Thoughts on Wild-Animal Suffering

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effective altruism, ozy blog post, world's worst vegan

[All views are my own and are not those of my employer.]

I think that animals matter morally, and I think that wild animals matter as much as domestic animals do. These are pretty controversial statements, but they’d take many blog posts to address, so I’m mostly going to be talking to an audience that agrees with me about both points.

One common objection I want to examine a little more closely is the “naturalness” objection– that it is ill-advised to interfere with the natural order of things, perhaps because there may be consequences that you are not capable of foreseeing. It’s true that interactions with nature often have unforeseen consequences. If you let your fertilizer run off into a lake, snails will have more to eat; the snails are a secondary host for a parasite that infects frogs; the parasite causes leg deformities in frogs. You wouldn’t guess that one of the consequences of fertilizing your crops is deformed frogs, but in reality it is.

The problem with this objection is that all landscapes are touched by humanity. The heaths of Scotland are a product of human intervention going back thousands of years. Human beings in the Pleistocene played a vitally important role (along with climate change) in the extinction of megafauna such as the mammoth. To get these ecosystems to return to an untouched state, one would have to wind back the clock not decades but millennia.

Furthermore, today in the United States, if something is untouched wilderness, it’s untouched wilderness because someone decided that that particular tract of land needed to be untouched wilderness and another tract over there could be safely transformed into condominiums. Natural parks and reserves are usually managed to allow outdoor recreation like hunting, fishing, wildlife photography, and hiking; national forests often allow logging and livestock grazing. And of course all areas– not matter how untouched– are affected by climate change, pollution, and other global changes that humans have wrought.

There just isn’t a natural wilderness unaffected by humans. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t make sense to argue about whether it would be a good idea to leave untouched wilderness alone, because there isn’t any. Because of our power, humans are already the stewards of nature. The only question is whether we will care about our charges’ happiness or neglect them. And the same management principles that are used to handle things like eutrophication can be used to handle issues of wild-animal suffering as well.

Unlike many anti-wild-animal-suffering advocates, I currently do not support destroying habitat. Partially, this is because I am not sure whether I care about insects. If you think insects are sufficiently morally important, there is an open-and-shut case for habitat destruction, because insect lives suck a lot and they are too tiny and numerous to manage. Since I have a high degree of uncertainty about whether they matter at all, and I wouldn’t care about them very much even if they did matter, I don’t view this as an open-and-shut argument.

I am very uncertain about the quality of life of the average wild bird or mammal. On one hand, they typically experience disease, fear, stress, and a painful death. On the other hand, they get a lot of opportunities to explore, play, engage in social interaction, and perform natural behaviors. I don’t think anyone really knows for certain; it’s simply not been studied enough. I’m also uncertain about the quality of life of the average bird or mammal, given predator removal, addition of food during winters or famines, population management through contraceptives or pain-minimizing hunting, vaccination programs, etc. With an ecologically informed, humane management strategy, is it possible to make wild animal lives worth living in a cost-effective way? I’m not sure.

Humans get a lot of benefits from the continued existence of wild ecosystems, ranging from wild food to climate regulation to their aesthetic value. These benefits disproportionately affect the global poor, who are more likely to eat bushmeat, more likely to be victims of climate change, and who get to look at nature like all the time. I am concerned that habitat destruction will cause grave harm to human beings. (This is a really good paper about the economic and well-being consequences of environmental damage, and I encourage interested people to read it.)

I am concerned about the effects of habitat destruction on currently existing animals. Habitat destruction often hurts the animals that live in the habitat: being burned alive because someone is doing slash-and-burn agriculture on your forest is not a pleasant death. Among animals who live in new, smaller habitats, there are edge effects, which are often harmful to the animal: for instance, edge effects increase the risk of fires in the Amazon rainforest, and they can also make animals more vulnerable to predation.

It is difficult to undestroy a habitat: once a species is extinct, it’s gone; a sufficiently small species will often go extinct even if conservation efforts are made to preserve it; destroying a habitat may involve physical changes that are difficult to reverse; many habitats are a product of decades if not centuries of succession which would have to be repeated. For this reason, I feel it is best to err on the side of not destroying habitat.

I think that in the long term the right attitude for anti-wild-animal-suffering advocates is something like conservation biology. Conservation biology successfully shifted US land management policy from “we care about things that benefit humans, like timber and hunting” to “we care about things that benefit humans AND biodiversity.” I think the end game for anti-wild-animal-suffering advocacy is to shift it to “we care about things that benefit humans AND biodiversity AND the wellbeing of the animals under our care.”

I think this might be the least difficult sell from a public-relations perspective. I think it triggers the whole “leave nature alone” intuition less if we advocate for the well-being of animals to be considered as part of land management, that is, in decisions about nature that humans are already making. I also think that this might enable us to ally more closely with hunters. Assuming that a hunter’s bullet is one of the least painful ways to die (which is not always true, but often is), anti-wild-animal-suffering advocates should promote a massive increase in hunting. Hunters also support some policies, such as providing supplemental food during winters, which conservationists typically disapprove of and which anti-wild-animal-suffering advocates might like.

