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John Locke and the Social Contract

Danny Shahar strikes back! Although I feel more as though I am lofting softballs than actually striking anything. Nevertheless, I am still unsatisfied with his (and I'll assume the wider academy of philosophers') answers to my question.

My question is essentially this: wouldn't a good starting point for any philosophy of ethics be the natural equality of all human beings. In other words, shouldn't any two individuals have the same rights with respect to the other? Furthermore, shouldn't it require something real and tangible, something observable, measurable and testable to deviate from the basic physical reality that human beings are in a single biological category and, therefore, the same moral category?

Danny takes me to task for my claim that academic philosophers outline one set of ethical behaviors for citizens (or subjects) and another for governments (or rulers). According to Danny, mainstream philosophy already accepts this view. He claims that this pillar of modern ethics can be traced back to some guy named John Locke (just kidding, I know Locke, Lost is one of my favorite shows). Locke says two things, and I will abbreviate the quotes--they are laid out more fully in Danny's post.

First from In Section 4 of the second treatise, Of Civil Government:

A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection . . .

He goes on to caveat the situation in which God designates a ruler. Which was probably pretty important since he worked for/wrote in support of an English lord and thereafter King (formerly Prince) William of Orange.

Honestly, I don't know how one would know if God has designated a ruler, and I don't know that Locke put his bosses in the category of the divinely appointed. I do think that it is noteworthy that his writings were in the support of the violent (although not so violent in England proper) subjugation of a population under the rule of a king. To be fair, there weren't (and still aren't) alot of jobs for philosophers outside of legitimizing the rule of a particular political group. But I digress.

So, except for the god thing, this seems pretty solid and in line with what I consider to be a sound starting point for an ethical system. He even says that everybody in this "state of nature" can defend themselves and their property.

Ah, but without a central authority, he claims, there will be naught but endless war! His evidence for this claim? There is none. He's simply certain that it would happen. He is sure that under no circumstances could people formulate a solution between arguing parties that doesn't rely on an ultimate violent enforcer. While this seems ridiculous to anyone who has spent a lifetime interacting in society with no need to call upon the monopolistic arbiter of disputes, I don't want to focus on this empty assertion (maybe another time, John).

Locke continues in Section 21:

To avoid this state of war (wherein there is no appeal but to heaven, and wherein every the least difference is apt to end, where there is no authority to decide between the contenders) is one great reason of men's putting themselves into society, and quitting the state of nature: for where there is an authority, a power on earth, from which relief can be had by appeal, there the continuance of the state of war is excluded, and the controversy is decided by that power . . .

Immediately upon being declared a being with an identical moral nature to every other human, one group of individuals "put themselves into society" where another group of individuals form the "authority." These two groups of individuals have entirely different moral structures surrounding them. One individual is "good" when he kills and/or takes. Another, in what by any measurable physical metric is the commission of the exact same act of killing and/or taking, is "bad."

Despite Danny's claim to the opposite, Locke, and all other (recorded) philosophers throughout history rely on the manipulation of abstract concepts (previously "god's will," now "the authority of the community") to justify the violent coercion of one group of individuals by another.

One last note, Locke does allow for the society to replace one government with another, which sounds pretty useful. During their time of "legitimacy," however, most governments build the sort of supremacy of arms that makes citizen/subject rebellions a fairly suicidal prospect.

To wrap up this post, I would like to state for the record that I have great respect for the towering intellects of the enlightenment philosophers. Each of them is attempting to put forth radical ideas about human equality while also endeavoring to get paid (and not executed) by people whose positions rest on an axiom of human inequality. In any case, Locke is probably the least offensive when it comes to using abstractions to override reality.

But I think it is a dreadful mistake to overlook this obvious inconsistency. Why must we pretend that ethics begins from the physically grounded principle of human equality when it is clearly founded on the ethical supremacy of empty concepts such as the common authority, the public good, god's will, the health of the race, the defense of the nation, and so forth.

