolplexes of possibilities.  Within that suite of possibilities, there would again be a lot of arrangements with beings indistinguishable from us in them. Then there's the possibility of duplication - which brings us to the possibility of an infinite number of replications of us in existence.  There might not only be an infinite number of universes which are very, very similar to our own, but also an infinite number of universes (albeit a "smaller infinity") that are exactly the same.

So, it's true enough that, if Tegmark is correct about multiverses, that there are an infinite number of Tegmarks and Harrises who has a discussion that was turned into a podcast.  And it's true that there is an infinite number of Tegmarks and Harrises who had very similar, but slightly different, discussions that either did or didn't get turned into a podcast.  And it's true that this infinity of variations might include discussions in which Harris suddenly began talking in Hungarian.

What concerns me, however, is that either by accident or design, the presentation of multiverses was staggeringly arrogant.  They failed to mention that there was an infinite number of universes in which their discussion didn't take place even within the infinite number of universes which contain a Max Tegmark and a Sam Harris.  It's a bit like a series of matryoshka dolls, each of which is infinite in size but, because the rubberiness of infinity, can be ranked:

The infinite number of universes in which the Harris-Tegmark discussion happened precisely as it did in ours which is a subset of:

The infinite number of universes in which the Harris-Tegmark discussion took place which is a subset of:

The infinite number of universes in which Harris and Tegmark met each other which is a subset of:

The infinite number of universes in which both Harris and Tegmark exist which is a subset of:

The infinite number of universes in which humans exist which is a subset of:

The infinite number of universes in which intelligent life is possible which is a subset of:

The infinite number of universes in which there is something rather than nothing:

The infinite number of possible universes.

Tegmark himself points out that human endeavours have been plagued by a sense of arrogance – this, our village, is the only village.  No?  But this land is the only land.  No?  But this continent is the only continent.  No? But this planet is the only planet.  No?  But this solar system is the only solar system.  No?  But this galaxy is the only galaxy.  No?  Well, the universe that we can see is certainly the only universe.  Perhaps we’ll soon be trying on “this is the only multiverse” for size.

The arrogance is inherent in the contemplation of what we are doing (right now) and the imagining of what would be changed if things were very slightly different, as if our activities were some sort of focal point for the universe.

But I think it gets a bit worse, as least in so far as the discussion that Harris and Tegmark actually did have, in our universe.  They were discussing how there could arguably be an infinite number of universes such that anything that is possible does actually happen.  Think about that for a moment.  Anything that is possible happens in some universe or another.  Really?

Is there a universe in which an analogue of me (clearly not actually me, because I live in this universe, but a version of me that would think precisely the same as me except that this other version …) buys a lottery ticket every week and wins the jackpot every time?  This is very highly unlikely, to be sure, but it's not strictly impossible.  Oh Grand Pixie, why oh why am I not that version of me?

It gets worse.  Harris and Tegmark touch on how the brain (and the suite of the processes within the brain) interacts with the outside world, implying that the common ground is mathematics.  My concern isn't so much with that, but with the concept that there are things go on inside our brains that are interpreted as interactions with an external world that really aren't.  Usually these are minor hiccups and most of us resolve them and carry on.  Some however are constantly plagued by voices in their heads and other delusions.  It's highly unlikely that we could all be affected by chemical states in our neurology that results in coherent voices that all tell us that a god is real.  But it's not strictly impossible.  And it's not strictly impossible that cloud formations could take on the appearance of an old man in the sky (or an old woman in slightly less politically incorrect alternate universes).

What I'm suggesting here is that, at least in the rather light touch on multiverses discussed by Harris and Tegmark, the odds are that in some universe there will be all the evidence that anyone could ever need to prove the existence of a god.  The vast majority of prayers would be answered in such a universe (merely on the basis of coincidence, but the supplicants don't know that).  Everyone would get visitations from what appear to be divine agents (or rather have internally generated experiences of such visitations, purely due to random chemical reactions in their brains).