I also think it might be one of the most effective ways of using activist dollars to help wild animals without destroying habitat, because we’d be focusing on changing the way that the US government spends its money. A single lobbying dollar can influence many more dollars of US government spending.

I have only looked into the history of conservation biology a little bit, but I think one of the key points of their success is combining activist energy with mainstream academic credibility. Conservation biology, in its early days, had many tenured professors whose research had had a lot of influence on the science of ecology, such as E. O. Wilson. Anti-wild-animal-suffering advocacy is distinctly lacking in academic credibility; the few academics interested in it are usually in unrelated fields like economics (Tyler Cowen, Yew-Kwang Ng) or philosophy (Oscar Horta). This is not only a problem for our ability to influence policymakers but also for our ability to understand what we want to influence them to do, which would probably involve a lot of careful ecological research that simply isn’t being performed.

Unfortunately, it may be more difficult to get biologists to be interested in animal welfare than it is in biodiversity, because the loss of biodiversity is a direct threat to the thing they’re studying. Nevertheless, I think that outreach to academic biologists is quite important. I also suggest that students who care about wild animal suffering and have an interest in biology strongly consider a career as an academic biologist specializing in wild-animal welfare.

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On Pro-Choice Veganism

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ozy blog post, pregnancy cw, world's worst vegan

[This post was suggested by my Patreon backer Ryan (yes, the same Ryan– this is how random number generators work, people). A random backer at the $5/month or more level is selected each month to suggest a post or story.]

Many people care about animal welfare: that is, they might stop eating meat or donate to charities which campaign for cage-free eggs, because they care about creatures that are generally less intelligent than humans. However, a lot of people who support animal welfare are pro-choice: they think it should be legal to kill fetuses, often because fetuses are less intelligent than born humans and thus matter less. That seems sort of strange.

I think there are three ways to harmonize pro-choice and pro-animal-welfare beliefs.

First, young fetuses are probably significantly less morally relevant than chickens or even crickets. A systemic review suggests that fetuses certainly cannot feel pain before 23 weeks, because their thalamocortical fibers have not developed yet, and evidence from electroencephalography suggests that they probably cannot feel pain before 30 weeks. Conversely, there is no scientific consensus on whether insects feel pain, and chickens certainly do experience pain. Pain matters not just because it’s a pretty significant source of disutility but because it’s relatively simple. If a fetus has not developed the ability to feel pain, it probably hasn’t developed other morally relevant capacities either, most of which are probably more complicated than feeling pain and would thus take longer to develop. 88% of abortions occur during the first trimester, which is well before the fetus has developed its capability to feel pain. Only a tiny percentage of abortions occur with a morally relevant fetus, and a much smaller percentage are for reasons other than life or health of the pregnant person or severe disability of the fetus, which most people think are okay reasons to abort.

Second, most consequentialist vegetarianisms are not about the right to life per se but instead about suffering. Many vegetarians believe it is okay to kill animals, but not okay to allow them to suffer. However, broiler chickens do not have lives that are worth living; therefore, one should avoid eating them in order to not create an incentive to create more broiler chickens. Fetuses, conversely, probably have pretty okay lives: they’re in a warm and safe environment, they are adequately fed, they generally don’t suffer from many diseases and they can enjoy pleasurable activities like listening to their parents’ voices, thumb-sucking, and masturbation. The only painful thing an aborted fetus is likely to experience is its death. Of course, given how short a fetus’s life is, its death makes up a pretty significant percentage of its life. However, it is possible to eliminate even this suffering. Fetal anesthesia has been developed, and laws in some states require its use during abortion, although usually far before the fetus is actually capable of feeling pain. It seems wise to me to require anesthesia to be used in third-trimester abortions (which, again, are a tiny percentage of abortions), assuming that there is no health risk to the pregnant person in doing so. Given that most third-trimester abortions are of wanted children, routine use of anesthetic may even provide some comfort to the mother.

Third, most vegetarians are not advocating for making meat illegal. We even think it’s okay to eat meat in certain serious situations: for instance, if you have an eating disorder triggered by vegetarianism, your diet is very limited due to a physical health condition, or you are averse to eating essentially all plant matter and if you became vegetarian you would wind up living on white bread and Skittles. And we certainly wouldn’t want to have a doctor or government board who’s in charge of deciding whether or not someone’s situation is grave enough to allow them to eat meat; that’s something the individual should decide for themselves. Even many vegetarians who believe that animals have a right to life believe that that right can be overridden by the welfare of a human being.

Imagine adopting a similar attitude towards fetuses. You don’t want abortion to be illegal. You think abortion is okay in certain serious situations: for instance, if you have a health condition aggravated by pregnancy, you’re carrying your rapist’s child, or you’re phobic of pregnancy. And you certainly wouldn’t want to have a doctor or a government board who’s in charge of deciding whether or not someone’s situation is grave enough to allow them to abort; that’s something the individual should decide for themselves.

Congratulations, you’re pro-choice! Certainly you have a complex and not unambiguous relationship with abortion, but so do many pro-choice people.

