rules

Go ahead and identify as a season

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 2 JDN 2460464

A few weeks back, Fox News was running the story that “kids today are identifying as seasons instead of genders”. I suspected that by “kids today” they meant “one particular person on the Internet”, but in fact it was even worse than that; the one person on the Internet they had used as an example hadn’t actually said what Fox claimed they said.

What they actually said was far more nuanced: It was basically that their fluid gender expression varied based on what kind of clothes they wear, which, naturally, varies with the seasons. So they end up feeling more masculine at certain times of year when they like to wear masculine clothing. Honestly, this would be pretty boring stuff if conservatives hadn’t blown it out of proportion.

But after thinking about it for awhile, I decided that I don’t even care if kids want to identify as seasons.

It seems silly. I don’t understand why you’d want to do it. It would probably always feel weird to me. (And what pronouns do you even use for someone who identifies as “summer”?)

But ultimately, it seems completely, utterly harmless. So if there are in fact kids—or adults—out there who really feel that they want to identify their gender with a season, I’m here to tell you now:

Go right ahead and do that.

It’s really astonishing just what upsets conservatives in this world. Poverty? No big deal. Climate change? Probably a hoax or something. War? That’s just how it goes. But kids with weird genders!? The horror! The horror!

I think the reasoning here goes something like this:

  1. Civilization is built upon social constructions.
  2. Social constructions rely upon consensus behavior.
  3. Consensus behavior relies upon shared norms.
  4. Challenging any shared norms challenges all shared norms.
  5. Challenging any norm will cause it to collapse.
  6. Challenging gender norms is challenging a shared norm.
  7. Therefore, challenging gender norms will cause civilization to collapse.

Premises 1 through 3 are true, though I suspect that phrases like “social construction” would actually not sit well with most conservatives. (Part of their whole shtick seems to be that if you simply admit that money, government, and national identity are socially constructed, that in itself will cause them to immediately and irretrievably collapse. Nevermind that I can tell you money is made up all day long, and you’ll still be able to spend it.)

Premise 6 is also true, indeed, nearly tautological.

And, indeed, the argument is valid; the conclusion would follow from the premises.

So of course we come to the two premises that aren’t valid.


Premise 4 is wrong because you can challenge some norms but not others. I have yet to see anyone seriously challenge the norm against murder, for example. Nor does it even seem especially popular to challenge the norm in favor of democratic voting. But those are the kind of norms that actually sustain our civilization—not gender!

And premise 5 is even worse: A norm that can’t withstand even the slightest challenge is a norm that’s too weak to rely upon in the first place. If our civilization is to be strong and robust, it must allow its norms to be challenged, and those norms must be able to sustain themselves against the challenge. And indeed, if someone were to challenge the norm against murder or the norm in favor of democratic voting, there are plenty of things I could say to reply to that challenge. These norms aren’t arbitrary. They are strong because we can defend them.

What about gender norms? How defensible are they?

Well, uh… not very, it turns out.

The existence of sexes is defensible. Humans are sexually dimorphic, and the vast majority of humans can be readily classified as either male or female. Yes, there are exceptions even to that, and those people count too. But it’s a pretty useful and accurate heuristic to divide our species into two sexes.

But gender norms are so much more than this. We don’t simply recognize that some people have penises and others have vaginas. We attach all sorts of social and behavioral requirements to people based on their bodies, many of which are utterly arbitrary and culturally dependent. (Not all, to be fair: The stereotype that men are stronger than women is itself a very useful and accurate heuristic.)

Worse, we don’t merely assign stereotypes to predict behavior—which might sometimes be useful. We assign norms to control behavior. We tell people who deviate from those norms that they are bad. We abuse them, discriminate against them, ostracize them from society. This is really weird.

And for what?

What benefit do gender norms have?

I can see how norms against murder and in favor of democracy sustain our civilization. I’m just not seeing how norms against using she/her pronouns when you have a penis provide similar support.

It’s true, most human societies throughout history have had strict gender norms, so maybe that’s some sort of evidence in their favor… but how about we at least try not having them for awhile? Or just relax them here and there, a little at a time, see how it goes? If indeed it seems to result in some sort of disaster, we’ll stop doing it. But I don’t see how it could—and so far, it hasn’t.