Remember that we are talking about infinity here, not just a very big number.  Even if the likelihood of an apparently god-infested universe is infinitesimally remote, if there is an infinite number of universes, then there is at least one universe like that, and possibly even an infinite number of them.

Would Harris and Tegmark agree with this, as a possibility?

Either way, it seems that multiverse predictions do tell us something about the likelihood of there being a god.

Consider the difference between 1) a great being which exists and for whose existence there is clear evidence and 2) another great being for which there is no compelling evidence of its existence.  Which is the greatest?  Unless hiddenness is defined as a strength (which seems unlikely since we are repeatedly told that the god of the theists wants to have a relationship with us), the evidence based god is superior.  Some theists will argue that it's not possible to have evidence of their god.  But what multiverse theory seems to be telling us is that it actually is possible to have overwhelming evidence of a god, even their specific god, and that that applies even if such a god does not exist.  But clearly you and I don't live in a universe in which there is overwhelming evidence of anything of the sort.

On the contrary, we live in one of the universes in which it is not only possible but entirely reasonable to reject the notion of a god.  The question therefore is this: How do theists who buy into multiverses and subscribe to some sort of mandatory divine hiddenness get around this issue?

Chili Flavoured Ice Cream

This is another in what could be called a series of articles on the raging debate over objectivity and subjectivity.  I’ll try to make this particular article freestanding, but those who want context could look at:

my critique of William Lane Craig’s morality argument;

a report of my adventures at the Reasonable Faith forums; and

the article “The Objectionable Rape of Subjectivity”.

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One might be forgiven for thinking that a popular argument for the existence of god, or at least the Christian God, is that based on the claim that objective moral values and duties do exist.  A simple Google search on the string “objective moral values” appears to return just under half a million hits.  However, we’ve experienced the vagaries of Google before.  Suffice to say, these are the figures after repeated clicking on the last o in Goooooooooogle, without looking at “similar results” (I did something similar with Bing as well):

·         “objective moral values” – 472 (Bing 543)

o   as above without “Craig” – 450 (Bing 622)

o   as above without “god” – 463 (Bing 248)

o   as above with neither “Craig” nor “god” – 460 (Bing 240)

o   as above with neither “theism” nor “theist” – 473 (Bing 569)

§  as above without “Craig” – 442 (Bing 564)

§  as above without “god” – 441 (Bing 242)

§  as above with neither “Craig” nor “god” – 417 (Bing 235)

The figures are a little screwy, but the conclusion that there isn’t really that much interest in “objective moral values” seems to be reasonably well founded.

Nevertheless, let us soldier on.

During my interchange with a chap with the handle LNC over at the Reasonable Faith forums (link above), he was if not evasive at least inconsistent in his definition of “objective”.  I just want to focus in on one particular aspect of the debate; centred on the idea that objective is the opposite of subjective.  I don’t want to use LNC’s grammar-based definitions here because, to be frank, they are ludicrous.  Instead I’ll try to explain what I think people generally mean by subjective and objective in these types of debates.

A common example used involves ice cream.  The argument might be something like this (thanks to LNC for the example):

Really, you are saying that right and wrong do exist, but they are subjective?  That’s your argument?  Do you know the difference between what are called moral realism and moral non-realism?  How do you take personal preferences and apply them beyond yourself?  For example, I like coconut ice cream.  That is my personal preference.  That doesn’t make coconut ice cream the “right” ice cream and all others “wrong.”  I have expressed my subjective preference.  Just because I like it, doesn’t make it right for everyone.  The same can be said for subjective morality.  You may prefer not murdering people while James Holmes prefers shooting people, even killing them.  If morality is subjective, then both of you are right and both of you are wrong.  Your morality is right for you and Holmes’ morality is wrong for you and vice versa.  If there is no objective standard, then there is not legitimate way for you to say that he is wrong and you are right.

