Sam Harris, Popper and Morality

November 3, 2013 36 Comments

Sam Harris wrote a book called The Moral Landscape (TML), which is about a secular moral philosophy. It sucks. I’m going to contrast his position with Popper’s, which also has some flaws.

Harris claims that we should accept the idea that morality is about the well-being of sentient creatures and depends on “events in the world and states in the human brain” (p. 5). He then claims that if we accept this idea philosophers who claim you can’t derive an ought from an is have missed the point.

Chapter 5 of The Open Society and Its Enemies pdf, Kindle is about why Popper considers it impossible to derive values from facts. Different people can see the same facts and come to different moral judgements and so morality can’t be derived from facts. This is correct as it stands but there is more interesting stuff in the notes.

OSE Chapter 5 Note 18

The hope of getting some argument or theory to share our responsibilities is, I believe, one of the basic motives of ‘scientific’ ethics. ‘Scientific’ ethics is in its absolute barrenness one of the most amazing of social phenomena. What does it aim at? At telling us what we ought to do, i.e. at constructing a code of norms upon a scientific basis, so that we need only look up the index of the code if we are faced with a difficult moral decision? This clearly would be absurd; quite apart from the fact that if it could be achieved, it would destroy all personal responsibility and therefore all ethics.

Popper claims scientific ethics is absurd but doesn’t explain why. I think the problem is that if you claimed to have a scientific derivation of morality that wouldn’t get you anywhere because that just raises questions that can’t be answered by your theory. Are you doing the science correctly? And why would it be right to judge this issue using science? And what counts as science in the first place and why? Also progress would be impossible if it were true. Progress involves inventing new ideas that won’t be on the approved list because those ideas and the practices required to criticise and understand them don’t exist yet. So if there is such a list then all progress of any kind will have to end.

Or would it give scientific criteria of the truth and falsity of moral judgements, i.e. of judgements involving such terms as ‘good’ or ‘bad’? But it is clear that moral judgements are absolutely irrelevant. Only a scandalmonger is interested in judging people or their actions; ‘judge not’ appears to some of us one of the fundamental and much too little appreciated laws of humanitarian ethics. (We may have to disarm and to imprison a criminal in order to prevent him from repeating his crimes, but too much of moral judgement and especially of moral indignation is always a sign of hypocrisy and pharisaism.) Thus an ethics of moral judgements would be not only irrelevant but indeed an immoral affair. The all-importance of moral problems rests, of course, on the fact that we can act with intelligent foresight, and that we can ask ourselves what our aims ought to be, i.e. how we ought to act.

This seems a bit muddled. Are we supposed to judge the criminal’s actions or not? I would say if we’re going to lock people up we should have made sure to judge their actions bad enough that we want to prevent him from acting that way by force.

Popper talks of “too much” moral judgement. I think this refers to something like a real problem but the problem is people making moral condemnations without understanding the issues or the situation the person in question faced. In other words, it’s not a problem of moral judgement but a problem of lack of judgement: that is, a lack of carefully considering the problems involved.

An example of not understanding more problems: many people in the UK say the US ought obviously to ban guns to stop mass shootings at cinemas and that sort of thing. Those people fail to understand the context. It is perfectly possible to use a gun properly, i.e. – don’t shoot people, or only shoot them in self defence. So if you ban guns you deprive people of an item that can be used in a legitimate way, including defending people from being shot up at a cinema. This is a bad idea. There are other relevant moral issues too.

Nearly all moral philosophers who have dealt with the problem of how we ought to act (with the possible exception of Kant) have tried to answer it either by reference to ‘human nature’ (as did even Kant, when he referred to human reason) or to the nature of ‘the good’. The first of these ways leads nowhere, since all actions possible to us are founded upon ‘human nature’, so that the problem of ethics could also be put by asking which elements in human nature I ought to approve and to develop, and which sides I ought to suppress or to control. But the second of these ways also leads nowhere; for given an analysis of ‘the good’ in form of a sentence like: ‘The good is such and such’ for ‘such and such is good’), we would always have to ask: What about it? Why should this concern me? Only if the word ‘good’ is used in an ethical sense, i.e. only if it is used to mean ‘that which I ought to do’, could I derive from the information ‘x is good’ the conclusion that I ought to do x. In other words, if the word ‘good’ is to have any ethical significance at all, it must be defined as ‘that which I (or we) ought to do (or to promote)’. But if it is so defined, then its whole meaning is exhausted by the defining phrase, and it can in every context be replaced by this phrase, i.e. the introduction of the term ‘good’ cannot materially contribute to our problem. (Cp. also note 49 (3) to chapter 11.)

Note 49(3) to Chapter 11 of OSE:

Essentialism and the theory of definition have led to an amazing development in Ethics. The development is one of increasing abstraction and loss of touch with the basis of all ethics—the practical moral problems, to be decided by us here and now. It leads first to the general question, ‘What is good?’ or ‘What is the Good?’; next to ‘What does “Good” mean?’ and next to ‘Can the problem “What does ‘Good’ mean?” be answered?’ or ‘Can “good” be defined?’ G. E. Moore, who raised this last problem in his Principia Ethica, was certainly right in insisting that ‘good’ in the moral sense cannot be defined in ‘naturalistic’ terms. For, indeed, if we could, it would mean something like ‘bitter’ or ‘sweet’ or ‘green’ or ‘red’; and it would be utterly irrelevant from the point of view of morality. Just as we need not attain the bitter, or the sweet, etc., there would be no reason to take any moral interest in a naturalistic ‘good’. But although Moore was right in what is perhaps justly considered his main point, it may be held that an analysis of good or of any other concept or essence can in no way contribute to an ethical theory which bears upon the only relevant basis of all ethics, the immediate moral problem that must be solved here and now. Such an analysis can lead only to the substitution of a verbal problem for a moral one.

The idea that morality is about “the immediate moral problem that must be solved here and now” is at best a bad formulation. You need moral principles to judge what you should do in a particular situation because otherwise all you have is a pile of competing claims and no way to sort them out. The best construction I can put on what Popper said here is that each situation has some unique aspects and we have to think on our feet to apply moral principles to that situation and no definition of the good could contribute to such thought. Presumably that’s what he meant but he didn’t state it clearly.