Of course, you might want to take steps to reduce abortion. For instance, one might want to make long-acting reversible contraception easier to access, so that people have fewer unintended pregnancies. One might want to accommodate parents better (both through government and workplace policy and through social support for parents), so that fewer people have abortions due to financial difficulties or the inability to be a single parent. One might ensure that birth parents have access to appropriate mental health support after their adoption and that open adoptions are legally enforceable, so that the grief of giving up one’s child for adoption can be minimized.

What you definitely don’t want to do is make abortion more difficult to get, because that means that pregnant people will get abortions later. The older a fetus is, the more likely that it is morally relevant. Thus, the entire strategy of the pro-life movement is unacceptable to a consequentialist who believes fetuses have a right to life.

You Don’t Have To Be A Utilitarian To Be An EA

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ozy blog post, utilitarianism it works bitches

Effective altruism is a question.

The question that it is is something along the lines of “how can I do the most good with the resources that are available to me?” Of course, that’s not precisely accurate, because that question elides certain assumptions that effective altruism makes about how you define ‘the most good’. Effective altruism does not permit religious arguments about what the Good is; effective altruism judges the goodness of an action by whether our actions reduce bad things or increase good things; effective altruism does not care about people in one’s home country or that one is related to more than the global poor.

And, of course, defining effective altruism as a question does not mean that all effective altruists approach effective altruism with a spirit of curiosity and non-attachment, ready to go where the winds of evidence blow them. Most humans are quite ideological. Effective altruism being a question is something that can only be approached as an ideal, not something that we can assume we’ve embodied.

But nevertheless effective altruism is, at its core, a question.

I see no reason that only utilitarians should be interested in the answer to this question.

I expect most effective altruists actually agree with me here. After all, according to the latest EA survey, 56% of EAs are utilitarians, which implies that 44% of EAs are not utilitarians. (I could probably just post that and this post would be done, but eh. I like hearing myself talk.) In my personal experience, it’s hard to spend much time as an effective altruist without noticing the many valuable contributions from people who aren’t utilitarians, some of whom may wish to out themselves in the comments. This post is primarily directed at people who are interested in effective altruism but feel reluctant to join in because they don’t agree with utilitarianism, as well as tiresome people who think that the demandingness objection to utilitarianism somehow means effective altruism is bad and terrible.

Of course, there’s a very obvious reason that effective altruists and utilitarians are conflated. The two groups are closely related. After all, most people who could be considered ‘founders’ of effective altruism are utilitarians, and the earliest person who said proto-effective-altruist ideas was Peter Singer, a utilitarian philosopher who wrote a famous paper arguing that it is morally required to devote all of one’s resources to helping the poor.

However, there is actually no requirement that effective altruists agree with Peter Singer about everything. Effective altruists may disagree with Peter Singer about many questions, such as “is it morally permitted to murder babies?”, “how many severely disabled people have lives worth living?”, “should we care about animals?” and “is AI a serious concern that may wipe out humanity within the next few hundred years?” I see no reason that we can’t include normative ethics on the list of things that effective altruists may be permitted to disagree with Peter Singer about.

It’s true that a lot of effective altruists argue for effective altruism from a utilitarian viewpoint. This is quite natural. A lot of effective altruists are utilitarians. And an intellectually honest utilitarian in the modern world pretty much has to be an effective altruist. But there is a distinction between “utilitarianism is commonly used to argue in favor of effective altruism” and “all effective altruists are utilitarians and effective altruism is an inherently utilitarian endeavor.” Christianity is commonly used to argue in favor of giving to charity, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who donates to charity is a Christian.

I have a personal interest in this topic. I myself can’t do universalizing morality. I don’t like it when beings suffer and I want them to suffer less, in much the same sense that I don’t like it when I wind up waiting in long lines at the Social Security Administration and I want to do that less. While I am close enough to being a utilitarian that I tend to round myself off to one, I tend to part from utilitarians when they start going on about moral obligations and drowning children and so on; I consider “I want to spend this much of my resources on altruism and no more” to be a perfectly good reason to spend that amount of resources on altruism. So I have a natural interest in the subject of being an effective altruist without fully buying into utilitarianism.

And I don’t think I’m the only one. Off the top of my head, here are some people who are not utilitarians and who might be interested in the question of effective altruism: A virtue ethicist cultivating the virtue of compassion. A deontologist doing supererogatory good deeds. An ethical egoist who knows that the warmfuzzies of truly helping someone is the best way to improve her own personal happiness. A Christian who knows that what we do unto the least of these we do unto him. A Jewish person who is performing tikkun olam. A Buddhist practicing loving-kindness. Someone who cares about fairness and doesn’t think it’s fair that they have so much when others have so little. A basically normal person who feels sad about how much suffering there is in the world and wants to help.

Even more people might be interested in bits and pieces of the effective altruist project, even if they aren’t interested in the whole thing. A purely self-interested person has an obvious reason to be concerned about existential risk; someone who cares primarily about freedom might be interested in the best ways to help animals in factory farms.

Now, some of the people I named might choke on some of the effective altruist assumptions I listed: a religious person might object to the secularism, while a virtue ethicist might feel she has a particular duty to those closest to her. Certainly, the particular assumptions that effective altruism has are probably related to it being founded by a bunch of utilitarians. It would have different assumptions if it were founded by a bunch of deontologists.

