Tom Morris

I still don’t see why Ayn Rand should be cited in the context of a discussion of Kant and his thinking. If she is to be considered a philospher so should L. Ron Hubbard and Mickey Mouse.

The Philosophical Significance of Psychopaths: Postmodernism, Morality, and God →

There’s been lots of philosophical thought about psychopathy and psychopaths, but this essay by David N. Stamos is rather unique: a comparison between postmodernists and psychopaths…

Euthanasia, competency, and paternalism

I’ve been working on euthanasia related articles on Wikipedia recently, specifically Dignity in Dying. Mostly, I’ve just been adding in historical information and so on, hoping that I can serve the role of a philosophically reasonably well-informed editor rather than being a “POV warrior”.

But I cannot help but step in and express an opinion.

Most of those who oppose a change in the law on euthanasia–sorry, “assisted dying”–in Britain seem to accept that ‘passive’ euthanasia is acceptable. There aren’t people out there thumping their chests too much on the grand injustices of persistent vegetative state cases like Airedale NHS Trust v. Bland or the Terri Schiavo debacle, nor is there much opposition to people making advance directives, living wills or DNR orders. The bad old days of medical paternalism are supposedly gone, and patients are allowed to refuse treatment if they are competent (under the Mental Capacity Act 2005) to give informed consent ahead of time. There is also fairly uniform consensus that analgesic care that hastens inevitable death is acceptable under the principle of double effect.

The criticism made of attempts to reform the law in the United Kingdom is that such attempts do not provide adequate safeguards to prevent against coercion: the money-grubbing buggers want their rich old aunt’s inheritance and so coerce her into ‘voluntary’ euthanasia. Or, there is the more subtle “don’t want to be a burden” coercion where people do not wish to die but feel a “duty to die”.

But surely, the same argument works against advance directives, living wills and DNR orders. The doctrine of double effect provides convenient moral cover for the doctor: he isn’t killing, he is easing pain and there is a side effect of killing. But said double effect dodge doesn’t work for the coercive money-grubbing inheritors or the subtle coercers. Surely, if there is a problem with active euthanasia, a similar problem exists for a variety of forms of passive ‘euthanasia’.

In the greedy inheritors scenario, they might encourage rich auntie to drink herself into oblivion, or smoke cigarettes or take up dangerous sports in her old age. And the good old principle of double effect applies to that too: they are only encouraging her to enjoy the hedonistic joys of excessive alcohol consumption, the liver cancer is just an undesirable side effect.

If we are able to allow a patient to accept that a patient can be competent enough to instruct a doctor shorten their life passively–with the doctrine of double effect as an ethical fig leaf–then why cannot we accept that they can be competent enough to instruct a doctor to shorten their life actively in a similar scenario?

There may still be reasons to oppose voluntary euthanasia, but there seems to be a rather large inconsistency here in the case for the opposition.

A bit more: I should expand this. My argument thus far makes it so that if we accept someone can be competent to consent to passive euthanasia, they should be considered competent to consent to active euthanasia. And that objections to the idea that people could be competent to consent to active euthanasia mostly (I’m not going to rule out all possible objections a priori) also apply to the possibility of competently consenting to passive euthanasia.

Given this, might we still have grounds to object to active euthanasia? I’d say it’s possible. I can’t think of any good grounds, but my argument leaves space for the possibility of grounds to consent to active euthanasia in spite of the possibility of competent consent.

You can see this simply by analogy: imagine a man turned up to the doctor’s office asking to have his genitals removed: both his testicles and penis. The doctor could of course challenge his ability to consent to such a procedure: “he must be mad!” But upon closer inspection, he finds out that the patient is competent. He perhaps uses some sci-fi McGuffin device and finds out that the patient really is completely competent and able to consent.

But he may still have very good reason to not remove the man’s genitals. It would be dangerous, medically pointless, he would lose function, it would go outside the scope of medical practice etc. etc. The argument I’ve made doesn’t mean allowing active, voluntary euthanasia is right (although I lean towards that view) but simply that one particular type of argument opposed to it seems very flawed.

