Month: September 2024

Expressivism

PNRJ cognitive science, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 29 JDN 2460583

The theory of expressivism, often posited as an alternative to moral realism, is based on the observation by Hume that factual knowledge is not intrinsically motivating. I can believe that a food is nutritious and that I need nutrition to survive, but without some emotional experience to motivate me—hunger—I will nonetheless remain unmotivated to eat the nutritious food. Because morality is meant to be intrinsically motivating, says Hume, it must not involve statements of fact.

Yet really all Hume has shown is that if indeed facts are not intrinsically motivating, and moral statements are intrinsically motivating, then moral statements are not merely statements of fact. But even statements of fact are rarely merely statements of fact! If I were to walk down the street stating facts at random (lemurs have rings on their tails, the Sun is over one million kilometers in diameter, bicycles have two wheels, people sit on chairs, time dilates as you approach the speed of light, LGBT people suffer the highest per capita rate of hate crimes in the US, Coca-Cola in the United States contains high fructose corn syrup, humans and chimpanzees share 95-98% of our DNA), I would be seen as a very odd sort of person indeed. Even when I state a fact, I do so out of some motivation, frequently an emotional motivation. I’m often trying to explain, or to convince. Sometimes I am angry, and I want to express my anger and frustration. Other times I am sad and seeking consolation. I have many emotions, and I often use words to express them. Nonetheless, in the process I will make many statements of fact that are either true or false: “Humans and chimpanzees share 95-98% of our DNA” I might use to argue in favor of common descent; “Time dilates as you approach the speed of light” I have used in to explain relativity theory; “LGBT people suffer the highest per capita rate of hate crimes in the US” I might use to argue in favor of some sort of gay rights policy. When I say “genocide is wrong!” I probably have some sort of emotional motivation for this—likely my outrage at an ongoing genocide. Nonetheless I’m pretty sure it’s true that genocide is wrong.

Expressivism says that moral statements don’t express propositions at all, they express attitudes, relations to ideas that are not of the same kind as belief and disbelief, truth and falsehood. Much as “Hello!” or “Darn it!” don’t really state facts or inquire about facts, expressivists like Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard would say that “Genocide is wrong” doesn’t say anything about the facts of genocide, it merely expresses my attitude of moral disapproval toward genocide.

Yet expressivists can’t abandon all normativity—otherwise even the claim “expressivism is true” has no moral force. Allan Gibbard, like most expressivists, supports epistemic normativity—the principle that we ought to believe what is true. But this seems to me already a moral principle, and one that is not merely an attitude that some people happen to have, but in fact a fundamental axiom that ought to apply to any rational beings in any possible universe. Even more, Gibbard agrees that some moral attitudes are more warranted than others, that “genocide is wrong” is more legitimate than “genocide is good”. But once we agree that there are objective normative truths and moral attitudes can be more or less justified, how is this any different from moral realism?

Indeed, in terms of cognitive science I’m not sure beliefs and emotions are so easily separable in the first place. In some sense I think statements of fact can be intrinsically motivating—or perhaps it is better to put it this way: If your brain is working properly, certain beliefs and emotions will necessarily coincide. If you believe that you are about to be attacked by a tiger, and you don’t experience the emotion of fear, something is wrong; if you believe that you are about to die of starvation, and you don’t experience the emotion of hunger, something is wrong. Conversely, if you believe that you are safe from all danger, and yet you experience fear, something is wrong; if you believe that you have eaten plenty of food, yet you still experience hunger, something is wrong. When your beliefs and emotions don’t align, either your beliefs or your emotions are defective. I would say that the same is true of moral beliefs. If you believe that genocide is wrong but you are not motivated to resist genocide, something is wrong; if you believe that feeding your children is obligatory but you are not motivated to feed your children, something is wrong.

It may well be that without emotion, facts would never motivate us; but emotions can warranted by facts. That is how we distinguish depression from sadness, mania from joy, phobia from fear. Indeed I am dubious of the entire philosophical project of noncognitivism, of which expressivism is the moral form. Noncognitivism is the idea that a given domain of mental processing is not cognitive—not based on thinking, reason, or belief. There is often a sense that noncognitive mental processing is “lower” than cognition, usually based on the idea that it is more phylogenetically conserved—that we think as men but feel as rats.

Yet in fact this is not how human emotions work at all. Poetry—mere words—often evokes the strongest of emotions. A text message of “I love you” or “I think we should see other people” can change the course of our lives. An ambulance in the driveway will pale the face of any parent. In 2001 the video footage of airplanes colliding with skyscrapers gave all of America nightmares for weeks. Yet stop and think about what text messages, ambulances, video footage, airplanes, and skyscrapers are—they are technologies so advanced, so irreducibly cognitive, that even the world’s technological superpower had none of them 200 years ago. (We didn’t have text messages forty years ago!) Even something as apparently dry as numbers can have profound emotional effects: In the statements “Your blood sugar is X mg/dL” to a diabetic, “You have Y years to live” to a cancer patient, or “Z people died” in a news report, the emotional effects are almost wholly dependent upon the value of the numbers X, Y, and Z—values of X = 100, Y = 50 and Z = 0 would be no cause for alarm (or perhaps even cause for celebration!), while values of X = 400, Y = 2, and Z = 10,000 would trigger immediate shock, terror and despair. The entire discipline of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy depends upon the fact that talking to people about their thoughts and beliefs can have profound effects upon their emotions and actions—and in empirical studies, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy is verified to work in a variety of circumstances and is more effective than medication for virtually every mental disorder. We do not think as men but feel as rats; we thinkandfeel as human beings.