I agree that we should be wary of effective altruism changing its assumptions. If deontologists wish to have a movement about being the best deontologist you can be, they must start their own movement and not piggyback on ours. I would be concerned if more than, say, ten percent of the effective altruist movement was self-interested people who are concerned about existential risk, freedom-lovers who are worried about factory farms, people who feel they have a special duty to those close to them but who don’t care literally zero percent about Africans, and other people who are not on board with the effective altruist project as a whole. It’s important to balance the contributions from talented allies with the risk of values drift.

But I don’t think everyone who isn’t a utilitarian poses a risk of values drift. Lots of religious people are, in fact, fully capable of compartmentalizing and using secular reasoning in secular contexts. Most non-consequentialists agree that good things are better than bad things and their non-consequentialism mostly comes up in contexts unrelated to effective altruism: after all, Give Directly very rarely involves either lying to Nazis or making decisions about whether a trolley should run over one person or five people.

To be clear: an effective altruist must be on board with the effective altruist project. I do not suggest outreach to people who think proximity is a morally important trait, the consequences of one’s actions are completely irrelevant, or we can find the optimal charity through clever use of the Bible Code. I just suggest that people who aren’t utilitarians can also be on board with the effective altruist project.

 

Against The Drowning Child Argument

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ozy blog post, utilitarianism it works bitches

There is an argument commonly known as the Drowning Child Argument, which goes something as follows:

Imagine that you’re walking across a shallow pond and you notice that a small child has fallen in, and is in danger of drowning…Of course, you think you must rush in to save the child. Then you remember that you’re wearing your favorite, quite expensive, pair of shoes and they’ll get ruined if you rush into the pond. Is that a reason for not saving the child? I’m sure you’ll say no it isn’t, you just can’t compare the life of a child to the cost of a pair of shoes, no matter how expensive.

The problem with this argument is that the current best estimate of the cost to save a life is about $3500. I do not think that most people own shoes that cost $3500. Even their favorite most expensive pair of shoes probably isn’t $3500; it might be a tenth of that. However, the problem with specifying the cost of the shoes in the analogy is that most people will assume the person is rich, and therefore can trivially afford to buy another pair of absurdly expensive shoes.

A more correct analogy is something like this:

Imagine we live in a fantasy world in which children are sometimes teleported away from their homes to drown in ponds. However, it is possible to go on a quest to save the children. The average person can complete one quest in about five weeks. However, some people are very skilled, and can complete a quest in a week or even a day; others are less capable, and may take months to finish the quest.

(Also some people argue that instead of focusing on the teleporting drowning children, one should help spread norms of not slaughtering orcs or work on preventing evil wizards from destroying the world.)

My intuitions for this world suggest that it is not actually mandatory to spend all of your time going on quests, unless you happen to be extraordinarily good at quests, and a person who completes one quest a year has probably discharged their duties with regards to the teleporting baby epidemic and can spend the rest of their time farming dirt or counting how many lice they have or whatever people do in medieval fantasy settings.

Moving that back into this world, the teleporting drowning child argument suggests that one should donate about ten percent of one’s income, unless one happens to be wealthy in which case one should donate more.

This is why I don’t trust thought experiments.

Ethicists Are Less Ethical

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ozy blog post, utilitarianism it works bitches

The research of philosopher Eric Shwitzgebel appears to show that ethicists are less ethical. Katja Grace argues that that’s exactly what you ought to expect. Since ethicists are supposed to change our understanding of ethics, we should expect ethicists to behave unethically according to our common-sense understanding of ethics. If not, why are we employing them?

However, I think her argument is flawed.

There are two minor flaws. First, ethicists tend to behave less ethically across a wide variety of different measures. While it might be true that it is morally obligatory to talk during American Philosophical Association presentations, in spite of the general consensus that people who talk during presentations are dickbags, it would be very strange if it were also equally obligatory to steal ethics books, slam doors, and leave your trash behind in conference rooms. Surely common sense morality has to be right about something. In addition, these issues are rarely addressed in ethical debate; as far as I am aware, ethicists do not generally work on the subject of whether it is morally obligatory to talk during presentations, and thus it would be very strange if they’d collectively decided that it was.

Second, Shwitzgebel also included peer ratings of the ethics of ethicists. Presumably, if ethicists were consistently behaving according to a morality that makes more sense than common-sense morality, they would be rated by their peers as more ethical, not about the same. (Unfortunately, Shwitzgebel does not include a breakdown of whether ethicists believe other ethicists are more ethical than non-ethicists do, so it is possible that non-ethicist philosophers simply haven’t gotten the memo.)

More importantly, Katja Grace’s argument depends on eliding the difference between unethical acts and ethically neutral acts. Most formulations of ethics– “everything not permitted is forbidden” utilitarianism aside– have a category for acts that ethics doesn’t care about much at all. Ethics does not have a strong opinion on whether I drink coffee, tea, milk, or nothing in the morning. Ethics research might very well say that an act believed to be unethical is actually ethical, but it might also very well say that an act believed to be ethically neutral is ethical. Indeed, several famous points of disagreement between ethicists and non-ethicists fall in the latter category– most notably charity donations and vegetarianism.

