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Response to Thought Experiment 86: Art for Art's Sake

3/31/2017

Is unseen art actually art?

After all the dense analytical philosophy in last week's thought experiment, this week's entry seems incredibly simple to me. So much so that I didn't even bother to introduce the experiment on Monday because once it's considered, the answer seems obvious. At least it does to me. It did, however, motivate me to work on some other things all week so that was good. Let's take a look at the experiment and see what I'm talking about:

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Marion was used to the inconvenience of discovering archaeological remains during construction projects. But nothing had prepared her for this.
   The day they found the shaft, a message was delivered to her explaining what it contained. At the bottom of the shaft was a sealed box, containing a Michelangelo statue. The box was booby-trapped in several ways: opening it would set off a bomb; it contained a gas, which if exposed to oxygen, would explode; and other ingenious traps were built in. The upshot was that the artwork could never be revealed, as any attempt to do so or to move the box would destroy it.
   But such a dangerous time-bomb could not be left underneath what was to become a hospital. So there seemed to be only two solutions: abandon the hospital and leave the work of art secure but unseen, or destroy it safely.
   In the circumstances, there appeared to be little choice for Marion but to order the bomb squad in to conduct a controlled explosion. But she couldn't help thinking that it would be better for the statue to remain intact, even if no one could ever see it.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 256.
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Based on his discussion of this thought experiment, Baggini seems to be trying to sow some doubt in the crowd of people who believe that art has some intrinsic value all on its own. I don't know who this crowd is though and I'm certainly not in it. The art in this experiment is not a living, sentient creature. It's just some reshaped stone. As I said when I posted about The Purpose of (My) Art),

Art is knowledge applied to the emotions. Science finds knowledge. Art uses knowledge to inspire. (It can also inspire scientists.) Art causes emotional responses so it often draws emotional people to it, but great art is created by rational processes, filled with knowledge, fueled by emotion, and executed with skill. Bad art is blind emotion that purports falsehoods for truth.

If we take the experiment at its word that the box holding the art is perfectly booby-trapped, then really, the art in there has already been destroyed since it can never be seen again and manage to do its work of inspiring emotion. In real life, I would be tempted to keep the box, and use it as an inspiring symbol for the potential power of art, under the guise that new technology could set it free some day. But since the possibility of that freedom is technically out of bounds for these thought experiments, it's really a moot point. In this circumstance of certainty, the box could only be a symbol for being held hostage by a maniac, and that's dreadfully unappealing. Marion ought to order the controlled explosion.

So how did this thought experiment motivate me? It did so because I've been working on my next novel for a very long time now and I really don't want it to go unseen. This experiment reminded me that such a novel would have no purpose. Time for me to get it finished!

What about you? Any other thoughts or inspiration that spring to mind from this thought experiment?

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Response to Thought Experiment 85: The Nowhere Man

3/24/2017

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Just how meaningless is a phrase like "the present President of the United States"?

Bear with me. After taking several passes at reading through the dense analytic philosophy in Bertrand Russell's essay On Denoting that is behind this week's thought experiment, I think it's finally starting to make sense to me. Hopefully I'll be able to convey that to you, but there is definitely a reason that in the 1920s, Frank P. Ramsey referred to On Denoting as "that paradigm of philosophy." In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry Descriptions, Peter Ludlow singled the essay out as "the paradigm of philosophy", and called it a work of "tremendous insight"; "provoking discussion and debate among philosophers of language and linguists for over a century."

Sounds good, right? Okay here's the thought experiment.

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"Your honour, my client's defence is very simple. He accepts that he did indeed write in his newspaper column that "the current manager of the England football team is a liar, an idiot, and a national disgrace." He also accepts going on to say that he "should be shot." But by doing so, he in no way libelled the plaintiff, Mr Glenn Robson-Keganson.
   "The reason for this is easy to see. At the time the article was written and published, there was no such person as the England football team manager. Mr Robson-Keganson had tendered his resignation two days earlier, and his offer had been accepted. This news became public knowledge on the day the defendant's article was published.
   "The plaintiff claims that the accusations my client made were false. But they were neither true nor false, since they were not about anyone. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say they were meaningless. "Flar-Flar is a racehorse" is true if Flar-Flar is a racehorse, false if she is not, and meaningless if there is no such beast.
   "The jury should therefore dismiss the case. It is just nonsense to suggest one can libel someone who does not exist. I rest my case."

Source: "On Denoting" by Bertrand Russell (1905).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 253.
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In my post Analysing Russell, the Father of Analytical Philosophy, I briefly touched on this puzzle, although I did not wrestle with it in depth. I ended up concluding, perhaps too simply, that:

This over-analysis of grammar known as analytical philosophy is just logic applied to writing. It is important to be clear, but this is a small part of our overarching knowledge. It does not deserve the central role in philosophy departments that it has achieved. It consigns them to the role of fussy nitpicker, rather than the broad-minded lover of wisdom.

I still feel that way about this topic, but who amongst us doesn't feel it's necessary to pick some nits every once in a while? I know I do. And so I feel I should indulge Bertrand Russell on this, especially since he absolutely spent plenty of time on broad-minded pursuits of wisdom too. He wrote this after all:

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great.

So, let's get studying and see what gets enriched!

(Have I sold you on this enough yet?)

When Baggini discussed this thought experiment, he started by acknowledging the pragmatic real-world response to the legal case by saying, "The jury would probably dismiss [the defence] on the grounds that we know who he meant by 'the current manager of the England football team'." I agree. It is indeed specious to claim the article was not libellous in its intent. By changing one adjective—"current" to something like "previous" or "former" or "the last"—the entire article would still stand, naked with its obvious intent. The moment-to-moment accuracy in the mind of the writer of this one word does not change the meaning or the intent of his entire article. Especially since no one would go to all that trouble to write something about a non-existent person.

So that answers the legal question, but what about the philosophical ones being raised here? Before we dive in to those, keep this plea in mind from the end of Russell's original paper:

Of the many consequences of the view I have been advocating, I will say nothing. I will only beg the reader not to make up his mind against the view—as he might be tempted to do, on account of its excessive complication—until he has attempted to construct a theory of his own on the subject of denotation. This attempt, I believe, will convince him that, whatever the theory may be, it cannot have such a simplicity as one might have expected beforehand.