In TML Sam Harris claims that morality can be derived from facts about human wellbeing and we can understand those facts by looking at how the brain lights up when a person is happy. This invokes all of the bad ideas Popper criticised above. He defines morality as being about wellbeing but this just evades the question of what counts as wellbeing and why. And why is the way a person’s brain lights up the relevant issue? Harris claims that this is because thought is instantiated in the brain, but by that logic the vast bulk of knowledge is about paper or electronic information storage devices since most knowledge is instantiated in those forms.

At any particular time you’re going to have some areas of your life you find unsatisfactory. To make your life better you have to find out why these aspects of your life are unsatisfactory and solve the relevant problems. That’s an epistemological problem, which has nothing to do with brain chemistry.

Indeed, if a person is solving problems then his brain chemistry has to be explained in terms of the morality of how to solve problems. He will be thinking about what is required by epistemology (and other stuff too, like physics or economics or aesthetics or whatever) and his brain chemistry will instantiate the relevant ideas.

Most of TML is spent discussing moral issues without tying them to brain states or explaining them in terms of brain states in any substantive way. Rather, the discussion of brain states gets in the way of openly discussing moral standards in some cases. For example, on p. 94 he claims that looking at the brains might help us understand whether we should choose to throw one person in the path of a moving train to save five more. If the best thing you can think of to do involves shoving somebody under a train you ought to consider that you don’t actually understand the problem too well and shoving somebody under a train under those circumstances would be stupid or criminal.

And as I noted in discussing Popper’s objection to scientific ethics above, if there was some particular scientific theory that provided the answers to all ethical questions, then progress would be impossible. It’s not clear to me how Sam Harris would avoid this. Once we understand how the brain works do we understand all of morality? If so, then all progress will end when that happens.

Just one final note, I think TML is crap not just because it’s so badly wrong but because there is so much in it that is silly. There are so many points where Harris should have said “okay, there’s something badly wrong here, I’m writing stuff that’s just complete crap.” Take, as an example, the bit on p. 71 where he discusses Parfit. According to Parfit if we were to aggregate utility then it might be better to have one person who is really happy to a world where there are billions of people who are just a little bit happy. But we have to aggregate utility, claims Harris, so we have to think about such “paradoxes”. You don’t have to think about aggregation. You have to think about solving problems. If you solve a problem you make things better. If you don’t solve problems you don’t make things better. End of story. And how could you possibly be put in the position of making a decision between the sorts of scenarios Parfit discusses? How could you be in a position to decide whether there will be one person who is very happy or billions who are slightly less happy? You would either have to be a mass murderer or a tyrant who controls whether people get to have children.

TML is abysmal. Read David Deutsch, Ayn Rand, William Godwin, Karl Popper or Thomas Szasz instead.

UPDATE: What I said above is wrong in an important respect. Ethics doesn’t have a basis in problems or anything else including principles, but both problems and principles are important. Ethics can’t be based on problems because problems only come up in the light of a clash between different pieces of moral knowledge. So the knowledge has to be there before you can have the problem. If you’re going to solve the problem rather than just paper over it then the moral knowledge involved should be made explicit enough to be criticised.

Filed under epistemology, moral philosophy, scientism

Answers for a statist moralist

November 3, 2013 Leave a comment

In a blog entry on the New York Times website Amia Srinivasan asks some questions for “free market moralists”. She starts by summarising Rawls:

 In 1971 John Rawls published “A Theory of Justice,” the most significant articulation and defense of political liberalism of the 20th century. Rawls proposed that the structure of a just society was the one that a group of rational actors would come up with if they were operating behind a “veil of ignorance” — that is, provided they had no prior knowledge what their gender, age, wealth, talents, ethnicity and education would be in the imagined society. Since no one would know in advance where in society they would end up, rational agents would select a society in which everyone was guaranteed basic rights, including equality of opportunity. Since genuine (rather than “on paper”) equality of opportunity requires substantial access to resources — shelter, medical care, education — Rawls’s rational actors would also make their society a redistributive one, ensuring a decent standard of life for everyone.

There is a very large assumption in this first paragraph smuggled in under the term “equality of opportunity”. Srinivasan doesn’t explain what it consists of or why anybody should be interested in it. Rawls on p.63 of the book she refers to writes (you can get the book in pdf by searching “rawls theory of justice pdf” it’s the first hit):

More specifically, assuming that there is a distribution of natural assets, those who are at the same level of talent and ability, and have the same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial place in the social system.

This is unclear and doesn’t make much sense. Let’s suppose that Jim is born into a poor family and he cleans toilets for a living but yearns to be a poet. Note that the mere fact that Jim wants to be a poet doesn’t imply he would be a good poet. So then Jim should make some effort to persuade people to pay him for poetry. And if he can’t persuade people and he is still unhappy with cleaning toilets then there is a problem. It’s not clear what the problem is exactly or how to solve it because if that was clear, Jim wouldn’t be unhappily cleaning toilets: the problem would have been solved. And if you’re going to force people to pay Jim to write poetry then you have no check on whether the poetry is any good.

What we need is to set up institutions to make it easy for people to change how they spend their time and money. That way, if you want people to spend their time and money on what you’re doing they can choose not to and give you some information about whether you’re doing stuff badly. If you don’t get time and money from people you’re doing something that’s not persuasive.

She then summarises Nozick:

In 1974, Robert Nozick countered with “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” He argued that a just society was simply one that resulted from an unfettered free market — and that the only legitimate function of the state was to ensure the workings of the free market by enforcing contracts and protecting citizens against violence, theft and fraud. (The seemingly redistributive policy of making people pay for such a “night watchman” state, Nozick argued, was in fact non-redistributive, since such a state would arise naturally through free bargaining.) If one person — Nozick uses the example of Wilt Chamberlain, the great basketball player — is able to produce a good or service that is in high demand, and others freely pay him for that good or service, then he deserves to get rich. And, once rich, he doesn’t owe anyone anything, since his wealth was accumulated through voluntary exchange in return for the goods and services he produced. Any attempt to “redistribute” his wealth, so long as it is earned through free market exchange, is, Nozick says, “forced labor.”