Because they are evolved instincts, we have limited control over them, and other animals have them, we are often inclined to suppose that emotions are simple, stupid, irrational—but on the contrary they are mind-bogglingly complex, brilliantly intelligent, and the essence of what it means to be a rational being. People who don’t have emotions aren’t rational—they are inert. In psychopathology a loss of capacity for emotion is known as flat affect, and it is often debilitating; it is often found in schizophrenia and autism, and in its most extreme forms it causes catatonia—that is, a total lack of body motion. From Plato to Star Trek, Western culture has taught us to think that a loss of emotion would improve our rationality; but on the contrary, a loss of all emotion would render us completely vegetative. Lieutenant Commander Data without his emotion chip should stand in one place and do nothing—for this is what people without emotion actually do.

Indeed, attractive and aversive experiences—that is, emotions—are the core of goal-seeking behavior, without which rationality is impossible. Apparently simple experiences like pleasure and pain (let alone obviously complicated ones like jealousy and patriotism) are so complex that the most advanced robots in the world cannot even get close to simulating them. Injure a rat, and it will withdraw and cry out in pain; damage a robot (at least any less than a state-of-the-art research robot), and it will not react at all, continuing ineffectually through the same motions it was attempting a moment ago. This shows that rats are smarter than robots—an organism that continues on its way regardless of the stimulus is more like a plant than an animal.

Our emotions do sometimes fail us. They hurt us, they put us at risk, they make us behave in ways that are harmful or irrational. Yet to declare on these grounds that emotions are the enemy of reason would be like declaring that we should all poke out our eyes because sometimes we are fooled by optical illusions. It would be like saying that a shirt with one loose thread is unwearable, that a mathematician who once omits a negative sign should never again be trusted. This is not rationality but perfectionism. Like human eyes, human emotions are rational the vast majority of the time, and when they aren’t, this is cause for concern. Truly irrational emotions include mania, depression, phobia, and paranoia—and it’s no accident that we respond to these emotions with psychotherapy and medication.

Expressivism is legitimate precisely because it is not a challenger to moral realism. Personally, I think that expressivism is wrong because moral claims express facts as much as they express attitudes; but given our present state of knowledge about cognitive science, that is the sort of question upon which reasonable people can disagree. Moreover, the close ties between emotion and reason may ultimately entail that we are wrong to make the distinction in the first place. It is entirely reasonable, at our present state of knowledge, to think that moral judgments are primarily emotional rather than propositional. What isnot reasonable, however, is the claim that moral statements cannot be objectively justified—the evidence against this claim is simply too compelling to ignore. If moral claims are emotions, they are emotions that can be objectively justified.

Against Moral Anti-Realism

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 22 JDN 2460576

Moral anti-realism is more philosophically sophisticated than relativism, but it is equally mistaken. It is what is sounds like, the negation of moral realism. Moral anti-realists hold that moral truths are meaningless because they rest upon presumptions about the world that fail to hold. To an anti-realist, “genocide is wrong” is meaningless because there is no such thing as “wrong”, much as to any sane person “unicorns have purple feathers” is meaningless because there are no such things as unicorns. They aren’t saying that genocide isn’t wrong—they’re saying that wrong itself is a defective concept.

The vast majority of people profess strong beliefs in moral truth, and indeed strong beliefs about particular moral issues, such as abortion, capital punishment, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, contraception, civil liberties, and war. There is at the very least a troubling tension here between academia and daily life.

This does not by itself prove that moral truths exist. Ordinary people could be simply wrong about these core beliefs. Indeed, I must acknowledge that most ordinary people clearly are deeply ignorant about certain things, as only 55\% of Americans believe that the theory of evolution is true, and only 66\% of Americans agree that the majority of recent changes in Earth’s climate has been caused by human activity, when in reality these are scientific facts, empirically demonstrable through multiple lines of evidence, verified beyond all reasonable doubt, and both evolution and climate change are universally accepted within the scientific community. In scientific terms there is no more doubt about evolution or climate change than there is about the shape of the Earth or the structure of the atom.

If there were similarly compelling reasons to be moral anti-realists, then the fact that most people believe in morality would be little different: Perhaps most ordinary people are simply wrong about these issues. But when asked to provide similarly compelling evidence for why they reject the moral views of ordinary people, moral anti-realists have little to offer.