Most people see eating meat as a morally neutral action and donating large amounts of money to charity as, if not neutral, certainly not obligatory. Ethicists are more likely than the general public to believe that eating meat and not donating to charity are both wrong. Nevertheless, the evidence appears to suggest that ethicists are statistically indistinguishable from non-ethicists in their meat consumption and charity donation habits. This is frankly kind of embarrassing, because you’d think at least the Peter Singer fans would drive up the average.

In conclusion, I think it is still probably true that thinking about ethics doesn’t make you a better person.

Assorted Thoughts On Scrupulosity

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neurodivergence, ozy blog post, scrupulosity cw

[Attention conservation notice: Navel-gaze-y.]
[Content warning: brief discussion of eating disorders.]

I.

This essay is very personal. On scrupulosity, even more so than on other issues, I am acutely aware of the reality that different things work for different people, and that the advice that saves and soothes me is poison to someone else. We do not have best practices for dealing with scrupulosity yet. And for scrupulous people even more than for other groups, advice may be easily taken as orders; if the things that work for me don’t work for you, you can conclude that you are evil because they don’t work for you. This is not my intention. If my strategies work for you, excellent; if they do not, try something else. Write about it. We need more people who deal with scrupulosity talking about the techniques that work for them.

II.

I recently read an essay by Peter Singer, Ethics Beyond Species and Beyond Instincts, in which he defined the moral as that which is universalizable, in this sense: “We can distinguish the moral from the nonmoral by appeal to the idea that when we think, judge, or act within the realm of the moral, we do so in a manner that we are prepared to apply to all others who are similarly placed.”

I read that, sat back, and said to myself: “I cannot do morality.”

I cannot do it in the same sense that an alcoholic cannot drink, and a person with an eating disorder cannot go on a diet. I am incapable of engaging with universalizable morality in a way that does not cause me severe mental harm. While I can reject a universalizable moral claim on an intellectual level, I am incapable of rejecting them– no matter how absurd or contradictory to other things I accept– on an emotional level. If I fail to live up to such a claim, I will hate myself and curl in a ball and be utterly nonfunctional for a few hours, causing harm to both myself and those who have to put up with me.

So (with much backsliding) I have started to make an effort to weed out the universalizable morality from my brain. I do things I want to do, and I don’t do things I don’t want to do. I do not mean a simplistic sense of ‘want’ here. If a person is trying to kick the caffeine habit, they may deeply crave a cup of coffee, but they can still be said to “really want” to not drink caffeine. Notably, this does not require that we create a universalizable moral rule that no one ought to drink caffeinated beverages.

This resolution may prompt the question of why I’m an effective altruist. Well, I want to. It is nowhere written that I am not allowed to have preferences about states of the world, and as it happens I prefer worlds in which fewer people die horrible painful deaths to worlds in which more people do. I do not care about it as the most important thing in my life, but as one of perhaps half a dozen equally important goals. I would, of course, prefer that more people become effective altruists, and I will act in such a way that more people become effective altruists, but that does not require any justification other than my own preferences.

This is the reason, I think, that I am triggered by so much discourse around scrupulosity. It is not engaged in the project of stepping away from universalizable morality and learning to live without it; instead, it is engaged in the project of coming up with a form of universalizable morality that most people can achieve, and (often) of criticizing other systems as unrealistic and inhuman. (See that fucking Moral Saints essay.) For me, this is sort of like going up to an anorexic and saying “look, that diet you’re on is very unrealistic! You need to get on Weight Watchers instead.” If the anorexic could get on Weight Watchers and not have this predictably result in eating-disordered behavior, they wouldn’t fucking have anorexia anymore.

(People actually do give that advice, because people are the worst at putting themselves in other people’s shoes.)

Also, like, what if I want to be more morally saintly than Susan Wolf prefers? At least utilitarianism has the advantage that when it’s telling me to do shit I don’t want to do, it’s telling me to prevent children dying horrible deaths, rather than telling me to be someone Susan Wolf wants to hang out with. Why do I care whom you want to hang out with, Susan Wolf? I have literally never met you!

III.

One of the most useful techniques for me in coping with my scrupulosity is training myself to respond to universalizable moral claims by adopting the attitude in this picture:

BDSM is disrespectful to the dignity of the human person? Literally no one asked for your opinion!

Effective altruism is wrong because we should help people in our own neighborhoods first? Remind me again why I care?

Promiscuous women are being unfair to men because they only have sex with attractive men and not with the unattractive ones? Uh, who asked you?

Being fat is morally wrong because of the burden on our healthcare system and because people should be physically fit? I don’t recall asking for your input!

I am working on trying to parse universalizable moral claims as people having opinions about their own preferences which they then choose to extend to me. “I want there not to be any promiscuous women, therefore you have to want there not to be any promiscuous women!” No, I don’t. In fact, I am generally in favor of the existence of promiscuous women. It is an argument as absurd as saying that because you like dark chocolate therefore I must like dark chocolate.

(I know this isn’t actually true– universalizable moral claims are actually different than statements of preferences– but it’s sure as hell useful.)