Okay.  Let’s address the realism/non-realism thing first.  By “coconut ice cream”, I am assuming that LNC means “coconut flavoured ice cream”, which is ice cream that might be flavoured naturally with real bits of coconut.  I am not assuming that he means some sort of ice confection made of nothing but coconut.  So it’s the flavour that matters – an ice confection made almost entirely from coconut but with flavorants added would not be “coconut ice cream” for the purposes of the discussion.  If, for example, the right combination of flavorants to achieve a chocolate flavour were added, it would more accurately be described as “chocolate flavoured coconut-based ice confection”.

If one were a realist with respect to “coconut ice cream”, one would argue that there is in fact a real coconut flavour.  Such a realist would not be referring to a combination of flavours that are not coconut in themselves and which, under certain circumstances can result in a coconut flavour, but an actual, real, unitary thing – “coconut flavour” that conceptually could be distilled from a coconut and added by the spoonful to whatever food product you wanted.  There is no such thing, of course, and I don’t even think LNC (or indeed WLC) would argue that there was. 

With respect to “coconut flavour”, we are all non-realists.  We know that this flavour is just something that emerges from the combination of certain chemicals interacting with our senses of taste and smell.  The impression of “coconut-ness” of the ice cream occurs in our head, along with the impression that leads one to state “this coconut ice cream is more delicious than the chocolate”.

If we considered chili flavoured ice cream instead, we could identify a single compound that we know has a specific impact on the human mouth – capsaicin.  We can say, with some level of confidence, that if capsaicin was in your ice cream in greater than trace quantities, you’d be soon aware of it (unless your TRPV1 receptors were defective, desensitised or destroyed).

With chili flavoured ice cream we can make both subjective and objective assessments.

I could hand out samples of chili flavoured ice cream to unsuspecting punters and afterwards ask if it was “hot”.  The responses from my victims would be subjective, and possibly even violent.  They (when not hitting me) would be saying that the chili flavoured ice cream was “too hot for me” or “not too hot for me” or “funny tasting to me” or “delicious to me, can I have some more”.

Alternatively, I could send a sample off to a laboratory.  The boffins could analyse the sample and provide a report on how much capsaicin was in it.  If I sent them a range of samples, from different batches of ice cream for example, they could even tell me which has more or less capsaicin than the others.  This response would be objective.  The report that there is 0.28mg/g of capsaicin in the ice cream is not the result of a subjective assessment.

What the boffins could not detect is the objective level of deliciousness associated with the chili flavoured ice cream, in much the same way as they cannot detect the objective level of deliciousness associated with coconut ice cream.  Deliciousness is not real.

The boffins might, after some research, be able to assess just which combination of chemicals reliably results in an impression of “coconut-ness” – but to argue that we can quantify the chemical combination that we associate with “coconut” is to miss the point.  In other words, while the “coconut flavour” is not real, it is nevertheless more real than the “deliciousness” of the coconut ice cream.

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Now we are in a position to say something about “objective” and “subjective”.

Objective implies that an assessment may be made based on something real, like the volatile aromatics that we associate with flavour, or the capsaicin that we associate with a hot chili.  An objective assessment can be repeated reliably: one kilo of chili flavoured ice cream containing almost three grams of capsaicin always contains almost three grams of capsaicin – it’s not half a gram for me and twelve for you.

When an assessment is subjective, however, it is based on something which cannot be measured or quantified, or on a perception which particular to a person or a situation.  A subjective assessment cannot be repeated reliably: even the most avid fan of chili flavoured ice cream today would have probably hated it as a child, and while I think it sounds perfectly delicious it would be irrational of me to assume that it would necessarily be delicious for you also.

So, the question we are left with is:

What are “objective moral values” tied to that would justify a claim, by theists, that they exist?

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Anyone who identifies something real that could be argued to justify the “objective moral values” claim, for instance “the minimisation of suffering and the maximisation of well-being”, may be interested in a reading a book called “The Moral Landscape”.  Theists might not like it though.

The Problem with Sam (The Final Prelude)

I’m going to let you into an open secret.

Atheists, along with scientists and academics, disagree with each other.