These concepts cannot be accessed by individual people, since they are not part of the physical world. In such cases, the most heavily armed usually speaks for the abstract concept. The speaker (or speakers) can now define moral categories that have no basis in reality. Since the abstract concept is seen as the greater good, the arbitrarily defined moral categories trump the principle of human equality. I am not aware of any society grounded on any philosophy of ethics that did/does not arrange itself in such a way.

And so, I ask again, what is the objection to founding ethics on accessible reality and refusing to grant moral primacy to empty abstract categories?

Private Property and Ethics

It's funny (to me) to recall a time, not long ago, when the very idea of discussing property rights would have put me in a coma. At the time, I held that notions of property rights existed essentially to legitimize keeping wealth in the hands of the wealthy. I have since come to see the value of examining different ideas about property rights. I've come to realize that these ideas exist, not only to keep wealth in the hands of the wealthy, but also to redirect wealth to the well armed and politically connected.

Of course there is, at least, one exception to this rule. It is the idea that sparked my interest in property rights a few years ago. That is the radical notion that the products (or property) generated by an individual's labor should belong to the individual. I classify the notion as radical because all existing (i.e. enforced) systems of property rights in the world today, deny, implicitly or explicitly, the rights of the fruits of work to the worker.

Around the world, access to resources is controlled by monarchs, congresses, generals, people's assemblies, and parliaments rather than by the individuals who live on or develop the resources. Large portions of the products that the worker produces are forcibly expropriated to serve the "public good" by, for example, building prisons and waging wars.

This is not to say that the Lockean idea of property belonging to the creator of property doesn't encounter complications in the details. These complications can typically be worked out without the need to mobilize national armies--the method preferred by alternate theories of property rights.

Property rights eventually (or maybe from it inception) is connected with ethics.

In a conversation I'm having with Danny Shahar, a philosopher who is very generously helping me think through various aspects of ethics, I overgeneralized the term "theft" as always being "wrong" or unethical in contrast to "taking" which doesn't indicate an ethical judgment. Danny rightly pointed out that one must first accept "the moral legitimacy of property rights of some form." In addition, Danny outlines a situation in which theft may be morally ambiguous:

let's say you felt chest pains while walking down the street, and knew (somehow) that you were starting to have a heart attack. You happened to be passing by the open window of a house where some aspirin was sitting on the table, but no one was home. Now, let's say (probably falsely--I don't know) that if you took the aspirin, it would increase your chances of surviving the heart attack significantly. Would it be wrong to steal it? I don't think that the answer is clearly yes, or that by saying no we would be denying any form of property rights. We would just need to say that property rights aren't absolute like that; they don't tell us what we always must do or must refrain from doing.

Here I may require some further instruction from formal philosophy. I believe that almost anyone would choose to take the aspirin. To extend the situation: you've now survived the heart attack and the homeowner (or aspirin owner) approaches you. He says that you "owe" him ten cents for the aspirin. Is his claim justified?

What this teases out, perhaps, is the difference between ethics as a pre/proscriptive tool and ethics as a tool for the determination of just outcomes. It makes little sense to imagine that someone should ignore the biological imperitive to live because of ethical considerations. I'm sure there are some weightier scenarios that we could invent that would increase the ethical dilemma somewhat in favor of repressing the biological imperitive in favor of ethical considerations.

Nevertheless the action can still be considered as a breach of ethics in the sense that we justly owe the aspirin owner compensation for that which was taken from him. Again, we can fog the just nature of the outcome by having the asprin owner demand a million dollars or by having him kill us as we reach in the window for the aspirin.

I would repeat my point, though, that these seem to be issues around the fringe of what we as humans need from an ethical system and issues that can probably be addressed without recourse to extreme measures--making all aspirin state owned, for example.

My (now oft) repeated claim is that academic philosophy tends to justify, or at least let pass, the violence of religions and states. I do not wish to demean attempts to iron out the details of the ethical content of scenarios such as the one above. However, seeking to resolve questions of heart-attack induced aspirin theft seems secondary to questioning the ethical frameworks that justify, for example, incarcerating 2 million people--largely for victimless crimes against the state. Under "normal" circumstances, I would think that the efforts of those most highly educated in the science of ethics would be applied to less ambiguous scenarios.