I’m not going to defend Nozick specifically partly because I don’t remember much about him so he might suck.

Wilt Chamberlain “deserves” to get rich? “Deserve” is the moral equivalent of “justify”. That is, if Wilt Chamberlain deserves the money that means he can show that it is true he should have it or he should probably have it or something like that. But justification is impossible, so it is impossible to show that somebody deserves something. So if that was the only free market position it would be wrong.

The real reason Wilt Chamberlain should get to keep his money is just that you haven’t offered an alternative other people consider better. A contract in a free market is a means of testing whether a person consents to be legally bound to the terms of a particular exchange. See Randy Barnett’s papers and books on contract law for a detailed discussion. The enforceability of laws required for the operation of a free market has nothing to do with whether they arise through free bargaining. Rather, it has to do with whether the law in question is required to deal with other people consentually. See Randy Barnett’s The Structure of Liberty.

I’m going to skip a bit because there’s a lot of boring stuff and get on to the bit where she demands that free market people answer a load of questions:

 1. Is any exchange between two people in the absence of direct physical compulsion by one party against the other (or the threat thereof) necessarily free?

If you say yes, then you think that people can never be coerced into action by circumstances that do not involve the direct physical compulsion of another person. Suppose a woman and her children are starving, and the only way she can feed her family, apart from theft, is to prostitute herself or to sell her organs. Since she undertakes these acts of exchange not because of direct physical coercion by another, but only because she is compelled by hunger and a lack of alternatives, they are free.

We have a welfare state and people do engage in prostitution and sell organs. The welfare state doesn’t solve that problem. So why is Srinivasan brining up flaws in her own position?

If a person doesn’t want to fuck or sell her organs she can ask for charity. That charity should come with strings attached. That is, if you’re going to get a charity’s money they should require you to gain skills of some sort so that you’re not stuck on their roles permanently. And the charity should be free to turn people down who are a bad risk.

Let’s suppose that every charity decides a particular person is a bad risk. She has chosen to have children. That is her responsibility. If she can’t raise them she should offer them up for adoption. The knowledge already exists to get children adopted by people who have better options than selling sex unwillingly.

Would I prefer to see a world in which the only people who engage in the sex trade are people who want to do that? Yes. But that requires the creation of better knowledge to help people avoid that. The government hasn’t done that and I don’t think it can since taxation makes it difficult for people to stop supporting bad government institutions that help create such problems. Also, it’s not my responsibility to do that unless I take on that responsibility and I shouldn’t do that unless I have a really kickass idea about how to do it and can raise money for it voluntarily.

2. Is any free (not physically compelled) exchange morally permissible?

If you say yes, then you think that any free exchange can’t be exploitative and thus immoral. Suppose that I inherited from my rich parents a large plot of vacant land, and that you are my poor, landless neighbor. I offer you the following deal. You can work the land, doing all the hard labor of tilling, sowing, irrigating and harvesting. I’ll pay you $1 a day for a year. After that, I’ll sell the crop for $50,000. You decide this is your best available option, and so take the deal. Since you consent to this exchange, there’s nothing morally problematic about it.

If we’re talking about a free market you have other options and can point this out to get a better deal. “Give me more than $1 a day or your crops will rot in the field and you get nothing.”

3. Do people deserve all they are able, and only what they are able, to get through free exchange?

I’ve pointed out the flaw in the idea of desert above but let’s see what she has to say anyway.

If you say yes, you think that what people deserve is largely a matter of luck. Why? First, because only a tiny minority of the population is lucky enough to inherit wealth from their parents. (A fact lost on Mitt Romney, who famously advised America’s youth to “take a shot, go for it, take a risk … borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”) Since giving money to your kids is just another example of free exchange, there’s nothing wrong with the accumulation of wealth and privilege in the hands of the few.

You don’t have to get money from your parents. If you have a good business idea you can persuade people to loan you the money.

Second, people’s capacities to produce goods and services in demand on the market is largely a function of the lottery of their birth: their genetic predispositions, their parents’ education, the amount of race- and sex-based discrimination to which they’re subjected, their access to health care and good education.

It’s also a function of what the market happens to value at a particular time. Van Gogh, William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Vermeer, Melville and Schubert all died broke. If you’re a good Nozickian, you think that’s what they deserved.

If somebody hasn’t produced a good or service in demand on the market all you know is that there is some unsolved problem that prevents them from doing this. Srinivasan hasn’t got anywhere near to producing an explanation of why a monopolistic institution that threatens to imprison people who don’t give it money is a good solution to these problems.

4. Are people under no obligation to do anything they don’t freely want to do or freely commit themselves to doing?

If you say yes, then you think the only moral requirements are the ones we freely bring on ourselves — say, by making promises or contracts. Suppose I’m walking to the library and see a man drowning in the river. I decide that the pleasure I would get from saving his life wouldn’t exceed the cost of getting wet and the delay. So I walk on by. Since I made no contract with the man, I am under no obligation to save him.

I’m not entirely sure what obligation means in this context. Does it mean that if I walk past a man drawing in a river I might be prosecuted for not saving him? That would be a bad idea. Perhaps I don’t know how to swim. Or maybe I have done any swimming for a long time and I think I would drown trying to save him. Or maybe I’m really tired that morning and fear I would drown trying to save him as a result of exhaustion.

If it means people who knew about the drowning would think worse of me that might be fair enough if I could easily have raised the alarm and got somebody else to come save him. Both I and other people are better off having another creative problem-solving person in the world than letting him drown.

If it means that in the case where I couldn’t easily raise the alarm I should take a large risk of killing myself to save him, then you can fuck off. I don’t know much about him so taking a large risk of killing myself trying to save him would be a bad idea since I have no idea whether it’s worth the risk.

