In Nozicem

2025-11-022025-10-24 PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, inequality anarchism, anarchist, anarcho-capitalism, capitalism, history, histroy, libertarian, morality, redistribution, Robert Nozick, Rome, slavery, taxation, theft

Nov 2 JDN 2460982

(I wasn’t sure how to convert Robert Nozick’s name into Latin. I decided it’s a third-declension noun, Nozix, Nozicis. But my name already is Latin, so if one of his followers ever wants to write a response to this post that also references In Catalinam, they’ll know how to decline it; the accusative is Julium, if you please.)

This post is not at all topical. I have been too busy working on video game jams (XBOX Game Camp Detroit, and then the Epic Mega Jam, for which you can view my submission, The Middle of Nowhere, here!) to keep up with the news, and honestly I think I am psychologically better off for it.

Rather, this is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, but never quite got around to.

It is about Robert Nozick, and why he was a bad philosopher, a bad person, and a significant source of harm to our society as a whole.

Nozick had a successful career at Harvard, and even became president of the American Philosophical Association. So it may seem that I am going out on quite a limb by saying he’s a bad philosopher.

But the philosophy for which he is best known, the thing that made his career, is not simply obviously false—it is evil. It is the sort of thing that one can only write if one is either a complete psychopath, utterly ignorant of history, or arguing in bad faith (or some combination of these).

It is summarized in this pithy quote that makes less moral sense than the philosophy of the Joker in The Dark Knight:

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (p.169)

I apologize in advance for my language, but I must say it:

NO IT FUCKING ISN’T.

At worst—at the absolute worst, when a government is utterly corrupt and tyrannical, provides no legitimate services whatsoever, contributes in no way to public goods, offers no security, and exists entirely to enrich its ruling class—which by the way is worse than almost any actual government that has ever existed, even including totalitarian dictators and feudal absolute monarchies—at worst, taxation is like theft.

Taxation, like theft, takes your wealth, not your labor.

Wealth is not labor.

Even wealth earned by wage income is not labor—and most wealth isn’t earned by wage income. Elon Musk is now halfway to a trillion dollars, and it’s not because he works a million times harder than you. (Nor is he a million times smarter than you, or even ten—perhaps not even one.) The majority of wealth—and the vast majority of top 1%, top 0.1%, and top 0.01% wealth—is capital that begets more capital, continuously further enriching those who could live just fine without ever working another day in their lives. Billionaire wealth is honestly so pathological at this point that it would be pathetic if it weren’t so appalling.

Even setting aside the historical brutality of slavery as it was actually implemented—especially in the United States, where slaves were racialized and commodified in a way that historically slaves usually weren’t—there is a very obvious, very bright, very hard line between taking someone’s wealth and forcing them to work.

Even a Greek prisoner of war who was bought by a Roman patrician to tutor his children—the sort of slave that actually had significant autonomy and lived better than an average person in Roman society—was fundamentally unfree in a way that no one has ever been made unfree by having to pay income tax. (And the Roman patrician who owned him and (ahem) paid taxes was damn well aware of how much more free he was than his slave.)

Whether you are taxed at 2% or 20% or 90%, you are still absolutely free to use your time however you please. Yes, if you assume a fixed amount of work at a fixed wage, and there are no benefits to you from the taxation (which is really not something we can assume, because having a good or bad government radically affects what your economy as a whole will be like), you will have less stuff, and if you insist for some reason that you must have the same amount of stuff, then you would have to work more.

But even then, you would merely have to work more somewhere—anywhere—in order to make up the shortfall. You could keep your current job, or get another one, or start your own business. And you could at any time decide that you don’t need all that extra stuff and don’t want to work more, and simply choose to not work more. You are, in other words, still free.

At worst, the government has taken your stuff. It has made you poorer. But absolutely not, in no way, shape or form, has it made you a slave.

Yes, there is the concept of “wage slavery”, but “wage slavery” isn’t actually slavery, and the notion that people aren’t really, truly free unless they can provide for basic needs entails the need for a strong, redistributive government, which is the exact opposite of what Robert Nozick and his shockingly large body of followers have been arguing for since the 1970s.

I could have been sympathetic to Nozick if his claim had been this:

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with [theft]. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing [goods he has purchased with his own earnings].

Or even this:

[Military conscription] is on a par with forced labor. [After all, you are] seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Even then, there are some very clear reasons why we might be willing to accept taxation or even conscription from a legitimate liberal democratic government even though a private citizen doing the same fundamental activity would obviously be illegal and immoral.

Indeed, it’s not clear that theft is always immoral; there is always the Les Miserables exception where someone desperately poor steals food to feed themselves, and a liberal democratic government taxing its citizens in order to provide food stamps seems even more ethically defensible than that.

And that, my friends, is precisely why Nozick wasn’t satisfied with it.

Precisely because there is obvious nuance here that can readily justify at least some degree of not only taxation for national security and law enforcement, but also taxation for public goods and even redistribution of wealth, Nozick could not abide the analogies that actually make sense. He had to push beyond them to an analogy that is transparently absurd, in order to argue for his central message that government is justifiable for national security and law enforcement only, and all other government functions are inherently immoral. Forget clean water and air. Forget safety regulations in workplaces—or even on toys. Forget public utilities—all utilities must be privatized and unregulated. And above all—above all—forget ever taking any money from the rich to help the poor, because that would be monstrous.

If you support food stamps, in Nozick’s view, there should be a statue of you in Mississippi, because you are a defender of slavery.

Indeed, many of his followers have gone beyond that, and argued using the same core premises that all government is immoral, and the only morally justifiable system is anarcho-capitalism—which, I must confess, I have always had trouble distinguishing from feudalism with extra steps.

Nozick’s response to this kind of argument basically seemed to be that he thought anarcho-capitalism will (somehow, magically) automatically transition into his favored kind of minarchist state, and so it’s actually a totally fine intermediate goal. (A fully privatized military and law enforcement system! What could possibly go wrong? It’s not like private prisons are already unconscionably horrible even in an otherwise mostly-democratic system or anything!)

Nozick wanted to absolve himself—and the rich, especially the rich, whom he seemed to love more than life itself—from having to contribute to society, from owing anything to any other human being.

Rather than be moved by our moral appeals that millions of innocent people are suffering and we could so easily alleviate that suffering by tiny, minuscule, barely-perceptible harms to those who are already richer than anyone could possibly deserve to be, he tried to turn the tables: “No, you are immoral. What you want is slavery.”

And in so doing, he created a thin, but shockingly resilient, intellectual veneer to the most craven selfishness and the most ideologically blinkered hyper-capitalism. He made it respectable to oppose even the most basic ways that governments can make human life better; by verbal alchemy he transmuted plain evil into its own new moral crusade.

Indeed, perhaps the only reason his philosophy was ever taken seriously is that the rich and powerful found it very, very, useful.

Evolutionary skepticism

2025-03-092025-03-03 PNRJ ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm evolution, Kant, meta-ethics, morality, Richard Joyce, skepticism, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker

Post 572 Mar 9 JDN 2460744

In the last two posts I talked about ways that evolutionary theory could influence our understanding of morality, including the dangerous views of naive moral Darwinism as well as some more reasonable approaches; yet there are other senses of the phrase “morality evolves” that we haven’t considered. One of these is actually quite troubling; were it true, the entire project of morality would be in jeopardy. I’ll call it “evolutionary skepticism”; it says that yes, morality has evolved—and this is reason to doubt that morality is true. Richard Joyce, author of The Evolution of Morality, is of such a persuasion, and he makes a quite compelling case. Joyce’s central point is that evolution selects for fitness, not accuracy; we had reason to evolve in ways that would maximize the survival of our genes, not reasons to evolve in ways that would maximize the accuracy of our moral claims.

This is of course absolutely correct, and it is troubling precisely because we can all see that the two are not necessarily the same thing. It’s easy to imagine many ways that beliefs could evolve that had nothing to do with the accuracy of those beliefs.

But note that word: necessarily. Accuracy and fitness aren’t necessarily aligned—but it could still be that they are, in fact, aligned rather well. Yes, we can imagine ways a brain could evolve that would benefit its fitness without improving its accuracy; but is that actually what happened to our ancestors? Do we live on instinct, merely playing out by rote the lifestyles of our forebears, thinking and living the same way we have for hundreds of millennia?

Clearly not! Behold, you are reading a blog post! It was written on a laptop computer! While these facts may seem perfectly banal to you, they represent an unprecedented level of behavioral novelty, one achieved only by one animal species among millions, and even then only very recently. Human beings are incredibly flexible, incredibly creative, and incredibly intelligent. Yes, we evolved to be this way, of course we did; but so what? We are this way. We are capable of learning new things about the world, gaining in a few short centuries knowledge our forebears could never have imagined. Evolution does not always make animals into powerful epistemic engines—indeed, 99.99999\% of the time it does not—but once in awhile it does, and we are the result.