I happen to disagree with Sam Harris about a thing or two, which I will get to shortly, but I also disagree with a number of other atheists on various things.  For example, I think that Richard Dawkins should try to keep his cool a little more and that his arrogant pose isn’t helpful.  I do sympathise with his plight, since he’s an evolutionary biologist and it must eventually get on one's nerves to be continually told by ignorant amateurs that your life work is bollocks because a musty old book contains, along with a raft of ridiculous claims that no-one holds to be true anymore, a barely coherent alternative.

I recently got slightly singed (I won’t say burnt, that would be over-doing it) after straying too close to a heated academic battle, complete with two opposing factions steadfastly failing to agree on the Bertrand Paradox.

So disagreement happens.  However, since I am not a monochromatic type, just because I think that Sam is wrong about one thing this should not necessarily lead to thinking that he must therefore be wrong about everything.  He’s a perfectly pleasant, erudite and genial chap who has a lot of interesting things to say.  It’s just that he has said a couple of things that are somewhat less brilliant.

The first, of course, is the little joke (if that’s what it was) about William Lane Craig putting the wind up atheists – made in opening statements in a debate against the very same William Lane Craig.  Craig is irritating and devious, but he’s not frightening by any stretch of the imagination.  Even if Craig’s ability to lie barefaced is one of the characteristics one normally associates with a psychopath, the likelihood of WLC being a psychopath is probably not high and hence he is (probably) not that frightening.

The second thing is what truly and deeply annoyed me with his book, “The Moral Landscape”.   In many ways this is a very good book, the mission associated with it is laudable (that is not a typo, I meant “laudable”, not “laughable”).  But in my view, the book would have been an excellent book if he had not made what I consider to be a massive and unnecessary concession to the theist camp.

In his book, and in his debates, Sam repeatedly insists that there is such a thing as objective morality.  He does this even when debating with philosophers and apologists.  The problem is that there isn’t objective morality, not even in Sam’s world – at least not in the sense that most philosophers and apologists would interpret the term.

I discussed objective moral values and duties in WLC3: When Morality Arguments are Bad because Craig asserts that objective moral values and duties exist.  It is clear in his supporting arguments that by these terms he means the moral values and duties that derive from an absolute morality, which supposedly originate in the essential nature of his god.  If something is morally wrong, it is always morally wrong irrespective of the circumstances.  One would expect also that if something is morally acceptable then it’s always morally acceptable irrespective of the circumstances.  Objective morality is usually more the preserve of theologians even though it creates problems for the types of people who base their world view on what is written in ancient documents.  If the Bible were to reflect the objective morality of an eternal god, then homosexuality should still be morally abhorrent and incurring the death penalty while slavery should still be morally acceptable (while homosexuality still attracts the death penalty in some nations, to the best of my knowledge none support slavery).

A careful read of The Moral Landscape reveals that Sam doesn’t mean anything like this by his use of the term “objective morality”.  Instead, what he means is something that could, if the term were not already taken, be called “moral relativism”.

I suspect that a major contributor to Sam’s attempts to avoid being seen as being any sort of moral relativist is the fact “moral relativism”, and the related “moral subjectivism”, seem to have almost as bad a rap in the US as “atheism” has – no doubt due in part to the fact that they are associated with secularism.  Moral relativism is charged with a number of crimes: for example being a form of moral nihilism (in which nothing is intrinsically moral or immoral), being incoherent in a number of senses (including self-refutation) and so on.

Clearly Sam doesn’t want to be associated with moral nihilists.

In his book, Sam doesn’t really spend much time addressing what he means by moral relativism, but the clearest indication is found in a section of Chapter One titled “Moral Blindness in the Name of ‘Tolerance’”.  Sam describes a form of moral abdication in which liberal Westerners tacitly condone all manner of horrendous acts because they are carried out in the context of another culture.  It is a mixture of cowardice and cultural shame that leads to tolerance where tolerance is unwarranted.

While it’s understandable that Sam wants to be associated with neither moral nihilists nor the idiot extreme of moral cowardice generally labelled as “moral relativism”, he should not want to be associated with moral absolutists and for that reason he should avoid using the term “objective morality”.

