BUILDING A BETTER BIRTHDAY CAKE: A rambling reply to Julian about epistemology and ethics and stuff. I apologize in advance for the length and rambliness–there are a lot of issues here, and I hope to hit all the major ones and some interesting sidelights.

1) What am I arguing for? My basic claim here is: There will be times, in the course of doing philosophy (pursuing truth through reason), when you arrive at an ethical conclusion that appears repugnant to you. The two examples I gave were infanticide and Stalinist purges. If your underlying metaphysical principles and reasoning appear to drive you to accept baby-killing or mass murder, that is a pretty good sign that either the underlying principles or the intermediate reasoning are wrong. So instead of accepting the evil ethical conclusion, you investigate: Did I screw up on the way from metaphysics to ethics? That’s the “easy” part. The next question is harder: Are my metaphysical principles a) wrong or b) insufficient? (= true enough, but lacking some important components.) One good way of investigating that question is to look again at the moment of ethical shock (the moment when you realize your philosophy is driving you to accept infanticide, purges, etc.). What happens if you hold to the ethical principle rather than the metaphysics? What happens if you say, “No, purges are just wrong“?

If you’re being rigorous, you won’t just stop there. You won’t stick with all the underlying pro-purge metaphysics and a conflicting anti-purge ethics. Ethical claims do come embedded in a metaphysical framework; accepting an ethical conclusion requires acceptance of its implied metaphysical foundations. So once you experience ethical shock, you need to figure out whether your anti-purge ethics can be justified by a metaphysical framework that you find acceptable. You can use the moment of ethical shock as a spur to investigate philosophies you’d previously dismissed. The “if/then” choices we often find in philosophy (e.g. “Without God, all is permissible”–that doesn’t actually tell you if all is permissible!) are only the most obvious places where we are faced with a choice between two ethics+metaphysics conglomerates. (Is that the word I want? Basically you’re faced with “There is no God and all is permissible”–a metaphysical claim plus an ethical claim–vs. “There is a God and some things are impermissible.”)

One place where the usefulness of ethical shock is most obvious is in dealing with a philosophy that’s internally consistent but false. Something from outside has to enter if the person holding the consistent+false philosophy is ever to change his mind, since he won’t run across a troubling internal contradiction. Assuming that Julian believes that consistent+false philosophies do exist, I wonder if he would find ethical shock a valid way to leave such a philosophy. (Or a valid way to confront someone who holds such a philosophy.)

I fear we’re skidding off into Abstract-Noun-Land, so here, have an example: Ayn Rand works hard, adding all kinds of funky “epicycles” to her philosophy, in order to justify giving your life for a cause or person you value. I think her attempts to justify these acts totally fail. Pretend that I’m an Objectivist who does not see internal contradictions in Rand’s metaphysics. I really want to keep being an Objectivist (for what should be obvious reasons–keeping my fun Objectivist friends, fear of looking like a flighty idiot, inertia, embarrassment, let’s say I’ve made a name for myself as an Objectivist speaker) but I am also utterly sure that Harriet Tubman and Harry Wu were right to risk their lives to aid others. Once I realize that underlying Objectivist principles conflict with that particular ethical judgment, that Objectivist attempts to praise Tubman and Wu are incoherent, I have to ditch one or the other. My only claim throughout this discussion has been that it is not self-evidently better (more courageous, more rational, etc.) for me to choose the underlying Objectivist principles as vs. the ethical claim that Tubman and Wu were right.

2) Is reason more trustworthy than intuition? Julian argues that even if I say I don’t want blank acceptance of ethical intuitions, that’s actually what will happen, because out there in real reality the emotional pull of ethical intuitions is stronger than that of metaphysical convictions. There are a couple of things to say about this:

a) I’m not opposing instinct and reason and choosing instinct. As I tried to make clear above, the “moment of ethical shock” is a beginning, not an end-stage. Moral intuitions are not get-out-of-philosophy-free cards. If you say, “I am more sure that Tubman was right than I am of Rand’s metaphysics,” you have a lot of work to do–you have to figure out whether there are metaphysical frameworks that explain the world accurately while justifying Tubman’s heroism. So I think I can sign on to something Julian says later on: “The intuition needs to be cashed out: we need to get behind it and see what feature of the case is causing us to have that reaction. …The point of those intuitions is to serve as guideposts in the revision of theory.” But then he adds, “That is, we should make revisions on the prompting of an intuition only when we can find an internal motivation in the theory for making that change.” And this I disagree with, because I do think some internally consistent philosophies are false, and also because the particular ethical shock I’ve experienced with some philosophy may not actually be related to any of its inconsistencies! (Dialectical materialism may be incoherent, but its incoherencies [if that’s a word???] may not have anything to do with the wrongness of Stalinist purges.) Nonetheless, I think Julian and I are more in agreement than he thinks–ethical shock is a question not an answer.