Many anti-realists will note the diversity of moral opinions in the world, as John Burgess did, which would be rather like noting the diversity of beliefs about the soul as an argument against neuroscience, or noting the diversity of beliefs about the history of life as an argument against evolution. Many people are wrong about many things that science has shown to be the case; this is worrisome for various reasons, but it is not an argument against the validity of scientific knowledge. Similarly, a diversity of opinions about morality is worrisome, but hardly evidence against the validity of morality.

In fact, when they talk about such fundamental disagreements in morality, anti-realists don’t have very compelling examples. It’s easy to find fundamental disagreements about biology—ask an evolutionary biologist and a Creationist whether humans share an ancestor with chimpanzees. It’s easy to find fundamental disagreements about cosmology—ask a physicist and an evangelical Christian how the Earth began. It’s easy to find fundamental disagreements about climate—ask a climatologist and an oil company executive whether human beings are causing global warming. But where are these fundamental disagreements in morality? Sure, on specific matters there is some disagreement. There are differences between cultures regarding what animals it is acceptable to eat, and differences between cultures about what constitutes acceptable clothing, and differences on specific political issues. But in what society is it acceptable to kill people arbitrarily? Where is it all right to steal whatever you want? Where is lying viewed as a good thing? Where is it obligatory to eat only dirt? In what culture has wearing clothes been a crime? Moral realists are by no means committed to saying that everyone agrees about everything—but it does support our case to point out that most people agree on most things most of the time.

There are a few compelling cases of moral disagreement, but they hardly threaten moral realism. How might we show one culture’s norms to be better than another’s? Compare homicide rates. Compare levels of poverty. Compare overall happiness, perhaps using surveys—or even brain scans. This kind of data exists, and it has a fairly clear pattern: people living in social democratic societies (such as Sweden and Norway) are wealthier, safer, longer-lived, and overall happier than people in other societies. Moreover, using the same publicly-available data, democratic societies in general do much better than authoritarian societies, by almost any measure. This is an empirical fact. It doesn’t necessarily mean that such societies are doing everything right—but they are clearly doing something right. And it really isn’t so implausible to say that what they are doing right is enforcing a good system of moral, political, and cultural norms.

Then again, perhaps some people would accept these empirical facts but still insist that their culture is superior; suppose the disagreement really is radical and intractable. This still leaves two possibilities for moral realism.

The most obvious answer would be to say that one group is wrong—that, objectively, one culture is better than another.

But even if that doesn’t work, there is another way: Perhaps both are right, or more precisely, perhaps these two cultural systems are equally good but incompatible. Is this relativism? Some might call it that, but if it is, it’s relativism of a very narrow kind. I am emphatically not saying that all existing cultures are equal, much less that all possible cultures are equal. Instead, I am saying that it is entirely possible to have two independent moral systems which prescribe different behaviors yet nonetheless result in equally-good overall outcomes.

I could make a mathematical argument involving local maxima of nonlinear functions, but instead I think I’ll use an example: Traffic laws.

In the United States, we drive on the right side of the road. In the United Kingdom, they drive on the left side. Which way is correct? Both are—both systems work well, and neither is superior in any discernible way. In fact, there are other systems that would be just as effective, like the system of all one-way roads that prevails in Manhattan.

Yet does this mean that we should abandon reason in our traffic planning, throw up our hands and declare that any traffic system is as good as any other? On the contrary—there are plenty of possible traffic systems that clearly don’t work. Pointing several one-way roads into one another with no exit is clearly not going to result in good traffic flow. Having each driver flip a coin to decide whether to drive on the left or the right would result in endless collisions. Moreover, our own system clearly isn’t perfect. Nearly 40,000 Americans die of car collisions every year; perhaps we can find a better system that will prevent some or all of these deaths. The mere fact that two, or three, or even 400 different systems of laws or morals are equally good does not entail that all systems are equally good. Even if two cultures really are equal, that doesn’t mean we need to abandon moral realism; it merely means that some problems have multiple solutions. “X2 = 4; what is X?” has two perfectly correct answers (2 and -2), but it also has an infinite variety of wrong answers.

In fact, moral disagreement may not be evidence of anti-realism at all. In order to disagree with someone, you must think that there is an objective fact to be decided. If moral statements were seen as arbitrary and subjective, then people wouldn’t argue about them very much. Imagine an argument, “Chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream!” “No, vanilla is the best!”. This sort of argument might happen on occasion between seven-year-olds, but it is definitely not the sort of thing we hear from mature adults. This is because as adults we realize that tastes in ice cream really are largely subjective. An anti-realist can, in theory, account for this, if they can explain why moral values are falsely perceived as objective while values in taste are not; but if all values are all really arbitrary and subjective, why is it that this is obvious to everyone in the one case and not the other? In fact, there are compelling reasons to think that we couldn’t perceive moral values as arbitrary even if we tried. Some people say “abortion is a right”, others say “abortion is murder”. Even if we were to say that these are purely arbitrary, we would still be left with the task of deciding what laws to make on abortion. Regardless of where the goals come from, some goals are just objectively incompatible.

