punishment

More on religion

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

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.

You know what? Let’s repeal Obamacare. Here’s my replacement.

PNRJ heuristics and biases, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 18 JDN 2458168

By all reasonable measures, Obamacare has been a success. Healthcare costs are down but coverage rates are up. It reduced both the federal deficit and after-tax income inequality.

But Republicans have hated it the whole time, and in particular the individual mandate provision has always been unpopular. Under the Trump administration, the individual mandate has now been repealed.

By itself, this can only be disastrous. It threatens to undermine all the successes of the entire Obamacare system. Without the individual mandate, covering pre-existing conditions means that people can simply wait to get insurance until they need it—at which point it’s not insurance anymore. The risks stop being shared and end up concentrated on whoever gets sick, then we go back to people going bankrupt because they were unlucky enough to get cancer. The individual mandate was vital to making Obamacare work.

But I do actually understand why the individual mandate is unpopular: Nobody likes being forced into buying anything.

John Roberts ruled that the individual mandate was Constitutional on the grounds that it is economically equivalent to a tax. This is absolutely correct, and I applaud his sound reasoning.

That said, the individual mandate is not in fact psychologically equivalent to a tax.

Psychologically, being forced to specifically buy something or face punishment feels a lot more coercive than simply owing a certain amount of money that the government will use to buy something. Roberts is right; economically, these two things are equivalent. The same real goods get purchased, at the same people’s expense; the accounts balance in the same way. But it feels different.

And it would feel different to me too, if I were required to actually shop for that particular avionic component on that Apache helicopter my taxes paid for, or if I had to write a check for that particular section of Highway 405 that my taxes helped maintain. Yes, I know that I give the government a certain amount of money that they spent on salaries for US military personnel; but I’d find it pretty weird if they required me to actually hand over the money in cash to some specific Marine. (On the other hand, this sort of thing might actually give people a more visceral feel for the benefits of taxes, much as microfinance agencies like to show you the faces of particular people as you give them loans, whether or not those people are actually the ones getting your money.)

There’s another reason it feels different as well: We have framed the individual mandate as a penalty, as a loss. Human beings are loss averse; losing $10 feels about twice as bad as not getting $10. That makes the mandate more unpleasant, hence more unpopular.

What could we do instead? Well, obviously, we could implement a single-payer healthcare system like we already have in Medicare, like they have in Canada and the UK, or like they have in Scandinavia (#ScandinaviaIsBetter). And that’s really what we should do.

But since that doesn’t seem to be on the table right now, here’s my compromise proposal. Okay, yes, let’s repeal Obamacare. No more individual mandate. No fines for not having health insurance.

Here’s what we would do instead: You get a bonus refundable tax credit for having health insurance.

We top off the income tax rate to adjust so that revenue ends up the same.

Say goodbye to the “individual mandate” and welcome the “health care bonus rebate”.

Most of you reading this are economically savvy enough to realize that’s the same thing. If I tax you $100, then refund $100 if you have health insurance, that’s completely equivalent to charging you a fine of $100 if you don’t have health insurance.

But it doesn’t feel the same to most people. A fine feels like a punishment, like a loss. It hurts more than a mere foregone bonus, and it contains an element of disapproval and public shame.

Whereas, we forgo refundable tax credits all the time. You’ve probably forgone dozens of refundable tax credits you could have gotten, either because you didn’t know about them or because you realized they weren’t worth it to you.

Now instead of the government punishing you for such a petty crime as not having health insurance, the government is rewarding you for the responsible civic choice of having health insurance. We have replaced a mean, vindictive government with a friendly, supportive government.

Positive reinforcement is more reliable anyway. (Any child psychologist will tell you that while punishment is largely ineffective and corporal punishment is outright counterproductive, reward systems absolutely do work.) Uptake of health insurance should be at least as good as before, but the policy will be much more popular.

It’s a very simple change to make. It could be done in a single tax bill. Economically, it makes no difference at all. But psychologically—and politically—it could make all the difference in the world.

Moral responsibility does not inherit across generations

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457548

In last week’s post I made a sharp distinction between believing in human progress and believing that colonialism was justified. To make this argument, I relied upon a moral assumption that seems to me perfectly obvious, and probably would to most ethicists as well: Moral responsibility does not inherit across generations, and people are only responsible for their individual actions.

But is in fact this principle is not uncontroversial in many circles. When I read utterly nonsensical arguments like this one from the aptly-named Race Baitr saying that White people have no role to play in the liberation of Black people apparently because our blood is somehow tainted by the crimes our ancestors, it becomes apparent to me that this principle is not obvious to everyone, and therefore is worth defending. Indeed, many applications of the concept of “White Privilege” seem to ignore this principle, speaking as though racism is not something one does or participates in, but something that one is simply by being born with less melanin. Here’s a Salon interview specifically rejecting the proposition that racism is something one does:

For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts. This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time—that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not “doing.”