If I understand his intent correctly, Sam uses the term “objective” in the same sense that a scientist would use “objective” measures to ascertain the success or failure of an experiment.  For example, an objective measure for the success of an experiment on the efficacy of prayer on cancer would involve standard recovery rates for various types of cancer, the involvement of a control group, measures of sample sizes to ascertain margins of error and a statistical analysis could then say, for example, that if positive effects were observed in 10 more patients who were prayed for than in the control group, then there is a statistically significant effect.  Either you get that number (or more) and prayer might work, or you don’t and prayer probably doesn’t work.  You actually get a slightly higher proportion of complications in people who know that they have been prayed for, probably because they don’t take as good care of themselves, leaving their recovery up to a god who either doesn’t exist or doesn’t get involved in health issues, or maybe they are nervous about the fact that whenever science looks for god, he never turns up.

A subjective measure might be to use the responses, from the recipients of prayer, to a question about whether they felt better as a result of having been prayed for.

Objective measures used in scientific research are not absolute and in fact almost everything we measure is relative in one way or another.  In this sense, Sam’s suggested “objective morality” is actually relative – relative to the two extremes he describes: a world of unrelenting suffering and a world of maximal well-being.  If an act results in a move towards more suffering, it’s bad.  If an act results in a move towards more well-being, it’s good.

Can I suggest the use of another term altogether, perhaps “rational morality”?  I suggest this option because despite Sam’s protestations, there is no “objective morality” that science can discover.  Instead, what we can say is that rational maximisation of well-being is a suitable basis on which to build a moral framework (or an ethical structure) and that science can be used to determine which acts tend towards maximising well-being, via neuroscience and so forth.

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Some of you might ask “what is this ethical structure of which you speak?”

I’m so glad that you asked.

Over the next few months, I shall be posting a series of articles taken from a document that I first started working on many years ago.  These will culminate in a smaller number of articles in which I discuss a proposed model for representing the ethical structures in which we all operate.

The first of those articles is The Moral Animal.  The previous two preludes are Saving the Dog and Being Bad.

The Real Winners?

Given this NY Times article - which says:

Christian conservatives … lost fights against same-sex marriage in all four states where it was on the ballot, and saw anti-abortion-rights Senate candidates defeated and two states vote to legalize marijuana for recreational use.

and quotes R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as saying:

It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed. An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.

Perhaps the real winners of the 2012 Presidential Election are these guys:
 

(http://thunderf00tdotorg.wordpress.com/)

(I know that dead people often vote in US elections, but not often do they have as much impact as Hitch did.)

WLC takes us for a ride

I first heard of the “Taxi-Cab Fallacy”, invoked by William Lane Craig while debating against Lawrence Krauss.  Follow me on a journey of discovery to see what this term means.  Once we arrive at an idea of what it means, we can look to see if Craig’s opponents really are guilty of committing it.

Craig first makes reference to the “Taxi-Cab Fallacy” in his first rebuttal:

He says, “Well, is the universe contingent? Perhaps the universe doesn’t exist necessarily.” My argument was that the universe doesn’t exist necessarily, that it’s contingent in its being. Scientists regularly discuss other models of the universe that are logically possible, universes governed by different laws of nature. And clearly the universe is not ultimate in the sense of being self-explanatory. And you can’t say that it’s contingent and yet ultimate-without-explanation because that would be arbitrary and unjustified. It commits what’s been called the Taxi-Cab Fallacy, which is thinking you can dismiss the need for explanation when you arrive at your desired destination. And it’s simply arbitrary to apply the explanatory principle everywhere else in life but then deny it when you get to the existence of the universe itself.

This Taxi-Cab Fallacy doesn’t seem to exist outside of Craig’s world (Christian Apologetics), so nailing down precisely what it means is a little difficult.  When Craig uses it in this context, it’s not totally clear what he means.  Note that he makes reference to “the explanatory principle”.

