Right and Righteousness in Utilitarianism

One of the problems in utilitarianism is that the rightness of an action depends solely on the actual consequences of the action, rather than foreseeable or probable consequences of it. This means that a sincere utilitarian may try to increase overall happiness and end up doing the wrong thing, and conversely, someone describable as having a repugnant moral character might "accidentally" increase overall happiness by their actions and so have done the right thing both unknowingly and unwillingly. Given that our actions have repercussions into the far-flung future that are arrived at by long and complex causal-chains, it seems impossible even with hindsight to accurately determine whether an action is right or wrong - and trying to use foresight is even worse.

This problem of utilitarianism whereby the consequences of actions are so complicated that it is seemingly impossible to use utilitarianism as a practical ethical theory can be called the epistemic problem, because it is a problem with our knowledge of the world. It is much like trying to predict the weather far into the future: even if it may be possible in principle to do, it seems unattainable in practice with any modicum of precision.

So, it seems, it is impossible to declare any action to be right or wrong, even what may seems like obvious goods or evils. Only simple, isolated scenarios can even hope to be evaluated by utilitarianism and these only occur in our imaginations. From this it is straightforward to conclude that utilitarianism is perfectly useless in practice.

I disagree, but let me grant that argument for the sake of exploring a concept related to moral rightness which is usually wrongly lumped with it: moral character. Rightness is a concept that applies to actions but not to persons, whereas both persons and actions can be immoral. In English at least this distinction is clear, since describing someone as moral gives them a moral judgement (unsurprisingly) whereas describing someone as right seems to give them a judgement based on the content of their beliefs or assertions.

Utilitarianism gives in itself no grounds for describing the moral character of persons; it is a more conservative theory describing actions. However, our use of language allows us to ask another question: what makes a person good? A utilitarian may say that such a concept is undefined except by saying that a moral person is a person that does good. This seems unsatisfactory, however, because it seems obvious to most that describing the character of a person should have something to do with what they are like as persons, not whether their actions happen to be good (from the vantage point of some omniscient observer who can foresee the consequences of all possible actions in a scenario).

Confining utilitarianism to the description of actions, it can be defined that a moral person is someone who intends to maximise happiness. That is to say, they choose their actions based on what they perceive to be the action that would most increase happiness. Their righteousness, to use an unpopular term, is determined by their intentions and not the actual consequences of their actions.

I contend that this view of moral character is upheld sufficiently by our use of language without the need of further metaethical argumentation. What people mean when they say of someone that their character is good is that they intend to do good. This is illustrated clearly in the fact that people readily ignore that actual consequences of actions when they are suitably convinced that the agent did not intend them to come about.

This allows for one of the most important concepts in ethics: responsibility (and the corollary blame). A person is responsible for the consequences of their actions insofar as they can be reasonably expected to have foreseen them, and not responsible otherwise. Hence, a doctor is responsible for the known effects and side-effects of a drug they administer, but not for whether the life he is saving turns out many years down the line to be a serial killer. Similarly, the serial killer is responsible for the deaths of those they kill, but not responsible for the prevention of a terror attack that may result from their unknowing of a terrorist.

With this in mind, I think shift could be enacted from trying to maximise happiness to attempting to be a moral person. Where other theories have doing right and being righteous as the same thing (notably virtue ethics), utilitarianism may always have a decided tension between these two. Nonetheless, this line of reasoning can still provide the basis for moral function in a practical sense within a community.

Implicit Bias and Scepticism

I listened to a fascinating lecture given by Jennifer Saul at the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the UK which brought up an excellent link between the psychological study of implicit bias (for which she gave numerous examples) and its implications for epistemology, in particular, scepticism. I recommend giving the talk a listen (YouTube link here) because it goes into much greater detail than I will here. I am going to focus on the fascinating link Saul made between the fact that we know we have these ingrained biases with our inability to overcome them by willpower and its implications for knowledge and rational thought.

Saul tentatively defines the term implicit bias as the collection of largely unconscious associations which people are prone to which affect how we perceive and interact with the world. The biases are not quite beliefs, they are not conscious, and yet they affect our thought processes. They are not mitigated by stated beliefs: for instance, the famous African-American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson said:

“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody White and feel relieved.” (citation)

That is implicit bias in action, and the painful experience of Jackson is not only common, it is practically universal. Unlike in Jackson's case, it is almost always sub-conscious. This presents an unfortunate sceptical problem: we have good reason to believe that our faculties are deficient when it comes to decisions that we believe are made rationally.