If racism isn’t something one does, then what in the world is it? It’s all well and good to talk about systems and social institutions, but ultimately systems and social institutions are made of human behaviors. If you think most White people aren’t doing enough to combat racism (which sounds about right to me!), say that—don’t make some bizarre accusation that simply by existing we are inherently racist. (Also: We? I’m only 75% White, so am I only 75% inherently racist?) And please, stop redefining the word “racism” to mean something other than what everyone uses it to mean; “White people are snakes” is in fact a racist sentiment (and yes, one I’ve actually heard–indeed, here is the late Muhammad Ali comparing all White people to rattlesnakes, and Huffington Post fawning over him for it).

Racism is clearly more common and typically worse when performed by White people against Black people—but contrary to the claims of some social justice activists the White perpetrator and Black victim are not part of the definition of racism. Similarly, sexism is more common and more severe committed by men against women, but that doesn’t mean that “men are pigs” is not a sexist statement (and don’t tell me you haven’t heard that one). I don’t have a good word for bigotry by gay people against straight people (“heterophobia”?) but it clearly does happen on occasion, and similarly cannot be defined out of existence.

I wouldn’t care so much that you make this distinction between “racism” and “racial prejudice”, except that it’s not the normal usage of the word “racism” and therefore confuses people, and also this redefinition clearly is meant to serve a political purpose that is quite insidious, namely making excuses for the most extreme and hateful prejudice as long as it’s committed by people of the appropriate color. If “White people are snakes” is not racism, then the word has no meaning.

Not all discussions of “White Privilege” are like this, of course; this article from Occupy Wall Street actually does a fairly good job of making “White Privilege” into a sensible concept, albeit still not a terribly useful one in my opinion. I think the useful concept is oppression—the problem here is not how we are treating White people, but how we are treating everyone else. “What privilege gives you is the freedom to be who you are.”? Shouldn’t everyone have that?

Almost all the so-called “benefits” or “perks” associated with “privilege” are actually forgone harms—they are not good things done to you, but bad things not done to you. “But benefitting from racist systems doesn’t mean that everything is magically easy for us. It just means that as hard as things are, they could always be worse.” No, that is not what the word “benefit” means. The word “benefit” means you would be worse off without it—and in most cases that simply isn’t true. Many White people obviously think that it is true—which is probably a big reason why so many White people fight so hard to defend racism, you know; you’ve convinced them it is in their self-interest. But, with rare exceptions, it is not; most racial discrimination has literally zero long-run benefit. It’s just bad. Maybe if we helped people appreciate that more, they would be less resistant to fighting racism!

The only features of “privilege” that really make sense as benefits are those that occur in a state of competition—like being more likely to be hired for a job or get a loan—but one of the most important insights of economics is that competition is nonzero-sum, and fairer competition ultimately means a more efficient economy and thus more prosperity for everyone.

But okay, let’s set that aside and talk about this core question of what sort of responsibility we bear for the acts of our ancestors. Many White people clearly do feel deep shame about what their ancestors (or people the same color as their ancestors!) did hundreds of years ago. The psychological reactance to that shame may actually be what makes so many White people deny that racism even exists (or exists anymore)—though a majority of Americans of all races do believe that racism is still widespread.

We also apply some sense of moral responsibility applied to whole races quite frequently. We speak of a policy “benefiting White people” or “harming Black people” and quickly elide the distinction between harming specific people who are Black, and somehow harming “Black people” as a group. The former happens all the time—the latter is utterly nonsensical. Similarly, we speak of a “debt owed by White people to Black people” (which might actually make sense in the very narrow sense of economic reparations, because people do inherit money! They probably shouldn’t, that is literally feudalist, but in the existing system they in fact do), which makes about as much sense as a debt owed by tall people to short people. As Walter Michaels pointed out in The Trouble with Diversity (which I highly recommend), because of this bizarre sense of responsibility we are often in the habit of “apologizing for something you didn’t do to people to whom you didn’t do it (indeed to whom it wasn’t done)”. It is my responsibility to condemn colonialism (which I indeed do), to fight to ensure that it never happens again; it is not my responsibility to apologize for colonialism.

This makes some sense in evolutionary terms; it’s part of the all-encompassing tribal paradigm, wherein human beings come to identify themselves with groups and treat those groups as the meaningful moral agents. It’s much easier to maintain the cohesion of a tribe against the slings and arrows (sometimes quite literal) of outrageous fortune if everyone believes that the tribe is one moral agent worthy of ultimate concern.

This concept of racial responsibility is clearly deeply ingrained in human minds, for it appears in some of our oldest texts, including the Bible: “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,” (Exodus 20:5)

Why is inheritance of moral responsibility across generations nonsensical? Any number of reasons, take your pick. The economist in me leaps to “Ancestry cannot be incentivized.” There’s no point in holding people responsible for things they can’t control, because in doing so you will not in any way alter behavior. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on moral responsibility takes it as so obvious that people are only responsible for actions they themselves did that they don’t even bother to mention it as an assumption. (Their big question is how to reconcile moral responsibility with determinism, which turns out to be not all that difficult.)