And, really, what can one say about Objectivism? It isn’t so much a philosophy as what someone who has never actually encountered philosophy imagines a philosophy might look like: good hard axiomatic absolutes, a bluff attitude of intellectual superiority, lots of simple atomic premises supposedly immune to doubt, immense and inflexible conclusions, and plenty of assertions about what is “rational” or “objective” or “real.” Oh, and of course an imposing brand name ending with an “-ism.” Rand was so eerily ignorant of all the interesting problems of ontology, epistemology, or logic that she believed she could construct an irrefutable system around a collection of simple maxims like “existence is identity” and “consciousness is identification,” all gathered from the damp fenlands between vacuous tautology and catastrophic category error. She was simply unaware that there were any genuine philosophical problems that could not be summarily solved by flatly proclaiming that this is objectivity, this is rational, this is scientific, in the peremptory tones of an Obersturmführer drilling his commandoes.

Zombies: The Movie →

Yudkowsky’s very amusing take on Chalmers’ p-zombies. I’d say I found it funny, but I expect there are some funniness qualia tokens which got lost down the back of the sofa. which may be instantiated if I weren’t a p-zombie.

On missing links

Creationists frequently like to shout about “missing links” in the fossil record. I came up with an analogy today which I think explains exactly why you shouldn’t get trapped in this bad piece of thinking.

If creationists were philosophers rather than dull-witted fools, we’d dignify it with the word ‘paradox’. In fact, it has some similarity in form to Zeno’s paradox.

But here’s the analogy.

Someone says to you: “there are missing links between New York and Los Angeles”.

So you got out a map and found somewhere roughly between the two cities and explained you’ve found the missing link:

“Tulsa, Oklahoma!”

You have now duplicated the problem: you’ve gone from having one missing link to having two: there’s a missing link between Tulsa and New York and another missing link between Tulsa and LA.

So you then suggest Knoxville, Tennessee and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

You’ve now got four missing links.

You can keep going. Flagstaff, Arizona. Amarillo, Texas. Memphis, Tennessee. Lynchburg, Virginia.

Each time you find a missing link, you’ve created more missing links. Eventually, you won’t be able to reach Los Angeles because there’s a missing link between Manhattan and Hoboken and your creationist friend pulls up some ad hoc objection to you saying “the Lincoln Tunnel”. By playing the game of ‘missing link’ finding you already lose. That’s because we have enough links in the chain to know that evolution happens.

Missing links are a curious thing: the more missing links you find, the more you still have to find. In Zeno’s paradox, Achilles must reach an infinite number of points between him and the tortoise, therefore he can never overtake the tortoise. The evidential demands of the creationist are never satisfiable, just as the atlas maker can never satisfy someone who wants to know about all the missing links. Eventually you have to get down to a certain level of “yes, it’s there, deal with it”. You can drive to Los Angeles despite Zeno-style objections.

And once you’ve piled up enough evidence to show that evolution is possible (and I think that has been done), missing link objections become purely theoretical objections. They make for good rhetoric. “There are missing links!” is a pretty nifty soundbite. Sadly, for some people seem to think the set of good arguments is exactly equal to the set of good soundbites.

Evolution works on a smooth progression with hundreds of thousands of intermediaries. Just as on our drive from New York to Los Angeles, we may have stretches at the beginning and end of the trip where there are lots of settlements and geographical features we can point to in order to say “here’s a link between these two cities”, there will be large chunks of the route (like I-40, passing along through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and eventually through the Mojave Desert) where you are uninterrupted by towns or hamlets for miles and miles. And then suddenly, you get down into San Bernadino and all your missing links are here: streets, cities, blocks, things with names. They are all here. Despite the creationist telling you that these missing links are here, you can sit on a beach in Malibu to relax after your long drive from New York, even if you can’t give a distinct name to each piece of sand you drove past in Arizona or every drop of water you saw in the Mississippi River.

(Postscript: Google Maps tells me the best way is to go via Columbus, Ohio and Indianapolis, then through to Springfield, Missouri. I had mentally planned a more Southern route: Charlottesville, Virginia, then Knoxville, through Arkansas, then onto Tulsa. I used the analogy of driving across the U.S. because one day I’d love to drive a camper van across America for a few months.)