Okay, we're withholding judgment. So what is "denoting" and what kind of theory do we need to construct about it? Russell wrote:

By a "denoting phrase" I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: a man, some man, any man, every man, the present King of England, the present King of France, [etc.]... We may distinguish three cases: (1) a phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote anything; e.g. "the present King of France." (2) A phrase may denote one definite object; e.g. "the present King of England" denotes a certain man [as it did when this was written in 1905]. (3) A phrase may denote ambiguously; e.g. "a man" denotes not many men, but an ambiguous man.

Got it? We're talking about linguistics here and the correspondence between words and objects in reality. What do our words really refer to and how do we make logical sense of that relationship? Is there always a direct correspondence with some physical or mental object? The folk intuition is to say, "yes, of course our words denote such things," but can such denotation always be explained? Philosophers have had trouble answering this, but Russell offered a new theory for tackling this problem:

My theory, briefly, is as follows. I will take the notion of the variable as fundamental; I use "C(x)" to mean a proposition in which x is a constituent, where x, the variable, is essentially and wholly undetermined. Then we can consider the two notions "C(x) is always true" and "C(x) is sometimes true." Then everything and nothing and something (which are the most primitive of denoting phrases) are to be interpreted as follows:

C(everything) means "C(x) is always true"
C(nothing) means " 'C(x) is false' is always true"
C(something) means "It is false that 'C(x) is false' is always true

Everything, nothing, and something, are not assumed to have any meaning in isolation, but a meaning is assigned to every proposition in which they occur. This is the principle of the theory of denoting I wish to advocate: that denoting phrases never have any meaning in themselves, but that every proposition in whose verbal expression they occur has a meaning.

Hmmm. Maybe it will help to see this in action:

Suppose we now wish to interpret the proposition, "I met a man." If this is true, I met some definite man; but that is not what I affirm. What I affirm is, according to the theory I advocate:

" 'I met x, and x is human' is not always false"

Huh?? If you didn't follow that, you don't want to read what he advocates for "all men are mortal" or how to interpret phrases containing "the." After many logical substitutions, it leads to this:

Thus "the father of Charles II was executed" becomes:

"It is not always false of x that x begat Charles II and that x was executed and that 'if y begat Charles II, y is identical with x' is always true of y."

This may seem a somewhat incredible interpretation; but I am not at present giving reasons, I am merely stating the theory. ... The above gives a reduction of all propositions in which denoting phrases occur into forms in which no such phrases occur.

Somewhat incredible?? Yegads. This seems like an awfully difficult way to attempt to reduce denoting phrases to their non-denoting components. So how are we expected to judge all this?

A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science. I shall therefore state three puzzles which a theory as to denoting ought to be able to solve; and I shall show later that my theory solves them.

Okay, this sounds fun. What are the three puzzles?

(1) If a is identical with b, whatever is true of the one is true of the other, and either may be substituted for the other in any proposition without altering the truth or falsehood of that proposition. Now George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley; and in fact Scott was the author of Waverley. Hence we may substitute Scott for the author of Waverley, and thereby prove that George IV wished to know whether Scott was Scott. Yet an interest in the law of identity can hardly be attributed to the first gentleman of Europe.

Haw, haw, haw. Harumph, harumph. But the law of identity and substitution does not make sense here. "Scott" and "the author of Waverley" do indeed point to the same identical person, but they hardly have the same amount of information in them. They only denote one small part of that person. "Scott" is the name of that person. "The author of Waverley" describes one action that person has performed. Treating such adjectival phrases as indistinct from one another is to completely misunderstand the form and function of language. This first puzzle is no puzzle at all. Next!

(2) By the law of excluded middle, either "A is B" or "A is not B" must be true. Hence either "the present King of France is bald" or "the present King of France is not bald" must be true. Yet if we enumerated the things that are bald, and the things that are not bald, we should not find the present King of France in either list.

Of course you would! The things that are not bald includes all imagined things too. It helps slightly to restate the original question into the form that Russell used to analyse it. In that case, we see that "the present King of France" is not "a bald thing." It's no thing at all, so it's certainly not a bald one either. It's quite weird to say, but "the present King of France is not bald" may technically be considered a true statement. Anyone who has played 20 questions will have experienced this phenomenon. But is it as accurate as it could be? More on that below.

To me, the problem with these first two puzzles (and much of analytic philosophy) is that they are examples of what happens when one attempts to take the rules of logic from mathematics and numbers and tries to apply them directly to the world of words and meaning. Numbers are discrete, objective, singular points. Words are vague, fuzzy, subjective, multipolar concepts. Simple manipulations such as negation, substitution, and addition do not always apply here with the perfect accuracy that logicians want so desperately to have.

From my blog post profiling Bertrand Russell, we saw hints that such clinging to cold and logical mathematics by the adult Russell probably arose because of his emotionally traumatic childhood. I wrote that, "It seems from several quotes that Bertrand came to rely on the bedrock of mathematics as a solid retreat from his chaotic childhood filled with so much promise, change, and death:

In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.

From this background, we see perhaps why Russell attempted the whole project of co-founding analytical philosophy with his student Ludwig Wittgenstein. But in my post on Wittgenstein, I noted:

After the completion of his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1918, Wittgenstein believed he had solved all the problems of philosophy and he abandoned his studies. However, in 1929 he returned to Cambridge and began the meditations that ultimately led him to renounce or revise much of his earlier work, rejecting the analytical fantasy that a philosophical language could be derived mathematically from first principles, in favor of a more descriptive linguistic philosophy. This change of mind culminated in his second magnum opus, the Philosophical Investigations, which was published posthumously. In it, Wittgenstein asks the reader to think of language as a multiplicity of language-games within which parts of language develop and function. He argues philosophical problems are bewitchments that arise from philosophers' misguided attempts to consider the meaning of words independently of their context, usage, and grammar, what he called "language gone on holiday.” According to Wittgenstein, philosophical problems arise when language is forced from its proper home into a metaphysical environment, where all the familiar and necessary landmarks and contextual clues are removed. He describes this metaphysical environment as like being on frictionless ice: where the conditions are apparently perfect for a philosophically and logically perfect language - the language of the Tractatus - where all philosophical problems can be solved without the muddying effects of everyday contexts; but where, precisely because of the lack of friction, language can in fact do no work at all. Wittgenstein argues that philosophers must leave the frictionless ice and return to the "rough ground" of ordinary language in use.

What a perfect criticism of these puzzles on denotation so far. But let's get back to Russell's original paper and see the third and final puzzle, which actually raises an interesting question. Next!