Most of us, I suspect, will find it difficult to say yes to all four of these questions.

The rest of us, who know the questions are ill-formed, think that this illustrates the peril of taking bad questions for granted.

Filed under epistemology, moral philosophy, political philosophy

Russell Brand

October 26, 2013 Leave a comment

Russell Brand is literally a socialist revolutionary. He wants high taxes on corporations to redistribute money from the rich to the poor, he claims corporations are destroying the environment and he thinks profit is a dirty word.

According to Brand, profit means that somebody has a deficit: see around 4:30ish in the video. This is false. If I give a person or group some money in exchange for a good or service then one of two things must be true. (1) I prefer the good or service to the money, in which case we both end up in a situation we prefer to our original position. (2) I have two or more competing ideas about whether I ought to buy the product or service. If the former is the case I and my trading partner both gain from trade. If the latter, I can’t expect to gain until I sort out my priorities, which is not my trading partner’s responsibility since he doesn’t control my thoughts.

Profit is the result of people trading for mutual benefit. To oppose profit is to say that it is wrong for people to cooperate for mutual benefit. This is the creed of somebody who expects people to sacrifice themselves, and like all ideologies based on human sacrifice it can only result in destruction and death. To quote Ayn Rand:

Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others—it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others—it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch—it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself—it is evil to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice—it is evil to create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others.

Why are some people poor? Because they practise what Brand preaches. Why did governments bail out banks? Because they don’t a free market in money and banking, which would prevent them from running a welfare state based on the principle of human sacrifice that Brand advocates. If the government can’t print money whenever it wants to then it can’t pay for lots of people who do no productive work. And what about the planet? Won’t somebody please think of the planet? The planet is getting better by the standard of supporting human life thanks to the productivity enabled by industrial progress.

What about Paxman’s dismal performance in this interview? He first asks about Brand’s authority. This is the creed of a man who believes in witch doctors who can relieve him of the responsibility to think for himself. Oh, holy expert, tell me the answer so that I don’t actually have to think. This is a cop out. He has to pick the expert so if he’s not willing to think he will just consider whoever he finds most comforting an expert and discard anybody else as an amateur.

What about voting? Western liberal democracy is better than Russell Brand’s brand of tyranny. It could be improved if people didn’t want the terrible stuff that Russell Brand advocates. We could reform toward more stuff being done by cooperation for mutual benefit, which would be better than what we have now.

Filed under moral philosophy, political philosophy

Freedom and employment

October 26, 2013 9 Comments

Anarchopac who is an anarchist/socialist thinks that wage labour is incompatible with freedom. His argument is that workers must work to earn a living. And even if a worker wants to start his own business he must work for a wage to save up money to start the business and so has to work for a wage. Since he has no choice but to work for a wage he isn’t free since he has no alternative. I don’t think it does much good to argue about whether this or that action is compatible with freedom because it frames the debate in a misleading way. If you go along with discussing the issue in this way you’re going to end up talking about the definition of freedom.

Such discussions tend to go nowhere because of a general philosophical problem: discussing definitions is a bad idea. If somebody wants to argue about the definition of a word the best thing to do is just to concede the definition and move on to discussing a substantive issue. A word is just a label for an idea. If you disagree with me about an idea then we need to discuss the idea, not the label. For more criticisms of discussing definitions see Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies Volume 2, Chapter 11, Section II. Specifically when we want to discuss a pattern of behaviour, such as wage labour, we should discuss what problem it solves, whether the pattern is problematic. If it is problematic is there some variant that would be better? Or is the pattern in question so bad it should be abolished, like slavery?

Some people who work for a wage dislike their job and wish they didn’t have to do it. But a person can dislike doing something because he has bad ideas, so this doesn’t tell us much. Nor does disagreement tell us which party to the disagreement, if either, is correct.  So if an employer and employee disagree about what the employee should do we can’t say which of them is right without knowing more.

Socialists say that the way to solve this problem is for the employers to give up their property rights in the plant they own to the workers. The workers are better suited to run the plant because they actually use the machines and know how they perform in practise. But there is a problem with this argument. Why did the employer own the machines in the first place?

The employer had an idea about some good or service. He thought that people would want that good or service and he thought about the best way to provide it. He then got the money to buy the plant, the premises in which to install it and so on. And he makes decisions about how to use the plant for as long he owns it. If not enough people buy his product or service then his business will fail. He pays the employees money in advance of knowing whether their labour will make him a profit or not. Doing anything novel involves risk. The employer takes that risk and the employees don’t. If the employees genuinely have a better idea about what risk should be taken then they could try to raise the money to buy the employer out.

Some socialists might say there isn’t really that much risk. You can just produce stuff that people know they want. This idea is problematic: it presupposes that people know the best way of making stuff and just have to tell other people to go do it. But figuring out how to do stuff well is hard. It requires trial and the correction of error. This is equally true of producing new technology and continuing to produce stuff that was produced before under changing conditions. The way the market does this is that if the good is being supplied badly enough by the lights of the people who might buy it the people supplying it won’t make a profit and will have to stop.

Somebody has to take the risky decisions and those people should get the profit or take the hit. If they don’t then they will not be able to make decisions about whether to continue making a product or service or not. That is, they will not be able to decide whether they prefer to make the product under current conditions or not, nor will they have any guidance on whether other ways of making it might work.

What the socialists propose amounts to saying that nobody should want to make the tradeoff of getting money now, and taking a lot less risk, rather than taking a large risk and getting money later. But what about the worker who needs the money right now and has no choice but to make that tradeoff? If he has no idea how to produce goods and services better then there is no reason for anybody to give him stuff when he doesn’t know how to use it. If he does have a great idea then he should want to put in the time and effort needed to persuade other people to give him money to try it, or he should save the required money. To say anything else entails that people should give him stuff when they don’t think it’s a good idea. It requires people to act irrationally: that is, to ignore criticisms of their actions.