Later in the debate, in the second rebuttal, Craig invokes the “fallacy” again:

What about the first point of evidence that the existence of contingent beings is more probable on God’s existence than on atheism? He didn’t deny the point. Remember, I explained, to deny the explanatory principle of the universe is to commit the Taxi-Cab Fallacy: it’s arbitrary and unjustified.

O-kay.  This is no explanation either.

Craig calls on it again, in his closing speech:

First of all, we looked at the existence of contingent beings, and I explained that given the existence of God, it is more probable that contingent beings would exist than on atheism because on atheism there is no explanation for the existence of contingent beings. And to try and say that there need not be an explanation for the existence of the universe is arbitrary and unjustified. It commits the Taxi-Cab Fallacy. So I think the very existence of contingent beings makes God’s existence more probable than it otherwise would have been.

Hang on, are we talking about the existence of “contingent beings” or “the existence of the universe”?  Craig veers wildly between the two.

The universe exists and we know that because we are in it.  Our lack of an explanation for the universe clearly doesn’t prevent us from being here anymore than an inability to explain cosmology affects existence of slugs.  Craig seems to be arguing for a God on the basis that our having an explanation for the universe (that is, God) would make the existence of contingent beings (that is, us) more probable.

But Dr Craig, just in case you haven’t noticed … we exist.  The probability of us existing, given that we are doing the calculation of the probability, is 100%.  The probability of us existing is:

·         100% if God made us

·         100% if the Flying Spaghetti Monster made us and

·         100% if we arose due to processes entirely consistent with materialism

Only if you were a God, sitting outside the universe making these calculations could you arrive at any other probability.

But, back the “Taxi-Cab Fallacy” …

In the closing speech, Craig fails again to clarify what he means by the term.

In the Q&A session, Craig invokes the “fallacy” one last time:

Well, what’s lazy is to stop arbitrarily when you get to the universe. That’s what’s committing the Taxicab Fallacy: to accept the Principle of Sufficient Reason everywhere else until you get to the universe, and then arbitrarily stop there. The theist doesn’t arbitrarily stop when he gets to God as the explanatory ultimate. God has an explanation of his existence. “Everything that exists has an explanation, either in the necessity of its own nature, or (if it’s contingent) in an external cause.” God exists by a necessity of his own nature. Even the atheist recognizes that. If a being has a cause, it isn’t God because God by definition is the metaphysical ultimate. So when you get to God, you’ve reached a metaphysically necessary being which has no cause of its existence, and its existence is explained by the fact that it exists by a necessity of its own nature, just like mathematical objects and other abstract objects. And that’s why you don’t run into the slushy crush or whatever it is that you were talking about. It would be logically impossible for God to be caused by slushy crush or whatever it is.

At this point, Craig has still not explained his “fallacy” properly.  What he has done, however, is to make reference to the “Principle of Sufficient Reason” (which he also fails to explain, but we can look up) and exposed what he probably means by invoking the “fallacy”.

This was my thesis: Craig meant that for an atheist (and a materialist), the metaphorical “taxi-cab” is the use of science and materialism to explain everything.  The atheist likes to use this explanation all the way up to the existence of the universe, which is the metaphorical “destination”, but then the atheist will say, metaphorically, “I got here using the taxi-cab (science and materialism), but I don’t want to use it anymore, I want to switch to a new argument”.

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A little more on the origin of the fallacy and then we can look to see if its use has been appropriate.

If you use Google and limit the search to before the end of 2007, you can find the first appearance of the term – William Lane Craig’s website (we will get to it shortly).  If you widen the search out to the end of 2010, there will be two websites with the term, but the second is a blog which has a mention of the “fallacy” only in a comment which was posted towards the end of January 2011.

2011 was a golden year for the term, with a total of maybe a dozen new sites referring to the fallacy – Google seems to say more but a couple of blogs inflate the numbers significantly such as www.onthebox.us and somethingsurprising.blogspot.com.  This year, 2012, has seen another dozen or so appearances (of which, this shall be another).