(3) Consider the proposition "A differs from B." If this is true, there is a difference between A and B, which fact may be expressed in the form "the difference between A and B subsists." But if it is false that A differs from B, then there is no difference between A and B, which fact may be expressed in the form "the difference between A and B does not subsist." But how can a non-entity be the subject of a proposition? ... Hence, it would appear, it must always be self-contradictory to deny the being of anything; but we have seen, in connection to Meinong, that to admit being also sometimes leads to contradictions. Thus if A and B do not differ, to suppose either that there is, or that there is not, such an object as "the difference between A and B" seems equally impossible. The relation of the meaning to the denotation involves certain rather curious difficulties, which seem in themselves sufficient to prove that the theory which leads to such difficulties must be wrong.

I have to jump back here to a passage about Meinong to make sense of this. Russell wrote that:

The evidence for [my] theory is derived from the difficulties which seem unavoidable if we regard denoting phrases as standing for genuine constituents of the propositions in whose verbal expressions they occur. Of the possible theories which admit such constituents the simplest is that of Meinong. This theory regards any grammatically correct denoting phrase as standing for an object. Thus "the present King of France," "the round square," etc., are supposed to be genuine objects. It is admitted that such objects do not subsist, but nevertheless they are supposed to be objects. This is in itself a difficult view; but the chief objection is that such objects, admittedly, are apt to infringe the law of contradiction. It is contended, for example, that the existent present King of France exists, and also does not exist; that the round square is round, and also not round; etc. But this is intolerable; and if any theory can be found to avoid this result, it is surely to be preferred.

Okay, we are finally at the heart of this denoting problem. Basically, when philosophers invent an impossible strong of words such as "the present King of France" or "the round square", we seem to be able to understand these phrases and even perform logical analyses using them, but they actually refer to nothing. In case you missed it, Russell summarised this above when he said, "But how can a non-entity be the subject of a proposition?"

His own answer was to go through the incredible manipulations and substitutions shown above in order to remove all denoting phrases from the logical analysis of language. Thus, "I met a man" became "'I met x, and x is human' is not always false"; and "the father of Charles II was executed" became "It is not always false of x that x begat Charles II and that x was executed and that 'if y begat Charles II, y is identical with x' is always true of y." In Russell's words, this "gives a reduction of all propositions in which denoting phrases occur into forms in which no such phrases occur."

Besides being incredibly abstruse and unhelpful, I don't think Russell actually achieved his goal since language is nothing but referrals and denotations. It is literally impossible to remove denoting phrases from language. This is why Wittgenstein later abandoned the project of "a philosophically and logically perfect language." But then where does that leave us with regard to puzzle number (3) and how a non-entity can be the subject of a proposition?

I'm not well enough versed in the language and history of formal logic to know the answer to this, but to me it seems like the kind of problem that was solved in mathematics by the invention of the concept of zero. Just like "the present King of France" or "the round square", the number zero doesn't actually refer to anything. It is just a symbol that represents nothing, which we sometimes find useful in mathematical calculations. In the same way that zero is neither positive nor negative, non-denoting phrases may be neither true nor false. And this would help answer the calculation problem that Baggini raised in his analysis of this thought experiment. He said:

The problem is that, in logic, the negation of a false statement is true. So, for example, if "the sun orbits the Earth" is false, then clearly "the sun does not orbit the Earth" is true. That means, however, that if "the King of France is bald" is false, then "the King of France is not bald" must be true. But it can't be true that the King of France is not bald, because there is no such monarch. And so it seems that such statements as "the King of France is bald" when there is no king and "the current manager of the England football team is a liar" when there is no such manager are neither true nor false. If a statement is neither true nor false, doesn't that make it meaningless? You might think so, but surely the meaning of the statement "the current manager of the England football team is a liar" is perfectly clear. And a meaningless statement, the meaning of which is clear, would seem to be a contradiction in terms.

If we take the mathematical properties of zero, however, and apply the same type of logical properties to these non-denoting phrases, then we can get something that is not contradictory and is still clear. We know that 6 is a positive number and -6 is a negative number. If we multiply either number by zero, we get zero, which is neither positive nor negative. In the same way, "is bald" is a positive / true assertion and "is not bald" is a negative / false assertion. If we modify / multiply either of these assertions with something like "the present King of France", we get statements that have zero value. They are neither true nor false.

Indeed, in his essay, "On Referring", P. F. Strawson criticised Russell's "characterisation of statements where the object does not exist, such as "the present King of France", as being false. Such statements, Strawson held, are neither true nor false but, rather, absurd. Strawson believed that, contrary to Russell, use does determine the meaning of a sentence. To give the meaning of an expression is to "give general directions for its use." Because of this, Strawson argued that, were someone to say the King of France was wise, we would not say their statement is true or false, but, rather, decide they must be under a misapprehension since, normally, the question would not arise as there is no King of France."

Thus, in the same way that mathematical equations with the number zero in them are meaningful and understood and may result in answers that are neither true nor false, non-denoting phrases that are "absurd" are also meaningful and understood, even if they result in phrases that are neither true nor false.

It seems shocking to any schoolchild now that it took thousands of years to invent the number zero, but perhaps we see why it took so long because of how the same difficulty can be seen to be playing out in the linguistic logic of analytical philosophy. Since zero doesn't refer to anything real or imagined, it's a really hard concept to invent. The word "absurd" already has other connotations that involve disbelief and falsehood, and a quick read of Strawson's essay would seem to indicate to me that he didn't make the connection between the emptiness of zero and the emptiness of absurd phrases, so if I got to rename this concept, I might call it something new like xero. As in, the article in this thought experiment is neither true nor false, it is technically xero.

And with that conjecture about how to help solve the puzzle of denotation, I'll end this long post. If anyone out there is enough of an expert in analytical philosophy to help me judge whether this is a new idea or not, I would love to receive feedback on it. If not, then this will have just been another one of those difficult exercises wrestling with the logic and understanding of the world that has somehow enlarged my appreciation for it. Thanks for taking that journey with me.

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Thought Experiment 85: The Nowhere Man

3/20/2017

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Say what you want about "this coach." He probably doesn't exist anymore.

I've been diligently plugging away at these thought experiments for over two years now, and I've promised to work through each and every one of the 100 that are in Julian Baggini's book. That's led me to a lot of important discoveries about the history of philosophy, but occasionally it leads to a clunker. Even Baggini closed his thoughts on this week's experiment by saying:

The puzzle cannot, of course, be resolved here. One thing is clear, however. If you find these problems trivial rather than engrossing, don't study logic or the philosophy of language.

Uh oh. Let's see what it is I have to discuss.