Another common anti-realist argument rests upon the way that arguments about morality often become emotional and irrational. Charles Stevenson has made this argument; apparently Stevenson has never witnessed an argument about religion, science, or policy, certainly not one outside academia. Many laypeople will insist passionately that the free market is perfect, global warming is a lie, or the Earth is only 6,000 years old. (Often the same people, come to think of it.) People will grow angry and offended if such beliefs are disputed. Yet these are objectively false claims. Unless we want to be anti-realists about GDP, temperature and radiometric dating, emotional and irrational arguments cannot compel us to abandon realism.

Another frequent claim, commonly known as the “argument from queerness”, says that moral facts would need to be something very strange, usually imagined as floating obligations existing somewhere in space; but this is rather like saying that mathematical facts cannot exist because we do not see floating theorems in space and we have never met a perfect triangle. In fact, there is no such thing as a floating speed of light or a floating Schrodinger’s equation either, but no one thinks this is an argument against physics.

A subtler version of this argument, the original “argument from queerness” put forth by J.L. Mackie, says that moral facts are strange because they are intrinsically motivating, something no other kind of facts would be. This is no doubt true; but it seems to me a fairly trivial observation, since part of the definition of “moral fact” is that anything which has this kind of motivational force is a moral (or at least normative) fact. Any well-defined natural kind is subject to the same sort of argument. Spheres are perfectly round three-dimensional objects, something no other object is. Eyes are organs that perceive light, something no other organ does. Moral facts are indeed facts that categorically motivate action, which no other thing does—but so what? All this means is that we have a well-defined notion of what it means to be a moral fact.

Finally, it is often said that moral claims are too often based on religion, and religion is epistemically unfounded, so morality must fall as well. Now, unlike most people, I completely agree that religion is epistemically unfounded. Instead, the premise I take issue with is the idea that moral claims have anything to do with religion. A lot of people seem to think so; but in fact our most important moral values transcend religion and in many cases actually contradict it.

Now, it may well be that the majority of claims people make about morality are to some extent based in their religious beliefs. The majority of governments in history have been tyrannical; does that mean that government is inherently tyrannical, there is no such thing as a just government? The vast majority of human beings have never traveled in outer space; does that mean space travel is impossible? Similarly, I see no reason to say that simply because the majority of moral claims (maybe) are religious, therefore moral claims are inherently religious.

Generally speaking, moral anti-realists make a harsh distinction between morality and other domains of knowledge. They agree that there are such things as trucks and comets and atoms, but do not agree that there are such things as obligations and rights. Indeed, a typical moral anti-realist speaks as if they are being very rigorous and scientific while we moral realists are being foolish, romantic, even superstitious. Moral anti-realism has an attitude of superciliousness not seen in a scientific faction since behaviorism.

But in fact, I think moral anti-realism is the result of a narrow understanding of fundamental physics and cognitive science. It is a failure to drink deep enough of the Pierian springs. This is not surprising, since fundamental physics and cognitive science are so mind-bogglingly difficult that even the geniuses of the world barely grasp them. Quoth Feynman: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” This was of course a bit overstated—Feynman surely knew that there are things we do understand about quantum physics, for he was among those who best understood them. Still, even the brightest minds in the world face total bafflement before problems like dark energy, quantum gravity, the binding problem, and the Hard Problem. It is no moral failing to have a narrow understanding of fundamental physics and cognitive science, for the world’s greatest minds have a scarcely broader understanding.

The failing comes from trying to apply this narrow understanding of fundamental science to moral problems without the humility to admit that the answers are never so simple. “Neuroscience proves we have no free will.” No it doesn’t! It proves we don’t have the kind of free will you thought we did. “We are all made of atoms, therefore there can be no such thing as right and wrong.” And what do you suppose we would have been made of if there were such things as right and wrong? Magical fairy dust?

Here is what I think moral anti-realists get wrong: They hear only part of what scientists say. Neuroscientists explain to them that the mind is a function of matter, and they hear it as if we had said there is only mindless matter. Physicists explain to them that we have much more precise models of atomic phenomena than we do of human behavior, and they hear it as if we had said that scientific models of human behavior are fundamentally impossible. They trust that we know very well what atoms are made of and very poorly what is right and wrong—when quite the opposite is the case.

In fact, the more we learn about physics and cognitive science, the more similar the two fields seem. There was a time when Newtonian mechanics ruled, when everyone thought that physical objects are made of tiny billiard balls bouncing around according to precise laws, while consciousness was some magical, “higher” spiritual substance that defied explanation. But now we understand that quantum physics is all chaos and probability, while cognitive processes can be mathematically modeled and brain waves can be measured in the laboratory. Something as apparently simple as a proton—let alone an extended, complex object, like a table or a comet—is fundamentally a functional entity, a unit of structure rather than substance. To be a proton is to be organized the way protons are and to do what protons do; and so to be human is to be organized the way humans are and to do what humans do. The eternal search for “stuff” of which everything is made has come up largely empty; eventually we may find the ultimate “stuff”, but when we do, it will already have long been apparent that substance is nowhere near as important as structure. Reductionism isn’t so much wrong as beside the point—when we want to understand what makes a table a table or what makes a man a man, it simply doesn’t matter what stuff they are made of. The table could be wood, glass, plastic, or metal; the man could be carbon, nitrogen and water like us, or else silicon and tantalum like Lieutenant Commander Data on Star Trek. Yes, structure must be made of something, and the substance does affect the structures that can be made out of it, but the structure is what really matters, not the substance.