I’m not an experience-seeking user, I’m a meaning-seeking human person

After an evening of cynicism last night, reading a bloody awful article by a pompous twit, and travelling on bloody slow trains, and then logging on to Twitter and seeing a bunch of bloody fools debating things they are completely ignorant of without even a modicum of philosophical charity, I found something which restored my trust in the human race: psd’s talk at Ignite London. It combines giving naughty link-breaking, data-sunsetting corporate types a spank for misbehaviour with an admiration for I Spy books. I had I Spy books as a kid, although mine were products of the late 80s/early 90s and had the Michelin Man, although in not nearly as an intrusively corporate way as Paul’s slides of current day I Spy suggests. Do forgive me: I’m going to do one of those free-associative, meditative riffing sessions that you can do on blogs.

The sort of things Paul talks about underly a lot of the things I get excited about on the web: having technology as a way for people to establish an educational, interactional feeling with the world around them, to hack the world, to hack their context, to have the web of linked data as another layer on top of the world. The ‘web of things’ idea pushes that too far in the direction of designed objects (or spimes or blogjects or whatever the current buzzword is), and the way we talk about data and datasets and APIs makes it all too tied to services provided by big organisations. There’s definitely some co-opting of hackerdom going on here that I can’t quite put my finger on, and I don’t like it. But that’s another rant.

I’ve been hearing about ‘gamification’ for a while and it irritates me a lot. Gamification gets all the design blogs a-tweeting and is a lovely refrain used at TED and so on, but to me it all looks like “the aesthetic stage” from Kierkegaard applied to technology. That is, turning things into games and novelties in order to mask the underlying valuelessness of these tasks. Where does that get you? A manic switching between refrains. To use a technological analogy, this week it is Flickr, next week it is TwitPic, the week after it is Instagram. No commitment, just frantic switching based on fad and fashion. Our lives are then driven by the desire to avoid boredom. But one eventually runs out of novelties. The fight against boredom becomes harder and harder and harder until eventually you have to give up the fight. There’s a personal cost to living life as one long game of boredom-avoidance, but there’s also a social cost. You live life only for yourself, to avoid your boredom, and do nothing for anybody else. Technology becomes just a way for you to get pleasure rather than a way for you to contribute to something bigger than yourself.

In Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, the alternative to this aesthetic life was typified by marriage. You can’t gamify marriage, right? You commit yourself for life. You don’t get a Foursquare badge if you remember your anniversary. The alternative to aestheticism and boredom is an ethical commitment. (And, for Kierkegaard anyway, ultimately a religious commitment.¹) And I think the same holds true for the web: you can gamify everything, make everything into Foursquare. Or you can do something deeper and build intentional, self-directed communities of people who want to try and do something meaningful. Gamification means you get a goofy badge on your Foursquare profile when you check into however many karaoke bars. A script fires off on a server somewhere and a bit changes in a database, you get a quick dopamine hit because an ironic badge appears on your iPhone. Congratulations, your life is now complete. There’s got to be more to life and technology than this. If I had to come up with a name for this alternative to gamification that I’m grasping for, it would be something like ‘meaning-making’.

Gamification turns everything into a novelty and a game (duh). Meaning-making turns the trivial into something you make a commitment to for the long haul; it turns the things we do on the web into a much more significant and meaningful part of our lives.

In as much as technology can help promote this kind of meaning-making, that’s the sort of technology I’m interested in. If I’m on my deathbed, will I regret the fact that I haven’t collected all the badges on Foursquare? Will I pine for more exciting and delightful user experiences? That’s the ultimate test. You want a design challenge? Design things people won’t regret doing when they are on their deathbed and design things people will wish they did more of when they are on their deathbed. Design things that one’s relatives will look back in fifty years and express sympathy for. Again, when you are dead, will your kids give a shit about your Foursquare badges?