Natural selection is quite frugal; it tends to evolve things the easiest way. The way the world is laid out, it seems to be that the easiest way to evolve a brain that survives really well in a wide variety of ecological and social environments is to evolve a brain that is capable of learning to expand its own knowledge and understanding. After all, no other organism has ever been or is ever likely to be as evolutionarily fit as we are; we span the globe, cover a wide variety of ecological niches, and number in the billions and counting. We’ve even expanded beyond the planet Earth, something no other organism could even contemplate. We are successful because we are smart; is it really so hard to believe that we are smart because it made our ancestors successful?

Indeed, it must be this way, or we wouldn’t be able to make sense of the fact that our human brains, evolved for the African savannah a million years ago with minor tweaks since then, are capable of figuring out chess, calculus, writing, quantum mechanics, special relativity, television broadcasting, space travel, and for that matter Darwinian evolution and meta-ethics. None of these things could possibly have been adaptive in our ancestral ecology. They must be spandrels, fitness-neutral side-effects of evolved traits. And just like the original pendentives of San Marco that motivated Gould’s metaphor, what glorious spandrels they are!

Our genes made us better at gathering information and processing that information into correct beliefs, and calculus and quantum mechanics came along for the ride. Our greatest adaptation is to be adaptable; our niche is to need no niche, for we can carve our own.

This is not to abandon evolutionary psychology, for evolution does have a great deal to tell us about psychology. We do have instincts; preprocessing systems built into our sensory organs, innate emotions that motivate us to action, evolved heuristics that we use to respond quickly under pressure. Steven Pinker argues convincingly that language is an evolved instinct—and where would we be without language? Our instincts are essential for not only our survival, but indeed for our rationality.

Staring at a blinking cursor on the blank white page of a word processor, imagining the infinity of texts that could be written upon that page, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were looking at a blank slate. Yet in fact you are staring at the pinnacle of high technology, an extremely complex interlocking system of hardware and software with dozens of components and billions of subcomponents, all precision-engineered for maximum efficiency. The possibilities are endless not because the system is simple and impinged upon by its environment, but because it is complex, and capable of engaging with that environment in order to convert subtle differences in input into vast differences in output. If this is true of a word processor, how much more true it must be of an organism capable of designing and using word processors! It is the very instincts that seem to limit our rationality which have made that rationality possible in the first place. Witness the eternal wisdom of Immanuel Kant:

Misled by such a proof of the power of reason, the demand for the extension of knowledge recognises no limits. The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

The analogy is even stronger than he knew—for brains, like wings, are an evolutionary adaptation! (What would Kant have made of Darwin?) But because our instincts are so powerful, they are self-correcting; they allow us to do science.

Richard Joyce agrees that we are right to think our evolved brains are reasonably reliable when it comes to scientific facts. He has to, otherwise his whole argument would be incoherent. Joyce agrees that we evolved to think 2+2=4 precisely because 2+2=4, and we evolved to think space is 3-dimensional precisely because space is 3-dimensional. Indeed, he must agree that we evolved to think that we evolved because we evolved! Yet, for some reason Joyce thinks that this same line of reasoning doesn’t apply to ethics.

But why wouldn’t it? In fact, I think we have more reason to trust our evolved capacities in ethics than we do in other domains of science, because the subject matter of morality—human behavior and social dynamics—is something that we have been familiar with even all the way back to the savannah. If we evolved to think that theft and murder are bad, why would that happen? I submit it would happen precisely because theft and murder are Pareto-suboptimal unsustainable strategies—that is, precisely because theft and murder are bad. (Don’t worry if you don’t know what I mean by “Pareto-suboptimal” and “unsustainable strategy”; I’ll get to those in later posts.) Once you realize that “bad” is a concept that can ultimately be unpacked to naturalistic facts, all reason to think it is inaccessible to natural selection drops away; natural selection could well have chosen brains that didn’t like murder precisely because murder is bad. Indeed, because morality is ultimately scientific, part of how natural selection could evolve us to be more moral is by evolving us to be more scientific. We are more scientific than apes, and vastly more scientific than cockroaches; we are, indeed, the most scientific animal that has ever lived on Earth.

I do think that our evolved moral instincts are to some degree mistaken or incomplete; but I can make sense of this, in the same way I make sense of the fact that other evolved instincts don’t quite fit what we have discovered in other sciences. For instance, humans have an innate concept of linear momentum that doesn’t quite fit with what we’ve discovered in physics. We tend to presume that objects have an inherent tendency toward rest, though in fact they do not—this is because in our natural environment, friction makes most objects act as if they had such a tendency. Roll a rock along the ground, and it will eventually stop. Run a few miles, and eventually you’ll have to stop too. Most things in our everyday life really do behave as if they had an inherent tendency toward rest. It’s only once we realized that friction is itself a force, not present everywhere, that we came to see that linear momentum is conserved in the absence of external forces. (Throw a rock in space, and it will not ever stop. Nor will you, by Newton’s Third Law.) This casts no doubt upon our intuitions about rocks rolled along the ground, which do indeed behave exactly as our intuition predicts.

Similarly, our intuition that animals don’t deserve rights could well be an evolutionary consequence of the fact that we sometimes had to eat animals in order to survive, and so would do better not thinking about it too much; but now that we don’t need to do this anymore, we can reflect upon the deeper issues involved in eating meat. This is no reason to doubt our intuitions that parents should care for their children and murder is bad.

Other approaches to evolutionary ethics

2025-03-022025-02-24 PNRJ ethics, tribal paradigm adaptation, aliens, anthropocentrism, biology, Darwin, evolution, Extrans, extraterrestrial, Frans de Waal, mathematics, morality, Sam Harris

Mar 2 JDN 2460737

In my previous post, I talked about some ways that evolutionary theory can be abused in ethics, leading to abhorrent conclusions. This is all too common; but it doesn’t mean that evolutionary theory has nothing useful to say about ethics.

There are other approaches to evolutionary ethics that do not lead to such horrific conclusions; one such approach is evolutionary anthropocentrism; it is a position held by respected thinkers such as Frans de Waal, but it is still flawed. The claim is that certain behaviors are moral because we have evolved to do them—that behaviors like friendship, marriage, and nationalism are good precisely because they are part of human nature. On this theory, we can discern what is right and wrong for human beings simply by empirically studying what behaviors are universal or adaptive among human beings.

While I applaud the attempt to understand morality scientifically, I must ultimately conclude that the peculiar history of human evolution is far too parochial a basis for any deep moral truths. Another species—from the millions of other life forms with which we share the Earth to the millions of extraterrestrial civilizations that must in all probability exist somewhere in the vastness of the universe—could have a completely different set of adaptations, and hence a completely incompatible moral system.

Is a trait good because it evolved, or did it evolve because it is good? If the former then “good” just means “fit” and human beings are no more moral than rats or cockroaches. Indeed, the most fit human being of all time was the Moroccan tyrant Mulai Ismail, who reputedly fathered 800 children; the least fit include Isaac Newton and Alan Turing, who had no children at all. To say that evolution gets it right—as, with qualifications, I will—is to say that there is a right, independent of what did or did not evolve; if evolution can get it right, then it could also, under other circumstances, get it wrong.

For illustration, imagine a truly alien form of life, one with which we share no common ancestor and only the most basic similarities. Such creatures likely exist in the vastness of the universe, though of course we’ve never encountered any. Perhaps somewhere in one of the nearby arms of our galaxy there is an unassuming planet inhabited by a race of ammonia-based organisms, let’s call them the Extrans, whose “eyes” see in the radio spectrum, whose “ears” are attuned to frequencies lower than we can hear, whose “nerves” transmit signals by fiber optics instead of electricity, whose “legs” are twenty frond-structured fins that propel them through the ammonia sea, whose “hands” are three long prehensile tentacles extending from their heads, whose “language” is a pattern of radio transmissions produced by their four dorsal antennae. Now, imagine that this alien species has managed to develop sufficient technology so that over millions of years they have colonized all the nearby planets with sufficient ammonia to support them. Yet, their population continues to grow—now in the hundreds of trillions—and they cannot find enough living space to support it. One of their scientists has discovered a way to “ammoniform” certain planets—planets with a great deal of water and nitrogen can be converted into ammonia-supporting planets. There’s only one problem: The nearest water-nitrogen planet is called Earth, and there are already seven billion humans (not to mention billions of other lifeforms) living on it who would surely die if the ammoniforming were performed. The ammoniformer ship has just entered our solar system; we have managed to establish radio contact and achieve some rudimentary level of translation between our radically different languages. What do we say to the Extrans?

