I plan to read it twice before reviewing. A philosophy professor I
was acquainted with once said "read a book once, give it a light read"
("light read" is an interesting concept when applied to some philosophy
books) "and then read it again more seriously". It's a good idea to
take notes, at least on the second reading, I think. Also it can be
better to understand the big picture before trying to make more
detailed arguments.
Here are some criticisms I have of hedonic utilitarianism which
she may address:
1. How do we know what ought to give us pain or pleasure?
a. This is relevant when thinking about artificial superintelligence
(ASI). An ASI programmed to be a hedonist might want to change human
nature so that it is trivially easy to cause us pleasure, and to avoid
giving us pain. We would say "No, I don't want to be a blob of
pleasure", but why not be one?
There's some risk (similar or essentially the same as what a past
version of me said here) that we find
pleasure easy to consent to, and the removal of pain, so there's an
incentive for civilization (including ASI) to drift in the direction
of giving us more and more pleasure, less and less pain, until we
have gradually simplified ourselves into blobs of pleasure. I think
hedonism is not just an explicit philosophical position, but also a
powerful psychological tendency.
Some people might bite the bullet and say "No, being a blob of
pleasure sounds good to me". Who can say what's wrong or right? If it
feels good, it's good. But what if God disagrees? You might look at
your child and hope that they don't get hooked on heroin. Technically,
they're happy when they're on heroin. Maybe technically we're
happy when we're living painless, rich, godless lives, or when we
are blobs of pleasure. But God might disagree.
b. Another point of relevance is when people construct scripts of
what a life is supposed to be. When a life event is "bad" then "you are in
a pity-worthy, deplorable state" -- the script wants you to feel depressed.
Should you feel depressed? Maybe the script comes from other people, and
is there to discourage you from doing things that are unpopular.
2. What about other goods that aren't captured well by hedonism?
a. Pleasure could be bad, if it takes us away from God, or some other
reality. In an upcoming short story about the future of beauty, that
I plan to release relatively soon, you may see a tension between deeper
good and surface good. It may take some pain to have deeper good, and
unbroken pleasure may prevent things like coming to value people apart
from how they or their life realities give a
person pleasure.
b. Pain could be good. Two more easily dismissed examples of this
are found in the concept of purgatory (pain, in itself, purges us of
sin or the guilt of sin) and the phrase "pain is weakness leaving the
body". (Dismissed because you could say "what you really want is improved
strength, or heaven, in the end, and both those states are basically
pleasurable.") A less easily dismissed example is found when we ask
"what if God doesn't care if we suffer, as long as we can bear it
and connect with reality?" In other words, what if there is pain in
heaven after all -- our real reward is God himself, not the pleasure
or freedom from pain he might be able to give us? The pain is good
because it is real, and experiencing it is part of being
receptive to reality. An overall
receptiveness to reality (perhaps) is the only way to really connect
with God.
c. I am adding this section in later in the editing process, and
don't want to make this point long so that it gives me yet more to
edit, but basically I can mention fiducialism as a replacement for hedonism.
3. Why should we think that "ought" has anything to do with our
feelings, or even our judgments?
a. Maybe "ought" is more like "I want something to be a certain way
(if it's not that way), or that want is satisfied by that thing being
that certain way (if it is), and that exact wanting is something that
deserves to be true". (I suspect that it's hard to define "deserves"
without basically using "ought" -- circularity. Maybe "ought" is a
primitive of language and psychology?) Someone who ought to be able to
define things is the one who can define things, and can say "pain
is not necessarily bad, and pleasure is not necessarily good".
The athlete who says "pain is weakness leaving the body", or the
believer who says "I will accept this bitter cup" are basically exercising
their ability to claim that some thing ought to be. To say that
something that is, ought to be, is something that in a sense no one
can argue with. But maybe some persons can even say that what is
ought not to be? So in this way, good and bad come out of our taste,
more so than out of our pure experience. (Out of opinion rather than
feeling.) Maybe pain biases us to call it bad. But we don't have
to -- we can see through that sometimes.
b. It could be that it seems like hedonism is a real view of things,
that pleasure ought to be and pain ought not to be, because these
are popular judgments. (One way to cash out the popular defining of human well-being.) (You could
also say that this is why preferentialism seems to be a real view,
because of course everyone likes preferences.) These might seem
to be real things, because of our humanism. But why should real
"ought" have anything to do with human judgments? You could say
that human judgments do have something to do with it, if what
we're exploring is "our strongest moral convictions" rather than
something outside that. (Rawlette, p. 3: "The version of realism
I present actually provides a robust metaethical justification for
many of our strongest moral convictions."). But what do our
strongest moral convictions have to do with real "ought"? If
there is a God (in this case, in the sense of a most-authoritative
being), then we might hope to be in line with his preferences, or
perhaps rather with his truth, which is similar to preference
but which is unlike ours for some kind of lack of "falsehood" (we call
both self-justifiying explanations and lies "B.S.") or lack of
partiality. If there is no God, then how are "our strongest moral
convictions" anything other than "what is popular in a certain way"?