A long time ago, I read a story online about a young guy who got killed in a road accident. I think he was on a bike and got hit by a car while driving home from work. He was a PHP programmer and ran an open source CMS project. There was a huge outpouring of grief and support from people who knew the guy online, from other people who contributed to the project. A few people clubbed together to help pay for two of the developers to fly up to Canada to visit his family and attend the funeral. They met the guy’s mother and she asked them to explain what it is that he was involved in. They explained, and in the report they e-mailed back to the project, they said that the family eventually understood what was going on, and it brought them great comfort to know that the project that their son had started had produced something that was being used by individuals and businesses all over the world. This is open source: it wasn’t paid for. He was working at a local garage, hacking on this project in between pumping petrol. But there was meaning there. A community of people who got together and collaborated on something. It wasn’t perfect, but it was meaningful for him and for other people online. That’s pretty awesome. And it’s far more interesting to me to enable more people to do things like this than it is to, I dunno, gamify brands with social media or whatever.

This is why I’m sceptical about gamification: there’s enough fucking pointless distractions in life already, we don’t need more of them, however beautiful the user experiences are. But what we do need more of is people making a commitment to doing something meaningful and building a shared pool of common value.

And while we may not be able to build technologies that are equivalent in terms of meaning-making as, say, the importance of family or friendship or some important political commitment like fighting for justice, we should at least bloody well try. Technology may not give us another Nelson Mandela, but I’m sure with all the combined talent I see at hack days and BarCamps and so on, we can do something far more meaningful than Google Maps hacks and designing delightful user experiences in order to sell more blue jeans or whatever the current equivalent of blue jeans is (smartphone apps?).

The sort of projects I try to get involved in have at least seeds of the sort of meaning-making I care about.

Take something like Open Plaques, where there are plenty of people who spend their weekends travelling the towns and cities in this country finding blue memorial plaques, photographing them and publishing those photos with a CC license and listing them in a collaborative database. No, you don’t get badges. You don’t get stickers and we don’t pop up a goofy icon on your Facebook wall when you’ve done twenty of them. But you do get the satisfaction of joining with a community of people who are directed towards a shared meaningful goal. You can take away this lovely, accurate database of free information, free data, free knowledge, whatever you want to call it. All beautifully illustrated by volunteers. No gamification or fancy user experience design will replicate the feeling of being part of a welcoming community who are driven by the desire to build something useful and meaningful without a profit motive.

The same is true with things like Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Ten, fifteen years ago, if you were carrying around a camera in your backpack, it was probably to take tourist snaps or drunken photos on hen nights. Today, you are carrying around a device which lets you document the world publicly and collaboratively. A while back I heard Jimmy Wales discussing what makes Wikipedia work and he said he rejected the term ‘crowdsourcing’ because the people who write Wikipedia aren’t a ‘crowd’ of people whose role is to be a source of material for Wikipedia: they are all individual people with families and friends and aspirations and ideas, and writing for Wikipedia was a part of that. As Wales put it: they aren’t a crowd, they are just lots of really sweet people.

What could potentially lead us into more meaning-making rather than experience-seeking is the cognitive surplus that Clay Shirky refers to. The possibilities present in getting people to stop watching TV and to start doing something meaningful are far more exciting to me than any amount of gamification or user experience masturbation, but I suspect that’s because I’m not a designer. I can see how designers would get very excited about gamification because it means they get to design radically new stuff. They get to crack open the workplace, rip out horrible management systems and replace them with video games. Again, not interested. The majority of things which they think need to be gamified either shouldn’t be, because they would lose something important in the process, or they are so dumb to start with that they need to be destroyed, not gamified. The answer to stupid management shit at big companies isn’t to turn it into a game, it’s to stop it altogether and replace the management structure with something significantly less pathological.

Similarly, I listen to all these people talking about social media. Initially it sounded pretty interesting: there was this democratic process waiting in the wings that was going to swoop in and make the world more transparent and democratic and give us the odd free handjob too. Now, five years down the line and all we seem to be talking about is brands and how they can leverage social media and all that. Not at all interested. I couldn’t give a shit what the Internet is going to do to L’Oreal or Snickers or Sony or Kleenex or The Gap. They aren’t people. They don’t seek meaning, they seek to sell more blue jeans or whatever. I give far more of a shit what the Internet is doing for the gay kid in Iran or the geeky kid in rural Nebraska or a homeless guy blogging from the local library than what it is doing for some advertising agency douchebag in Madison Avenue.