If morality is to have a truly objective meaning, we ought to be able to explain in terms the Extrans could accept and understand why it would be wrong for them to ammoniform our planet while we are still living on it. We ought to be able to justify to these other intelligent beings, however different they are from us chemically, biologically, psychologically, and technologically, why we are creatures of dignity who deserve not to be killed. Otherwise, the species with superior weapons will win; and if they can get here, that will probably be them, not us.

Sam Harris has said several times, “morality could be like food”; by this he seems to mean that there is objective evaluation that can be made about the nutrition versus toxicity of a given food, even if there is no one best food, and similarly that objective evaluation can be made about the goodness or badness of a moral system even if there is no one best moral system. This makes a great deal of sense to me, but the analogy can also be turned against him, for if morality is just as contingent upon our biology as diet, then who are we to question these Extrans in their quest for more lebensraum?

Or, if you’d prefer to keep the matter closer to home: Who are we to question sharks or cougars, for whom we are food? In practice it’s difficult to negotiate with sharks and cougars, of course. But if even this is to have real moral significance, e.g. that creatures more capable of rational thought and mutual communication are morally better, we still need an objective inter-species account of morality. And suppose we found a particularly intelligent cougar, and managed some sort of communication; what would we be able to say? What reasons could we offer in defense of our claim that they ought not to eat us? Or is, ultimately, our moral authority in these conflicts no deeper than our superior weapons technology? If this is so, it’s hard to see why the superior weapons technology of the Nazi military wouldn’t justify their genocide of the Jews; and thus we run afoul of the Hitler Principle.

While specific moral precepts can and will depend upon the particular features of a given situation, and evolution surely affects and informs these circumstances, the fundamental principles of morality must be deeper than this—they must at least have the objectivity of scientific facts; in fact I think we can go further than this and say that the core principles of morality are in fact logical truths, the sort of undeniable facts that any intelligent being must accept on pain of contradiction or incoherence. Even if not trivially obvious (like “2+2=4” or “a triangle has three sides”), logical and mathematical truths are still logically undeniable (like “the Fourier transform of a Gaussian function is a Gaussian function” or “the Galois group of some fifth-order real polynomials has an acyclic simple normal subgroup” or “the existence of a strong Lyapunov function proves that a system of nonlinear differential equations has an asymptotically stable zero solution”. Don’t worry if you have no idea what those sentences mean; that’s kind of the point. They are tautologies, yes, but very sophisticated tautologies). The fundamental norms must be derivable by logic and the applications to the real world must depend only upon empirical facts.

The standard that moral principles should be scientific or logical truths is a high bar indeed; and one may think it is unreachable. But if this is so, then I do not see how we can coherently discuss ethics as something which makes true claims against us; I can see only prudence, instinct, survival or custom. If morality is an adaptation like any other, then the claim “genocide is wrong” has no more meaning than “five fingers are better than six”—each applies to our particular evolutionary niche, but no other. Certainly the Extrans will not be bound by such rules, and it is hard to see why cougars should be either. There may still be objectively valid claims that can be made against our behavior, but they will have no more force than “Don’t do that; it’s bad for your genes”. Indeed, I already know that plenty of things people do are (at least potentially) bad for their genes, and yet I think they have a right to do them; not only the usual suspects of contraception, masturbation and homosexuality, but indeed reading books, attending school, drinking alcohol, watching television, skiing, playing baseball, and all sorts of other things human beings do, are wastes of energy in purely Darwinian terms. Most of what makes life worth living has little, if any, effect at spreading our genes.

Naive moral Darwinism

2025-02-232025-02-17 PNRJ ethics, tribal paradigm Benjamin Franklin, Creationism, Darwinism, eugenics, evolution, morality, Social Darwinism

Feb 23 JDN 2460730

Impressed by the incredible usefulness of evolutionary theory in explaining the natural world, many people have tried to apply it to ethical claims as well. The basic idea is that morality evolves; morality is an adaptation just like any other, a trait which has evolved by mutation and natural selection.

Unfortunately the statement “morality evolves” is ambiguous; it could mean a number of different things. This ambiguity has allowed abuses of evolutionary thinking in morality.

Two that are particularly harmful are evolutionary eugenics and laissez-faire Darwinism, both of which fall under an umbrella I’ll call ‘naive moral Darwinism’.

They are both terrible; it saddens me that many people propound them. Creationists will often try to defend their doubts about evolution on empirical grounds, but they really can’t, and I think even they realize this. Their real objection to evolution is not that it is unscientific, but that it is immoral; the concern is that studying evolution will make us callous and selfish. And unfortunately, there is a grain of truth here: A shallow understanding of evolution can indeed lead to a callous and selfish mindset, as people try to shoehorn evolutionary theory onto moral and political systems without a deep understanding of either.

The first option is usually known as “Social Darwinism”, but I think a better term is “evolutionary eugenics”. (“Social Darwinism” is a pejorative, not a self-description.) This philosophy, if we even credit it with the term, is especially ridiculous; indeed, it is evil. It doesn’t make any sense, either as ethics or as evolution, and it has led to some of the most terrible atrocities in history, from forced sterilization to mass murder. Darwin adamantly disagreed with it, and it rests upon a variety of deep confusions about evolutionary science.

First, in practice at least, eugenicists presumed that traits like intelligence, health, and even wealth are almost entirely genetic—when it’s obvious that they are very heavily affected by the environment. There certainly are genetic factors involved, but the presumption that these traits are entirely genetic is absurd. Indeed, the fact that the wealth of parents is strongly correlated with that of their children has an obvious explanation completely unrelated to genetics: Inheritance. Wealthy parents can also give their children many advantages in life that lead to higher earnings later. Controlling for inherited environment, there is still some heritability of wealth, but it’s quite weak; it’s probably due to personality traits like conscientiousness, ambition, and in fact narcissism which are beneficial in a capitalist economy. Hence breeding the wealthy may make more people who are similar to the wealthy; but there’s no reason to think it will actually make the world wealthier.

Moreover, eugenics rests upon a confusion between fitness in the evolutionary sense of expected number of allele copies, and the notion of being “fit” in some other sense, like physical health (as in “fitness club”), socially conformity (as in “misfits”) or mental sanity (as in “unfit to serve trial”). Strong people are not necessarily higher in genetic fitness, nor are smart people, nor are people of any particular race or ethnicity. Fitness entails the probability of one’s genes being passed on in a given environment—without reference to a specific environment, it says basically nothing. Given the reference environment “majority of the Earth’s land surface”, humans are very fit organisms, but so are rats and cockroaches. Given the reference environment “deep ocean”, sharks fare far better than we ever will, and better even than our cousins the cetaceans who live there. Moreover, there is no reason to think that intelligence in the sense of Einstein or Darwin is particularly fit. The intelligence of an ordinary person is definitely fit—that’s why we have it—but beyond that point, it may in fact be counterproductive. (Consider Isaac Newton and Alan Turing, both of whom were geniuses and neither of whom ever married or had children.)

There is milder form of this that is still quite harmful; I’ll call it “laissez-faire Darwinism”. It says that because natural selection automatically perpetuates the fit at the expense of the unfit, it ultimately leads to the best overall outcome. Under laissez-faire Darwinism, we should simply let evolution happen as it is going to happen. This theory is not as crazy as evolutionary eugenics—nor would its consequences be as dire—but it’s still quite confused. Natural selection is a law of nature, not a moral principle. It says what will happen, not what should happen. Indeed, like any law of nature, natural selection is inevitable. No matter what you do, natural selection will act upon you. The genes that work will survive, the genes that fail will die. The specifics of the environmental circumstances will decide which genes are the ones that survive, and there are random deviations due to genetic drift; but natural selection always applies.

Typically laissez-faire Darwinists argue that we should eliminate all government welfare, health care, and famine relief, because they oppose natural selection; but this would be like tearing down all skyscrapers because they oppose gravity, or, as Benjamin Franklin was once asked to do, to cease installing lightning rods because they oppose God’s holy smiting. Natural selection is a law of nature, a fundamental truth; but through wise engineering we can work with it instead of against it, just as we do with gravity and electricity. We would ignore laws of nature at our own peril—an engineer who failed to take gravity into account would not make very good buildings!—but we can work with them and around them to achieve our goals. This is no less true with natural selection than with any law of nature, whether gravity, electricity, quantum mechanics, or anything else. As a laser uses quantum mechanics and a light bulb uses electricity, so wise social policy can use natural selection to serve human ends. Indeed, welfare, health care, and famine relief are precisely the sort of things that can modulate the fitness of our entire species to make us all better off.