Jackson's example is one of a feeling produced, but others may bring out the force of the problem more clearly if they highlight how it is our conscious decision making that is affected by these ingrained biases against people of particular races, genders, sexual orientations and so forth. But the research is clear that there are pervasive and insidious cases of discrimination among self-labelled egalitarians who, try as they may to make calm, reflective decisions when choosing between biased options, still tend to make the biased on - whether it be gender, racial or even height discrimination, among countless other features to discriminate upon.

The social problem is clear in that these implicit biases produce stagnant structures of discrimination. However, there is a more philosophical problem that Saul highlights:

"I will be arguing that what we know about implicit biases shows us that we have very good reason to believe that we cannot properly trust our knowledge-seeking faculties. This does not mean that we might be mistaken about everything, or even everything in the external world (so it is weaker than traditional scepticism). But it does mean that we have good reason to believe that we are mistaken about a great deal (so it is stronger than traditional forms of scepticism). A further way in which bias-related doubt is stronger than traditional scepticism: this is doubt that demands action. With traditional scepticism, we feel perfectly fine about setting aside the doubts we have felt when we leave the philosophy seminar room. But with bias-related doubt, we don’t feel fine about this at all. We feel a need to do something to improve our epistemic situation." (citation)

I recommend giving a long and hard think to the paper she delivered (cited just above) because unfortunately, this is not a problem that exists external to us as individuals: the problem is me, the problem is you.

Laws of Nature as Patterns

An old definition of science could be that science is the study of cause and effect in nature. The idea that causality is the central idea in knowledge goes back at least to Aristotle's four cause analysis of the world and in many ways this is what people believe science does today. Instead of directly citing cause and effect, it seems to me that the intermediate notion of the "laws of nature" is interjected; science studies the laws of nature, which are about cause and effect in nature. Simple, right?

I want to propose an alternate idea based on how I view science and in particular, based on how I see modern science handling data. There's a caveat before I begin: as usual, I think much more about the canonical status of physics in science than I do of other equally legitimate branches of natural science. So what I say relates most to physics and (perhaps) the applicability slowly decreases as we move towards more qualitative sciences. Or it might not - my point is that I am making a stronger case for science as most exemplified in the hard, mathematical sciences.

Scientists do experiments and get data. This data is put often into tables or graphs and analysed, whereby models are produced which explain the correlations in the data by causal mechanisms. The model, if it is a good one, will make other predictions which can be tested to see if it is correct, and the more it passes those tests, the more credence it is given. That is the scientific method of observation, hypothesis, testing, conclusion. There are two very similar problems I see with this process: an error in data analysis and a deeper philosophical issue that Hume would have noted.

It is drilled into every data analysis/scientific statistics student that a correlation does not mean a causation and yet this explication of the scientific method clearly makes that jump. The justification is simple: eliminate as many variables as possible and the remaining correlations must be causation. That is simply mistaken and the history of science is rife with examples of deeper explanations being found of natural phenomena which destroyed the previously perceived causal mechanism.

Hume would have heartily agreed with this objection and would defiantly disagree with anyone who tried to maintain that, whilst correlation does not equal causation, a lot of correlation does, in fact, equal causation. His problem was two-fold: the assumption that the correlations of the past will hold in the future is only based on the observation that the correlations of the past have so far held true in the future. But that is circular, since in effect it says that the future is causally equivalent to the past because the past is causally equivalent to the past. But again, Hume had a deeper problem that simply the problem of induction. His biggest reason for scepticism is that causality was not a superficial relation between objects, in fact, we never really perceive causality at all, we perceive effects and infer causation. He called this "customary conjunction", or basically, correlation. For all this scepticism (and Hume unlike others branded with this title really was a sceptic), Hume did still believe in cause and effect, he simply thought it was beyond our knowledge.