But the worker might be unhappy I hear you cry. If somebody can’t convince other people to give him stuff or money to try some great idea he should be interested in working out why they aren’t convinced. So he has an opportunity to learn. If he doesn’t have good ideas for a business but wants to have good ideas about that then he should be interested in learning about how to have such ideas. And if he wants neither of those things, that’s fine but he shouldn’t want people to give him stuff when he doesn’t know how to use it and has no intention of learning. And when I say it’s fine not to want those things I really mean it. Some people want to do philosophy or poetry or draw or whatever and don’t want to run a business. All I’m saying is that if that’s what you want to do and you’re not willing to persuade other people to sponsor you to do it you shouldn’t expect to get stuff for doing it.

Filed under epistemology, moral philosophy, political philosophy

Punishment vs responsibility

October 19, 2013 Leave a comment

Many people seem to think that if somebody is responsible for doing something bad, like murder, that legitimises punishing him – that is, harming him in a way that has nothing to do with self defence, defence of others, or defence of property. (I am using the word punishment to denote this idea. You can substitute another term for punishment if you would prefer other terminology.) The standard attitude is that people in prison are bad and so we should make them suffer because it is good for them to suffer. And so if people get raped in prison that’s just too bad.

But there is a problem with punishing somebody because he is responsible. If a person is responsible for something he did that means he could have chosen to do otherwise. He could have created knowledge about a better way to live and so avoided doing the bad thing he did. But if that’s true, why punish him? Why not help him to learn a better way of living and then let him get on with his life? Punishing a criminal won’t make the punisher better off except insofar as it satisfies a desire to hurt the criminal. Punishment won’t make the criminal more productive. Only better ideas about how to live could do that. So punishment is a dead end that benefits nobody.

There is also another problem. The criminal is responsible because he should have realised there are better ways of behaving and found out about them. The non-criminal ways of behaving would enable him to cooperate with other people for mutual benefit. So one principle that should have guided his actions is that he should have been looking for a way to cooperate with other people for mutual benefit. But that principle can’t be reconciled with punishment, which involves the punisher acting in a way that he knows can’t lead to mutual benefit.

A few disclaimers. I am not saying that prisons should be shut down, although they are to some extent devoted to punishment. Some of the people locked up in prison should be locked up to stop them from preying on others. Nor do I think we should necessarily go out of our way to make prison pleasant. But we should also not go out of our way to make prison horrible and destructive.

Filed under Uncategorized

Who should be helped/hurt?

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

In his book The Open Society and Its Enemies [free pdf 1, 2; Amazon] in Chapter 7 Section I, Karl Popper points out that since Plato most political philosophers have been doing political philosophy wrong. They have been asking the question “Who should rule?” This question presupposes that somebody should rule: somebody should have the final say. But any particular person or group can be mistaken and very often will be mistaken. So instead of asking “who should rule?” we should ask “How institutions can be arranged to stop bad or incompetent rulers from doing too much damage?” Political institutions in liberal democracies go some way to addressing the latter question and they could be improved but there is a related issue that I want to address.

In many political debates, it seems like the main question people want to ask is “who should be helped?” or “who should be hurt?” In the discussion in the wake of the financial crisis many people have been asking who they should lynch in order to prevent another crisis and most of them say that bankers, or short sellers, or some other financial institution should be destroyed or broken up or banned. In the dispute over global warming the mainstream position is that fossil fuel companies are evil and should be destroyed by virtuous environmentalists to help baby seals, polar bears and anyone living near the sea. I could name many other positions like this, but I won’t.

Every one of these positions takes for granted that some people should be helped and others should be hurt, but this is wrong. One problem with this kind of policy is that it involves ignoring the objections of the group who will be hurt or criticisms of the behaviour of those who will be helped. Another is that it almost always involves a cartoon version of morality that obscures the reasons why the group who will be hurt acts the way they do. So when it comes to fossil fuel companies and global warming, people ignore the fact that fossil fuel companies dig up fossil fuels and burn them so that we can have cheap electricity and cars and stuff like that, without which our lives would be a lot worse. By a lot worse I mean you would be dead or would never have been born in the first place because we wouldn’t have clean running water and stuff like that. Likewise, if we just say bankers are stupid or wicked then we can’t understand all of the problems that helped lead to the financial crisis, many of which were a result of actions taken by governments.

The final and most important reason is that there is no reason to think that hurting people is a good thing to do. Any problem can be solved by finding a new way of doing things that everybody prefers to what they were doing originally. We should want to solve problems that way. You might say something like “What if somebody wants something that it is impossible to deliver?” For example, it is not particularly desirable to get rid of fossil fuels in the absence of a better alternative but that’s what many people seem to want. If a person just doesn’t know how useful fossil fuels are then he will change his mind when he finds out. If he thinks that nature is somehow better than humans and if lots of people die it doesn’t matter, then we could point out that only humans can create new explanatory knowledge and so are more significant than the rest of nature. Human beings could spread life beyond the Earth by space travel and preserve it indefinitely, no other species can do that.

But what about really bad people who want to kill other people, like Hamas, who want to kill all the Jews in Israel. The point of countering Hamas is to stop the bad stuff they want to do, and stopping Hamas is just a consequence of that broader goal. It is difficult to see how Hamas could survive abandoning the goal of destroying Israel because it’s not an open, adaptable institution that seeks new ideas. Any organisation that abandoned destroying Israel would be so different from Hamas as it now stands that it would have virtually nothing at all in common with it even if it had the same name. But I don’t really care whether Hamas exists or not.

UPDATE A reader has pointed out something important I didn’t say in the post. It may be rational to adopt a policy even if some group claims they will be hurt by that policy. This is the other side of not deciding policy on the basis of who will be helped or hurt. Slaveowners before the American Civil War claimed they would be hurt by not being allowed to take slaves into the territories. That doesn’t mean it was wrong for Lincoln to say they should be banned from taking slaves into the territories. What is needed is an explanation of what sorts of policies can be adopted even in the face of opposition. The relevant policies are policies that facilitate voluntary cooperation. Stopping the spread of slavery facilitated cooperation in the places to which slavery did not spread in a variety of ways. Black people would be less reluctant to deal with white people if they couldn’t be enslaved. Also, in places where slavery existed its preservation required the suppression of freedom of speech. White people could not talk to black people to teach them to read. People who disagreed with slavery couldn’t be allowed to speak or write partly because they were right and partly because slaveowners feared rebellion. And of course, black people couldn’t be allowed to say what they actually wanted because many would want the slaveowners to leave them alone, or might even want compensation for deprivation of liberty.