There are however important ways in which evolution can influence our ethical reasoning, which I’ll talk about in later posts.

Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy”

2025-01-122025-01-07 PNRJ ethics, Logic of Kindness Alison Gopnik, Aristotle, Bayes net, consequentialism, definition, deontology, ethics, fallacy, foundherentist, G.E. Moore, good, Kant, language, learning, Mill, Moore, morality, naturalism, Quine, Susan Haack, virtue

Jan 12 JDN 2460688

In last week’s post I talked about some of the arguments against ethical naturalism, which have sometimes been called “the naturalistic fallacy”.

The “naturalistic fallacy” that G.E. Moore actually wrote about is somewhat subtler; it says that there is something philosophically suspect about defining something non-natural in terms of natural things—and furthermore, it says that “good” is not a natural thing and so cannot be defined in terms of natural things. For Moore, “good” is not something that can be defined with recourse to facts about psychology, biology or mathematics; “good” is simply an indefinable atomic concept that exists independent of all other concepts. As such Moore was criticizing moral theories like utilitarianism and hedonism that seek to define “good” in terms of “pleasure” or “lack of pain”; for Moore, good cannot have a definition in terms of anything except itself.

My greatest problem with this position is less philosophical than linguistic; how does one go about learning a concept that is so atomic and indefinable? When I was a child, I acquired an understanding of the word “good” that has since expanded as I grew in knowledge and maturity. I need not have called it “good”: had I been raised in Madrid, I would have called it bueno; in Beijing, hao; in Kyoto, ii; in Cairo, jaiid; and so on.

I’m not even sure if all these words really mean exactly the same thing, since each word comes with its own cultural and linguistic connotations. A vast range of possible sounds could be used to express this concept and related concepts—and somehow I had to learn which sounds were meant to symbolize which concepts, and what relations were meant to hold between them. This learning process was highly automatic, and occurred when I was very young, so I do not have great insight into its specifics; but nonetheless it seems clear to me that in some sense I learned to define “good” in terms of things that I could perceive. No doubt this definition was tentative, and changed with time and experience; indeed, I think all definitions are like this. Perhaps my knowledge of other concepts, like “pleasure”, “happiness”, “hope” and “justice”, is interconnected with “good” in such a way that none can be defined separately from the others—indeed perhaps language itself is best considered a network of mutually-reinforcing concepts, each with some independent justification and some connection to other concepts, not a straightforward derivation from more basic atomic notions. If you wish, call me a “foundherentist” in the tradition of Susan Haack; I certainly do think that all beliefs have some degree of independent justification by direct evidence and some degree of mutual justification by coherence. Haack uses the metaphor of a crossword puzzle, but I prefer Alison Gopnik’s mathematical model of a Bayes net. In any case, I had to learn about “good” somehow. Even if I had some innate atomic concept of good, we are left to explain two things: First, how I managed to associate that innate atomic concept with my sense experiences, and second, how that innate atomic concept got in my brain in the first place. If it was genetic, it must have evolved; but it could only have evolved by phenotypic interaction with the external environment—that is, with natural things. We are natural beings, made of natural material, evolved by natural selection. If there is a concept of “good” encoded into my brain either by learning or instinct or whatever combination, it had to get there by some natural mechanism.

The classic argument Moore used to support this position is now called the Open Question Argument; it says, essentially, that we could take any natural property that would be proposed as the definition of “good” and call it X, and we could ask: “Sure, that’s X, but is it good?” The idea is that since we can ask this question and it seems to make sense, then X cannot be the definition of “good”. If someone asked, “I know he is an unmarried man, but is he a bachelor?” or “I know that has three sides, but is it a triangle?” we would think that they didn’t understand what they were talking about; but Moore argues that for any natural property, “I know that is X, but is it good?” is still a meaningful question. Moore uses two particular examples, X = “pleasant” and X = “what we desire to desire”; and indeed those fit what he is saying. But are these really very good examples?

One subtle point that many philosophers make about this argument is that science can discover identities between things and properties that are not immediately apparent. We now know that water is H₂O, but until the 19th century we did not know this. So we could perfectly well imagine someone asking, “I know that’s H₂O, but is it water?” even though in fact water is H₂O and we know this. I think this sort of argument would work for some very complicated moral claims, like the claim that constitutional democracy is good; I can imagine someone who was quite ignorant of international affairs asking: “I know that it’s constitutional democracy, but is that good?” and be making sense. This is because the goodness of constitutional democracy isn’t something conceptually necessary, it is an empirical result based on the fact that constitutional democracies are more peaceful, fair, egalitarian, and prosperous than other governmental systems. In fact, it may even be only true relative to other systems we know of; perhaps there is an as-yet-unimagined governmental system that is better still. No one thinks that constitutional democracy is a definition of moral goodness. And indeed, I think few would argue that H₂O is the definition of water; instead the definition of water is something like “that wet stuff we need to drink to survive” and it just so happens that this turns out to be H₂O. If someone asked “is that wet stuff we need to drink to survive really water?” he would rightly be thought talking nonsense; that’s just what water means.

But if instead of the silly examples Moore uses, we take a serious proposal that real moral philosophers have suggested, it’s not nearly so obvious that the question is open. From Kant: “Yes, that is our duty as rational beings, but is it good?” From Mill: “Yes, that increases the amount of happiness and decreases the amount of suffering in the world, but is it good?” From Aristotle: “Yes, that is kind, just, and fair, but is it good?” These do sound dangerously close to talking nonsense! If someone asked these questions, I would immediately expect an explanation of what they were getting at. And if no such explanation was forthcoming, I would, in fact, be led to conclude that they literally don’t understand what they’re talking about.

I can imagine making sense of “I know that has three sides, but is it a triangle?”in some bizarre curved multi-dimensional geometry. Even “I know he is an unmarried man, but is he a bachelor?” makes sense if you are talking about a celibate priest. Very rarely do perfect synonyms exist in natural languages, and even when they do they are often unstable due to the effects of connotations. None of this changes the fact that bachelors are unmarried men, triangles have three sides, and yes, goodness involves fulfilling rational duties, alleviating suffering, and being kind and just (Deontology, consequentialism, and virtue theory are often thought to be distinct and incompatible; I’m convinced they amount to the same thing, which I’ll say more about in later posts.).

This line of reasoning has led some philosophers (notably Willard Quine) to deny the existence of analytic truths altogether; on Quine’s view even “2+2=4” isn’t something we can deduce directly from the meaning of the symbols. This is clearly much too strong; no empirical observation could ever lead us to deny 2+2=4. In fact, I am convinced that all mathematical truths are ultimately reducible to tautologies; even “the Fourier transform of a Gaussian is Gaussian” is ultimately a way of saying in compact jargon some very complicated statement that amounts to A=A. This is not to deny that mathematics is useful; of course mathematics is tremendously useful, because this sort of compact symbolic jargon allows us to make innumerable inferences about the world and at the same time guarantee that these inferences are correct. Whenever you see a Gaussian and you need its Fourier transform (I know, it happens a lot, right?), you can immediately know that the result will be a Gaussian; you don’t have to go through the whole derivation yourself. We are wrong to think that “ultimately reducible to a tautology” is the same as “worthless and trivial”; on the contrary, to realize that mathematics is reducible to tautology is to say that mathematics is undeniable, literally impossible to coherently deny. At least the way I use the words, the statement “Happiness is good and suffering is bad” is pretty close to that same sort of claim; if you don’t agree with it, I sense that you honestly don’t understand what I mean.

In any case, I see no more fundamental difficulty in defining “good” than I do in defining any concept, like “man”, “tree”, “multiplication”, “green” or “refrigerator”; and nor do I see any point in arguing about the semantics of definition as an approach to understanding moral truth. It seems to me that Moore has confused the map with the territory, and later authors have confused him with Hume, to all of our detriment.

What’s fallacious about naturalism?

2025-01-052024-12-30 PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness David Hume, epistemic normativity, experimental philosophy, expressivism, Frege, Geach, is-ought problem, morality, naturalism, NOMA, normativity, Stephen Jay Gould

Jan 5 JDN 2460681

There is another line of attack against a scientific approach to morality, one which threatens all the more because it comes from fellow scientists. Even though they generally agree that morality is real and important, many scientists have suggested that morality is completely inaccessible to science. There are a few different ways that this claim can be articulated; the most common are Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA), David Hume’s “is-ought problem”, and G.E. Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy”. As I will show, none of these pose serious threats to a scientific understanding of morality.

NOMA

Stephen Jay Gould, though a scientist, an agnostic, and a morally upright person, did not think that morality could be justified in scientific or naturalistic terms. He seemed convinced that moral truth could only be understood through religion, and indeed seemed to use the words “religion” and “morality” almost interchangeably:

The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).