Hence, I think it is deeply misguided to suggest that because human beings are made of molecules, this means that we are just the same thing as our molecules. Love is indeed made of oxytocin (among other things), but only in the sense that a table is made of wood. To know that love is made of oxytocin really doesn’t tell us very much about love; we need also to understand how oxytocin interacts with the bafflingly complex system that is a human brain—and indeed how groups of brains get together in relationships and societies. This is because love, like so much else, is not substance but function—something you do, not something you are made of.

It is not hard, rigorous science that says love is just oxytocin and happiness is just dopamine; it is naive, simplistic science. It is the sort of “science” that comes from overlaying old prejudices (like “matter is solid, thoughts are ethereal”) with a thin veneer of knowledge. To be a realist about protons but not about obligations is to be a realist about some functional relations and not others. It is to hear “mind is matter”, and fail to understand the is—the identity between them—instead acting as if we had said “there is no mind; there is only matter”. You may find it hard to believe that mind can be made of matter, as do we all; yet the universe cares not about our incredulity. The perfect correlation between neurochemical activity and cognitive activity has been verified in far too many experiments to doubt. Somehow, that kilogram of wet, sparking gelatin in your head is actually thinking and feeling—it is actually you.

And once we realize this, I do not think it is a great leap to realize that the vast collection of complex, interacting bodies moving along particular trajectories through space that was the Holocaust was actually wrong, really, objectively wrong.

Against Moral Relativism

PNRJ core principles, development economics, ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Moral relativism is surprisingly common, especially among undergraduate students. There are also some university professors who espouse it, typically but not always from sociology, gender studies or anthropology departments (examples include Marshall Sahlins, Stanley Fish, Susan Harding, Richard Rorty, Michael Fischer, and Alison Renteln). There is a fairly long tradition of moral relativism, from Edvard Westermarck in the 1930s to Melville Herskovits, to more recently Francis Snare and David Wong in the 1980s. University of California Press at Berkeley.} In 1947, the American Anthropological Association released a formal statement declaring that moral relativism was the official position of the anthropology community, though this has since been retracted.

All of this is very, very bad, because moral relativism is an incredibly naive moral philosophy and a dangerous one at that. Vitally important efforts to advance universal human rights are conceptually and sometimes even practically undermined by moral relativists. Indeed, look at that date again: 1947, two years after the end of World War II. The world’s civilized cultures had just finished the bloodiest conflict in history, including some ten million people murdered in cold blood for their religion and ethnicity, and the very survival of the human species hung in the balance with the advent of nuclear weapons—and the American Anthropological Association was insisting that morality is meaningless independent of cultural standards? Were they trying to offer an apologia for genocide?

What is relativism trying to say, anyway? Often the arguments get tied up in knots. Consider a particular example, infanticide. Moral relativists will sometimes argue, for example, that infanticide is wrong in the modern United States but permissible in ancient Inuit society. But is this itself an objectively true normative claim? If it is, then we are moral realists. Indeed, the dire circumstances of ancient Inuit society would surely justify certain life-and-death decisions we wouldn’t otherwise accept. (Compare “If we don’t strangle this baby, we may all starve to death” and “If we don’t strangle this baby, we will have to pay for diapers and baby food”.) Circumstances can change what is moral, and this includes the circumstances of our cultural and ecological surroundings. So there could well be an objective normative fact that infanticide is justified by the circumstances of ancient Inuit life. But if there are objective normative facts, this is moral realism. And if there are no objective normative facts, then all moral claims are basically meaningless. Someone could just as well claim that infanticide is good for modern Americans and bad for ancient Inuits, or that larceny is good for liberal-arts students but bad for engineering students.

If instead all we mean is that particular acts are perceived as wrong in some societies but not in others, this is a factual claim, and on certain issues the evidence bears it out. But without some additional normative claim about whose beliefs are right, it is morally meaningless. Indeed, the idea that whatever society believes is right is a particularly foolish form of moral realism, as it would justify any behavior—torture, genocide, slavery, rape—so long as society happens to practice it, and it would never justify any kind of change in any society, because the status quo is by definition right. Indeed, it’s not even clear that this is logically coherent, because different cultures disagree, and within each culture, individuals disagree. To say that an action is “right for some, wrong for others” doesn’t solve the problem—because either it is objectively normatively right or it isn’t. If it is, then it’s right, and it can’t be wrong; and if it isn’t—if nothing is objectively normatively right—then relativism itself collapses as no more sound than any other belief.

In fact, the most difficult part of defending common-sense moral realism is explaining why it isn’t universally accepted. Why are there so many relativists? Why do so many anthropologists and even some philosophers scoff at the most fundamental beliefs that virtually everyone in the world has?