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Holding positions rationally

September 28, 2013 8 Comments

Many people seem to think that rationality consists of holding certain positions that are justified (shown to be true or probably true) – justified true belief. For example, you are supposedly rational if you think that life evolved by natural selection and creationists are irrational. Why? One common answer is that there is lots of evidence for evolution. Thus evolution is not just a theory it is a proven scientific fact or something like that. If you don’t look at this story too closely, you might think it makes sense. There is a lot of evidence that is relevant to the theory that life evolved on Earth by common descent from a single ancestor. However, the idea that positions can and should be justified – justificationism – is a gross misrepresentation of science and rationality more generally.

If you were looking for flaws in justificationism, it wouldn’t be difficult to find them. Newtonian mechanics was not contradicted by the vast bulk of experimental evidence before the 20th century – that’ two hundred years of positive experimental results. But Newton’s theory was replaced by quantum mechanics and general relativity, which contradict one another so they can’t both be true. We don’t know what the replacement will be and it may be the case that there is stuff physicists have badly misunderstood at the foundations of both theories. If physicists are almost certainly misunderstanding a whole load of stuff and don’t have a consistent worldview then it can hardly be said that physics is justified. So by justificationist lights, the whole of physics is irrational.

I picked physics, but I could have picked many other subjects. In biology we don’t understand what sort of complexity DNA can be used to create as a result of natural selection. Would it be possible to evolve creatures that travel through space and colonise other planets purely by natural selection among genes? Human beings haven’t created knowledge about space travel in that way. Rather, we have created a lot of that knowledge through evolution of ideas. And we have virtually no understanding of how evolution of ideas is instantiated in the brain.

And then there’s everyday life. Let’s take brushing you teeth. Can you justify brushing your teeth? People seem to end up doing stuff that is widely recognised as irrational when they undertake activities like politics, personal relationships, work, money, drugs, food, exercise and other stuff. But a lot of it is the same old shit people have been doing for centuries. So what’s the hold up? Why hasn’t it been justified yet and so made rational? Many people will say that such stuff is necessarily irrational. Why? Because we’re apes or something comes the vague reply. This reply doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t explain why all this stuff should be irrational while science is supposedly rational.

Rationality isn’t about the content of your positions, it’s about how you hold them. Justification is not any part of rationality, because justification is impossible. Any argument has to start with premises, so if the premises are not justified nor is the conclusion. And if you try to justify the premises then you need another argument, with more premises that have to be justified.

“Aha!” I hear you cry, “I have got you. For I can look out of my window right now and see lots of stuff like a white van. I can base my worldview on these observations.” This is a terrible argument. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. People often misunderstand stuff they see quite badly. They make up stories to try to explain what they see after the fact and this can change what they think they saw.

And people don’t understand the vast majority of what they see. For example, there are some rain drops on my window. Those raindrops are refracting the light from the scenery in front of the window: they bend the path the light takes away from a straight line. I can see colours in each raindrop because it takes the light from some piece scenery and bends it in such a way that it enters my eye and I see it. The optics of visible light for an object as large as a raindrop is fairly well understood. Given enough time I might be able to reproduce what I can see through the raindrops. Most people couldn’t do that calculation since they don’t know the relevant physics, and I’m just not going to do it because it’s not interesting. Now, think about how much stuff in everyday life you don’t understand at that level of detail and you’ll begin to see a problem in taking what you see as totally unproblematic.

So if justification is impossible how can we think and act rationally? What’s needed is a way to try to sort bad ideas from good ones. The way to do that is to take your ideas seriously as descriptions of how the world works and look for problems with them – anything that seems unsatisfactory. You then propose solutions to those problems and look for problems with the solutions until only one is left. Then you start on another problem. Rationality is about solving problems and then moving on to new problems you prefer to the old ones. It’s not about fixing some particular idea in stone. Rather, it is about improving ideas

To the extent that we have succeeded in creating knowledge in subjects like physics and biology, it’s because people have found lots of flaws with their past ideas and discovered new ideas that don’t have those flaws. They have other flaws that are more interesting.

By contrast, it is notable that when it comes to things like politics and personal issues people seldom admit error and almost never look for explanations. For example, when people get married they become dependent on one another to some extent because their finances are bound together, unless they specifically stipulate otherwise in a prenup and prenups can be overturned. But why should two adults be financially dependent on one another? Most of them could afford to rent  or buy an abode on their own. Food is cheap. Lots of people could live near to where they work and to shops so they wouldn’t need a car. Many people say marriage is good for raising children, but lots of married people get divorced and hurt their children in the process. There is a lot of stuff here that just doesn’t add up at all and very few people are looking for alternatives.

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Plastic bag charge

September 15, 2013 Leave a comment

The Liberal Democrats (who are “liberal” in the same sense as the Democrats in the US: they are statist) have decided that supermarkets must be forced to charge 5p for each plastic bag. Why? They say that plastic bags have a bad environmental impact, especially on waterborne animals.

Plastic bags have a great impact on my environment. They are convenient for carrying stuff. I can put some dirty washing in a plastic bag, take it to the washing machine, put in the washing and then throw out the dirty bag. They are convenient for throwing out rubbish. They are really good for rubbish because they are not terribly large so the rubbish isn’t around for long and doesn’t stink up the house. And they are so cheap supermarkets can give them away. Plastic bags are fucking awesome.