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"Your honour, my client's defence is very simple. He accepts that he did indeed write in his newspaper column that "the current manager of the England football team is a liar, an idiot, and a national disgrace." He also accepts going on to say that he "should be shot." But by doing so, he in no way libelled the plaintiff, Mr Glenn Robson-Keganson.
   "The reason for this is easy to see. At the time the article was written and published, there was no such person as the England football team manager. Mr Robson-Keganson had tendered his resignation two days earlier, and his offer had been accepted. This news became public knowledge on the day the defendant's article was published.
   "The plaintiff claims that the accusations my client made were false. But they were neither true nor false, since they were not about anyone. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say they were meaningless. "Flar-Flar is a racehorse" is true if Flar-Flar is a racehorse, false if she is not, and meaningless if there is no such beast.
   "The jury should therefore dismiss the case. It is just nonsense to suggest one can libel someone who does not exist. I rest my case."

Source: "On Denoting" by Bertrand Russell (1905).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 253.
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What do you think? True, false, or meaningless? What does it all mean and why does that matter? There's a little more to it than just this one libel case so I'll be back on Friday to dissect it all. We're in the home stretch now so I hope you'll stick with me to the end.

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Response to Thought Experiment 84: The Pleasure Principle

3/17/2017

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High and low pleasures. Which is which again?

This week's thought experiment is based solely on a premise from utilitarianism that I think is fatally flawed. Therefore, before we can explore and answer the question that is being raised in the experiment, I first need to go back and explain how the roots of this branch of moral philosophy need to be fixed.

John Stuart Mill's book Utilitarianism first appeared as a series of three articles published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861, but the articles were collected and reprinted as a single book in 1863. To this day, it remains:

"the most famous defense of the utilitarian view ever written and is still widely assigned in university ethics courses around the world. Largely owing to Mill, utilitarianism rapidly became the dominant ethical theory in Anglo-American philosophy. ... Though heavily criticized both in Mill's lifetime and in the years since, Utilitarianism did a great deal to popularize utilitarian ethics and was the most influential philosophical articulation of a liberal humanistic morality that was produced in the nineteenth century."

In this small 44-page book, Mill's theory of morality is grounded in a particular “theory of life…namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.” Mill believed that pleasure was equal to happiness, and that it was "the only thing humans do and should desire for its own sake. Since happiness is the only intrinsic good, and since more happiness is preferable to less, the goal of the ethical life is to maximize happiness."

This was published a couple of years after Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), but Mill had obviously not digested that work. Pleasure or freedom from pain are NOT ends in themselves, they are means towards something else. They are signposts for how to act towards survival! And this is the fatal flaw in utilitarianism. Pleasure / happiness is not desired for its own sake. One can quite easily pleasure themselves (not a euphemism) directly into the ground unless they take some kind of long-term view that allows them to balance pleasure and pain towards....survival. Mill should have been able to see this flaw. After all, he argued that:

"traditional moral rules such as 'Keep your promises' and 'Tell the truth' have been shown by long experience to promote the welfare of society. Normally we should follow such 'secondary principles' without reflecting much on the consequences of our acts. As a rule, only when such second-tier principles conflict is it necessary (or wise) to appeal to the principle of utility directly."

But this "principle of utility" is clearly just another "secondary principle" since it often comes into conflict with itself. Happiness / pleasure cannot be used as a guide on its own because there are all sorts of pleasures for all sorts of reasons, many of which need to be followed and many of which need to be ignored. Therefore, there must be a more fundamental principle to guide wise judgment about these types of pleasure. Mill should have seen this, but instead of finding a guiding principle, he just tried to assert what "higher and lower pleasures" are. That brings us to this week's thought experiment.

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It's just typical — you wait years for a career breakthrough then two opportunities turn up at once. Penny had finally been offered two ambassadorial positions, both at small South Sea Island states of similar size, geology, and climate. Raritaria had strict laws which prohibited extra-marital sex, drink, drugs, popular entertainments and even fine food. The country permitted only the "higher pleasures" of art and music. Indeed, it actually promoted them, which meant it had world-class orchestras, opera, art galleries, and "legitimate" theatre.
Rawitaria, by contrast, was an intellectual and cultural desert. It was nonetheless known as a hedonists' paradise. It had excellent restaurants, a thriving comedy and cabaret circuit, and liberal attitudes to sex and drugs.
Penny did not appreciate having to choose between the higher pleasures of Raritaria and the lower ones of Rawitaria, for she enjoyed both. Indeed, a perfect day for her would combine good food, good drink, high culture, and low fun. Choose she must, though. So, forced to decide, which would it be? Beethoven or Beef Wellington? Rossini or Martini? Shakespeare or Britney Spears?

Source: Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill (1863).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 250.
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In Baggini's discussion of this thought experiment, he writes:

In which of these odd little countries is it easier to live a good life? You might think that it is merely a question of preference. ... If it is simply a matter of taste and disposition, however, then why do the higher pleasures attract government subsidies when the lower ones are more often than not heavily taxed? If the pleasure we gain from listening to a Verdi opera is worth no more than the pleasure of listening to Motörhead, then why aren't seats at rock gigs subsidised as much as those at the Royal Opera House? ... The suspicion is that this is just preference, snobbery, or elitism dressed up as an objective argument. The problem exercised John Stuart Mill, the utilitarian philosopher, who thought that the goal of morality was to increase the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The problem he faced was that his philosophy seemed to value a life full of shallow and sensual pleasures above that of a life with fewer, but more intellectual ones. The contented cat would have a better life than a troubled artist. The solution was to distinguish between the quality as well as the quantity of pleasure. A life full only of lower pleasures was worse than one with even just a few higher ones. This still leaves the problem of justification: why is it better? Mill proposed a test. We should ask what competent judges would decide. Those who had tasted both higher and lower pleasures were the best placed to determine which were superior. And as the labels "higher" and "lower" suggest, he knew how he thought they would choose.

Now we see, however, that the choice is a false one. Pleasure is not an intrinsic end goal, so higher and lower pleasures do not exist intrinsically. Sensual pleasures can sometimes lead to survival, and sometimes lead toward extinction. Intellectual pleasures can also lead us in either direction. At the end of my blog post on John Stuart Mill, I pointed out that "there is a fatal flaw in utilitarianism in that by proclaiming the endpoint of morality as "maximising happiness for the greatest number," it can too easily lead to overpopulation and a crashing of the planet's ecosystems [which is known as the repugnant conclusion] because not enough attention is being paid to the actual objective basis for morality—the long-term survival of life." That goal is no secondary principle. Life can have pleasure or not have pleasure. It cannot have survival or not have survival. If it has no survival, there is nothing left. I discussed this at length in my reply to the repugnant conclusion, but I ended with this:

Welfare, well-being, flourishing, eudaimonia...whatever you want to call it...it does matter, but it is NOT paramount. Survival is paramount, and therefore decisive. You can have all the thriving you want, but only AFTER your morals point life towards survival. If well-being were the ultimate and decisive value, whose well-being would be worth marching everything else to extinction? When an issue A supervenes upon issue B, issue B is more fundamental. The issue A of well-being can only be satisfied if the issue B of existence is met. Survival / existence is the most fundamental attribute we must build our morality upon.