If we take Gould to be using a very circumscribed definition of “science” to just mean the so-called “natural sciences” like physics and chemistry, then the claim is trivial. Of course we cannot resolve moral questions about stem cell research entirely in terms of quantum physics or even entirely in terms of cellular biology; no one ever supposed that we could. Yes, it’s obvious that we need to understand the way people think and the way they interact in social structures. But that’s precisely what the fields of psychology, sociology, economics, and political science are designed to do. It would be like saying that quantum physics cannot by itself explain the evolution of life on Earth. This is surely true, but it’s hardly relevant.

Conversely, if we define science broadly to include all rational and empirical methods: physics, chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, sociology, astronomy, logic, mathematics, philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, economics, political science, and so on, then Gould’s claim would mean that there is no rational reason for thinking that rape and genocide are immoral.

And even if we suppose there is something wrong with using science to study morality, the alternative Gould offers us—religion—is far worse. As I’ve already shown in previous posts, religion is a very poor source of moral understanding. If morality is defined by religious tradition, then it is arbitrary and capricious, and real moral truth disintegrates.

Fortunately, we have no reason to think so. The entire history of ethical philosophy speaks against such notions, and had Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill alive been alive to read them, they would have scoffed at Gould’s claims. I suspect Peter Singer and Thomas Pogge would scoff similarly today. Religion doesn’t offer any deep insights into morality, and reason often does; NOMA is simply wrong.

What’s the problem with “ought” and “is”?

The next common objection to a scientific approach to morality is the remark, after David Hume, that “one cannot derive an ought from an is”; due to a conflation with a loosely-related argument that G.E. Moore made later, the attempt to derive moral statements from empirical facts has become called the “naturalistic fallacy” (this is clearly not what Moore intended; I will address Moore’s actual point in a later post). But in truth, I do not really see where the fallacy is meant to lie; there is little difference in principle between deriving “ought” from “is” than there is from deriving anything from anything else.

First, let’s put aside direct inferences from “X is true” to “X ought to be true”; these are obviously fallacious. If that’s all Hume was saying, then he is of course correct; but this does little to undermine any serious scientific theory of morality. You can’t infer from “there are genocides” to “there ought to be genocides”; nor can you infer from “there ought to be happy people” to “there are happy people”; but nor would I or any other scientist seek to do so. This is a strawman of naturalistic morality.

It’s true that some people do attempt to draw similar inferences, usually stated in a slightly different form—but these are not moral scientists, they are invariably laypeople with little understanding of the subject. Arguments based on the claim that “homosexuality is unnatural” (therefore wrong) or “violence is natural” (therefore right) are guilty of this sort of fallacy, but I’ve never heard any credible philosopher or scientist support such arguments. (And by the way, homosexuality is nearly as common among animals as violence.)

A subtler way of reasoning from “is” to “ought” that is still problematic is the common practice of surveying people about their moral attitudes and experimentally testing their moral behaviors, sometimes called experimental philosophy. I do think this kind of research is useful and relevant, but it doesn’t get us as far as some people seem to think. Even if we were to prove that 100% of humans who have ever lived believe that cannibalism is wrong, it does not follow that cannibalism is in fact wrong. It is indeed evidence that there is something wrong with cannibalism—perhaps it is maladaptive to the point of being evolutionarily unstable, or it is so obviously wrong that even the most morally-blind individuals can detect its wrongness. But this extra step of explanation is necessary; it simply doesn’t follow from the fact that “everyone believes X is wrong” that in fact “X is wrong”. (Before 1900 just about everyone quite reasonably believed that the passage of time is the same everywhere regardless of location, speed or gravity; Einstein proved everyone wrong.) Moral realism demands that we admit people can be mistaken about their moral beliefs, just as they can be mistaken about other beliefs.

But these are not the only way to infer from “is” to “ought”, and there are many ways to make such inferences that are in fact perfectly valid. For instance, I know at least two ways to validly prove moral claims from nonmoral claims. The first is by conjunctive addition: “2+2=4, therefore 2+2=4 or genocide is wrong”. The second is by contradictory explosion: “2+2=5, therefore genocide is wrong”. Both of these arguments are logically valid. Obviously they are also quite trivial; “genocide is wrong” could be replaced by any other conceivable proposition (even a contradiction!), leaving an equally valid argument. Still, we have validly derived a moral statement from nonmoral statements, while obeying the laws of logic.

Moreover, it is clearly rational to infer a certain kind of “ought” from statements that entirely involve facts. For instance, it is rational to reason, “If you are cold, you ought to close the window”. This is an instrumental “ought” (it says what it is useful to do, given the goals that you have), not a moral “ought” (which would say what goals you should have in the first place). Hence, this is not really inferring moral claims from non-moral claims, since the “ought” isn’t really a moral “ought” at all; if the ends are immoral the means will be immoral too. (It would be equally rational in this instrumental sense to say, “If you want to destroy the world, you ought to get control of the nuclear launch codes”.) In fact this kind of instrumental rationality—doing what accomplishes our goals—actually gets us quite far in defining moral norms for real human beings; but clearly it does not get us far enough.

Finally, and most importantly, epistemic normativity, which any rational being must accept, is itself an inference from “is” to “ought”; it involves inferences like “Is it raining, therefore you ought to believe it is raining.”

With these considerations in mind, we must carefully rephrase Hume’s remark, to something like this:

One cannot nontrivially with logical certainty derive moral statements from entirely nonmoral statements.

This is indeed correct; but here the word “moral” carries no weight and could be replaced by almost anything. One cannot nontrivially with logical certainty derive physical statements from entirely nonphysical statements, nor nontrivially with logical certainty derive statements about fish from statements that are entirely not about fish. For all X, one cannot nontrivially with logical certainty derive statements about X from statements entirely unrelated to X. This is an extremely general truth. We could very well make it a logical axiom. In fact, if we do so, we pretty much get relevance logic, which takes the idea of “nontrivial” proofs to the extreme of actually considering trivial proofs invalid. Most logicians don’t go so far—they say that “2+2=5, therefore genocide is wrong” is technically a valid argument—but everyone agrees that such arguments are pointless and silly. In any case the word “moral” carries no weight here; it is no harder to derive an “ought” from an “is” than it is to derive a “fish” from a “molecule”.

Moreover, the claim that nonmoral propositions can never validly influence moral propositions is clearly false; the argument “Killing is wrong, shooting someone will kill them, therefore shooting someone is wrong” is entirely valid, and the moral proposition “shooting someone is wrong” is derived in large part from the nonmoral proposition “shooting someone will kill them”. In fact, the entire Frege-Geach argument against expressivism hinges upon the fact that we all realize that moral propositions function logically the same way as nonmoral propositions, and can interact with nonmoral propositions in all the usual ways. Even expressivists usually do not deny this; they simply try to come up with ways of rescuing expressivism despite this observation.

There are also ways of validly deriving moral propositions from entirely nonmoral propositions, in an approximate or probabilistic fashion. “Genocide causes a great deal of suffering and death, and almost everyone who has ever lived has agreed that suffering and death are bad and that genocide is wrong, therefore genocide is probably wrong” is a reasonably sound probabilistic argument that infers a moral conclusion based on entirely nonmoral premises, though it lacks the certainty of a logical proof.

We could furthermore take as axiom some definition of moral concepts in terms of nonmoral concepts, and then derive consequences of this definition with logical certainty. “A morally right action maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain. Genocide fails to maximize pleasure or minimize pain. Therefore genocide is not morally right.” Obviously one is free to challenge the definition, but that’s true of many different types of philosophical arguments, not a specific problem in arguments about morality.

So what exactly was Hume trying to say? I’m really not sure. Maybe he has in mind the sort of naive arguments that infer from “unnatural” to “wrong”; if so, he’s surely correct, but the argument does little to undermine any serious naturalistic theories of morality.

On land acknowledgments

2024-12-292024-12-22 PNRJ ethics, inequality, tribal paradigm colonialism, ethics, Haudenosaunee, history, imperialism, indigenous, Iroquois, land, land reform, morality, Native, Native American, United States, violence, war

Dec 29 JDN 2460674

Noah Smith and Brad DeLong, both of whom I admire, have recently written about the practice of land acknowledgments. Smith is wholeheartedly against them. DeLong has a more nuanced view. Smith in fact goes so far as to argue that there is no moral basis for considering these lands to be ‘Native lands’ at all, which DeLong rightly takes issue with.

I feel like this might be an issue where it would be better to focus on Native American perspectives. (Not that White people aren’t allowed to talk about it; just that we tend to hear from them on everything, and this is something where maybe they’re less likely to know what they’re talking about.)