I am not sure if I believe in cause and effect, but I propose right now the weaker claim that science does not study it. Science studies data to produce laws of nature which are expressed mathematically because, at bottom, the laws of nature are patterns in observable variables or parameters. In other words, the laws of nature are patterns of numbers that describe nature. Let me give an illustrating idea to stir the intuition of this proposal and consider how this relates to epistemology and the metaphysics of causality (if causality exists at all).

Think of the positive integers: 1, 2, 3, 4, ... They form a nice set whose properties can be analysed to yield fascinating mathematics. Relations can be defined on this set giving it order, taking a pair of numbers to another in the set by multiplication or addition, and so on. The tools of mathematics are about seeing mathematical structure in the integers, seeing what symmetries it might have, trying to see what patterns it has. A simple pattern in the integers is that the numbers are alternating odd, even, odd, even.

What if we tried to apply the tools of old fashioned science to the integers? It would yield fictitious language about causality to something which exists independent of causes: the fact that 2 is even is not caused by the fact that 1 is odd, even though we could conceivably speak of it that way. Many of the properties of the positive integers can be spoken of in terms of causality, but it is a fiction of our language, not a fact about the set itself.

So, I claim, it is in science. Equations like Newton's laws are mathematical statements which should not be thought of in terms of causality but in terms of patterns. It is still possible to make if-then statements: If a force is applied, then an acceleration will occur. That is a statement about what the second law predicts and codifies. It is also important to note that I am not simply saying "science produces equations that have no necessary connection to what really exists." This view is not scientific anti-realism, it is congruent with a critical realism about science.

It is important to dispel the objection that I am merely playing with words and the if-then statements are exactly equivalent to causality statements. But I refer back to the case of mathematics: it seems clear that "if you add one to an odd number you get and even number" is not equivalent to "adding one to an odd number causes an even number." The first is true, and the second uses perverted language to try and express, it seems, the first statement.

The pattern view has several advantages: for starters, it is epistemically conservative and codifies what the science actually shows rather than trying to make it jump over the correlation-causation barrier in the data. It is robust to quibbles over the meaning and nature of causality, in particular, it allows for a less stringent requirement on the necessary conjunction between a state of affairs and its antecedents; the pattern view may allow, once specified, the derivation of if-then statements, but it does not have to. Patterns can in principle be random or ordered.

It also avoids infinite causal regress problems. It seems intuitive to some (though not all) that causal chains must have a beginning (whether the causal series be per se or per accidens as Thomists would distinguish). But it does not seem to be obvious that patterns need to have a beginning: sure, the pattern of odd, even, odd, even in the positive integers has a beginning because it has a first member. But the integers have no first member because they stretch from negative infinity to infinity - and yet they still have the pattern of odd, even, odd, even. What is not definable is whether the first element was odd or even, because there is no first element.

But even if we take the positive integers, it still does not need for there to be something before the first member for the pattern to continue ad infinitum. To ask "what caused the first member of the positive integers" is a senseless question. Similarly, it may very well be the case that nature had a beginning and it is self-contained. The objection that "but it had to have had a cause, science demonstrates that!" is simply not true. The universe could be just like a set which starts at time zero and continues to infinity without  quibbling over whether there was anything at t = -1.

My Theory of Truth and Justification

My views on truth and justification (my epistemology more generally, in fact) has undergone quite a change in recent times. With my apostasy from Catholicism, I stopped having a view I had termed Christian reliabilism (sketch here), and I could have easily just moved from a peculiarly Christian version of it towards a secular form by subtracting truths that were justified on the basis of divine revelation.

Instead, I recently had my interest piqued by a pragmatic theory of truth via the physicist Sean Carroll which says that "we should always act as if A is true" implies that A is true. Whilst I previously held a correspondence theory of truth, I found it hard to justify much knowledge at all because it was difficult to see how I could justifiably access that exterior world to check if truths corresponded. But, as interesting as pragmatism was as an alternative, I strongly disliked how under-determined it was: as far as I could tell, it offered no resources for distinguishing between ontologically distinct but empirically equivalent beliefs. I could also conceive of it having difficulty with "inconvenient truths" and "useful falsehoods." Could they be smuggled in as false or true respectively when it would seem obvious that they are false? Someone who believed that free will did not exist may still hold that it is better to act as if it does, for instance, but that would imply that free will does exist (or technically, "is true").

