Yay for pidgin philosophy!
(I don't believe "pidgin" really works here, but I don't know a better word for relatively-uninformed but sincerely interested vaguely philosophical questions.)
So, here are three questions that I think are interesting:
1) An oldie but a goodie: Would you rather be friends with A) A guy who got drunk in high school, drove home, and killed somebody (due to his drinking.) or B) A guy who had very good reason to believe that person C was a bad person (rapist, murderer, etc.) Guy B believes that C will never be brought to justice, so he follows C home and murders him. I would be tempted to go for B, but it's a hard question (I think).
2) Assuming we live in a purely naturalistic world, is it possible to waste your life?
3) Let's just assume that (again) we live in a naturalistic world and that utilitarianism is basically right. (I understand utilitarianism to be, at its core, the idea that it is morally good to increase the amount of happiness in the world.) I don't know anything about brain chemistry really, but I think that for our purposes, we can imagine that happiness is nicely correlated with the amount of chemical H in the brain. It seems clear that there is nothing especially "happy" about the mythical chemical H. Rather, it is simply the way that chemical H is interpreted by our brains that makes it the "happy" chemical. It also seems possible that other animals may have a similar but different chemical that makes them happy. (Dogs have Dh, cats have Ch, etc.) So, the specific chemical has nothing to do with happiness, really. Rather, any chemical, properly interpreted, could promote happiness in the utiliarian sense. So, could we write this into a computer program? Could we define simulated creatures that interpret the value of a certain variable (Vh) as happiness? Would it be morally good to have a basement full of computers quitely humming away and driving up the happiness of a million simple agents? Boy, it doesn't seem like it, but I haven't thought of any good argument beyond knee-jerk "that sounds silly."
Any thoughts?
posted by Nate at 7:28 PM
7 Comments:
Equally pidgin reactions:
1)Here's a twist: are there any unforgivable acts? That is, acts that are so morally repugnant that they leave a permanent stain on one's life. If not, then the question itself seems misguided--as long as, in the here and now, the guy meets your criteria for friendship, he could be your friend, no matter what he did in high school. If there are unforgiveable acts--then why? Persons can do bad things, and cultivate tendencies to do bad things, but beyond this, is there is any sort of abstract, metaphysical way in which people are either "good" or "bad"? The idea that there is seems to me the residue of religious thinking--souls, karma, and spooky stuff like that. As an avowed naturalist, your thoughts on the matter would be welcomed.
2. Take away the assumption and its still a toughy. I don't know if the assumption makes it more or less of a toughy.
3. Point of order: your "knee-jerk" intuition that the happy-computer scenario you described sounds silly doesn't seem as poor an argumentative move as you let on. It could be a simple reductio ad absurdum. Like this, maybe:
U=Utilitarianism is true
Assume U
If U, then creating the happy computer scenario could be morally good (actually, obligatory!)
But that would be silly
So utilitarianism is false.
Assuming that the "If..then" clause is true, then comes down to which intuition is stronger: that the scenario is silly, or that utilitarianism is true. My guess is that the latter gives way, and has to be reformulated or outright rejected. Utilitarianism is really demanding, after all. It leaves no room for supererogation (going beyond the call of duty). The only way to do whats right is to maximize the good.
Goddamit, it's 1:17 am.
-Charles Thickens
10:18 PM
Prof. Thickens, it's good to hear from you! Are you going home for Thanksgiving? When are you going home for Christmas?
Anyway:
1) I think the concept of a forgivable/unforgivable-in-the-general-sense is really not a sensical idea. You can only be (un)forgiven by people whom you wronged. Thus there are people who have wronged me with actions that are unforgivable by me (there's not really, but there could be), but I don't think it even makes sense to describe actions as objectively forgivable or not. I guess the main arguments against being friends with a killer are
A) Presumably someone who has already tasted blood, so to speak, is more likely to kill again in the future. Thus, you are endangering yourself and others by being aroudn the killer. Of course, the exact details of the killing play a large part in determining the plausibility of future violence.