It turns out that Native views on land acknowledgments are also quite mixed; some see them as a pointless, empty gesture; others see them as a stepping-stone to more serious policy changes that are necessary. There is general agreement that more concrete actions, such as upholding treaties and maintaining tribal sovereignty, are more important.

I have to admit I’m much more in the ’empty gesture’ camp. I’m only one-fourth Native (so I’m Whiter than I am not), but my own view on this is that land acknowledgments aren’t really accomplishing very much, and in fact aren’t even particularly morally defensible.

Now, I know that it’s not realistic to actually “give back” all the land in the United States (or Australia, or anywhere where indigenous people were forced out by colonialism). Many of the tribes that originally lived on the land are gone, scattered to the winds, or now living somewhere else that they were forced to (predominantly Oklahoma). Moreover, there are now more non-Native people living on that land than there ever were Native people living on it, and forcing them all out would be just as violent and horrific as forcing out the Native people was in the first place.

I even appreciate Smith’s point that there is something problematic about assigning ownership of land to bloodlines of people just because they happened to be the first ones living there. Indeed, as he correctly points out, they often weren’t the first ones living there; different tribes have been feuding and warring with each other since time immemorial, and it’s likely that any given plot of land was held by multiple different tribes at different times even before colonization.

Let’s make this a little more concrete.

Consider the Beaver Wars.

The Beaver Wars were a series of conflicts between the Haudenosaunee (that’s what they call themselves; to a non-Native audience they are better known by what the French called them, Iroquois) and several other tribes. Now, that was after colonization, and the French were involved, and part of what they were fighting over was the European fur trade—so the story is a bit complicated by that. But it’s a conflict we have good historical records of, and it’s pretty clear that many of these rivalries long pre-dated the arrival of the French.

The Haudenosaunee were brutal in the Beaver Wars. They slaughtered thousands, including many helpless civilians, and effectively wiped out several entire tribes, including the Erie and Susquehannock, and devastated several others, including the Mohicans and the Wyandot. Many historians consider these to be acts of genocide. Surely any land that the Haundenosaunee claimed as a result of the Beaver Wars is as illegitimate as land claimed by colonial imperialism? Indeed, isn’t it colonial imperialism?

Yet we have no reason to believe that these brutal wars were unique to the Haundenosaunee, or that they only occurred after colonization. Our historical records aren’t as clear going that far back, because many Native tribes didn’t keep written records—in fact, many didn’t even have a written language. But what we do know suggests that a great many tribes warred with a great many other tribes, and land was gained and lost in warfare, going back thousands of years.

Indeed, it seems to be a sad fact of human history that virtually all land, indigenous or colonized, is actually owned by a group that conquered another group (that conquered another group, that conquered another group…). European colonialism was simply the most recent conquest.

But this doesn’t make European colonialism any more justifiable. Rather, it raises a deeper question:

How should we decide who owns what land?

The simplest way, and the way that we actually seem to use most of the time, is to simply take whoever currently owns the land as its legitimate ownership. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law” was always nonsense when it comes to private property (that’s literally what larceny means!), but when it comes to national sovereignty, it is basically correct. Once a group manages to organize itself well enough to enforce control over a territory, we pretty much say that it’s their territory now and they’re allowed to keep it.

Does that mean that anyone is just allowed to take whatever land they can successfully conquer and defend? That the world must simply accept that chaos and warfare are inevitable? Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem.

The Westphalian solution.

The current solution to this problem is what’s called Westphalian sovereignty, after the Peace of Westphalia, two closely-related treaties that were signed in Westphalia (a region of Germany) in 1648. Those treaties established a precedent in international law that nations are entitled to sovereignty over their own territory; other nations are not allowed to invade and conquer them, and if anyone tries, the whole international community should fight to resist any such attempt.

Effectively, what Westphalia did was establish that whoever controlled a given territory right now (where “right now” means 1648) now gets the right to hold it forever—and everyone else not only has to accept that, they are expected to defend it. Now, clearly this has not been followed precisely; new nations have gained independence from their empires (like the United States), nations have separated into pieces (like India and Pakistan, the Balkans, and most recently South Sudan), and sometimes even nations have successfully conquered each other and retained control—but the latter has been considerably rarer than it was before the establishment of Westphalian sovereignty. (Indeed, part of what makes the Ukraine War such an aberration is that it is a brazen violation of Westphalian sovereignty the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Second World War.)

This was, as far as I can tell, a completely pragmatic solution, with absolutely no moral basis whatsoever. We knew in 1648, and we know today, that virtually every nation on Earth was founded in bloodshed, its land taken from others (who took it from others, who took it from others…). And it was timed in such a way that European colonialism became etched in stone—no European power was allowed to take over another European power’s colonies anymore, but they were all allowed to keep all the colonies they already had, and the people living in those colonies didn’t get any say in the matter.

Since then, most (but by no means all) of those colonies have revolted and gained their own independence. But by the time it happened, there were large populations of former colonists, and the indigenous populations were often driven out, dramatically reduced, or even outright exterminated. There is something unsettling about founding a new democracy like the United States or Australia after centuries of injustice and oppression have allowed a White population to establish a majority over the indigenous population; had indigenous people been democratically represented all along, things would probably have gone a lot differently.

What do land acknowledgments accomplish?

I think that the intent behind land acknowledgments is to recognize and commemorate this history of injustice, in the hopes of somehow gaining some kind of at least partial restitution. The intentions here are good, and the injustices are real.

But there is something fundamentally wrong with the way most land acknowledgments are done, because they basically just push the sovereignty back one step: They assert that whoever held the land before Europeans came along is the land’s legitimate owner. But what about the people before them (and the people before them, and the people before them)? How far back in the chain of violence are we supposed to go before we declare a given group’s conquests legitimate?

How far back can we go?

Most of these events happened many centuries ago and were never written down, and all we have now is vague oral histories that may or may not even be accurate. Particularly when one tribe forces out another, it rather behooves the conquering tribe to tell the story in their own favor, as one of “reclaiming” land that was rightfully theirs all along, whether or not that was actually true—as they say, history is written by the victors. (I think it’s actually more true when the history is never actually written.) And in some cases it’s probably even true! In others, that land may have been contested between the two tribes for so long that nobody honestly knows who owned it first.

It feels wrong to legitimate the conquests of colonial imperialism, but it feels just as wrong to simply push it back one step—or three steps, or seven steps.

I think that ultimately what we must do is acknowledge this entire history.

We must acknowledge that this land was stolen by force from Native Americans, and also that most of those Native Americans acquired their land by stealing it by force from other Native Americans, and the chain goes back farther than we have records. We must acknowledge that this is by no means unique to the United States but in fact a universal feature of almost all land held by anyone anywhere in the world. We must acknowledge that this chain of violence and conquest has been a part of human existence since time immemorial—and affirm our commitment to end it, once and for all.

That doesn’t simply mean accepting the current allocation of land; land, like many other resources, is clearly distributed unequally and unfairly. But it does mean that however we choose to allocate land, we must do so by a fair and peaceful process, not by force and conquest. The chain of violence that has driven human history for thousands of years must finally be brought to an end.

Moral progress and moral authority

2024-12-16 PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm Adam Smith, Bible, Catholic Church, Christianity, ethics, faith, history, Jerry Falwell, John Stuart Mill, Kant, Kinsey, Mar, Marx, Mary Woolstonecraft, morality, philosophy, Pope Ratzinger, progress, religion, Socrates

Dec 8 JDN 2460653

In previous posts I’ve written about why religion is a poor source of morality. But it’s worse than that. Religion actually holds us back morally. It is because of religion that our society grants the greatest moral authority to precisely the people and ideas which have most resisted moral progress. Most religious people are good, well-intentioned people—but religious authorities are typically selfish, manipulative, Machiavellian leaders who will say or do just about anything to maintain power. They have trained us to respect and obey them without question; they even call themselves “shepherds” and us the “flock”, as if we were not autonomous humans but obedient ungulates.

I’m sure that most of my readers are shocked that I would assert such a thing; surely priests and imams are great, holy men who deserve our honor and respect? The evidence against such claims is obvious. We only believe such things because the psychopaths have told us to believe them.

I am not saying that these evil practices are inherent to religion—they aren’t. Other zealous, authoritarian ideologies, like Communism and fascism, have been just as harmful for many of the same reasons. Rather, I am saying that religion gives authority and respect to people who would otherwise not have it, people who have long histories of evil, selfish, and exploitative behavior. For a particularly striking example, Catholicism as an idea is false and harmful, but not nearly as harmful as the Catholic Church as an institution, which has harbored some of the worst criminals in history.