A notable exception to this technique is moral philosophy, where I simply extended my eyes-glazed-over “why does anyone care about this bullshit?” attitude to metaphysics to normative ethics as well.

IV.

Part of my problem, I think, is that I don’t feel guilty enough.

This is an odd problem for a scrupulous person to have, but I think it’s true. An observation that comes up a lot in dialectical behavioral therapy is that for people with severely dysregulated emotions, an emotion that you have too much of is often a result of using that emotion to cope with another emotion you’re afraid to feel. For instance, a person who feels angry all the time might be shutting down their natural feelings of sadness at a loss, because they feel like if they start crying they might never stop.

Whenever I’m in a situation that should logically prompt guilt, instead I feel shame. I do not recognize that I have done something that goes against my long-term desires and acknowledge that I want to do better in the future. Instead, I think that I am a bad person, that others will hate me, that I am inherently evil and nothing I can do will wash the impurities away, that I will never be approved of or praised…

Of course, this is not right. The usefulness of guilt is in pointing out when I have violated my own standards; the approval or disapproval of other people does not particularly matter, except that they have an outside view and might be able to tell when I am being too hard or easy on myself. But, like I said, I care about my own preferences; while I do care about other people’s happiness, I do not give a flying fuck about their thoughts on whether parents should sacrifice everything for their kids or whatthefuckever.

But my brain slides, so subtly that I don’t even notice it, from the question of “did I do something that I don’t really want to do?” to the question of “does everyone hate me? am I inherently evil?” That first question is scary. It involves things like ‘taking responsibility’ and ‘making amends’ and ‘self-improvement’. All of that sounds like work. On the other hand, if you’re inherently evil, you don’t have to try to get better; you just have to try to stop existing, which is much easier. And if most people don’t care about me failing my own standards (which they don’t, because they don’t even know me, and also my standards are higher than most people care about), then I can determine that they don’t hate me, and never address the question of whether I’m failing to reach my goals. Because, you know, that would be hard. Self-flagellation is easy.

V.

Recently, I was having a conversation with an acquaintance who’s a negative utilitarian. He asked what my particular brand of morality was, and I began my usual “well, it’s kind of handwavey, but…” spiel, bracing myself for an argument about why I cared about things other than suffering and didn’t I realize that suffering was the most important issue and blah blah. Part of the way through, he interrupted me, smiled, and said “oh! You have complex values!” and the conversation moved on.

This made me feel really nice. Part of the reason, I think, is that I didn’t have to defend my position. He was a negative utilitarian. I was not. There were ways in which we could benefit each other: after all, I don’t particularly like suffering either, and so we could help each other on the common project of making there be less suffering in the world. Agreement on normative ethics or on ultimate goals was not necessary.

It felt freeing. He had his own morals, but (at least in that conversation) they didn’t have to be universalizable; he was comfortable with me believing differently from him. I didn’t have to be ashamed. It was great.

Everyone Is The Hero Of Their Own Story

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ethics, ozy blog post

Yes, everyone.

Which is to say: everyone tells a story to themselves about their lives, and in everyone’s story their actions are justifiable and make sense. It’s quite natural to think of some people as utterly incomprehensible, completely detached from reality, incapable of noticing obvious flaws in their beliefs, or valuing evil for its own sake. But mostly people aren’t.

Not everyone’s story is in the same genre. Some people are in a sitcom; some people are in a save-the-world science fiction novel; some people are in a mainstream, realistic novel about a father going to work every day and nobly sacrificing so that his children will have a better life. Me, I’m in a tremendously tedious biopic and we’ve been stuck in The Artist’s Early Life for an extraordinarily long time.

Of course, some people do tell stories in which they are the villains. But nobody tells a story in which they’re a lame, stupid villain; they tell stories in which they’re the villains that you wind up rooting for. They might be Punisher, wreaking vengeance on those who truly deserve it, willing to make the hard decisions for the greater good of all. They might be Frank Abagnale, living by their wits, cleverly outsmarting the forces of law and order. They might be Darth Vader, evil but oh-so-glamorous.

(In my experience, the last group tends to be pretty wimpy on the actual evil front.)

People are sympathetic to themselves mostly. When they aren’t, it’s called depression and it’s a pretty serious mental health condition– but even depressives, in my experience, often still have a story about how everyone has mistreated them and they’re holding up under adversity. That means that, for everyone you loathe and despise, there is a story in which they’re doing the right thing. If you try hard enough, you might be able to understand it yourself.

This applies even to the great villains of history. Nazis, Maoists, segregationists… they aren’t that different from us psychologically. I’m probably more different from the average neurotypical than I am from a Nazi with borderline personality disorder; in the right conditions, I too would be a Nazi. This is important. It means that you can’t say “I have a story I’m telling myself about why I’m sympathetic and good, so that means I must be sympathetic and good.” Everyone has those stories.

That doesn’t mean you have to stop thinking they’re doing harm, of course. People who think they’re doing right often hurt people in tremendously awful ways; the most dangerous people in the world are those who are well-intentioned but misinformed. But I think understanding people who are doing wrong is the first step to convincing them that they shouldn’t, and it’s an important tool to keep from demonizing people who hurt you.