An interesting counter-argument might be that descent can be incentivized: You could use rewards and punishments applied to future generations to motivate current actions. But this is actually one of the ways that incentives clearly depart from moral responsibilities; you could incentivize me to do something by threatening to murder 1,000 children in China if I don’t, but even if it was in fact something I ought to do, it wouldn’t be those children’s fault if I didn’t do it. They wouldn’t deserve punishment for my inaction—I might, and you certainly would for using such a cruel incentive.

Moreover, there’s a problem with dynamic consistency here: Once the action is already done, what’s the sense in carrying out the punishment? This is why a moral theory of punishment can’t merely be based on deterrence—the fact that you could deter a bad action by some other less-bad action doesn’t make the less-bad action necessarily a deserved punishment, particularly if it is applied to someone who wasn’t responsible for the action you sought to deter. In any case, people aren’t thinking that we should threaten to punish future generations if people are racist today; they are feeling guilty that their ancestors were racist generations ago. That doesn’t make any sense even on this deterrence theory.

There’s another problem with trying to inherit moral responsibility: People have lots of ancestors. Some of my ancestors were most likely rapists and murderers; most were ordinary folk; a few may have been great heroes—and this is true of just about anyone anywhere. We all have bad ancestors, great ancestors, and, mostly, pretty good ancestors. 75% of my ancestors are European, but 25% are Native American; so if I am to apologize for colonialism, should I be apologizing to myself? (Only 75%, perhaps?) If you go back enough generations, literally everyone is related—and you may only have to go back about 4,000 years. That’s historical time.

Of course, we wouldn’t be different colors in the first place if there weren’t some differences in ancestry, but there is a huge amount of gene flow between different human populations. The US is a particularly mixed place; because most Black Americans are quite genetically mixed, it is about as likely that any randomly-selected Black person in the US is descended from a slaveowner as it is that any randomly-selected White person is. (Especially since there were a large number of Black slaveowners in Africa and even some in the United States.) What moral significance does this have? Basically none! That’s the whole point; your ancestors don’t define who you are.

If these facts do have any moral significance, it is to undermine the sense most people seem to have that there are well-defined groups called “races” that exist in reality, to which culture responds. No; races were created by culture. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: The “races” we hold most dear in the US, White and Black, are in fact the most nonsensical. “Asian” and “Native American” at least almost make sense as categories, though Chippewa are more closely related to Ainu than Ainu are to Papuans. “Latino” isn’t utterly incoherent, though it includes as much Aztec as it does Iberian. But “White” is a club one can join or be kicked out of, while “Black” is the majority of genetic diversity.

Sex is a real thing—while there are intermediate cases of course, broadly speaking humans, like most metazoa, are sexually dimorphic and come in “male” and “female” varieties. So sexism took a real phenomenon and applied cultural dynamics to it; but that’s not what happened with racism. Insofar as there was a real phenomenon, it was extremely superficial—quite literally skin deep. In that respect, race is more like class—a categorization that is itself the result of social institutions.

To be clear: Does the fact that we don’t inherit moral responsibility from our ancestors absolve us from doing anything to rectify the inequities of racism? Absolutely not. Not only is there plenty of present discrimination going on we should be fighting, there are also inherited inequities due to the way that assets and skills are passed on from one generation to the next. If my grandfather stole a painting from your grandfather and both our grandfathers are dead but I am now hanging that painting in my den, I don’t owe you an apology—but I damn well owe you a painting.

The further we become from the past discrimination the harder it gets to make reparations, but all hope is not lost; we still have the option of trying to reset everyone’s status to the same at birth and maintaining equality of opportunity from there. Of course we’ll never achieve total equality of opportunity—but we can get much closer than we presently are.

We could start by establishing an extremely high estate tax—on the order of 99%—because no one has a right to be born rich. Free public education is another good way of equalizing the distribution of “human capital” that would otherwise be concentrated in particular families, and expanding it to higher education would make it that much better. It even makes sense, at least in the short run, to establish some affirmative action policies that are race-conscious and sex-conscious, because there are so many biases in the opposite direction that sometimes you must fight bias with bias.

Actually what I think we should do in hiring, for example, is assemble a pool of applicants based on demographic quotas to ensure a representative sample, and then anonymize the applications and assess them on merit. This way we do ensure representation and reduce bias, but don’t ever end up hiring anyone other than the most qualified candidate. But nowhere should we think that this is something that White men “owe” to women or Black people; it’s something that people should do in order to correct the biases that otherwise exist in our society. Similarly with regard to sexism: Women exhibit just as much unconscious bias against other women as men do. This is not “men” hurting “women”—this is a set of unconscious biases found in almost everywhere and social structures almost everywhere that systematically discriminate against people because they are women.

Perhaps by understanding that this is not about which “team” you’re on (which tribe you’re in), but what policy we should have, we can finally make these biases disappear, or at least fade so small that they are negligible.