I think maybe the problem here is that conservatives don’t understand how to evaluate norms, or perhaps even that norms can be evaluated. To them, a rule is a rule, and you never challenge the rules, because if there were no rules, there would be chaos and destruction.

But challenging some rules—or even all rules—doesn’t mean having no rules! It means checking to make sure our rules are good rules, and if they aren’t, changing them so they are.

And since I see no particular reason why having two genders is an especially good rule, go ahead, make up some more if you want.

Go ahead and identify if a season, if you really want to.

Against deontology

PNRJ core principles, ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 6 JDN 2460163

In last week’s post I argued against average utilitarianism, basically on the grounds that it devalues the lives of anyone who isn’t of above average happiness. But you might be tempted to take these as arguments against utilitarianism in general, and that is not my intention.

In fact I believe that utilitarianism is basically correct, though it needs some particular nuances that are often lost in various presentations of it.

Its leading rival is deontology, which is really a broad class of moral theories, some a lot better than others.

What characterizes deontology as a class is that it uses rules, rather than consequences; an act is just right or wrong regardless of its consequences—or even its expected consequences.

There are certain aspects of this which are quite appealing: In fact, I do think that rules have an important role to play in ethics, and as such I am basically a rule utilitarian. Actually trying to foresee all possible consequences of every action we might take is an absurd demand far beyond the capacity of us mere mortals, and so in practice we have no choice but to develop heuristic rules that can guide us.

But deontology says that these are no mere heuristics: They are in fact the core of ethics itself. Under deontology, wrong actions are wrong even if you know for certain that their consequences will be good.

Kantian ethics is one of the most well-developed deontological theories, and I am quite sympathetic to Kantian ethics In fact I used to consider myself one of its adherents, but I now consider that view a mistaken one.

Let’s first dispense with the views of Kant himself, which are obviously wrong. Kant explicitly said that lying is always, always, always wrong, and even when presented with obvious examples where you could tell a small lie to someone obviously evil in order to save many innocent lives, he stuck to his guns and insisted that lying is always wrong.

This is a bit anachronistic, but I think this example will be more vivid for modern readers, and it absolutely is consistent with what Kant wrote about the actual scenarios he was presented with:

You are living in Germany in 1945. You have sheltered a family of Jews in your attic to keep them safe from the Holocaust. Nazi soldiers have arrived at your door, and ask you: “Are there any Jews in this house?” Do you tell the truth?

I think it’s utterly, agonizingly obvious that you should not tell the truth. Exactly what you should do is less obvious: Do you simply lie and hope they buy it? Do you devise a clever ruse? Do you try to distract them in some way? Do you send them on a wild goose chase elsewhere? If you could overpower them and kill them, should you? What if you aren’t sure you can; should you still try? But one thing is clear: You don’t hand over the Jewish family to the Nazis.

Yet when presented with similar examples, Kant insisted that lying is always wrong. He had a theory to back it up, his Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

And, so his argument goes: Since it would be obviously incoherent to say that everyone should always lie, lying is wrong, and you’re never allowed to do it. He actually bites that bullet the size of a Howitzer round.

Modern deontologists—even though who consider themselves Kantians—are more sophisticated than this. They realize that you could make a rule like “Never lie, except to save the life of an innocent person.” or “Never lie, except to stop a great evil.” Either of these would be quite adequate to solve this particular dilemma. And it’s absolutely possible to will that these would be universal laws, in the sense that they would apply to anyone. ‘Universal’ doesn’t have to mean ‘applies equally to all possible circumstances’.

There are also a couple of things that deontology does very well, which are worth preserving. One of them is supererogation: The idea that some acts are above and beyond the call of duty, that something can be good without being obligatory.

This is something most forms of utilitarianism are notoriously bad at. They show us a spectrum of worlds from the best to the worst, and tell us to make things better. But there’s nowhere we are allowed to stop, unless we somehow manage to make it all the way to the best possible world.

I find this kind of moral demand very tempting, which often leads me to feel a tremendous burden of guilt. I always know that I could be doing more than I do. I’ve written several posts about this in the past, in the hopes of fighting off this temptation in myself and others. (I am not entirely sure how well I’ve succeeded.)

Deontology does much better in this regard: Here are some rules. Follow them.