The Catholic Church hierarchy is quite literally composed of a cadre of men who use tradition and rhetoric to extort billions of dollars from the poor and who have gone to great lengths to defend men who rape children—a category of human being that normally is so morally reviled that even thieves and murderers consider them beyond the pale of human society. Pope Ratzinger himself, formerly the most powerful religious leader in the world, has been connected with the coverup based on a letter he wrote in 1985. The Catholic Church was also closely tied to Nazi Germany and publicly celebrated Hitler’s birthday for many years; there is evidence that the Vatican actively assisted in the exodus of Nazi leaders along “ratlines” to South America. More recently the Church once again abetted genocide, when in Rwanda it turned away refugees and refused to allow prosecution against any of the perpetrators who were affiliated with the Catholic Church. Yes, that’s right; the Vatican has quite literally been complicit in the worst moral crimes human beings have ever committed. Embezzlement of donations and banning of life-saving condoms seem rather beside the point once we realize that these men and their institutions have harbored genocidaires and child rapists. I can scarcely imagine a more terrible source of moral authority.

Most people respect evangelical preachers, like Jerry Falwell who blamed 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina on feminists, gays, and secularists, then retracted the statement about 9/11 when he realized how much it had offended people. These people have concepts of morality that were antiquated in the 19th century; they base their ethical norms on books that were written by ignorant and cultish nomads thousands of years ago. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 indeed condemn homosexuality, but Leviticus 19:27 condemns shaving and Leviticus 11:9-12 says that eating fish is fine but eating shrimp is evil. By the way, Leviticus 11:21-22 seems to say that locusts have only four legs, when they very definitely have six and you can see this by looking at one. (I cannot emphasize this enough: Don’t listen to what people say about the book, read the book.)

But we plainly don’t respect scientists or philosophers to make moral and political decisions. If we did, we would have enacted equal rights for LGBT people sometime around 1898 when the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was founded or at least by 1948 when Alfred Kinsey showed how common, normal, and healthy homosexuality is. Democracy and universal suffrage (for men at least) would have been the norm shortly after 1689 when Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government. Women would have been granted the right to vote in 1792 upon the publication of Mary Woolstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, instead of in 1920 after a long and painful political battle. Animal rights would have become law in 1789 with the publication of Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. We should have been suspicious of slavery since at least Kant if not Socrates, but instead it took until the 19th century for slavery to finally be banned. We owe the free world to moral science; but nonetheless we rarely listen to the arguments of moral scientists. As a species we fight for our old traditions even in the face of obvious and compelling evidence to the contrary, and this holds us back—far back. If they haven’t sunk in yet, read these dates again: Society is literally about 200 years behind the cutting edge of moral science. Imagine being 200 years behind in technology; you would be riding horses instead of flying in jet airliners and writing letters with quills instead of texting on your iPhone. Imagine being 200 years behind in ecology; you would be considering the environmental impact of not photovoltaic panels or ethanol but whale oil. This is how far behind we are in moral science.

One subfield of moral science has done somewhat better: The economics of theory and the economics of practice differ by only about 100 years. Capitalism really was instituted on a large scale only a few decades after Adam Smith argued for it, and socialism (while horrifyingly abused in the Communism of Lenin and Stalin) has nonetheless been implemented on a wide scale only a century after Marx. Keynesian stimulus was international policy (despite its numerous detractors) in 2008 and 2020, and Keynes himself died in only 1946. This process is still slower than it probably should be, but at least we aren’t completely ignoring new advances the way we do in ethics. 100 years behind in technology we would have cars and electricity at least.

Except perhaps in economics, in general we entrust our moral claims to the authority of men in tall hats and ornate robes who merely assert their superiority and ties to higher knowledge, while ignoring the thousands of others who actually apply their reason and demonstrate knowledge and expertise. A criminal in pretty robes who calls himself a moral leader might as well be a moral leader, as far as we’re concerned; a genuinely wise teacher of morality who isn’t arrogant enough to assert special revelation from the divine is instead ignored. Why do we do this? Religion. Religion is holding us back.

We need to move beyond religion in order to make real and lasting moral progress.

More on religion

2024-12-092024-12-02 PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm holy texts, morality, punishment, religion, reward, selfishness

Dec 8 JDN 2460653

Reward and punishment

In previous posts I’ve argued that religion can make people do evil and that religious beliefs simply aren’t true.

But there is another reason to doubt religion as a source of morality: There is no reason to think that obeying God is a particularly good way of behaving, even if God is in fact good. If you are obeying God because he will reward you, you aren’t really being moral at all; you are being selfish, and just by accident doing good things. If everyone acted that way, good things would get done; but it clearly misses what we mean when we talk about morality. To be moral is to do good because it is good, not because you will be rewarded for doing it. This becomes even clearer when we consider the following question: If you weren’t rewarded, would you still do good? If not, then you aren’t really a good person.

In fact, it’s ironic that proponents of naturalistic and evolutionary accounts of morality are often accused of cheapening morality because we explain it using selfish genes and memes; traditional religious accounts of morality are directly based on selfishness, not for my genes or my memes, but for me myself! It’s legitimate to question whether someone who acts out of a sense of empathy that ultimately evolved to benefit their ancestors’ genes is really being moral (why I think so requires essentially the rest of this book to argue); but clearly someone who acts out of the desire to be rewarded later isn’t! Selfish genes may or may not make good people; but selfish people clearly aren’t good people.

Even if religion makes people act more morally (and the evidence on that is quite mixed), that doesn’t make it true. If I could convince everyone that John Stuart Mill was a prophet of God, this world would be a paradise; but that would be a lie, because John Stuart Mill was a brilliant man and nothing more. The belief that Santa Claus is watching no doubt makes some children behave better around Christmas, but this is not evidence for flying reindeer. In fact, the children who behave just fine without the threat of coal in their stockings are better children, aren’t they? For the same reason, people who do good for the sake of goodness are better people than those who do it out of hope for Heaven and fear of Hell.

There are cases in which false beliefs might make people do more good, because the false beliefs provide a more obvious, but wrong reason for doing something that is actually good for less obvious, but actually correct reasons. Believing that God requires you to give to charity might motivate you to give more to charity; but charity is good not because God demands it, but because there are billions of innocent people suffering around the world. Maybe we should for this reason be careful about changing people’s beliefs; someone who believes a lie but does the right thing is still better than someone who believes the truth but acts wrongly. If people think that without God there is no morality, then telling them that there is no God may make them abandon morality. This is precisely why I’m not simply telling readers that there is no God: I am also spending this entire chapter explaining why we don’t need God for morality. I’d much rather you be a moral theist than an immoral atheist; but I’m trying to make you a moral atheist.

The problem with holy texts

Even if God actually existed, and were actually good, and commanded us to do things, we do not have direct access to God’s commandments. If you are not outright psychotic, you must acknowledge this; God does not speak to us directly. If anything, he has written or inspired particular books, which have then been translated and interpreted over centuries by many different people and institutions. There is a fundamental problem in deciding which books have been written or inspired by God; not only does the Bible differ from the Qur’an, which differs from the Bhagavad-Gita, which differs from other holy texts; worse, particular chapters and passages within each book differ from one another on significant moral questions, sometimes on the foundational principles of morality itself.

For instance, let’s consider the Bible, because this is the holy book in greatest favor in modern Western culture. Should we use a law of retribution, a lex talionis, as in Exodus 21? Or should we instead forgive our enemies, as in Matthew 5? Perhaps we should treat others as we would like to be treated, as in Luke 6? Are rape and genocide commanded by God, as in 1 Samuel 15, Numbers 31, and Deuteronomy 20-21, or is murder always a grave crime, as in Exodus 20? Is even anger a grave sin, as in Matthew 5? Is it a crime to engage in male-male sex, as in Leviticus 18? Then, is it then also a crime to shave beards and wear mixed-fiber clothing, as in Leviticus 19? Is it just to punish descendants for the crimes of their ancestors, as in Genesis 9, or is it only fair to punish the specific perpetrators, as in Deuteronomy 24? Is adultery always immoral, as in Exodus 20, or does God sometimes command it, as in Hosea 1? Must homosexual men be killed, as in Leviticus 20, or is it enough to exile them, as in 1 Kings 15? A thorough reading of the Bible shows hundreds of moral contradictions and thousands of moral absurdities. (This is not even to mention the factual contradictions and absurdities.)