The government is claiming plastic bags are bad for waterborne animals. I think we shouldn’t be too bothered when an animal dies, but when a person dies or is inconvenienced that is bad. (There are exceptions to the standard that it’s bad when people die. For example, if a person is committing a crime like robbery, rape or murder and is killed in self defence that’s okay.) Unlike people, animals don’t create new explanatory knowledge. As a result they don’t write novels, or music, or non-fiction. They can’t do computer programming or physics or biology or any other kind of science. So every time a person dies, you lose an opportunity to cooperate with a unique person who might help you understand something new or produce a new good. This is bad. Animals aren’t like that. Animals are complicated robots that can be useful for certain boring mechanical tasks, e.g. – being a guide dog. Some animals look cute. Some animals produce tasty food like meat or milk. However, pretty much any animal of a given species tastes about as good as any other, or looks about as good as any other, or can do some mechanical task given the same treatment. The reason for this is that all of the information required to make the animal behave, or look, or taste a certain way is instantiated in its genes. So if one animal of a given species dies it doesn’t matter much provided that the genes are available in another member of the same species. So if some waterborne animals die as a result of plastic bags that doesn’t matter much.

By contrast, charging for plastic bags is going to be a disaster for humans and treating humans badly makes the world a worse place. The plastic bag charge will waste lots of time and money. That time and money might be spent on doing interesting things and will instead be completely wasted on this stupid rule.

Worse, the charge might kill people. How so? Some commentators have said that people could use those durable bags that supermarkets sell. Suppose you use your durable bag and take home some raw chicken that leaks and as a result your bag is now covered in chicken juice. So you either have to waste your time washing it or take the risk that your durable petri dish for growing dangerous microbes won’t kill you. It seems to be the case that many people have died as a result of not washing reusable bags properly when such plastic bag charges have been implemented. (The only part of this paper I am interested in is the fact that people have died as a result of the ban. Criticisms of my position on this should be limited to criticising that particular claim.)

Well, it’s not going to be so bad you might say. People could use paper bags. Fuck that. What happens if you’re trying to carry home shopping in the rain?

And then there is Nick Clegg’s witless suggestion that the 5p from each bag could be donated to charity. The changes as a result of this stupid law are going to be expensive. People may buy less stuff because they have to pay a stupid charge for a piece of plastic so cheap the supermarket can afford to give it away. That may reduce the supermarket’s profit and will make the customer worse off since he is being forced to pay more for the bag.

Another problem: consider all of the checkout machines where shoppers scan their own shopping. Typically, those machines have a platform where you put your shopping after it has been scanned to be weighed to check you’re not nicking stuff. At the back of that platform is a dispenser where you can get plastic bags. The weighing machine doesn’t count the weight of plastic bags. At a minimum somebody will have to waste his time coming up with a new program for counting the weight of the bags. But the weighing machines might not be sensitive enough to count the weight of the bags, in which case they will have to be replaced too. And in any case, the way the bags are dispensed now will have to change and changing the machines to take account of that will cost money: redesigning the machine and coming up with a new program. There are a lot of these machines that will all have to be modified or scrapped. That’s a lot of wasted money. Either that, or the supermarkets will scrap the machines completely and go back to the standard checkout, which means that where formerly you had one member of staff for six automatic checkout machines you now have one member of staff for each checkout. That’s going to cost a lot of money.

And on top of all that Nick Clegg wants supermarkets to donate the proceeds of selling the bags to charity. Who’s going to pay for that? Supermarkets or their customers are going to pay through the nose for Clegg’s “generosity”. Fuck you, Nick Clegg.

And of course this measure will raise the costs of anybody who wants to start a new supermarket, which might help explain why major retailers support this fatuous idea. Or maybe they just think this will be good PR.

This proposal illustrates almost everything that is wrong with British politics. You have political parties who think their job is to control the minutiae of everyday life. Judging by the comments the British public and supermarkets are willing to take this abuse. And then you have the fact that this legislation values the lives of animals and the “environment” above the lives of human beings.

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The problems of induction socialist calculation and altruism

September 14, 2013 2 Comments

The problem of induction is a philosophical problem about how knowledge is created. The socialist calculation problem is a problem in economics: it is impossible to do economic calculation without a free market. They may sound very different but they are actually very closely related to one another.

The problem of induction

Philosophers like to think that scientific knowledge is created by a process called induction that involves doing observations, using them to come up with an idea about how the world works and then showing that idea is true or probable with more observations. The problem is that induction is impossible.

Observations don’t imply any particular idea about how the world works. Any such idea implies a lot about stuff we don’t observe. Our best idea about how the sun works implies stuff about the core of the sun, which we can’t observe. Nobody has ever observed a dinosaur, only a dinosaur skeleton, but those theories are not primarily about skeletons. As a result of this it is impossible to invent an idea or to prove it is true or probably true.

In addition, it is impossible to do an observation without having some explanation of what you want to observe and why. So ideas are required for observations and cannot be created by doing observations.

Rather, knowledge is created by a process that does not resemble induction in any important respect. First, you look for problems with your current ideas. A problem is just anything that seems worth changing. You then propose guesses about how to solve these problems. You look for criticisms of the proposed solutions and eliminate criticised solutions until only one is left. You then look for new problems with your new set of ideas.

Note that there is no step of trying to show your ideas are good or probable. This is just not possible because all of your ideas about how to solve your problems are guesses. And since all of your ideas about how to test stuff are solutions to problems, all of them are guesses too. So all of your knowledge is guesswork. It is not confirmed or shown to be true or anything like that. Rather, you try to get rid of bad ideas through criticism. This means, in particular, that all of your ideas may be flawed and you should be willing to reconsider any idea.

Another important issue is that it could hardly be the case that your proposals for how to solve problems could be anything other than guesses. If you knew in advance how to solve a problem, then you wouldn’t have that problem in the first place. Sometimes people make the right guess about a problem the first time they say something about it but that must be a result of them having tried and discarded ideas before they said anything about it.

There is nothing about this discussion that limits its conclusions to science. Any process that creates any kind of knowledge (useful or explanatory information) has to proceed by variation of current knowledge and selection among those variations.

The socialist calculation problem

Socialists like the idea that people who are able to produce should give stuff to people who are not able to produce. This idea is morally bad for reasons I will explain later, but let’s leave that aside for the moment and think about whether you could actually run the world like this.