B) Befriending killers takes away some of the negative aspects of being a killer (namely social ostracization) and thereby may lead to more killings in the future (either by the killer or others who perceive killing to have reduced negative consequences.) I have no idea how much effect this second argument really has. It's tough to imagine pro/con weighing in the mind of someone contemplating murder. Happily, the actual rate of murder is low enough that the "Can I befriend a murderer?" question doesn't come up that often. If you extend it to rapists, shitheads, et. al., however, it can come up a disconcerting amount of time. I'm afraid that for myself (and others, I assume) principle takes a back seat to how much I like the person. I'm much more willing to forgive faults in my friends than in others. I don't know if this is good or bad, but I really don't see it changing.
2) It seems like if you allow for a God that has a plan for everyone, then you can pretty simply define a wasted life as a life where you didn't perform the plan you were meant to. (This, of course, brings up the question of why an all-knowing, future-seeing God has unrealistically high expectations for you, but that's a different question.)
3) Yeah, good call on this one. It's like a proof-by-contradiction. "Assume utilitarianism is totally right. Therefore, you're encouraged, nay, morally obligated, to simulate populations of orgasmically happy creatures. That's a stupid idea. Therefore, utilitarianism isn't right." I really like utilitarianism, but it doesn't seem to hold up well in the borderlands. The computer program seems obviously dumb, as does killing the village or whatever to save all humans from a bad case of the hiccups. On day to day stuff, though, utilitarianism seems like a really good idea and JSM was definitely a badass. Maybe it's like Newtonian physics or something, it works for 99% of the stuff you actually use it for.
7:14 PM
As for my coming home plans:
yay on Christmas, nay on Thanksgiving
CT
PS I just posted a response to your comments but it isnt showing up. If it doesnt show up, I'm not going to repost it--at least not now. Basically i agree with everything you said, and I tried to explain myself more clearly.
9:23 PM
My last final is Dec. 15th; I'll probably fly home the 16th.
Our hometowns being an hour or less away from each other, we should certainly arrange a meeting during the holiday season.
Only 52 more shoplifting days until Kwanzaa. Make the most of them.
CT
9:55 PM
Hey man, sounds great. Sorry if the thing lost your post. It's so disheartening to have to retype things in again.
Anyway, I should be getting home the 12ish? Before you do at any rate. I'd like to return to Avalon on a huge floating cloud, and I see that their finals are completed on the 16th. What would you think of a triumphant 16th, 17th, 18thish return?
5:12 AM
Here's the gist of the lost post:
Your arguments (A) and (B) seem to be pretty good empirical rules of thumb. But predicting future behavior is of course an inexact science, and in my response I was leaving this sort of speculation off to the side in order to focus in on (what seems to me) the more fundamental question, namely, which sort of act feels more intrinsically wrong. I was trying to make the point that no matter which is worse, it seems that weird that either would in itself disqualify a person for future friendship (assuming the person had fully atoned, rehabilitated, etc). I think my response would have been more interesting if the initial choice was between, say, an unjustified killer and a rapist. Before deciding which you would least like to be friends with, there is this threshold concern that the question assumes (perhaps falsely) that some acts are disqualifying for future friendship (or "unforgiveable",as I misleadingly used the term).
If the question were simply "which person's act is worse", then this whole discussion is moot. But this question seems to invite the inference that, because A's or B's act is worse, he or she is more or less eligible for future friendship. If we take out all the empirical speculation discussed above, I find this inference at least questionable. (Note: if the question really is empirical at its heart--i.e. which sort of person is more likely to perform well as a friend--then again, my discussion here is basically moot.)
Time for dinner.
CT
3:36 PM
Earlier I posted a stolen joke: "only 52 more shoplifting days until Kwanzaa". I can't remember where I read it, but it struck me as basically just kind of absurd and mildly amusing. Only now do I realize the possible racist implication, i.e. that black people celebrate Kwanzaa and are more likely to steal their gifts. I hadn't thought of that at all when I posted it, but just in case I ever get nominated to the Supreme Court and some intern has to comb the blogosphere in search of CT postings, let the Senate Judiciary Committee be assured that I was just proferring some harmless absurdity and that I never even smoked pot (successfully).
CT
10:49 PM
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