Because… some of those self-justifying stories people tell should throw up a red flag. They’re stories told far more often by those doing evil than by those doing good. And “those people are Always Chaotic Evil orcs” is one.

Loving Thy Actual Enemies

Tags

ethics, ozy blog post

Your enemies aren’t always the people you think they are.

See, most people have this odd sort of assumption that one’s enemies are people one disagrees with a lot. For instance, if they’re a libertarian, they might assume their enemies are Marxists. But I’m a left-libertarian and I actually like Marx quite a lot (although I disagree with him); I have found several Communist thinkers deeply insightful and count several Marxists among my friends. I disagree with them a lot but they aren’t my enemies. Similarly, while I’m an atheist, I harbor no particular ill-will towards religious people.

My actual enemies make me ruminate for hours and hours about all the things that are wrong with their positions. I feel scared and sad and my stomach is tight when I read things they write. I want to curl in a ball and cry, or lash out and show them everything that’s wrong with everything they think. As it happens, most of my actual enemies agree with me more than the people I don’t really care about. I don’t care about redpillers; I find some of them interesting to argue with and some of them funny, but none of them threatening. But there are some anti-feminists where I have had to ban myself from interacting with them because every time I do I behave in a way I regret.

For me, when someone’s positions are far enough different from mine, I don’t think of them as being able to hurt me. Their friends aren’t my friends; no one will be cruel to me because of their arguments; they might try to get some ridiculous law passed, but while the Overton window isn’t exactly in a great place no laws that could realistically get passed are going to make my life anything less than cushy. And while I do try to care about other people, I am self-centered enough that I can only hate people who are going to hurt me, not people who are going to hurt others. So the people I viscerally hate are mostly people who agree with me about 99% of everything. And while a lot of people are different from me– obviously! Look at the amount of hate that Trump supporters get!– I think some people are the same.

And that’s scary. Naturally, people– not having access to other people’s internal state of feeling scared and sad and angry and ruminating about how terrible the other person is– use the heuristic “people who disagree with someone about a lot of things are that person’s enemies.” So people like me can get a reputation for being kind and charitable and forgiving to their enemies without actually ever being kind or charitable or forgiving to any actual enemies. When they are vicious and cruel to their actual enemies, misrepresenting their positions and insulting them personally, everyone is like “well, that guy had to deserve it. After all, so-and-so is nice to all their enemies! Therefore they definitely responded to this person in a reasonable and kind way!”

There’s no get-out-of-jail-free card here. If you’re a preacher at a church in Tennessee, you have to pray for the soul of Osama Bin Laden. If you’re a liberal in California, you have to have empathy for the Trump voter. If you’re me, you have to be kind to the person who slightly disagrees with you on an issue. When you love your enemies, you have to love the person it is hardest for you to love. Anything else is cheating.

Defending Sacred Values

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

In the comments of my last post on sacred values, I noticed a lot of people thinking that they should transition from using sacred values to consciously-held ethical injunctions, or that sacred values are utterly unnecessary as long as you can think “torture is wrong even when I hear a good argument that torture is right”, etc. I think that this is ridiculous. Sacred values are great! I am personally working on cultivating several myself.

Of course, sacred values get a bad rap, because a lot of people have stupid sacred values. The problem with “it is unthinkable to not take every effort to extend a person’s life, even for a few days!” is not that it’s a sacred value; it’s that “spend all available resources to extend a person’s life, even when you have a good argument that you shouldn’t” is a terrible ethical injunction. Such considerations do not apply to sensible ethical injunctions like “don’t torture people” or “don’t deceive yourself” or “if you are Ozy, a known agoraphobe, go outside when you have planned to go outside.”

(Notably, “how important is the thing” is actually unrelated to how good a sacred value is. A good sacred value is one where it’s more likely that you’ve made a mistake about whether Thing is a good idea than it is that Thing is actually a good idea. Some ethical injunctions– such as me going outside even when I’m rationalizing why I shouldn’t have to– are about pretty minor things.)

Imagine the famous case of the dragon in one’s garage. In most cases, your system 1 and system 2 are aligned: you believe the propositional statement “there is no dragon in my garage” (system 2), and when you visualize your garage there isn’t any dragon in it (system 1). Sometimes this situation might get out of whack: you might believe the statement “there is a dragon in my garage”, while imagining your garage to be empty; on the other hand, you might believe the statement “there is no dragon in my garage” while on a certain level expecting that there’s a fire-breathing lizard inside it.

In the latter cases, I think, you can be said to “not really believe” that there isn’t a dragon in your garage. You “really believe” when your system 1 and system 2 match up; if they’re mixed up– if you think there’s no dragon in your garage while your gut is like “RUN AWAY RUN AWAY SCARY BIG LIZARD”– you don’t really believe there’s no dragon in your garage. (The former case– system 2 says there’s a dragon, system 1 says no– is typically called “belief in belief”; the idea is that you believe that you believe there’s a dragon, but you don’t actually believe there’s a dragon.)