One important tool in the box of meaning-making is consensual decision making and collaboration. There’s a reason it has been difficult for projects like Ubuntu to improve the user experience of Linux. There’s a reason why editing Wikipedia requires you to know a rather strange wiki syntax (and a whole load of strange social conventions and policies - you know, when you post something and someone reverts it with the message “WP:V WP:NPOV WP:N WP:SPS!”, that’s a sort of magic code for “you don’t understand Wikipedia yet!” See WP:WTF…). The reason is those things, however sucky they are, are a result of communities coming together and building consensus through collaboration. The result may be suboptimal, but that’s just the way it is.

Without any gamification, there are thousands of people across the world who have stepped up to do something that has some meaning: build an operating system that they can give away for free. Write an encyclopedia they can give away for free. All the gamification and fancy user experience design in the world won’t find you people who are willing to take up a second job’s worth of work to get involved in meaningful community projects. On Wikipedia, I see people who stay up for hours and hours reverting vandalism and helping complete strangers with no thought of remuneration.

It may seem corny, and it’s certainly not nearly as big of an ethical commitment as the sort Kierkegaard envisioned, but this kind of commitment is something I think we should strive towards doing, and helping others to do. And I think it is completely at odds with gamification, which seeks to basically turn us all into cogs in some kind of bizarre Skinner-style experiment. We hit the button not because we are getting something meaningful out of it, but because we get the occasional brain tickle of a badge or get to climb up the leaderboard or we get seventeen ‘likes’ or RTs or whatever. Gamification seems to be about turning these sometimes useful participation techniques into an end in themselves.

Plenty of the things which make meaning-making projects great are things any good user experience designer would immediately pick up and grumble about and want to design away. Again, contributing to the Linux kernel is hard work. Wikipedia has that weird-ass syntax and all those wacky policy abbreviations. Said UX designer will really moan about these and come up with elaborate schemes to get rid of them. And said communities of meaning will listen politely. And carry on regardless. Grandma will still have a difficult time editing Wikipedia.

When I listen to user experience designers, I can definitely sympathise with what they are trying to do: the world is broken in some fundamental ways, and it is certainly a good thing there are people out there trying to fix that. But some of them go way too far and think that something like “delight” or that “eyes lighting up” moment is the most important thing. If that is all technology is about, we could do that a lot easier by just hooking people up to some kind of dopamine machine. Technology should give us all our very own Nozickian experience machine and let us live the rest of our lives tripped out on pleasure drugs. I read an article a while back that reduced business management to basically working out how to give employees dopamine hits. Never mind their desire for self-actualization, never mind doing something meaningful. Never mind that the vast majority of people opt for reality with warts than Nozick’s experience machine—the real world has meaning.

The failure of meaning-making communities to value user experience will seem pretty bloody annoying, if only to designers. There are downsides to this. It sucks that grandma can’t edit Wikipedia. It sucks that Linux still has a learning curve. Meaning-making requires commitment. It can be hard work. It won’t be a super-duper, beautiful, delightful user experience. It’ll have rough edges. But that’s real life.

A meaningful life is not a beautiful user experience. A meaningful life is lived by persons, not users. But the positive side of that is that these are engaged, meaning-seeking, real human beings, rather than users seeking delightful experiences.

That’s the choice we need to make: are technologists and designers here to enable people to do meaningful things in their lives in community with their fellow human beings or are they here as an elaborate dopamine delivery system, basically drug dealers for users? If it is the latter, I’m really not interested. We should embrace the former: because although it is rough and ready, there’s something much more noble about helping our fellow humans do something meaningful than simply seeing them as characters in a video game.

This post is now on Hacker News, and Kevin Marks has written it up on the Tummelvision blog.

Massimo Pigluicci has written an excellent review of Sam Harris’ book on morality.

In 1987 a 77 year old A.J. Ayer was at a party with Mike Tyson & Naomi Campbell.

When Ayer told Tyson to stop harassing Campbell he replied: “Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.”

“And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men”

On morality

John Lawrence Aspden has an interesting post on morality. As someone who has studied moral theory a bit (not as much as I have other areas in philosophy like metaphysics and epistemology), I thought I might be able to enlighten the discussion a little bit.

I read the other day that thousands of years of philosophical thought had produced three ethical schools, and that they were called utilitarian ethics, deontological ethics, and virtue ethics.