Axiology and Material Reality

I want to thank Danny Shahar for continuing to provide detailed responses to my questions. In his latest post in our dialogue, he corrects a couple of my misconceptions, responds to a number of my points, and expands the discussion in a number of very interesting directions. I hope that he is enjoying this as much as I am, because I feel like he is increasing my understanding of the challenges that ideas face in scholarly or academic review.

I want to respond to a particular point in this post and pick up the other points in future posts. I think this might help focus my mind and will, perhaps, result in more readable posts.

I proposed a thought experiment in response to one posed by Danny. In short, there are 3 scenarios. In the first: You are sitting in a coffee shop and a stranger walks in. You kill the stranger. With no further information, it would be reasonable to conclude that you had acted "wrongly." Second scenario: Same coffee shop; the stranger walks in with a gun pointed at you and every indication is that he plans to kill you. You kill the stranger (nice quick-draw, by the way). It would be reasonable to conclude that you had not acted "wrongly." Third scenario: identical to the second in every way except that the stranger has a metal shield in his pocket with the symbols F.B.I. stamped on it.

Materially, there is no difference between the second and third scenarios. My concern with philosophical ethics (generalization ahead) is that it goes outside of the realm of the material--that which most if not all of us have access to--into the realm of abstract ideas to derive "values." Once there, almost any action can be justified by imbuing a concept (race, country, religion, tribe) with a greater "moral weight" than material entities (individual humans).

Danny informs me that this area of study is axiology:

What I do want to point out is that you've now moved into the realm of axiology (that is, the study of value, or more specifically for our purposes, the study of what kinds of things have moral weight and why). Once we enter into this area of thinking, consensus among philosophers breaks down extremely quickly, and so I'm not particularly eager to critique Stefan [Molyneux]'s views through an axiological alternative of my own (of course, we can discuss my own views on the grounding principles of ethics later if you want). But I will note that Stefan doesn't actually provide a rigorous axiology in his book (this was my final objection in the other post), except to say that we should come to an understanding of ethical principles through the scientific method.

Firstly, I want to note that Danny goes on to critique the scientific method. I hope to respond to the critique in a future post. For now, let's assume that the scientific method cannot directly provide a "rigorous" axiology. Secondly, I would like to express interest in a fully formed axiological alternative for my own edification as to what that would look like.

Conceding that I do not know the full requirements of a rigorous axiology, I am curious if material reality could fulfill those requirement. If not (if for example, a concept like "property" is necessary--and it seems reasonable that it would be), can we not ground the concepts on materially accessible foundations?

To revisit a point that I made in my initial post, the philosophy of ethics seems (going out on a bit of a limb), historically, to delineate one set of permissible actions for the powerless and a different set for the powerful. While this doesn't invalidate a particular ethical framework, it should at least invite investigation as to what axiology or set of values permits such inconsistencies.

Many ethical systems seem to require arbitrarily defined concepts (the will of god, the public good, the national interest) to "trump" values that are based on physical reality (that all humans seem to be roughly the same biological entity or that voluntary interactions serve the preferences of all involved parties).

These systems have typically been generated by religious scholars, court philosophers and state academicians and they typically justify the actions of the "ruling class" or, in material terms, those that are most heavily armed or direct those who are.

For these reasons, I continue to wonder if divorcing axiology (and, therefore ethics) from grounding in material reality isn't a failure of philosophy that should be examined and redressed.

Thanks again to Danny for his continued help in my understanding of these topics.

Ethics and Circumstances

I recently read Danny Shahar's summary of Universally Preferred Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics. The summary can be found here. In it, he states that, from the perspective of academic philosophy:

it is emphatically not a formal requirement of a moral theory that it make the same claim about what people should do regardless of the circumstances

I asked (in a comment below that post) if this might not be seen as a failure of the philosophy of ethics. His response leads me to believe that I have misunderstood what he intended with the word "circumstances."

