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Response to Thought Experiment 52: More or Less

4/30/2016

4 Comments

 
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Ah, the joys of less...
This week's thought experiment is one of the best I have seen for illustrating the problems that arise from traditional moral systems and how my evolutionary ethics can offer a solution to these problems. To feel the full weight of the issue, let's back up a bit and explore the background of ethics in general and how this particular thought experiment specifically arose.

In 2009, the largest-ever survey of what philosophers actually believe was conducted by David Bourget and David Chalmers. On the question of which ethical system they subscribed to, respondents were given the three traditional choices of: 1) deontology (a rule-based system); 2) consequentialism (ends matter, best exemplified by utilitarianism), or 3) virtue ethics (morals are guided by some competing list of character virtues). How did they answer?

32.3% other
25.8% deontology
23.6% consequentialism
18.1% virtue ethics

So on perhaps the most important question in philosophy—how do you know what is right and what is wrong?—a plurality of expert philosophers look at the best choices they've developed, throw their hands up in the air, and say "none of the above." Derek Parfit (the man who inspired this week's thought experiment) shed quite a bit of light on this by making his survey answers public. He
wrote in the comments for this question, "I believe that these main systematic theories all need to be revised, in ways that would bring them together."

Seeing holes everywhere, Parfit set out to poke them and expose them to even more daylight. If you aren't religious or a moral skeptic/relativist/nihilist, then the most common ethical position I've seen from philosophers is some kind of synthesis which says human well-being or flourishing (or eudaimonia from Aristotle's Ancient Greek) is the highest virtue, which yields a sort of utilitarian/deontological rule that what matters is the aggregate happiness, i.e. the happiness of everyone and not the happiness of any particular person, as long as no real deal-breakers are done to individuals. But Parfit saw that this kind of moral definition leads to a very problematic question: Where exactly are the limits of "aggregate happiness" in the face of a changing population?

To fully expose this problem, Parfit first had to show that populations will indeed change, but our moral concerns are independent of the hypothetical future people that are produced. (Note how reader Stephen Willey also illustrated this need with his insightful comment to the introduction of this week's thought experiment.) Parfit showed this independence with his introduction of the nonidentity problem. This is a huge problem deserving of its own post someday, but I'll just quickly introduce one example from it and how it led Parfit to his Repugnant Conclusion, which is the real ending point of the current discussion.

Parfit started down this path by considering how we ought to act in scenarios where our decisions will clearly change who will exist in the future. He looked at the following two possibilities:
  1. A pregnant mother suffers from an illness which, unless she undergoes a simple treatment, will cause her child to suffer a permanent handicap. If she receives the treatment and is cured her child will be perfectly normal.
  2. A woman suffers from an illness which means that, if she gets pregnant now, her child will suffer from a permanent handicap. If she postpones her pregnancy a few months until she has recovered, her child will be perfectly normal.

What should the women do in either of these two cases? In the first instance, our best predictions say the mother ought to get the treatment since her *actual* child will be more likely to have a better life. We can't say exactly the same thing for the second scenario though. In that case, when the woman delays her pregnancy, a different child will be brought into existence. The original potential child with the permanent handicap is rendered nonexistent by her choice, so to claim the mother ought to postpone her pregnancy is to say nonexistence is better for that person than an existence with a handicap. But that's not an argument anyone wants to make.

What this shows is that the benefits or harms done to future people must be independent of who those actual people turn out to be. Parfit calls this the “No-Difference View”, meaning it makes no difference who that future person is, the woman in the second scenario ought to postpone her pregnancy, just like the woman in the first scenario ought to undergo the treatment. This line of thinking, then, leads directly to what Parfit calls "the Impersonal Total Principle: If other things are equal, the best outcome is the one in which there would be the greatest quantity of whatever makes life worth living." In doing this, Parfit has managed to decouple benefits and harms from actual people and allowed these plusses and minuses to be considered from an impersonal perspective of the universe. This leads to some dark places though, since it implies that any loss in the quality of lives in a population can be compensated for by a sufficient gain in the quantity of a population. This is precisely the starting point laid out in this week's thought experiment. Let's finally take a look at it now.