b) It’s hard for me to buy the “people always choose ethical claims over metaphysical claims” argument since, as I said in my previous post on this subject, I’ve made the opposite decision. I realized I was more sure of the truth of Catholicism than I was of the falsehood of several of the Church’s ethical claims. That experience sucked, really, in terms of how it felt; but fortunately I had i) lots of reasons to be Catholic and ii) friends who offered models of philosophical rigor, models of how to accept a philosophical truth even when it’s personally difficult. So I tend to think that when people do have models of philosophical rigor, and training in ditto, they will be willing to ditch ethical claims when they think they have to. Obviously this kind of rigor requires careful introspection, as well; but again, I think my own experience at least suggests that the emotional pull of ethical claims can be overcome.

c) Attempting to be rational can also lead to major, major screw-ups. I know this is fairly obvious, but it might help to explain where I’m coming from here if I point out that I’ve known people who seriously derailed friendships and other relationships because they were trying very hard to choose rational metaphysics over irrational ethical principles like, oh, say, charity and humility. Again, I don’t see that as an argument against putting metaphysics first in any particular case (see point b!). I say it only as a caution to those who are quick to see the drawbacks of privileging ethical intuitions but slow to see the drawbacks of privileging often overly-abstract philosophical speculation. In pointing out the weaknesses of the “birthday cake” model I’m actually trying not to privilege either ethics or metaphysics in any particular case.

d) The Objectivist-Tubman-lover example should also underline one of the other problems with assuming that if a metaphysics vs. ethics fight is truly even, ethics will always win: Ethics don’t always carry the greater emotional weight. If you’re heavily personally invested in a philosophical system (like Objectivism; or Catholicism; or atheism; or Communism; or relativism; or whatever), you have major emotional incentives to stay put! You may actually have to work pretty hard to discern conflicting ethical intuitions and judge how certain you are of them. In this respect, someone trying hard to stick with metaphysics even when his ethical sense rebels against the consequences often becomes like Julian’s “astronomer with two data tables, one for recording ’empirical observations,’ which fit with his theory, and another for recording ‘telescope malfunctions’ – anything that doesn’t.” In this case the “telescope malfunctions” are ethical shocks.

I wish there were some easy way of saying: Here’s how you do philosophy. First, you derive your metaphysics… etc. But neither the philosophical claims themselves (since so many involve “if/then” choices) nor the process of reason and introspection by which we come to know them work that simply.

Finally, Julian “tells a story” of how condemnation of infanticide, specifically, may be a mere result of biology with no particular ethical significance. Sure, that might be true–although there are good reasons, as well, to think that evolution might predispose us not to care for deformed or burdensome infants. Cf. Steven Pinker’s wildly controversial “Why Do They Kill Their Newborns?” article. And it’s not as if there have never been cultures with widespread infanticide–especially of infants deemed unhealthy, or infants whose legal fathers suspected they were not the children’s biological fathers. This line of thought only becomes really interesting if we can see that ethical intuitions are more likely than metaphysical claims to be products of outdated evolutionary adaptations. I’m not sure how Julian would go about demonstrating (or suggesting) that; if he wants to, that might be intriguing, although really it all becomes pretty tangled since (for the materialists) culture is one way evolution expresses itself in humans. So a culture based on abstract reasoning, or on various metaphysical precepts, may itself be simply a product of evolutionary change. (If the change from a God-centered worldview to a human-centered worldview is an evolutionary response to changed conditions, I doubt that would lead Julian to say the change was wrong or unfounded, no? So too with a change from valuing healthy, wanted infants whose parentage is sure to valuing all infants, which may be, for all I know, similarly an evolutionary response to changed conditions.) Anyway, this whole paragraph is probably MUCH more speculative than it should be, and not necessary to the argument above.