I hadn’t heard that there were three answers. Ten minutes of research seems to indicate that they can be characterized as: ‘act for best consequences’, ‘follow rules’, and ‘be virtuous of character’?

There’s at least are a few others that are missing: divine command theory – do what God says; intuitionism – do what your intuitions tell you. There’s probably a few others out there in the books and journals, but that covers most of the theories. But they are a bit more complicated than this.

Let’s start with consequentialism, a set which contains utilitarianism as a component. John dismisses these:

Which leaves only ‘act for best consequences’, but of course, we need to say who is to judge the best consequences. If the judger is me, then surely that’s the definition of evil? If the judger is some sort of average of everyone, then it defines a sort of altruism. I don’t like either of those.

This is an interesting objection, but it isn’t a persuasive one. To see why, you have to see what utilitarians actually say. Bentham reckoned that a utilitarian calculus could be constructed such that you could calculate the effects of an action on all. Such a calculus would be an objective, shared, non-contextual tool that lets you measure the consequences of actions in the world. As with mathematics, from where the name of the calculus derives, two people should be able to weigh up the same consequences and get to the same conclusion. A better wording of the utilitarian principle is “act for the greatest good for the greatest number”.

Take the classic easy case for the utilitarian: you are walking along in a brand new suit with some very expensive shoes and you see a small child struggling in a pond. You immediately see that she is quite likely to drown, but the water is shallow. You can quite easily step into the pond and save her from an untimely death but it is quite likely that you will ruin your shoes and maybe your clothes too. Peter Singer and others have argued that it would be very, very wrong for you to not save the child. A child’s life is worth more than even the most expensive clothes and shoes.

The utilitarian will say that you can calculate the costs to yourself – namely, the cost of replacing the shoes and clothes, the coldness of the water against your skin, and maybe the cost of missing, being late to, or arriving in waterlogged shoes and spoiled clothes to whatever it is you are on your way to, perhaps having to make a witness statement to the police, or using up a small amount of your phone’s battery to call an ambulance – and weigh them up with the rewards you get – the feeling of satisfaction, the shiny medal given to you by the mayor, the gratification of the parents, possible reciprocal effects (the idea that your actions might inspire others to act in a morally brave or helpful way) – and the obvious good effects for others: for the child, for the child’s family and friends, for society overall.

If the utilitarians are right, the utilitarian calculus would be possible to do by anyone. That’s not to say it would be the same with other people in your place. It’s not saying that if you were to substitute another child in the place of the businessman, they would come to the same conclusion, but rather that another person would be able to do the same calculation of costs and benefits and come to the same conclusion if they are presented with the same facts.

The utilitarian is not ignorant of the fact that people will come to different conclusions: they are saying that with maximal knowledge, people would ideally act for the best consequences. You can subscribe to an ethical theory without believing that you’ll always obey it. In fact, that seems to be something of a feature of moral acts: for something to be a moral act, you actually need to make some kind of effort. One of the reasons I’m not a moral vegetarian is because it isn’t something where I am working against my own inclinations: I’m a vegetarian because I don’t like meat; the moral objections I could have to eating meat are not my primary reason for not eating meat.¹²

Let’s deal with another example: if I find myself on a Saturday morning lying in bed, I may be rather enjoying myself doing exactly nothing. But just down the road is considerable quantities of litter. It would promote the general good if I were to spend my morning removing the litter from the side of the road. It would come at little cost to me: I wouldn’t be able to lie in bed and read Twitter (I might also risk getting hit by a car while walking on the road, or I might encounter some vicious snake on the verge – not that there are many in rural Sussex). But I would get some exercise, perhaps feel good for helping others, and others would benefit aesthetically from the lack of litter. I would reduce the cost to the council in cleaning litter from the verges (and thus perhaps reduce in a negligible amount the taxes we all have to pay), and I would perhaps increase the value of properties in the area. I might even save some poor little animals from dying a horrific death inside an empty crisp packet or something equally good.

That’s all well and good, but I still don’t feel an obligation to do this. Laying on more benefits and reducing the costs even further do not change this. That something can be utilitarian-good but still impose on me no obligation to do it seems to suggest that morality might be a little bit more complicated than this.