So, Raritaria or Rawitaria? It doesn't really matter. Penny should flip a coin if she has to, but then immediately foster diplomatic relations between the two island nations which leads them both to reorganise their laws around a new fundamental principle based on evolutionary philosophy rather than utilitarianism.

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Thought Experiment 84: The Pleasure Principle

3/13/2017

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But is a still life of food high or low art?

This week's thought experiment is a real pleasure to contemplate. But which kind?

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It's just typical — you wait years for a career breakthrough then two opportunities turn up at once. Penny had finally been offered two ambassadorial positions, both at small South Sea Island states of similar size, geology, and climate. Raritaria had strict laws which prohibited extra-marital sex, drink, drugs, popular entertainments and even fine food. The country permitted only the "higher pleasures" of art and music. Indeed, it actually promoted them, which meant it had world-class orchestras, opera, art galleries, and "legitimate" theatre.
Rawitaria, by contrast, was an intellectual and cultural desert. It was nonetheless known as a hedonists' paradise. It had excellent restaurants, a thriving comedy and cabaret circuit, and liberal attitudes to sex and drugs.
Penny did not appreciate having to choose between the higher pleasures of Raritaria and the lower ones of Rawitaria, for she enjoyed both. Indeed, a perfect day for her would combine good food, good drink, high culture, and low fun. Choose she must, though. So, forced to decide, which would it be? Beethoven or Beef Wellington? Rossini or Martini? Shakespeare or Britney Spears?

Source: Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill (1863).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 250.
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What do you think? Which island would you choose? Why? Have the islands been set up properly? Why not? For those of you who want to "optimise pleasure" in your lives, what does that really mean? I'll post my thoughts on Friday, but I would be highly pleased to read yours below.

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Response to Thought Experiment 83: The Golden Rule

3/10/2017

2 Comments

All that's golden isn't gold either.

A frenemy philosopher I know has been stubbornly defending the golden rule as some kind of "universal moral means" for a few years now, so I was happy to see that this week's thought experiment would give me a chance to expand my criticism of this idea. I think it's terribly misguided to focus on means without considering ends, and any propensity to do so contributes to the millions of hours that have already been wasted in this direction during the history of philosophy. Let's dive in to the experiment and then I'll explain further.

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Constance had always tried to observe the golden rule of morality: do as you would be done by, or, as Kant rather inelegantly put it, "Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
   Now, however, she is sorely tempted by something that would seem to go against that principle. She has the chance to run off with the husband of her best friend, taking their entire family fortune with them. On the face of it, that would not be doing as she would be done by.
   But, she reasoned, things are more complex than that. When we lock up a criminal, we are not saying we should also be locked up. We are saying that we should be locked up if we were in the same circumstance as the criminal. That proviso is crucial; context is all.
   So, the question she should be asking herself is this: can she "will that is should become a universal law" that people in her circumstances should run off with their best friend's husband and fortune? Put like that, the answer seems to be yes. She's not saying adultery and asset-stripping are usually good, only that in her specific circumstances they are. So that's settled then: she can run away with a clear conscience.

Sources: The Analectics of Confucius (5th century BCE); Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant (1785).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 247.
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Okay, so obviously the Golden Rule is too vague and simplistic for smarty pants philosophers if they can make it look this dumb. As expert reader John A. Johnson said in a comment to my post on Monday introducing this thought experiment:

Some version of the so-called golden rule can be found in every culture of the world. There are many lists on the Internet pointing to the presence of the golden rule across cultures, religions, and philosophies. Some versions, I think, are better worded than others. One of my favorites is the Yoruba "One going to take a pointed stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts." I have nothing against the spirit of the golden rule, but I do not like how it is worded in Christianity, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (Luke 6:31). This wording assumes that others want to be treated the same way you want to be treated. To the extent that people are similar, this works, but what if I want to be treated in ways that you do not want to be treated? What if I love Brussels sprouts and would like nothing more than to have you bring me a bowl of them every day, but if you hate Brussels sprouts should I bring you a bowl every day because that's how I would like to be treated? I strongly prefer the platinum rule ("Treat others the way they want to be treated") in combination with the silver rule ("Do no harm"). (The silver rule prevents us from harming others when they say that is what they want.) A woman following the platinum+silver rules would never harm her best friend by running off with her husband.

This is excellent. And it's not surprising because Johnson knows what he's talking about when he's analysing moral rules. The first paper he ever published was titled "A Socioanalytical Theory of Moral Development", which he discussed in a comment to another post of mine a few weeks ago. One of the relevant interpretations I took from his paper is that things like the Golden Rule are only intermediate steps along the way to more mature philosophical systems. In Johnson's (et al) paper:

"The first phase [of moral development in an individual] is an absorption of adult rules by children, rules that help insure their survival. Piaget said that this stage of moral realism confuses human-made rules with natural laws and is therefore immature. I would counter by saying that uncritical absorption of rules that keeps a child safe is adaptive at that stage of life. The next phase of development concerns reciprocity, as children learn to get along with other children. Reciprocity involves empathy and other moral emotions that have always been there, but take the forefront as the peer group becomes increasingly more important than one's parents. Finally, we get to the phase of autonomous reasoning (if we are lucky), where we get to think about moral issues like philosophers. We sift through what our parents and other authorities have told us are absolute truths about morality, we consider how our friends want us to interact with them, and then through reasoning decide what is the right thing to do, as far as we can tell."

This is similar to another theory for the moral development of individuals that I wrote about during my post on the 2nd level of personality and the meaning of life, where I noted the following:

How do we know what is right or wrong? What are the values and beliefs we hold that drive us to progress nicely through life or put up our defenses in a negative reaction? I'm not talking about a universal morality just yet (that will come later in my discussion of ethics), but the personal development of morality that any individual can go through. Once again, a theory of stages of development for these traits has been put forth by the psychological community - this time by Lawrence Kohlberg in the 1950's and 1960's. His three levels of moral development are:

Pre Conventional Morality - Rules are external and merely self-serving. Avoiding punishment or gaining rewards are the primary motivators.
Conventional Morality - Others play a major role in morality. Feelings of empathy are considered. One wants to have good interpersonal relationships and maintain social order.
Principled or Postconventional Morality - Moral rules are based on universal principles of justice, equality, the social contract, and individual rights.