I should point out that it is indeed relativists, and not realists, who scoff at the most fundamental beliefs of other people. Relativists are fond of taking a stance of indignant superiority in which moral realism is just another form of “ethnocentrism” or “imperialism”. The most common battleground of contention recently is the issue of female circumcision, which is considered completely normal or even good in some African societies but is viewed with disgust and horror by most Western people. Other common choices include abortion, clothing, especially Islamic burqa and hijab, male circumcision, and marriage; given the incredible diversity in human food, clothing, language, religion, behavior, and technology, there are surprisingly few moral issues on which different cultures disagree—but relativists like to milk them for all they’re worth!

But I dare you, anthropologists: Take a poll. Ask people which is more important to them, their belief that, say, female circumcision is immoral, or their belief that moral right and wrong are objective truths? Virtually anyone in any culture anywhere in the world would sooner admit they are wrong about some particular moral issue than they would assent to the claim that there is no such thing as a wrong moral belief. I for one would be more willing to abandon just about any belief I hold before I would abandon the belief that there are objective normative truths. I would sooner agree that the Earth is flat and 6,000 years old, that the sky is green, that I am a brain in a vat, that homosexuality is a crime, that women are inferior to men, or that the Holocaust was a good thing—than I would ever agree that there is no such thing as right or wrong. This is of course because once I agreed that there is no objective normative truth, I would be forced to abandon everything else as well—since without objective normativity there is no epistemic normativity, and hence no justice, no truth, no knowledge, no science. If there is nothing objective to say about how we ought to think and act, then we might as well say the Earth is flat and the sky is green.

So yes, when I encounter other cultures with other values and ideas, I am forced to deal with the fact that they and I disagree about many things, important things that people really should agree upon. We disagree about God, about the afterlife, about the nature of the soul; we disagree about many specific ethical norms, like those regarding racial equality, feminism, sexuality and vegetarianism. We may disagree about economics, politics, social justice, even family values. But as long as we are all humans, we probably agree about a lot of other important things, like “murder is wrong”, “stealing is bad”, and “the sky is blue”. And one thing we definitely do not disagree about—the one cornerstone upon which all future communication can rest—is that these things matter, that they really do describe actual features of an actual world that are worth knowing. If it turns out that I am wrong about these things, \I would want to know! I’d much rather find out I’d been living the wrong way than continue to live the same pretending that it doesn’t matter. I don’t think I am alone in this; indeed, I suspect that the reason people get so angry when I tell them that religion is untrue is precisely because they realize how important it is. One thing religious people never say is “Well, God is imaginary to you, perhaps; but to me God is real. Truth is relative.” I’ve heard atheists defend other people’s beliefs in such terms—but no one ever defends their own beliefs that way. No Evangelical Baptist thinks that Christianity is an arbitrary social construction. No Muslim thinks that Islam is just one equally-valid perspective among many. It is you, relativists, who deny people’s fundamental beliefs.

Yet the fact that relativists accuse realists of being chauvinistic hints at the deeper motivations of moral relativism. In a word: Guilt. Moral relativism is an outgrowth of the baggage of moral guilt and self-loathing that Western societies have built up over the centuries. Don’t get me wrong: Western cultures have done terrible things, many terrible things, all too recently. We needn’t go so far back as the Crusades or the ethnocidal “colonization” of the Americas; we need only look to the carpet-bombing of Dresden in 1945 or the defoliation of Vietnam in the 1960s, or even the torture program as recently as 2009. There is much evil that even the greatest nations of the world have to answer for. For all our high ideals, even America, the nation of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the culture of “liberty and justice for all”, has murdered thousands of innocent people—and by “murder” I mean murder, killing not merely by accident in the collateral damage of necessary war, but indeed in acts of intentional and selfish cruelty. Not all war is evil—but many wars are, and America has fought in some of them. No Communist radical could ever burn so much of the flag as the Pentagon itself has burned in acts of brutality.

Yet it is an absurd overreaction to suggest that there is nothing good about Western culture, nothing valuable about secularism, liberal democracy, market economics, or technological development. It is even more absurd to carry the suggestion further, to the idea that civilization was a mistake and we should all go back to our “natural” state as hunter-gatherers. Yet there are anthropologists working today who actually say such things. And then, as if we had not already traversed so far beyond the shores of rationality that we can no longer see the light of home, then relativists take it one step further and assert that any culture is as good as any other.

Think about what this would mean, if it were true. To say that all cultures are equal is to say that science, education, wealth, technology, medicine—all of these are worthless. It is to say that democracy is no better than tyranny, security is no better than civil war, secularism is no better than theocracy. It is to say that racism is as good as equality, sexism is as good as feminism, feudalism is as good as capitalism.

Many relativists seem worried that moral realism can be used by the powerful and privileged to oppress others—the cishet White males who rule the world (and let’s face it, cishet White males do, pretty much, rule the world!) can use the persuasive force of claiming objective moral truth in order to oppress women and minorities. Yet what is wrong with oppressing women and minorities, if there is no such thing as objective moral truth? Only under moral realism is oppression truly wrong.

Why is America so bad at public transit?