There’s some other problems too. Take the little girl in the pond example again. I’m walking along, and before acting, am I supposed to weigh up these costs and benefits to determine whether it is the right thing to do? That takes time and energy. And I’m supposed to do this cost-benefit analysis before I do act or, I guess, not act. Some utilitarians have responded to this and other critiques³ by suggesting that we instead apply the utilitarian calculus only to rules. Act according to rules that as a whole cause more good than harm. The problem with this is that to satisfy the intuitions that led one to utilitarian ethics in the first place – namely, that of judging acts by consequences – one still needs to give some kind of opt-out clause to acts that do not fall under some rule or where applying the rule leads to terrible consequences. In (what I believe to be good and just) legal systems, laws are there to serve justice, rather than the institutes of justice being there simply to serve the arbitrary or badly-written laws.

Let’s move on then. What does John say about deontological ethics?

‘Follow rules’ seems at best silly and at worst evil. If you’ve made up your own list of rules, then again, you need some way of working out what’s on the list. If you’re following someone else’s rules, then they had the same problem, plus you’ve now got to worry that they might be trying to get you to act in their interests, plus their rules might have been corrupted in the process of being transmitted from their head to yours.

Absolutely right. The question is what rules you use. When people say ‘deontological ethics’, they tend to be referring not so much to the rule being “just follow rules”. Rather, they are saying that one ought to look at the specific rules in question. Whose rules? Well, Immanuel Kant. Or – if you believe Wikipedia – Ayn Rand. But in this case, I’d rather not worry about Ayn Rand. So, instead, we worry about Kant.

What’s he say then? “Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will”.

That’s not quite the same as saying “follow rules”, but rather follow rules that can be made universal. Kant asks you to imagine a possible world where everyone acts in the way you consider acting and to consider if any “contradictions or irrationalities” arise.

This isn’t simply following rules, this is following rules that have a specific property - that of being capable of being followed universally.

To show a problem with this, consider a rule that most Kantians including Kant seem to think is justified: not lying. The obvious objection – and I claim no originality here – is simply that of the Gestapo turning up on your door and asking if you have seen a particular Jewish person who they are trying to round up. You are in fact sheltering them. Surely, if you are protecting someone from being sent to a concentration camp, a little white lie to the Gestapo is not a breach of one’s moral duty? No, says the orthodox Kantian, but you are allowed to not tell the whole truth. The example I heard was that you are allowed to say “oh, I saw that person going to the shops”. Earlier on in the day, they had gone to the shops and you saw them walking up the street to the shops. You are telling the truth, but in such a way as to misdirect them.

If this seems legalistic and unsatisfying, you are right. It is legalistic and unsatisfying. You can reframe it though. “You should not lie unless the consequences of telling the truth will lead to grossly unjust outcomes for another”. Congratulations, you’ve just become a Kantian utilitarian, which makes about as much sense as a redheaded blonde or an abstinent sexaholic.

The problem, it seems, is that neither of these answers our moral intuitions very well. That may be because our moral intuitions are actually inconsistent. We ought to do cost-benefit analysis for something like the much-maligned National Institute of Clinical Excellence⁴, and no amount of irrelevant utilitarian hand-waving gives you the right to feed Christians to the lions in the Colosseum or innocent men to electric chairs in Texas. And, err, good luck meshing the two together.

That brings us to virtue ethics. John says:

‘Be virtuous of character’ seems vacuous. How are you supposed to decide what virtue is?

Here, I am going to refer to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The entry on virtue ethics is quite good.

The important thing about virtue ethics is that it isn’t about actions or rules so much as it is about persons. John is a Clojure programmer so I’ll give him an analogy: some programming languages can be easily switched. You can go from Python to Ruby pretty easily. But the difference between, say, Forth and Lisp is quite huge. Virtue ethics is trying to answer the meta-ethical question by reformulating the question as one of being how to live a flourishing life: it says the fundamental unit of ethical reflection isn’t actions or rules but what enables people to flourish. The very question that virtue ethics is trying to address is different: it is trying to push one to reflect differently on moral questions.

I’ll leave it there and I’d like to encourage John to look deeper: there is so much more to ethics than the potted summaries, and the questions of ethics require a lot of reflection to answer well.

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