There are important differences between Kohlberg's theory and Johnson's theory, but there is a lot of overlap too. Most relevant for this thought experiment is that it's obvious the Golden Rule is simply a second-level convention based on empathy, which may help explain why one struggles if you try to elevate it to the third-level status of a universal principle. In the pithy, simplified forms of a slogan, the various Golden Rules always seem to crumble under the weight of more intense scrutiny. The wikipedia entry for the Golden Rule notes a few such criticisms, "the most serious among these is its application. How does one know how others want to be treated? The obvious way is to ask them, but this cannot be done if one assumes they have not reached a particular and relevant understanding."

This reminds me of the time I warned us to Be Skeptical of Skepticism, when I criticised the head of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, for his new view on a science of morality. I loudly applauded Shermer's and Skeptic's scientific rigour in their debunking of pseudoscience over the years, but then I asked us to consider this statement from Shermer (underlined emphases added):

"First, morality is derived from the Latin moralitas, or “manner, character, and proper behavior.” Morality has to do with how you act toward others. So I begin with a Principle of Moral Good: Always act with someone else’s moral good in mind, and never act in a way that it leads to someone else’s moral loss (through force or fraud). Given this moral principle, the central question is this: On what foundation should we ground our moral decisions? How do we know that rape and adultery are wrong? We don’t need to ask God. We need to ask the affected moral agent—the rape victim in question, or our spouse or romantic partner who is being cuckolded. They will let you know instantly and forcefully precisely how they feel morally about that behavior. Here we see that the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) has a severe limitation to it: What if the moral receiver thinks differently from the moral doer? What if you would not mind having action X done unto you, but someone else would mind it? Most men, for example, are much more receptive toward unsolicited offers of sex than are women. Most men, then, in considering whether to approach a woman with an offer of unsolicited sex, should not ask themselves how they would feel as a test. This is why in my book The Science of Good and Evil I introduced the Ask-First Principle: To find out whether an action is right or wrong, ask first."

As I said then, "this is very weak. Morals are rules that tell us how we ought to act. Period. They are not only concerned with actions towards another person. Is it moral to kick a puppy, overfish an ocean, or dump waste in a forest? Could you ask any of these life forms for their consent? What about an infant? Or an insane person? Or a terrorist? Shermer's principles do not hold up to any scrutiny."

At least Shermer recognised another standard criticism of the Golden Rule. As George Bernard Shaw said about it, "'Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may be different.' Hence, the Golden Rule of 'do unto others' is 'dangerous in the wrong hands,' according to philosopher Iain King, because 'some fanatics have no aversion to death: the Golden Rule might inspire them to kill others in suicide missions.'" This is the same line of attack that Immanuel Kant pursued too, which Baggini brought to the fore. "Immanuel Kant famously criticized the Golden Rule for not being sensitive to differences of situation, noting that a prisoner duly convicted of a crime could appeal to the golden rule while asking the judge to release him, pointing out that the judge would not want anyone else to send him to prison, so he should not do so to others."

As Baggini alluded to in the thought experiment, Kant tried to deal with these "differences of situation" through his categorical imperative. He tried to simply just take them all into account explicitly. Instead of saying "do unto others," he basically said "do unto ALL others." That's it. In my post on Kant, I already made my objections to this clear:

"Categorical imperatives are principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good in and of themselves; they must be obeyed by all in all situations and circumstances if our behavior is to observe the moral law. This is fine, as I also believe strongly in a universal basis for morality, but Kant's formulation of such a principle is as follows:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."

This could only have been written by a man who did not travel the world and deeply absorb the vast and diverse history of actions that are out there in the history of humankind. While long-term and far-reaching principles may be agreed to, the actions to get there will never be universally agreed upon. Especially as our knowledge is so limited about all the future consequences of our actions within the complex systems we interact with. Anyway, sure enough, in his entire life Kant "never traveled more than 10 miles from Königsberg. It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and predictable life, leading to the oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks."

The problem here is with Kant's focus on the word "act." In reality, could any single definable behaviour become a categorical imperative on its own? No. As I described in my response to thought experiment 60:

"Deontological moral rules are not sufficient. Consequentialism shows that results matter too. And virtue ethics says intentions also count. Together, these three schools of thought make up the three main camps of moral philosophy. However, as is often the case with thorny philosophical issues, the best position on morality isn't an "either/or" decision from among these three choices, it's an "all/and" decision which considers the three of them. For any morally-considered human behaviour, there is an intention, an action, and a result. That's the way an event is described prior to, during, and after it occurs. It's the way the past, present, and future are bound together by causality yet allowed to be looked at separately across time. Virtue ethics concerns itself with the intention. Deontology focuses on the action. Consequentialism focuses on the result. But all three may be evaluated individually for moral purposes. ... We can hold all three of these judgments in our head at the same time and use them to guide future decisions accordingly with respect to blame, praise, imitation, or change."

So now we can reply to the main point Baggini is trying to make. As I noted on Monday, Baggini said in his discussion of this thought experiment that:

"The problem Constance's situation highlights is not just a sophisticated joke at the [golden] rule's expense. It goes to the heart of what the principle actually means. For either one of two extreme interpretations, the principle is either ridiculous or empty."

In fact, we find that the Golden Rule is ultimately empty. And here's why. Even if we re-word it perfectly, give it a platinum coating, and then extend to it the most generous benefit of the doubt about the spirit of its law, the Golden Rule is simply calling for reciprocity, for empathy, for more cooperation. But this isn't enough! A philosopher I usually admire named Oliver Curry published a paper in 2016 titled "Morality as Cooperation: A Problem-Centered Approach" that also tried to place cooperation as the sole center of moral philosophy. In an online discussion about this, however, I said the following:

Curry’s paper provides a wealth of support that cooperation is important to the construction of our morality and that these are not supernaturally inspired ideas, but he’s ignoring a big chunk of human experience, which is why his morality doesn’t go anywhere. A simple Wikipedia definition of morality is “the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and those that are bad.” But Curry has nothing to say in his paper about when and why his forms of cooperation might be good or bad. Why is that? Because 1) he’s got no goal, and 2) he’s missing at least half the story. Let me explain.