So, let’s say that you accept the ethical injunction ‘you should never torture anyone, even if torture seems like a good idea, because it’s more likely you’ve made a mistake than torture is a good idea’, but you don’t treat it as a sacred value. I think you can be said to believe that you believe that ‘torture is bad’ is an ethical injunction, but you don’t really believe it– any more than the person who expects their garage to be empty really believes there’s a dragon there. If you actually believed it, your system 1 would get with the program. Now, there are certain advantages to believing you believe ethical injunctions, without actually believing them: most notably, you get to signal that you’re a tough-minded consequentialist who pushes fat men in front of trolleys and tortures terrorists for the greater good.

But there are also advantages to, you know, actually believing ethical injunctions. For one thing, when you find yourself in a stressful situation, your system one often takes precedence over your system two. When it’s time to open that garage door, if your system one is screaming “DRAGON! DRAGON! THERE’S A FIREBREATHING DRAGON AND IT’S GOING TO EAT ME!”, it is significantly more difficult to open the damn garage door. Even if you have no problems thinking “it is desirable to open the garage door, so I can get to my car, because dragons don’t exist” when you are in your living room safely away from any potential dragons, when you’re actually there you will quite often find yourself turning around and running instead. Similarly, when your system two is going “no torture! ever!” and your system one is going “surely if it were JUSTIFIED it would be okay, and I can come up with a dozen justifications, I am so good at coming up with justifications for things I wanted to do anyway”, then it’s a lot harder not to torture people.

You may feel that you would have no difficulties resisting the temptation to torture someone. I would propose that you are potentially falling victim to restraint bias and ask you to reflect on your no doubt spotless history of drinking exactly as much as you intended to, saying ‘no’ to all high-pressure sales tactics, never cursing out drivers on the freeway, responding in a calm and mature manner to your romantic partner at all times, and turning in all your work a week before deadline. Of course, if you are such a paragon of self-control, you may certainly choose not to have sacred values, but for the rest of us mere mortals, we need all the help we can get.

Sacred Values Are How Ethical Injunctions Feel From The Inside

Tags

ozy blog post, utilitarianism it works bitches

[content warning: torture used as a hypothetical without details]

Ethical injunctions are basically any rule one adopts of the form “don’t do X, even when it’s a really good idea to do X.” Don’t deceive yourself, even when it’s a really good idea to deceive yourself. Don’t torture people, even when it’s a really good idea to torture people. Don’t kill children, even when it’s a really good idea to kill children. Don’t break confidentiality, even when it’s a really good idea to break confidentiality.

A perfectly rational being, of course, would have no need for ethical injunctions. But we’re monkeys with pretensions. We’re self-interested and prone to rationalization. If we say “it’s okay to torture people in very extreme cases that are never going to happen”, then you can talk yourself into thinking that this is a very extreme case, even though the actual reason you want to torture the guy is that he’s a horrible person and you want to see him suffer, and next thing you know you’re the U S Government.

An ethical injunction is a good thing to have in any case where it’s more likely that you’ve made a mistake about whether this thing is a good idea than that it’s an actually good idea. For instance, torture basically doesn’t work, so there’s really no practical reason to torture anyone; therefore, it’s off-limits.

The human brain implements a lot of strategies for thinking, a lot of cognitive algorithms. There are two ways these algorithms can be implemented. Sometimes, you know the algorithm and you are deliberately choosing to execute it: for instance, you might look at the problem 99 + 16 = ? and think “take one from the 16 and add it to the 99… that’s 100 and 15… the answer’s 115”, in which case you’re using an algorithm for how to do mental math.

But not every algorithm the brain uses works that way. For instance, most people’s brains have an algorithm for choosing a partner; they probably evolved because in the past that particular algorithm maximized your inclusive genetic fitness. However, you don’t consciously think “hmmm, that person seems like a good person to maximize my inclusive genetic fitness with, following these rules I’ve figured out about how to maximize my inclusive genetic fitness.” You think “sexy!”

Thus we say: “this is what the algorithm from inclusive genetic fitness feels like from the inside.”

Morality, like choosing a partner, is often intuitive: for most people, the conscious reasoning process is subordinate to the instinctive feeling of “that’s wrong!” or “that’s hot!” So its algorithms are probably similarly unconscious.

Most people have something called sacred values— things they refuse to compromise on, no matter what. For instance, one person might hold life as a sacred value– refusing to take life even to prevent tremendous suffering. Another person might hold autonomy as a sacred value– refusing to violate another person’s bodily autonomy even to save their life or the lives of others. This is tremendously vexing to consequentialists. We are like “okay, but you have to admit that in theory it is possible that a million billion people could be saved by that person having the tiniest pinprick on their finger, and in that case would we be justified in violating their bodily autonomy?” And then that person is like “no” and in many cases accuses us of being in favor of violating people’s autonomy.

But a sacred value is how an ethical injunction feels from the inside. It doesn’t feel like a calm, level-headed endorsement of the statement “it is more likely that you made a mistake about torture being right than it is that torture is right.” It feels like torture being unthinkable. Unimaginable. Like getting morally outraged at the thought that you might torture someone.

If you think about the benefit you might get from torturing someone, then you might be tempted to torture them. So you feel repulsed at the idea of contemplating a situation in which it is beneficial. You might get angry because someone even brought it up. How dare they? Don’t they know torture is wrong?