PNRJ development economics, inequality, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 8 JDN 2460562

In most of Europe, 20-30% of the population commutes daily by public transit. In the US, only 13% do.

Even countries much poorer than the US have more widespread use of public transit; Kenya, Russia, and Venezuela all have very high rates of public transit use.

Cities around the world are rapidly expanding and improving their subway systems; but we are not here in the US.

Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Japan are all building huge high-speed rail networks. We have essentially none.

Even Canada has better public transit than we do, and their population is just as spread out as ours.

Why are we so bad at this?

Surprisingly, it isn’t really that we are lacking in rail network. We actually have more kilometers of rail than China or the EU—though shockingly little of it is electrified, and we had nearly twice as many kilometers of rail a century ago. But we use this rail network almost entirely for freight, not passengers.

Is it that we aren’t spending enough government funds? Sort of. But it’s worth noting that we cover a higher proportion of public transit costs with government funds than most other countries. How can this be? It’s because transit systems get more efficient as they get larger, and attract more passengers as they provide better service. So when you provide really bad service, you end up spending more per passenger, and you need more government subsidies to stay afloat.

Cost is definitely part of it: It costs between two and seven times as much to build the same amount of light rail network in the US as it does in most EU countries. But that just raises another question: Why is it so much more expensive here?

This isn’t comparing with China—of course China is cheaper; they have a dictatorship, they abuse their workers, they pay peanuts. None of that is true of France or Germany, democracies where wages are just as high and worker protections are actually a good deal stronger than here. Yet it still costs two to seven times as much to build the same amount of rail in the US as it does in France or Germany.

Another part of the problem seems to be that public transit in the US is viewed as a social welfare program, rather than an infrastructure program: Rather than seeing it as a vital function of government that supports a strong economy, we see it as a last resort for people too poor to buy cars. And then it becomes politicized, because the right wing in the US hates social welfare programs and will do anything to make sure that they are cut down as much as possible.

It wasn’t always this way.

As recently as 1970, most US major cities had strong public transit systems. But now it’s really only the coastal cities that have them; cities throughout the South and Midwest have massively divested from their public transit. This goes along with a pattern of deindustrialization and suburbanization: These cities are stagnating economically and their citizens are moving out to the suburbs, so there’s no money for public transit and there’s more need for roads.

But the decline of US public transit goes back even further than that. Average transit trips per person in the US fell from 115 per year in 1950 to 36 per year in 1970.

This long, slow decline has only gotten worse as a result of the COVID pandemic; with more and more people working remotely, there’s just less need for commuting in general. (Then again, that also means fewer car miles, so it’s probably a good thing from an environmental perspective.)

Once public transit starts failing, it becomes a vicious cycle: They lose revenue, so they cut back on service, so they become more inconvenient, so they lose more revenue. Really successful public transit systems require very heavy investment in order to maintain fast, convenient service across an entire city. Any less than that, and people will just turn to cars instead.

Currently, the public transit systems in most US cities are suffering severe financial problems, largely as a result of the pandemic; they are facing massive shortfalls in their budgets. The federal government often helps with the capital costs of buying vehicles and laying down new lines, but not with the operating costs of actually running the system.

There seems to be some kind of systemic failure in the US in particular; something about our politics, or our economy, or our culture just makes us uniquely bad at building and maintaining public transit.

What should we do about this?

One option would be to do nothing—laissez faire. Maybe cars are just a more efficient mode of transportation, or better for what Americans want, and we should accept that.

But when you look at the externalities involved, it becomes clear that this is not the right approach. While cars produce enormous amounts of pollution and carbon emissions, public transit is much, much cleaner. (Electric cars are better than diesel buses, but still worse than trams and light rail—and besides, the vast majority of cars use gasoline.) Just for clean air and climate change alone, we have strong reasons to want fewer cars and more public transit.

And there are positive externalities of public transit too; it’s been estimated that for every $1 spent on public transit, a city gains $5 in economic activity. We’re leaving a lot of money on the table by failing to invest in something so productive.

We need a fundamental shift in how Americans think about public transit. Not as a last resort for the poor, but as a default option for everyone. Not as a left-wing social welfare program, but as a vital component of our nation’s infrastructure.

Whenever people get stuck in traffic, instead of resenting other drivers (who are in exactly the same boat!), they should resent that the government hasn’t supported more robust public transit systems—and then they should go out and vote for candidates and policies that will change that.

Of course, with everything else that’s wrong with our economy and our political system, I can understand why this might not be a priority right now. But sooner or later we are going to need to fix this, or it’s just going to keep getting worse and worse.

Housing should be cheap

PNRJ core principles, development economics, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy , , ,

Sep 1 JDN 2460555

We are of two minds about housing in our society. On the one hand, we recognize that shelter is a necessity, and we want it to be affordable for all. On the other hand, we see real estate as an asset, and we want it to appreciate in value and thereby provide a store of wealth. So on the one hand we want it to be cheap, but on the other hand we want it to be expensive. And of course it can’t be both.

This is not a uniquely American phenomenon. As Noah Smith points out, it seems to be how things are done in almost every country in the world. It may be foolish for me to try to turn such a tide. But I’m going to try anyway.