Morality as cooperation? Towards what? Putting a bagel on Saturn? Subjugating ladybugs? Spreading the message of Moses? Without any guiding goal, how could anyone ever decide whether it is moral to focus their cooperative efforts on kinship, mutualism, exchange, conflict resolution, or anything else for that matter? Yet we make those decisions all the time. And get them wrong all the time. And debate why those decisions were right or wrong. Morality can’t just be about cooperation or for cooperation’s sake.

Morality as cooperation? That’s only half the story. What about when cooperating with your family would be wrong? What about when mutually absconding with natural resources would be wrong? What about when submitting to Nazis would be wrong? What about the virtues of competition in many, many, many scenarios. Game theory allows for two basic choices - cooperate or compete. Wise morality requires understanding when it is necessary to use one or the other. To say you can only choose between various types of cooperation is tying at least one hand behind your back.

The theory of morality I proposed in my paper (Bridging the Is-Ought Divide, ASEBL Journal, Jan 2015) is that morals are rules that lead to the survival of life in general over the long term. That’s the fundamental and objective goal we all *ought* to agree to, which we can then use to try to judge right from wrong. We are discovering these rules all the time, but they require the balancing of competition and cooperation in order to find the optimum satisfaction of needs for individuals, societies, species, and ecologies over timeframes from the immediate present to the evolutionarily distant future. (Those spheres are the complete list because they make up all the spheres of life according to E.O. Wilson’s definition of consilient biology, i.e. the study of all life.) Curry provides a great catalogue of cooperative possibilities for our arsenal of moral choices, but there are other options as well, and our aim in using them must be true.

So, using my universal definition of good, which is a moral end and not a moral means, we see that Constance's actions to steal her friend's husband is clearly wrong, as we knew all along.* She's wrong, not because this is an action that others wouldn't want done to them (some bored wives might not mind), or because this is an action that everyone everywhere all the time shouldn't do (maybe some husbands need to be rescued from abusive wives), but because Constance's actions in this scenario would result in consequences that would probably harm her friend, isolate Constance and the man from other friends who used to trust them, and undermine the goal of developing a cooperative society where individuals can best act towards the survival of us all.

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* Note that Johnson had it right too. I've essentially taken his silver rule of "do no harm" and added my particular definition of harm to it.

2 Comments

Thought Experiment 83: The Golden Rule

3/6/2017

2 Comments

I love this week's thought experiment so much. Not because of the characters in it, or because of the (ahem) thrust of their actions, but because we're using the experiment to examine commonly received wisdom to see whether a bumper sticker motto is empty or not. Let's take a look.

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Constance had always tried to observe the golden rule of morality: do as you would be done by, or, as Kant rather inelegantly put it, "Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
   Now, however, she is sorely tempted by something that would seem to go against that principle. She has the chance to run off with the husband of her best friend, taking their entire family fortune with them. On the face of it, that would not be doing as she would be done by.
   But, she reasoned, things are more complex than that. When we lock up a criminal, we are not saying we should also be locked up. We are saying that we should be locked up if we were in the same circumstance as the criminal. That proviso is crucial; context is all.
   So, the question she should be asking herself is this: can she "will that is should become a universal law" that people in her circumstances should run off with their best friend's husband and fortune? Put like that, the answer seems to be yes. She's not saying adultery and asset-stripping are usually good, only that in her specific circumstances they are. So that's settled then: she can run away with a clear conscience.

Sources: The Analectics of Confucius (5th century BCE); Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant (1785).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 247.
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Obviously Constance is crazy. But that's the point. As Baggini says in his explanation of this thought experiment:

"The problem Constance's situation highlights is not just a sophisticated joke at the rule's expense. It goes to the heart of what the principle actually means. For either one of two extreme interpretations, the principle is either ridiculous or empty."

So what do you think? Can the golden rule actually be tarnished? Does rule-based morality ever work? I'll post my response on Friday, but please share your thoughts below in the meantime.

2 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 82: The Freeloader

3/3/2017

4 Comments

Are we hard wired to steal what we can? (Image from https://is.gd/ldwVDp)

We all hate cheaters. There's the anger we feel when we discover others have cheated, the powerful desire to seek revenge against them, the guilt we (should) feel when others discover our own treachery, and the angst that overcomes us until we get back into the good graces of others. All of these moral emotional reactions have been deeply implanted in us during billions of years of evolution into our cooperative species. Of course, it takes rational wisdom to know who to cooperate with and why, but according to modern developments in the understanding of the evolution of cooperation...

"...a 1971 paper by Robert Trivers demonstrated how reciprocal altruism can evolve between unrelated individuals, even between individuals of entirely different species. ... Trivers' theory is very powerful. Not only can it replace group selection, it also predicts various observed behavior, including moralistic aggression, gratitude and sympathy, guilt and reparative altruism, and development of abilities to detect and discriminate against subtle cheaters."

If you're still stuck in the mindset that evolution is mainly about competition and you think that the "law of the jungle" is the same things as the "survival of the fittest," then I encourage you to read through the excellent wiki entry I linked to for the above quote. If, however, you're already on board with with this whole cooperation thing (i.e. cooperating with cooperators), then we can move on to this week's thought experiment.

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Eleanor was delighted with her new broadband connection. Having been used only to dial-up, she loved the fact that now her internet connection was always on, and also that surfing and downloading was so much quicker. And it was a bonus that it happened to be completely free.
Well, to say it was free was perhaps a little misleading. Eleanor paid nothing for the service because she was using her neighbour's WiFi connection, otherwise known as a wireless Local Area Network. This enabled any computer within a limited range, as long as it had the right software and hardware, to connect without cables to a broadband internet connection. It so happened that Eleanor's apartment was close enough to her neighbour's for her to use his connection.
Eleanor didn't see this as theft. The neighbour had the connection anyway. And she was only using his excess bandwidth. In fact, a neat piece of software called Google Magpie made sure that her use of the connection never slowed her neighbour down by more than a negligible amount. So she got the benefit of his connection, but he didn't suffer as a result. What could be wrong with that?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 244.
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Baggini does a good job here of defining Eleanor's behaviour in such a way that it's not a straightforward case of outright theft from her neighbour. And this is because Baggini is really trying to get us to consider the free rider problem. Although this problem was first used in economic theory, it has been extended to describe issues in collective bargaining, antitrust law, psychology, political science, and biological evolution, so it's a very important concept to understand. Since this thought experiment is only about the problematic use of an economic good, I'll mostly confine my discussion to that field, but other applications should be obvious from this.