Tip for those who are new to Google, click on the last o in Gooooooooooogle and do it again.  At the time of writing, rather than approximately 19700 mentions (shown just to the right of the word “Search” in the top right hand corner), you end up with 121.  You can then click on the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” (at the bottom of the last page) to see an estimate of 8440 results.  Then repeat the clicking on the last o process and you arrive at a grand total of … 177 mentions.  This strange bouncing around of numbers seems to be a standard feature of Google’s search engine (you can get the same sort of result with “Loki is angry”, so it’s nothing to do with this particular search string).

The bottom line with this is that Craig’s fallacy is poorly known, despite the apparent 19,700 mentions that a naïve use of Google implies.  Craig should have clearly explained what he meant by the term.

The extent of Craig’s dishonesty is already apparent in the first appearance of the fallacy, which was phrased as a response to a reader’s question (it might have been Craig himself though, the fellow being called “William”).  Craig says:

Premise 1 is the premise that the atheist typically rejects. Sometimes atheists will respond to premise 1 by saying that it is true of everything in the universe but not of the universe itself. But this response commits what has been aptly called “the taxicab fallacy.” For as the nineteenth century atheist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer quipped, premise 1 can’t be dismissed like a hack once you’ve arrived at your desired destination!

(He’s referring to the first premise of his Cosmological Argument from Contingency:

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence (either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause).)

But hang on, “has been aptly called “the taxicab fallacy”?  By who?  This is the very first appearance of the fallacy.  But to be fair, he sort of attributes it to Schopenhauer (more about that in a later article).

Craig’s first use seems to be consistent with my thesis.  But being a thorough sort of person, I looked for a better explanation, which I found in the second direct appearance of the fallacy at Street Apologetics – led by Greg Laurie, who holds an honorary doctorate from Biola University, which just happens to be Craig’s University:

The “Taxi-Cab Fallacy” is committed when one hops in and assumes a certain system of thought or worldview in an attempt to make a particular point but then jumps out of the system of thought when it suits their fancy. Such practice lacks logical consistency and is therefore a logical fallacy.

A detractor of the Christian worldview cannot hop into the Christian system of thought by erecting an objection grounded in the Bible and then demand an answer be given without the use of a Bible. Again, they cannot appeal to the Bible in raising their question and then insist we throw our Bible out of the equation when we give an answer!

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Ok, we now have a verified definition of the “fallacy”.  It’s not quite how Craig is using it though, since here the “fallacy” seems to be related to asking for a non-Biblical explanation of an objection based on what is in the Bible.  Laurie’s version of the fallacy seems fair enough.  So long as an apologist never steps out of the Bible, and argues entirely within the narrative framework of the Bible, she is invulnerable.  No problems with that.

If she steps outside of the Bible, however, and tries to apply anything Biblical in the real world, she is fair game.

However, this is not how Craig uses the “Taxi-Cab Fallacy” in his debate with Krauss.  He implies that he is specifically talking about how atheists try to explain everything in the universe with science and then they switch arguments when it comes to the universe itself.  Are atheists guilty of this?

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Put briefly, no.

But perhaps I am biased, so let’s not accept the brief explanation.

The trouble with Craig’s argument is the fact that the atheist doesn’t switch arguments.  At each and every stage up to and including the existence of the universe (which is notionally a question about the origins of the universe), the atheist can say and is fully justified in responding with “I don’t know” to a question if there is no evidence on which to base an answer.

There is no sudden change of tactics when arriving at the existence of the universe.

Also, science uses the evidence gleaned from the universe to explain things in the universe.  If we live in a universe which is part of a multiverse, then we can possibly explain more about the universe, because we are also in the multiverse.

However, if we live in a more classic universe which includes all there is, all there ever was and all there ever will be, then it is not possible to fully explain the universe using the universe.  Self-reference invariably opens the door to paradox, even if the self-reference is indirect.  For example, the next sentence is a lie.  The previous sentence is true.  This sentence, however, is certainly a lie.

So, the long answer is no.  Atheists would not be guilty of employing the “Taxi-Cab Fallacy”, even if there were such a fallacy