(I mean this both as a rhetorical and a real question, if that makes
sense.) And then I'm not sure that Rawlette's project is really realist
after all. Her ultimate criterion is (may be? not sure yet) "our strongest
moral convictions", not any objective truth. In other words, realism
is supposedly about some grounding in reality through an argument of
justification, while antirealism doesn't bother with that. "Our
strongest moral convictions" sounds like the same criterion moral
antirealists would use. Why not just observe the criterion, rather
than adding some conceptual layer, some kind of logical
justification? Unless, what we are doing (with both realist and
antirealist ethics) is bending the criterion, democratically, by
presenting an argument that sounds (and in a sense, is) logical,
and is thus persuasive in shifting "our strongest moral convictions"?
If you want to change other people's values to be like yours, you
use logic, even if the real foundation of values is just values
-- we can be dazzled by logic.
Or maybe she really could be a moral realist (the appeal to
strongest moral convictions doesn't rule that out), one who just
says "our strongest moral convictions are real and we should
act on them", as opposed to the antirealist, who says "our
strongest moral convictions are fictions and we should act
on them". (I think I do not yet understand moral realism vs.
antirealism, especially moral antirealism, and hope the book will
help me understand.) Can you act on something as much as you should if
you don't feel it is real? Maybe that's the essence of Rawlette's
project, to say "No, so since we know we ought to act on certain
things, we need to figure out a way to see them as real". I
know that there is a kind of quixotic task that philosophers take
up (and scientists, I think), which is the search for truth but
which is actually really wanting something to be true and figuring
out a way to find out that it is true (if possible). If it's
true that we just know that certain things are good, and we
have to change our perspective on reality so as to fully
pursue those goods, then maybe reality is most deeply known
not by whatever science or philosophy says, but in those
things we know we have to think are good, and have to pursue
as good. We want things to be true, but in a way, that could
be that they just are true.
Or maybe Rawlette would be willing to say "No, those deep
things aren't true since they don't line up with philosophy"
-- philosophy is the real authority after all -- but doesn't
happen to have to say that because of the book she wrote,
showing how they do line up.
(If "our strongest moral convictions" can be modified with
rhetorical or logical force, then does it become "what is right
is what psychologically strong, motivated people reprogram
people to see as right"? -- something that the coming powers of
AI and genetic engineering can intensify. So then such convictions
might not be some kind of immutable standard.)
One could say that the deep things, and hedonic utilitarianism,
are two different aspects of the same being, the latter being
the former's expression in the world of ethical philosophy.
That doesn't feel intuitively correct to me, though. I could
see maybe fiducial
utilitarianism getting closer to that function than
hedonic utilitarianism, but even that doesn't feel right. Maybe
because ethical philosophy itself is a such a strange shard.
Still, we are left with "should it be true that deep human
convictions are reliable judges or creators of 'ought'?" -- a
philosophical question. And philosophy, as a whole, the general
pursuit, has some grounding in deep human convictions, comes from
the outworking of them. We might wonder if philosophy suggests
that we should consider God's point of view, either that God
shares our convictions, or that his differ from ours and that we
should align ourselves with his -- in other words, it's ultimately
his convictions as the founder of reality (or as
most-authoritative for some other reason than founding things)
that are truth, while ours are feelings or opinions.
c. I mentioned "truth" in the previous section. We might
say that truth is inherently something that is indifferent to
popularity. In fact, Rawlette's project is to use truth to change
people's minds (fellow philosophers who are moral antirealists,
for instance). So why shouldn't "ought" be indifferent to
popularity as well? Ought could be a form of truth.
d. Some of the above might boil down to: "we want truth,
independent of popularity -- does it come from God, or from
qualia?" I would want to defend "God", and Rawlette "qualia" or
something in the neighborhood of "qualia". I would say
"if ought is -- and I think it has to be -- then it is an
opinion", while Rawlette might say "if ought is, then it is
a feeling" -- not "we know it through feelings", because then
what is it in itself if not an opinion? (Mostly not a
rhetorical question.)
--
One thing I am thinking of addressing in the review (maybe
more than I am about to here), is the question of "What does this
matter?" Certainly the truth matters in itself. But how much
money can we devote to understanding the truth? Is there a way
that an altruist could benefit from a book like Rawlette's?