I hope to address that misunderstanding here, and perhaps he will be kind enough to delve deeper, should such delving be necessary, on his blog Back to the Drawing Board.

He first, quite rightly, draws distinctions between murder and killing and theft and taking. The prior two verbs entail an ethical judgment. We can, therefore, say that murder and theft are always wrong. If they were not, they would be killing and taking (respectively). Of course whether or not a death is a murder or a killing (or something else entirely) depends upon the circumstances. This certainly addresses the letter of my question. I concede a sloppy choice of words. We are in agreement that the difference between murder (bad) and killing (indeterminate) is based on circumstances. I believe that S. Molyneux's assessment would be the same.

He then gives another example of circumstances:

For example, take the act of "killing a person." If I'm sitting in a coffee shop, and I see a stranger walk in and order a coffee, it seems like it would be wrong of me to kill her. But if I'm sitting in that same coffee shop, and I see that same stranger walk in, except now she's pointing a gun at me and (seemingly) getting ready to pull the trigger, we might not judge me so harshly if I were to kill her

Again, we are in agreement. There is a material difference between the two circumstances. One that can be described in terms of a configurations of matter (to strip it to its barest components) and conditions which are accessible to observation and reason.

My comment about the (possible) failure of the philosophy of ethics does not stem from a belief that the above examples should be covered by a universal rule that is agnostic of the circumstances.

As an example of the difference between the judgment rendered by a rational, material-oriented ethical framework and those generated by historical ethical systems might be best demonstrated by the following example.

Imagine the coffee shop above. Situation #2 unfolds: a stranger comes in and points a gun at me and is about to pull the trigger (seemingly) and I incapacitate the stranger in some way.

Now imagine a parallel scenario identical in every detail, except that the stranger is carrying an FBI badge.

Do these differing circumstances change the "rightness" of my actions? Physically, there is no difference is circumstances (other than the shield of metal in the attackers coat pocket). Many ethical frameworks, of course, rely on abstract and slippery concepts: authority, legitimacy, jurisdiction, etc. and judge the attacked to have acted in an unethical manner. This is the sense in which I think traditional philosophy has failed with regards to ethics.

I'm curious how academic philosophy would respond to the claim that circumstances matter, but only circumstances that are manifest in physical reality (that may be too strong a restriction, we'll see).

And to follow up on one other point in my comment to Danny's post: is it not reasonable to begin with a system isomorphic to the scientific method? I find it appealing on every level (I know that's not relevant to its validity). The amount of human suffering that is let pass by ethical systems which weigh intangible concepts (usually concepts that favor the powerful and the aggressive) is staggering. Is it only coincidental that an ethical framework grounded in reason and evidence favors instead voluntary relationships and non-aggression? Is it coincidental that civil society, as a matter of course, follows the single maxim of a framework so grounded? Is it coincidence that the only violators are those that interact with strangers by killing or threatening to imprison/kill them?

Again, I know that the validity of the statement isn't determined by the appeal of the outcome. I am wondering if it is possible that a UPB style framework could be workable vis á vis the perspective of academic philosopy, and if so, under what circumstances.

Universally Preferable Behaviour

I have recently become interested in an approach to ethics proposed by Canadian philosopher Stefan Molyneux. His book on the matter is Universally Preferable Behaviour - A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.

I’m not certain that I understand the book in the way an academic philosopher would, and I may be misrepresenting the intentions of the author. In any case, here’s what I am proposing as the basis for an ethical system. I’m fairly sure this is the essence of his argument as well.

Removing the ability for an individual or group of people to proclaim a statement to be valid requires proposing a new standard by which statements are judged. Judging the validity of statements about reality (the earth is flat, the heart is the center of thought, mercury cures disease) used to be the province of religion. This was the case until it was proposed that claims about reality be measured against reality to establish their validity.

This seemingly obvious idea had been floating about for a couple thousand years. When the church’s grip faltered and the scientific method was finally applied on a broad scale, it had a tremendous effect, unleashing a wave of human creativity never before seen in history.

