THE BIRTHDAY CAKE OF EXISTENCE: Tangentially related to the cloning stuff posted below. (To which Will Wilkinson has responded. My reply to him will have to wait: I’m going out of town tomorrow, and won’t be back until maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, and I almost certainly won’t have time for heavy lifting on the blog before then. But I will reply when I return.)

Back when I would spend Monday nights hanging out at OSGAY (the Objectivist Study Group at Yale), debating the nature of productivity and the whichness of the why and that sort of thing, every meeting would include at least one bizarre diagram on the chalkboard. (The most elaborate one involved the two-headed, drooling dragon of government menacing Liberal Happy Land; my favorite was a box divided into thirds, which I believe was simply labeled, “Life.”) One of the diagrams that came up constantly was the Birthday Cake of Existence. I don’t know why it was the Birthday Cake, since it was actually shaped more like a wedding cake, with a series of layers resting one atop the other; I guess weddings are even less Objectivist than birthdays. The “classic cake” goes in this order, from bottom to top: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Politics. This will be familiar to anyone who recalls Ayn Rand’s famous definition of Objectivism while standing on one foot–“Metaphysics: Objective reality. Epistemology: Reason. Ethics: Self-interest. Politics: Capitalism.” Each layer of the cake rests on the one below it. Later we debated the ramifications of placing “aesthetics” on the cake–was it the candles on top (i.e. a kind of optional extra) or was it the frosting (i.e. an entire approach to life that colored all the layers and distinguished them from seemingly similar layers in non-Objectivist cakes)? And we argued over whether it was legitimate to include a cake plate, labeled, “Do I care?”, or whether there was simply no point in talking to or about those who decided they didn’t care. Then we all went out drinking together.

Anyway, my point (and I do have one) is that we like our intellectual lives to proceed according to the order and the categories of the Birthday Cake of Existence. We can argue about the lowest two layers of the cake–should Epistemology come first, because you have to get that squared away before you can agree on a method for discerning the truth? Or should Metaphysics come first, because it’s ontologically prior–you need Stuff before you can Think about that stuff? But intellectual types, people who argue about that sort of thing, generally don’t like the implications of deriving their metaphysics from their ethics (say).

I’m not so sure. I understand the desire to keep reason pristine, sealed away from the emotional weight that ethical commitments carry; I understand the caution about one’s culture or one’s personal inclinations that would lead one to say, “Even if it appears repugnant to me, I’ve got to do it because all my premises require it.” I’m definitely not saying that ethical judgments should remain static–that if accepting a certain metaphysical idea would require you to jettison an ethical stance, that in itself is an argument against the metaphysical idea. After all, I’ve personally changed a lot of my ethical stances, often because I was convinced, not of other ethical positions, but of underlying metaphysical claims that necessarily entailed certain ethical stances. (Becoming Christian is the big obvious underlying metaphysical change that requires lots of ethical changes, but there are others in my life. For example, my view of the nature of truth changed, which affected my view of the value and methods of philosophy, although now that I think back on it those changes came more or less at the same time–I was simultaneously convinced of a non-relativist understanding of truth and convinced out of my previous anti-philosophy stance. Anyway, I’m sure there are other examples in my life.)

But the picture of how we build our understanding of the world–and how we should build it–is more complicated than the “Birthday Cake of Existence” model suggests. First, of course, we’re often convinced of ethical and metaphysical stances simultaneously (in a process over time), as I described above. Second, there’s the question of “which thing you believe more.” When I was trying to figure out if I should enter the Catholic Church, I had a mountain of reasons pressing me toward the baptismal font. But I also really didn’t understand and didn’t like the Church’s teaching on some issues, most prominently contraception and homosexuality. (I think I understand the teaching on contraception a lot better now; homosexuality I’m still trying to figure out.) I had to decide which thing I believed more: that the Church’s claims about itself were true, that it was an institution ordained and inspired by God and that it had the authority to teach on these ethical questions; or that condoms and same-sex canoodling were OK. I think I even surprised myself a little when I realized that I was more convinced of the former.

Many principles come to us with “if/then” clauses built in; and we have to delve into our own experiences, with not only rational questioning but also introspection, in order to figure out where to go once we accept that particular way of framing a dilemma. For example, suppose I become convinced that “Without God, all is permissible.” This may lead me to a Nietzschean “overturning of the tables of values”; or it may lead me to seek God, and try to discover whether He might be found. Which journey I embark on will depend on what I believe more strongly: that there is no God, or that some things are genuinely impermissible. These “if/then” principles can’t be easily reconciled with the simple bottom-up method depicted in the Birthday Cake diagram.

I’m sorry if this all sounds fairly simplistic and intro-level. I’m trying to cash out reasons, from within philosophy, why we might want to be wary of a certain sentiment that can strike intellectuals. This sentiment is an overly simplistic or cliched understanding of intellectual courage; depending on the personality of the intellectual, it can become self-congratulatory in the extreme. This sentiment says, basically, “I’m courageous enough to accept any conclusion my reason pushes me toward–even if it means accepting Stalinist purges, rape, or any other repugnant acts.”

The problem here should be obvious: If you think your reason has forced you to accept Stalinism (for one example that actually happened to people trying to be rational), then maybe you should take some time to examine your premises. Maybe you shouldn’t say, “OK, Stalinism then!”, but should instead assume that your premises were screwed up somehow, and it’s your job to unscrew them.

The connection to the cloning/infanticide debate should be pretty obvious, really. If your philosophy ends up at baby-killing, maybe it’s time to take a step back and see if either a) you have screwed up in your reasoning, or b) you have taken the wrong path after an “if/then” choice.

Like I said, this is not an argument for ethical stasis. It’s a strong caution. And it’s a reminder that it’s OK to say that you are more convinced of certain ethical claims (e.g. baby-killing, or mass murder, is just wrong) than you are of certain metaphysical claims that you thought you held but that drive you to unacceptable ethical conclusions. That’s an if/then choice, not a rejection of rationality. If you believe a) historical materialism and b) that purges are bad, but you investigate and come to believe that c) historical materialism justifies purges (sorry, I think I’m massacring this example by oversimplifying it, but I hope you see my point), then you have to reject either a) or b). It is not irrational to decide that the ethical claim is the better one, the one you’re more sure of, and so you need to radically rework your metaphysics in order to justify that ethical claim.

In this particular case, I’m not sure, right now, whether the “babies: they’re what’s for dinner” side (which may just be Julian, at the moment, but I think he’s right that his premises lead to an infanticide-accepting conclusion) has failed to get from premise to conclusion or whether it has chosen the wrong “if/then” option, and, if so, what the other options are. I’m still working on it. As I’ve said throughout this discussion, I don’t believe that the anti-killing-currently-rational-persons stance can be justified through secular reason alone (my readers are probably getting tired of this link), but I’m not sure yet how far down into the premises we have to drill before we hit the “Without God, all is permissible” level. I believe we ultimately do reach that particular if/then choice, but I’d like to forestall it a bit longer. What I do know is that I’m more sure of the ethical claim, “Don’t kill Junior,” than I am of the rather tortuous paths I’ve taken in defending that claim. And, although of course all these judgments are subject to change, I don’t think that greater certainty about the ethical issue is a bad thing, or a sign that I lack intellectual courage.