Housing should be cheap.

For some reason, inflation is seen as a bad thing for every other good, necessity and luxury alike; but when it comes to housing in particular—the single biggest expense for almost everyone—suddenly we are conflicted about it, and think that maybe inflation is a good thing actually.

This is because owning a home that appreciates in value provides the illusion of increasing wealth.

Yes, I said illusion. In some particular circumstances it can sometimes increase real wealth, but when housing is getting more expensive everywhere at once (which is basically true), it doesn’t actually increase real wealth—because you still need to have a home. So while you’d get more money if you sold your current home, you’d have to go buy another home that would be just as expensive. That extra wealth is largely imaginary.

In fact, what isn’t an illusion is your increased property tax bill. If you aren’t planning on selling your home any time soon, you should really see its appreciation as a bad thing; now you suddenly owe more in taxes.

Home equity lines of credit complicate this a bit; for some reason we let people collateralize part of the home—even though the whole home is already collateralized with a mortgage to someone else—and thereby turn that largely-imaginary wealth into actual liquid cash. This is just one more way that our financial system is broken; we shouldn’t be offering these lines of credit, just as we shouldn’t be creating mortgage-backed securities. Cleverness is not a virtue in finance; banking should be boring.

But you’re probably still not convinced. So I’d like you to consider a simple thought experiment, where we take either view to the extreme: Make housing 100 times cheaper or 100 times more expensive.

Currently, houses cost about $400,000. So in Cheap World, houses cost $4,000. In Expensive World, they cost $40 million.

In Cheap World, there is no homelessness. Seriously, zero. It would make no sense at all for the government not to simply buy everyone a house. If you want to also buy your own house—or a dozen—go ahead, that’s fine; but you get one for free, paid for by tax dollars, because that’s cheaper than a year of schooling for a high-school student; it’s in fact not much more than what we’d currently spend to house someone in a homeless shelter for a year. So given the choice of offering someone two years at a shelter versus never homeless ever again, it’s pretty obvious we should choose the latter. Thus, in Cheap World, we all have a roof over our heads. And instead of storing their wealth in their homes in Cheap World, people store their wealth in stocks and bonds, which have better returns anyway.

In Expensive World, the top 1% are multi-millionaires who own homes, maybe the top 10% can afford rent, and the remaining 89% of the population are homeless. There’s simply no way to allocate the wealth of our society such that a typical middle class household has $40 million. We’re just not that rich. We probably never will be that rich. It may not even be possible to make a society that rich. In Expensive World, most people live in tents on the streets, because housing has been priced out of reach for all but the richest families.

Cheap World sounds like an amazing place to live. Expensive World is a horrific dystopia. The only thing I changed was the price of housing.


Yes, I changed it a lot; but that was to make the example as clear as possible, and it’s not even as extreme as it probably sounds. At 10% annual growth, 100 times more expensive only takes 49 years. At the current growth rate of housing prices of about 5% per year, it would take 95 years. A century from now, if we don’t fix our housing market, we will live in Expensive World. (Yes, we’ll most likely be richer then too; but will we be that much richer? Median income has not been rising nearly as fast as median housing price. If current trends continue, median income will be 5 times bigger and housing prices will be 100 times bigger—that’s still terrible.)

We’re already seeing something that feels a lot like Expensive World in some of our most expensive cities. San Francisco has ludicrously expensive housing and also a massive homelessness crisis—this is not a coincidence. Homelessness does still exist in more affordable cities, but clearly not at the same crisis level.

I think part of the problem is that people don’t really understand what wealth is. They see the number go up, and they think that means there is more wealth. Real wealth consists in goods, not in prices. The wealth we have is made of real things, not monetary prices. Prices merely decide how wealth is allocated.

A home is wealth, yes. But it’s the same amount of real wealth regardless of what price it has, because what matters is what it’s good for. If you become genuinely richer by selling an appreciated home, you gained that extra wealth from somewhere else; it was not contained within your home. You have appropriated wealth that someone else used to have. You haven’t created wealth; you’ve merely obtained it.

For you as an individual, that may not make a difference; you still get richer. But as a society, it makes all the difference: Moving wealth around doesn’t make our society richer, and all higher prices can do is move wealth around.

This means that rising housing prices simply cannot make our whole society richer. Better houses could do that. More houses could do that. But simply raising the price tag isn’t making our society richer. If it makes anyone richer—which, again, typically it does not—it does so by moving wealth from somewhere else. And since homeowners are generally richer than non-homeowners (even aside from their housing wealth!), more expensive homes means moving wealth from poorer people to richer people—increased inequality.

We used to have affordable housing, just a couple of generations ago. But we may never have truly affordable housing again, because people really don’t like to see that number go down, and they vote for policies accordingly—especially at the local level. Our best hope right now seems to be to keep it from going up faster than the growth rate of income, so that homes don’t become any more unaffordable than they already are.

But frankly I’m not optimistic. I think part of the cyberpunk dystopia we’re careening towards is Expensive World.