In order to remove the authority of individuals and groups to proclaim actions to be ethical or unethical, we must find a new standard by which those actions can be judged. Until a better mechanism is proposed (and I would be very interested in any such proposal), I think the clearly superior candidate is something parallel to the scientific method.

What would that look like in practice?

The basis of the scientific method is so well known to us that I won’t belabor the details. In short: statements about reality must be internally consistent and empirically verifiable. Anything failing either criterion does not accurately describe reality.

Thus, we can throw out any system handed down from divinely inspired desert nomads, or anything else whispered in the ears of prophets by undetectable sources. This is not to say that the contents of their ethical systems won’t be arrived at by our own (“don’t murder” seems like it could come in handy).

Another key aspect of the scientific method that I want to draw attention to is that experiments to determine the validity of a claim should be repeatable. In the case that a second experiment achieves dissimilar results, the experimenter must find the relevant context that caused the difference, or discard the tested claim as invalid.

Our parallel is the oft repeated by rarely understood maxim: “All people are equal.” This claim, much like the claim that no omnipotent god exists, might, in some parallel dimension, be disproven. Until we have access to that information, the biological evidence, which has found no genetic markers for greater ethical capacity, stands.

For our ethical system, this indicates that all proposed ethical rules must be universally applicable. If it is wrong for A to kill B, then it doesn’t matter if A is a man and B is a woman; A is white and B is black; A is a Muslim and B is a Jew; A is an Italian and B is Chinese; A is a cop and B is a “civilian.”

If it is right for B to kill A (say that A is going to kill B), then it is right for all the examples above.

There is nothing ethically relevant, from our scientific method inspired ethical framework, about the gender, race, religion, nationality or outfit of the two participants.

To fast forward a bit, this framework for evaluating ethical systems admits only one rule: the non-aggression principle (no violence except in self-defense). This in itself shouldn't be too surprising--the foundation of most every moral system is something like "The Golden Rule." Of course, they often add "burn the unbelievers," but you have to give credit where credit is due.

I have only seen one cogent review of this idea that was critical of its approach. Danny Shahar blogged about the book. He had some problems with it. Since I think this approach (if not UPB, then something similarly grounded in rationality and empiricism) is critical to the organization of a healthy world, I wanted to start a conversation with him. I hope to understand his concerns and determine whether S. Molyneux's approach is valid or if, perhaps, a more effective formulation might be arrived at.

Why Ethics?

The subject of ethics has been whirling around in my head recently. Apparently, it’s been whirling around in the heads and on the blogs of others as well.

For most of us, the application of ethics comes naturally, almost unconsciously. We don’t need to reason through a moral framework to decide not to kill our grocer and steal his money. Nor do we need to figure out how we feel when we hear that someone was raped in the park last night. We understand these things for what they are: abominable acts carried out by broken humans.

Aside from the occasional poaching of office supplies, lying to avoid family obligations, or turning away while the dog does its business in a state park, most of us lead relative ethical lives by any standard. Those of us who don’t probably aren’t interested in ethics anyway.

So why is ethics important?

Human beings want to do the “right thing.” It’s very difficult for someone to commit an act they know is wrong, and the degree of difficulty increases proportionally to their perception of its “wrongness.” Only sociopaths are free from this constraint, which is what makes them such unpleasant company.

Anyone who wants you to participate in something would benefit greatly by casting it as the “right thing” (I’m going to start to use “good” interchangeably with “the right thing” to save typing—I’m open to arguments that they aren’t synonymous in the way I use them).

For this reason, religion and government are two of the institutions most interested in managing the conversation about ethics. If tithing is good, religious people will do it. If fighting terrorism is the right thing to do, 70% of Americans will support the invasion of multiple countries.

I believe that ethics is currently a tool of power—a way that the strong justify the use of violence against the weak. A claim could probably be made that it always has been such. The evidence for this claim abounds, as goodness and right have been used since words have been written to lead populations to stupendous acts of barbarism against other populations.

Thus I see ethics as one of the areas in which it is critical that we bring clarity. That is the purpose of this blog—that and to pass the time while my wife is out having her nails done.