Similar contradictions and absurdities can be found in the Qur’an and other texts. Since most of my readers will come from Christian cultures, for my purposes I think brief examples will suffice. The Qur’an at times says that Christians are deserving of the same rights as Muslims, and at other times declares Christians so evil that they ought to be put to the sword. (Most of the time it says something in between, that “People of the Book”, ahl al-Kitab, as Jews and Christians are known, are inferior to Muslims but nonetheless deserving of rights.) The Bhagavad-Gita at times argues for absolute nonviolence, and at times declares an obligation to fight in war. The Dharmas and the Dao De Jing are full of contradictions, about everything from meaning to justice to reincarnation (in fact, many Buddhists and Taoists freely admit this, and try to claim that non-contradiction is overrated—which is literally talking nonsense). The Book of Mormon claims the canonicity of texts that it explicitly contradicts.

And above all, we have no theological basis for deciding which parts of which holy books we should follow, and which we should reject—for they all have many sects with many followers, and they all declare with the same intensity of clamor and absence of credibility that they are the absolute truth of a perfect God. To decide which books to trust and which to ignore, we have only a rational basis, founded upon reason and science—but then, we can’t help but take a rational approach to morality in general. If it were glaringly obvious which holy text was written by God, and its message were clear and coherent, perhaps we could follow such a book—but given the multitude of religions and sects and denominations in the world, all mutually-contradictory and most even self-contradictory, each believed with just as much fervor as the last, how obvious can the answer truly be?

One option would be to look for the things that are not contradicted, the things that are universal across religions and texts. In truth these things are few and far between; one sect’s monstrous genocide is another’s holy duty. But it is true that certain principles appear in numerous places and times, a signal of universality amidst the noise of cultural difference: Fairness and reciprocity, as in the Golden Rule; honesty and fidelity; forbiddance of theft and murder. There are examples of religious beliefs and holy texts that violate these rules—including the Bible and the Qur’an—but the vast majority of people hold to these propositions, suggesting that there is some universal truth that has been recognized here. In fact, the consensus in favor of these values is far stronger than the consensus in favor of recognized scientific facts like the shape of the Earth and the force of gravity. While for most of history most people had no idea how old the Earth was and many people still seem to think it is a mere 6,000 years old, there has never been a human culture on record that thought it acceptable to murder people arbitrarily.

But notice how these propositions are not tied to any particular religion or belief; indeed, nearly all atheists, including me, also accept these ideas. Moreover, it is possible to find these principles contradicted in the very books that religious people claim as the foundation of their beliefs. This is strong evidence that religion has nothing to do with it—these principles are part of a universal human nature, or better yet, they may even be necessary truths that would hold for any rational beings in any possible universe. If Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists all agree that murder is wrong, then it must not be necessary to hold any specific religion—or any at all—in order to agree that murder is wrong.

Indeed, holy texts are so full of absurdities and atrocities that the right thing to do is to completely and utterly repudiate holy texts—especially the Bible and the Qur’an.

If you say you believe in one of these holy texts, you’re either a good person but a hypocrite because you aren’t following the book; or you can be consistent in following the book, but you’ll end up being a despicable human being. Obviously I much prefer the former—but why not just give up the damn book!? Why is it so important to you to say that you believe in this particular book? You can still believe in God if you want! If God truly exists and is benevolent, it should be patently obvious that he couldn’t possibly have written a book as terrible as the Bible or the Qur’an. Obviously those were written by madmen who had no idea what God is truly like.

Defending Moral Realism

2024-10-062024-09-29 PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness Hitler, Holocaust, moral realism, morality, philosophy, pragmatism, Richard Swinburne

Oct 6 JDN 2460590

In the last few posts I have only considered arguments against moral realism, and shown them to be lacking. Yet if you were already convinced of moral anti-realism, this probably didn’t change your mind—it’s entirely possible to have a bad argument for a good idea. (Consider the following argument: “Whales are fish, fish are mammals, therefore whales are mammals.”) What you need is arguments for moral realism.

Fortunately, such arguments are not hard to find. My personal favorite was offered by one of my professors in a philosophy course: “I fail all moral anti-realists. If you think that’s unfair, don’t worry: You’re not a moral anti-realist.” In other words, if you want to talk coherently at all about what actions are good or bad, fair or unfair, then you cannot espouse moral anti-realism; and if you do espouse moral anti-realism, there is no reason for us not to simply ignore you (or imprison you!) and go on living out our moral beliefs—especially if you are right that morality is a fiction. Indeed, the reason we don’t actually imprison all moral anti-realists is precisely because we are moral realists, and we think it is morally wrong to imprison someone for espousing unpopular or even ridiculous beliefs.

That of course is a pragmatic argument, not very compelling on epistemological grounds, but there are other arguments that cut deeper. Perhaps the most compelling is the realization that rationality itself is a moral principle—it says that we ought to believe what conforms to reason and ought not to believe what does not. We need at least some core notion of normativity even to value truth and honesty, to seek knowledge, to even care whether moral realism is correct or incorrect. In a total moral vacuum, we can fight over our values and beliefs, we can kill each other over them, but we cannot discuss them or debate them, for discussion and debate themselves presuppose certain moral principles.

Typically moral anti-realists expect us to accept epistemic normativity, but if they do this then they cannot deny the legitimacy of all normative claims. If their whole argument rests upon undermining normativity, then it is self-defeating. If it doesn’t, then anti-realists need to explain the difference between “moral” and “normative”, and explain why the former is so much more suspect than the latter—but even then we have objective obligations that bind our behavior. The difference, I suppose, would involve a tight restriction on the domains of discourse in which normativity applies. Scientific facts? Normative. Interpersonal relations? Subjective. I suppose it’s logically coherent to say that it is objectively wrong to be a Creationist but not objectively wrong to be a serial killer; but this is nothing if not counter-intuitive.

Moreover, it is unclear to me what a universe would be like if it had no moral facts. In what sort of universe would it not be best to believe what is true? In what sort of universe would it not be wrong to harm others for selfish gains? In what sort of world would it be wrong to keep a promise, or good to commit genocide? It seems to me that we are verging on nonsense, rather like what happens if we try to imagine a universe where 2+2=5.

Moreover, there is a particular moral principle, which depends upon moral realism, yet is almost universally agreed upon, even by people who otherwise profess to be moral relativists or anti-realists.

I call it the Hitler Principle, and it’s quite simple:

The Holocaust was bad.

In large part, ethical philosophy since 1945 has been the attempt to systematically justify the Hitler Principle. Only if moral realism is true can we say that the Holocaust was bad, morally bad, unequivocally, objectively, universally, regardless of the beliefs, feelings, desires, culture or upbringing of its perpetrators. And if we can’t even say that, can we say anything at all? If the Holocaust wasn’t wrong, nothing is. And if nothing is wrong, then does it even matter if we believe what is true?

But then, stop and think for a moment: If we know this—if it’s so obvious to just about everyone that the Holocaust was wrong, so obvious that anyone who denies it we immediately recognize as evil or insane (or lying or playing games)—then doesn’t that already offer us an objective moral standard?

I contend that it does—that the Hitler Principle is so self-evident that it can form an objective standard by which to measure all moral theory. I would sooner believe the Sun revolves around the Earth than deny the Holocaust was wrong. I would sooner consider myself a brain in a vat than suppose that systematic extermination of millions of innocent people could ever be morally justified. Richard Swinburne, a philosopher of religion at Oxford, put it well: “it is more obvious to almost all of us that the genocide conducted by Hitler was morally wrong than that we are not now dreaming, or that the Earth is many millions of years old.” Because at least this one moral fact is so obviously, incorrigibly true, we can use it to test our theories of morality. Just as we would immediately reject any theory of physics which denied that the sky is blue, we should also reject any theory of morality which denies that the Holocaust was wrong. This might seem obvious, but by itself it is sufficient to confirm moral realism.

Similar arguments can be made for other moral propositions that virtually everyone accepts, like the following:

Theft is wrong.
Homicide is wrong.
Lying is wrong.
Rape is wrong.
Kindness is good.
Keeping promises is good.
Happiness is good.
Suffering is bad.

With appropriate caveats (lying isn’t always wrong, if it is justified by some greater good; homicide is permissible in self-defense; promises made under duress do not oblige; et cetera), all of these propositions are accepted by almost everyone, and most people hold them with greater certainty than they would hold any belief about empirical science. “Science proves that time is relative” is surprising and counter-intuitive, but people can accept it; “Science proves that homicide is good” is not something anyone would believe for an instant. There is wider agreement and greater confidence about these basic moral truths than there is about any fact in science, even “the Earth is round” or “gravity pulls things toward each other”—for well before Newton or even Archimedes, people still knew that homicide was wrong.

Though there are surely psychopaths who disagree (basically because their brains are defective), the vast majority of people agree on these fundamental moral claims. At least 95\% of humans who have ever lived share this universal moral framework, under which the wrongness of genocide is as directly apprehensible as the blueness of the sky and the painfulness of a burn. Moral realism is on as solid an epistemic footing as any fact in science.

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