As an (amateur) philosopher myself, I share the dilemma of
Rawlette (as I currently guess it to be, not having yet read her
book). I want to get some truth that makes a difference in
the world. But the expression of that truth, in the way I know
how to express it, is only going to be heard by philosophically-inclined
people -- maybe not a lot of them, only some of whom will change
what they do as a result. A project like Rawlette's (which, I see
from p. 1, involves the term "motivational structure", a term I
also use) might hope to
get people to feel and thus behave differently -- maybe causing
a release of cultural energy to cause more work or more deeply
felt caring (or the metaphor might be one of putting people to
work to build up cultural structures and institutions of caring).
But are philosophers or the philosophically-inclined the right
people to try to motivate to care more and work harder? Or is
it better to speak to people in general, there being so many
more of them?
Francis Schaeffer was disheartened at how philosophy trickled
down to the masses. But to me it seems like philosophy may not
have much potential to undo the undermining of moral realism (part
of what Schaeffer lamented) through the same process. That is, it
doesn't seem as clear to me that philosophy trickles down to the
average person, the way it used to in Schaeffer's day. I hope to
be proved (or help prove myself) wrong some day, in some way, but
it seems to me that the default assumption is that philosophy is a
game for philosophers, and few others pay attention. Schaeffer
thought that the artists could communicate philosophy-derived
truths, but it seems to me that most artists are either roughly as
obscure as philosophers, or not concerned with philosophy
themselves. And what can art do that is fresh? Where are the new
philosophies that are different from all the old ones that have
already influenced art? Again, I can hope that somehow I could find
or create ideas or approaches to things that are fresh, in some way,
which inspire artists (or myself) to create
philosophically-informed art. But my default assumption remains
that philosophy doesn't affect the average person, that there
isn't a trickling-down through art into the average person's culture.
(Maybe a counterpoint is: nihilism as evinced in recent TV.)
While I might hope to someday, somehow, reach average people
with philosophically-derived ideas or spirits, I can see right
now a group of people who take philosophy seriously, and perhaps
would take Rawlette's philosophy seriously, who put philosophy
into action, or at least generally aspire to. These are the
effective altruists (EAs). Would effective altruists be the kind of
people who need to be motivated to work harder and care more?
Maybe some of them? There's a term they use: "value drift",
the way that a person's priorities change and they no longer
work as hard for the cause, save as much money to give, etc.
Could something like Rawlette's philosophy, a bolsterer of
motivational structure, be something that could prevent value
drift in some individuals? It sounds plausible. The effective
altruists are already aware of the possibility of being moral
realists. (Many of them already are.) Maybe her book would
cause some of those who are moral antirealists to become moral
realists, causing them to stick with their first love.
Would it be possible to cause people on the margins of effective
altruist ideology to shift into being effective altruists, or EA-aligned?
For instance, a moral antirealist might think "Yeah, giving money
to help people is good... I should do that... but, then, morality
is kind of a social construct, right? Yeah, whatever." and not do
it. This person being driven by self-interest and logic, if they had
better beliefs, they might say "Giving money to help people is good...
and what is good really is good... I should do that..." and do it. A very
self-interested person might shy away from accepting what Rawlette
said in the first place, or use some kind of self-deception in order
to both hold Rawlette's views and not act on them. They would not
be on the margin of EA-aligned behavior. But there might be a lot
of people who are on the margin, who can be philosophically literate, or
are as much as EAs are, who just haven't heard of Rawlette's argument.
They might even have heard the EAs' pitch (Singer's Drowning Child
Argument, perhaps), and yet vitiated it with moral antirealism. But an
effective argument for moral realism might make a difference. One would
think that EAs would be looking for new ideologies to prevent value drift
and aid in recruiting people from social spaces adjacent to them.
From a few months' reading of the EA Forum, I don't get the impression
that this is something they seriously pursue to a great extent. (I might
be wrong -- but something that was a particularly burning issue, I wouldn't
have missed.) This might be because they know better than to be into
ideology (it's something they're past, as individuals, and something they
don't expect enough people to really be changed by), or it might be that
many EAs are not really into human resource questions, and this is
essentially a human resource question -- or some other reason.
I remember a philosophy professor saying something like "people
aren't bad, it's just that the system is bad". So maybe Rawlette
can't do much good, since everyone is already moral and good,
and we're just in horribly ill-coordinated systems. I hope to
discuss this in the future at some point, show a way that
if you really care, you can do something about systemic problems,
so as to provide benefit from improved motivational structures.
(This already has some other ideas that
might apply.) I have (and I think Rawlette may possibly also have)
the sense that it is required of us to do what is best, not just a
socially-acceptable half-effort. It is wrong of us to not be
heroes or "anointed ones", at whatever scale we can and should be.
Perhaps that is a message which could resonate with the average
person. In other words, with the right support beliefs and ideas,
Rawlette's may be able to function as one might intend them to.
One thing I don't know from not having read Rawlette's book
yet is how possible it is to convert her book into a form which
can be adopted by people who don't read academic philosophy.