Many of the rules are in fact very good rules that most people successfully follow their entire lives: Don’t murder. Don’t rape. Don’t commit robbery. Don’t rule a nation tyrannically. Don’t commit war crimes.

Others are oft more honored in the breach than the observance: Don’t lie. Don’t be rude. Don’t be selfish. Be brave. Be generous. But a well-developed deontology can even deal with this, by saying that some rules are more important than others, and thus some sins are more forgivable than others.

Whereas a utilitarian—at least, anything but a very sophisticated utilitarian—can only say who is better and who is worse, a deontologist can say who is good enough: who has successfully discharged their moral obligations and is otherwise free to live their life as they choose. Deontology absolves us of guilt in a way that utilitarianism is very bad at.

Another good deontological principle is double-effect: Basically this says that if you are doing something that will have bad outcomes as well as good ones, it matters whether you intend the bad one and what you do to try to mitigate it. There does seem to be a morally relevant difference between a bombing that kills civilians accidentally as part of an attack on a legitimate military target, and a so-called “strategic bombing” that directly targets civilians in order to maximize casualties—even if both occur as part of a justified war. (Both happen a lot—and it may even be the case that some of the latter were justified. The Tokyo firebombing and atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were very much in the latter category.)

There are ways to capture this principle (or something very much like it) in a utilitarian framework, but like supererogation, it requires a sophisticated, nuanced approach that most utilitarians don’t seem willing or able to take.

Now that I’ve said what’s good about it, let’s talk about what’s really wrong with deontology.

Above all: How do we choose the rules?

Kant seemed to think that mere logical coherence would yield a sufficiently detailed—perhaps even unique—set of rules for all rational beings in the universe to follow. This is obviously wrong, and seems to be simply a failure of his imagination. There is literally a countably infinite space of possible ethical rules that are logically consistent. (With probability 1 any given one is utter nonsense: “Never eat cheese on Thursdays”, “Armadillos should rule the world”, and so on—but these are still logically consistent.)

If you require the rules to be simple and general enough to always apply to everyone everywhere, you can narrow the space substantially; but this is also how you get obviously wrong rules like “Never lie.”

In practice, there are two ways we actually seem to do this: Tradition and consequences.

Let’s start with tradition. (It came first historically, after all.) You can absolutely make a set of rules based on whatever your culture has handed down to you since time immemorial. You can even write them down in a book that you declare to be the absolute infallible truth of the universe—and, amazingly enough, you can get millions of people to actually buy that.

The result, of course, is what we call religion. Some of its rules are good: Thou shalt not kill. Some are flawed but reasonable: Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Some are nonsense: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.

And some, well… some rules of tradition are the source of many of the world’s most horrific human rights violations. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live (Exodus 22:18). If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them (Leviticus 20:13).

Tradition-based deontology has in fact been the major obstacle to moral progress throughout history. It is not a coincidence that utilitarianism began to become popular right before the abolition of slavery, and there is an even more direct casual link between utilitarianism and the advancement of rights for women and LGBT people. When the sole argument you can make for moral rules is that they are ancient (or allegedly handed down by a perfect being), you can make rules that oppress anyone you want. But when rules have to be based on bringing happiness or preventing suffering, whole classes of oppression suddenly become untenable. “God said so” can justify anything—but “Who does it hurt?” can cut through.

It is an oversimplification, but not a terribly large one, to say that the arc of moral history has been drawn by utilitarians dragging deontologists kicking and screaming into a better future.

There is a better way to make rules, and that is based on consequences. And, in practice, most people who call themselves deontologists these days do this. They develop a system of moral rules based on what would be expected to lead to the overall best outcomes.

I like this approach. In fact, I agree with this approach. But it basically amounts to abandoning deontology and surrendering to utilitarianism.

Once you admit that the fundamental justification for all moral rules is the promotion of happiness and the prevention of suffering, you are basically a rule utilitarian. Rules then become heuristics for promoting happiness, not the fundamental source of morality itself.

I suppose it could be argued that this is not a surrender but a synthesis: We are looking for the best aspects of deontology and utilitarianism. That makes a lot of sense. But I keep coming back to the dark history of traditional rules, the fact that deontologists have basically been holding back human civilization since time immemorial. If deontology wants to be taken seriously now, it needs to prove that it has broken with that dark tradition. And frankly the easiest answer to me seems to be to just give up on deontology.