There is an interesting feature of the definition of truth that pragmatism has which may have consequences I do not currently foresee: it is based on an ought statement. If someone believes strongly in the is-ought gap, then defining that something is true based on what ought to be done/believed is going to be a problem. Or alternatively, one can think of this definition as the beginning of a solution to the is-ought gap's related problems. It is at least conceptually odd, even if true(!), that an ought statement gives a definition of truth. If, like me, you think oughts may imply teleology, then an important question to ask would be: we ought to...if what? We ought to believe A if we want to be come billionaires? Win a Nobel prize? Colonise Mars? Have seventeen children? I would refine the imprecise definition that Carroll suggested he was partial to by adding in something along the lines of "ought to...if we want to make accurate predictions about the world" or perhaps "...of our experience of the world." There is then subsumed into the theory what we originally found to be an important part of the definition of truth, that is, that it has something to do with how the world is.

Pragmatism about truth avoids a substantial amount of scepticism which seems to follow from a correspondence theory of truth, but perhaps one of its most appealing consequences is how you can get shades of truth and falsehood. Whilst something is only true if we ought always to act as if it were true, it is relatively easy to add in provisions about partial truths by saying that they refer to propositions that we should sometimes act as if true. For instance, it is relatively easy on this view to say that classical mechanics is partially true insofar as their is a classical regime in which we should act as if classical physics is true, even though that classical regime is not the most general regime possible.

However, that under-determinism aspect of it jars at me a lot, so eventually I clicked on a compromise: we can have pragmatism as a theory of justification and keep some kind of correspondence as a theory of truth. This would say that a person is justified in believing A if they should always act as if A is true, and yet, A is only actually true if it corresponds to how the world really is. This benefits from avoiding scepticism and explaining how we can have partially justified beliefs without allowing that there are a possibly infinite number of contradictory "truths" which count as true because they are empirically equivalent.

Obviously a lot more refining needs to take place, but I think this understanding of truth, justification and their interplay may even get me out of my most begrudgingly sceptical position: scientific anti-realism. If justification via pragmatism is a reasonable position, then it seems to follow that scientific realism is a reasonable position, and as someone that aspires to work in the natural sciences, that would be great.

David Hume's "An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding" Defending Philosophy

The most recent book I have been reading is an old philosophical classic of the Western tradition, perhaps David Hume's most succinct and readable book. As it is often said, even if Hume was an absolute philosophical lightweight himself, he is credited with bringing none other than Immanuel Kant out of his self-acclaimed "dogmatic slumber," and Kant is probably the single most influential philosopher of the modern era. But Hume was no lightweight and his Inquiry is a pleasure to read for its clarity and charming prose.

Of what I have read so far there are two primary sections and the first section is what concerns me here: his defence of philosophy and the endeavour he is about to embark on. It struck me several times how consonant Hume is with my current mode of thinking in this apologia if only because of how steadfastly his dismisses claims made purely out of alleged common sense. He laments at one point:

It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have the preference above the accurate and the abtruse; and by many will be recommended, not only as more agreeable, but more useful, than the other. (Section I: Of the Different Species of Philosophy)

 But he also is aware of another common variety of philosophy which is in a way the opposite of easy but nonetheless completes the same task of justifying pre-conceptions without rational inquiry:

Here, indeed, lies the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics, that they are not properly a science, but arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these entangling brambles to cover and protect their weakness. (ibid.)

Yet Hume is determined that philosophy does have a place in human thought and he does so in a way that would possibly satisfy even those who today would say that philosophy has lost to science, for Hume considers philosophy to be a mode of thought based on reason rather than a branch of thought. He is part of the old school who would consider the natural sciences to be sub-species of natural philosophy rather than separate disciplines. His defence of philosophy, even if it would lead to all manner of subtlety of idea, has several benefits as far as Hume is concerned and he expresses it thus:

Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy fitted for all persons and all dispositions and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners and gives it the air of science and wisdom. (ibid.)

 His defence of philosophy is a defence of rational thought over intellectual carelessness and complacency. I consider Hume to be quite right in his prizing of rationality above popular superstition, though I think he was overly optimistic: as everyone who has argued with another of quite clearly erroneous opinion has learnt, even accurate and just reasoning fails in the more extreme cases of ignorance and stubbornness in error.