In economics, the free rider problem occurs "when those who benefit from resources, goods, or services do not pay for them, which results in an underprovision of those goods or services. ... The free rider problem is common among public goods. These are goods that have two characteristics: non-excludability—non-paying consumers cannot be prevented from using it—and non-rivalry—when you consume the good, it does not reduce the amount available to others."

Did you get that? While those two characteristics of economic goods are vital to understand, and the definitions of non-excludability and non-rivalry seem easy enough to follow, I find that they are best grasped when looked at in this 2x2 matrix:

So because goods can be rivalrous (or not) or excludable (or not), there are four types of goods that require different considerations. In comments to my post on Monday introducing this thought experiment, a reader wondered if Eleanore's rationale could be extended to taking mail or even food delivered to the neighbour. Looking at the chart above, though, we see that those are different categories of goods since they are rivalrous, i.e. they would not be usable by their rightful owner if Eleanor used them first. This isn't really the case for the WiFi though. Especially if the Google Magpie software does its job of ensuring unfettered traffic for the neighbour.

So, as described in this thought experiment, the internet connection is acting as a public good. Baggini ended the experiment saying, "she got the benefit of his connection, but he didn't suffer as a result. What could be wrong with that?" The answer to this leading question is obvious, however, when you use economic tools to show what is really happening in free rider situations. Take a look at the supply and demand curves below.

In a marketplace of internet users where there are no free riders, you have demand curve D1, which yields price p1 and a quantity supplied of q1. When you add free riders to the situation though, demand increases and the demand curve shifts to the right to D2. Now, internet service is not free to provide. The greater the quantity of usage, the more servers and electricity (at a minimum) one has to use to produce it. This is why for demand curve D2, we get price point p2 and quantity produced q2, which are both higher than p1 and q1 respectively. However (!!), since demand curve D2 actually has no new people paying for this greater demand, all of the burden in the area between the dotted lines on the chart will fall on the people who would otherwise be paying p1 for q1. Baggini claims that Eleanor's neighbour didn't suffer as a result of her free riding, but this isn't really the case. He is paying his part (however small) for all of the free riding going on in the marketplace. This is why cooperators have developed such a powerful urge to discover cheaters and get rid of them. This holds true for everything from internet usage, to healthcare insurance, to tax payments, to union agreements, and all the way down to hunting and gathering for shared food. It may take time to discover the cheaters, they may get away with things for a little while, but as research into iterated prisoners dilemma games shows, cheating doesn't actually win over the long term. What does win, has been summarised by the following characteristics:

Be nice: cooperate, never be the first to defect.
Be provocable: return defection for defection, cooperation for cooperation.
Don't be envious: focus on maximizing your own 'score', as opposed to ensuring your score is higher than your 'partner's'.
Don't be too clever: or, don't try to be tricky.

Such advice for the game of life works well in small tribes where everyone has a chance to repeatedly interact with one another. But in large anonymous modern societies, "government is the primary agency that societies utilize to address the free rider problem. Practical tactics include compulsory participation (taxation) or a form of regulation, and linking the public good to a desirable private good (getting people to pay voluntarily). Governments have imposed taxes when not enough people have voluntarily paid for a public good or service, and some governments have turned a public good into a private one."

Of course, governments haven't been perfected yet. (Go ahead. Take a moment to laugh at that understatement.) And this is why when I wrote about The Purpose of Government, I noted:

We will never do away with the evolutionary history we have inherited, which leaves us vulnerable to strong urges to compete. For that alone, government will always be required to take care of the protection from and punishment of cheaters. However, we also know through the study of economics and its definitions of terms like public goods, private goods, natural monopolies, tragedies of commons, externalities, perfect competition, and information asymmetry, that even if every individual was committed to cooperating with their fellow citizens, there would still be things that we need centralized and collective action to address. We know that the invisible hands of the market will lead to market failures if they are left to act on their own. This essentially is the modern reason we have government - to efficiently do for the group what we cannot do acting alone.

This is also why I wrote in my guiding principles of political philosophy that:

The purpose of government is to regulate the economic system by correcting market failures in order to best ensure the long-term survival of the species. Different strategies are required for the markets of different types of goods. Public goods (non-excludable, non-rivalrous) such as national defense, justice, and public utilities must be highly regulated or provided by government. Common goods (non-excludable, rivalrous) such as air, water, fish stocks, and timber must be protected for long-term sustainability. Club goods and private goods (both excludable) should be regulated towards perfect competition, which ensures maximum benefits for consumers. The six characteristics of perfect competition are: 1) many suppliers with an insignificant share of the market; 2) identical output produced by each firm; 3) consumers with perfect information about goods and prices; 4) all firms have equal access to resources and technologies; 5) there are no barriers to entry or exit in the long term; 6) there are no externalities in production or consumption of the goods.

I've intended for these principles of government to be applied at global levels for global problems and then cascaded down through all smaller levels of government until you get truly local problems taken care of by only local governments. But since I wrote my first draft of Evolutionary Philosophy, I've also learned about the economist Elinor Ostrom who won a nobel prize for her research into how various groups have been able to solve free rider problems and avoid tragedies of the commons with or without formal government. She identified eight "design principles" for what she called the stable management of common pool resources (CPRs). They are:

Clear definition of the contents of the common pool resource and effective exclusion of external un-entitled parties;
The appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions;
Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process;
Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators;
A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules;
Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access;
Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities; and
In the case of larger common-pool resources, organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local CPRs at the base level.

This is fantastic research and the best governments do mimic these principles. They are very important for true commons, and I really wanted to touch on all of these facets of the free rider problem. But really, this is all a bit of overkill for a WiFi signal, isn't it? Imagine the difficulty in setting up local collective-choice arrangements, effective monitoring, and graduated sanctions to deal with Eleanor. In fact, the much easier solution to this thought experiment is for all neighbours to simply lock their WiFi routers behind a password, which would change their connections from a public good into a club good, i.e. it would then be excludable like a private park or satellite television. This is exactly what we see in most situations, which means the free riders have been thrown off and everyone chips in for cheaper internet connections all around.*

* Fine print: You're price may vary depending on your government's other regulations concerning the natural monopolies of phone lines and cable lines, or the de facto monopolies that arise due to over-consolidation in the marketplace.

4 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 86: Art for Art's Sake

Response to Thought Experiment 85: The Nowhere Man

Thought Experiment 85: The Nowhere Man

Response to Thought Experiment 84: The Pleasure Principle

Thought Experiment 84: The Pleasure Principle

Response to Thought Experiment 83: The Golden Rule

Thought Experiment 83: The Golden Rule

Response to Thought Experiment 82: The Freeloader

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