Let’s consider the problem of whether we should make flour and if so how we should make it, and how we should distribute it. According to socialism we’re supposed to do this by considering need, so let’s try to do that.

Let’s start with somebody who is hungry: let’s call him Jack. If you give Jack a bag of flour he might eat it. How much flour should you give Jack? If you drive a dump truck up to his house with a ton of flour and dump it in his grade, then he might not like that too much. He might not be able to eat it before it starts going off and it might attract vermin. So you should give him less than a ton and he won’t want you to dump it in his garden. But exactly how much should you give him? And how should the flour be packaged?

And the problem is worse than that. Jack might want to use the flour to make bread. So then he needs to have the other ingredients of bread and without those ingredients he might not want the flour at all.

But there is more complexity to come. If you sent the flour to a baker who makes bread and the baker gave Jack the bread, Jack would also eat the bread. So should you give any flour to Jack? Maybe you should just give him bread.

Another problem: whether we give Jack flour directly or give it to the baker to make bread the flour has to be made somewhere. In the place where you make it you can’t make many other things. You can’t have a factory that makes computer chips and a flour factory in the same place.

Indeed, you might even want to start making a factory for a product that doesn’t exist yet. You might have an idea for something you could invent that lots of people would want and maybe you should get some space to make it now.

This is starting to look very complicated. It looks like you have to take into account lots of knowledge you can’t have. Is this starting to sound familiar? Doesn’t it sound a bit like trying to come up with a scientific idea that covers lots of stuff you haven’t seen? If you want to make stuff for other people then you need to have lots of knowledge about how those other people will respond to what you’re doing, which is an emergent consequence of the laws of physics, biology chemistry, epistemology and other stuff. The solution to this problem has to be created by variation and selection of current knowledge.

So let’s suppose you know how to make flour. To make the flour you need certain items, like corn, say. So if you’re going to keep making flour you have to get a new supply of the stuff required to make if you want to continue. Unless the person who wants the flour happens to have exactly what you need to make it then he has to give me something you can exchange for stuff you can use to make flour. Now you might imagine he could give you stuff that a particular person wants if that person could supply the stuff you need to make the flour. But all sorts of things could go wrong with that. The person who makes the stuff I need might decide to do something else instead. Or he might have a change of circumstances that means he needs slightly different stuff. So what is really needed is something that he can exchange with other people to get what he wants. What is needed, in short, is a good that can be exchanged for anything – a medium of exchange. We have a name for that good: it is called money.

If you get more money by selling your flour to a baker than to Jack you can make more flour. If you make more money by making the flour in a different way, or with a different variety of corn or whatever then you can make more flour. You can also do other stuff with the money, like buying yourself food or an iPhone or whatever. So if different ways of making flour seem equally attractive in other respects you can choose among them by how much money they make. So the free market solves economic problems, not socialism.

Just like when we’re creating scientific knowledge, economic knowledge has to be created by looking for problems, guessing solutions, selecting among those solutions and then looking for more problems.

A moral flaw of socialism

To create knowledge you have to find problems. Socialism recommends looking at problems other people have and then trying to solve those problems. This is a bad idea shared by many other ideologies: let’s call it altruism. To solve a problem you have to try to understand it. So if you are trying to solve Jack’s problems then who is going to work on the problems that you know more about than anyone else? Nobody. So those problems won’t be solved.

And since you have to spend all of your time catching up to the other person’s problems, you are going to be interfering in that other person’s life in a ham fisted way.

The problems you should try to solve are the problems you know about, the problems you are interested in. You shouldn’t be trying to solve another person’s problems. You can help other people when cooperating with them helps you to solve your problems but that is very different from making it your aim to solve their problems.

Similar problems arise with many other political and moral ideologies that aim at solving another person’s problems. Some conservatives like to think they can solve the problems of poor people by encouraging them to get married. Some libertarians like to claim they can solve everybody else’s problems. Walter Block claims that Nazis can be libertarians if only they are willing to use persuasion rather than force to get Jews into gas chambers. Walter Block ought to have realised that gross irrationality like wanting to murder Jews is incompatible with liberty but he was paying too much attention to their problems and not enough to problems with his own knowledge.

To create knowledge about science or how to live better or anything else you have to start with problems you know something about: problems you are interested in. You propose solutions to those problems, select among the solutions by looking for criticisms and then look for new problems with the surviving solution.

Further reading

On induction: Realism and the Aim of Science and Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper. The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch.

On the socialist calculation problem: Socialism and Human Action by Ludwig von Mises.

On the moral problems of altruism more generally: Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

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National Slavery Bill

September 10, 2013 Leave a comment

It’s that time of year again when a politician’s fancy turns to thoughts of having a strapping young person forced to do his will. No it’s not another prostitution scandal. If only it were that innocent. Then politicians would only be trying to fuck two people. No, a National Service Slavery Bill has been proposed. I call it a National Slavery Bill because what the bill proposes is that people between 18 and 26 should be forced under threat of prosecution to work at a job the government tells them to do and I refuse to endorse the euphemistic title of this bill. The bill is based on the idea that it is legitimate to use the threat of force to get people to do stuff for you, which is no different in principle than chattel slavery. If a person isn’t free to act on his own judgement that makes him and everyone around him worse off since he can’t tell them to take a hike when they’re doing something wrong. Nor can he do stuff he thinks is right if his owner, i.e. – the British government according to this bill, disagrees with what he wants to do.

So to MP Philip Hollobone who proposed this I say fuck you. Anyone who votes for this bill or seconds it: fuck you too. You should all be expelled from your respective parties and from Parliament.

What is more interesting than the bill itself is the lack of disgust and outrage at the bill. It’s all right to force people to do stuff for a good cause. Your life is not your own but belongs to anyone more pathetic than you. Or it belongs to somebody who is somehow more patriotic than you because he is willing to spit on and trample the British idea of individual liberty. I have only seen a handful of blog entries condemning this bill as the evil piece of filth that it is, and that is a scandal.

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