---------------------------------------------------
     Carol had decided to use a large slice of her substantial wealth to improve life in an impoverished village in southern Tanzania. However, since she had reservations about birth-control programmes, the development agency which she was working with had to come up with two possible plans.
     The first would involve no birth-control element. This would probably see the population of the village rise from 100 to 150 and the quality of life index, which measures subjective as well as objective factors, rise modestly from an average of 2.4 to 3.2.
     The second plan did include a non-coercive birth-control programme. This would see the population remain stable at 100, but the average quality of life would rise to 4.0.
     Given that only those with a quality of life ranked as 1.0 or lower consider their lives not to be worth living at all, the first plan would lead to there being more worthwhile lives than the second, whereas the second would result in fewer lives, but ones which were even more fulfilled. Which plan would make the best use of Carol's money?

Source: Part four of Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit, 1984.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 154.
---------------------------------------------------

While Carol's singular dilemma is mildly interesting (and I will address it before the end of this post), this is really just the opening salvo that leads eventually to Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion. As it was originally written, that conclusion looks like this:

“For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.”

In other words, Carol's immediate problem is just a minor tradeoff. If we do the math (as reader John Johnson noted in his comment to this thought experiment), the "total happiness" of 3.2 x 150 = 480, which is greater than 4.0 x 100 = 400, and much greater than the current state of 2.4 * 100 = 240. Judging by total happiness, as you should according to the conclusion of Parfit's Impersonal Total Principle, you get a clear choice. But eventually, if you keep scaling this up, you might reach 500 people with a quality of life of 1.01, barely above having a life worth living, and that would somehow outweigh any of the current scenarios. Scaling this up to the size of the Earth, any morality that favours 100 billion nearly-suicidal people is indeed a repugnant morality. But how to avoid it?

The Repugnant Conclusion "highlights a problem in an area of ethics which has become known as population ethics" and "the last three decades have witnessed an increasing philosophical interest in" such questions. Shockingly, "it has been surprisingly difficult to find a theory that avoids the Repugnant Conclusion without implying other equally counterintuitive conclusions." Parfit "finds the Repugnant Conclusion unacceptable and many philosophers agree." The problem, however, is "to find an adequate theory about the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives, and their identities may vary." Parfit sought what he called a Theory X, which would be able to solve the nonidentity problem without leading to the repugnant conclusion, but by Parfit's own conclusion, "he had not succeeded in developing such a theory."

I believe my own moral theory does solve these problems, but before I get to that, for the sake of rigour, let's quickly run through the Eight Ways of Dealing with the Repugnant Conclusion, according to current academically published attempts (with the problems they incur summarised in parentheses):

1. 
Introduce new ways of aggregating welfare into a measure of value:
   1.1 E.g. use t
he average principle. (This leads to a repugnant conclusion in the opposite direction.)
   1.2 E.g. use variable value principles. (This is like the economic concept of utility, but it is not grounded in anything objective so different variables lead to different outcomes, making this solution useless.)
   1.3 E.g. use "critical level" principles. (Okay, but what is critical? Baggini's 1.0? No one can say.)
2. Question the way we can compare and measure welfare. (Well-being isn't a single smooth variable. This is true, but it doesn't offer us any way to judge population ethics.)
3. Count welfare differently depending on temporal or modal features. (I.e., if the same exact people are worse off in one scenario vs. another, then you can judge. Otherwise, you can't really make a comparison. This may be true, but again, it doesn't help us.)
4. Revise the notion of a life worth living. (This objection doesn't believe lives can be positive or worth living, which is counterintuitive to say the least, and leads to repugnant conclusions in the negative direction.)
5. Reject transitivity. (This unacceptably radical proposal says p>q, and q>r, but r>p, which requires an upheaval of all logic. It also doesn't provide any answers.)
6. Appeal to other values. (Offers to use "maximin" (the well-being of the worst off) or egalitarianism (all must be equal) as the final judge. But, again, these lead to repugnant conclusions in the opposite direction.)
7. Accept the impossibility of a satisfactory population ethics. (In other words, there is no Theory X without changing some of the assumptions. But no one has said how this change might be done.)
8. Accept the Repugnant Conclusion. (We are deluded by our intuitions so repugnance doesn't mean the densely-populated-barely-satisfied outcome is wrong. Ugh!)

To me, this list is absolutely mind boggling. How can the entirety of discussions about population ethics completely neglect any biological and ecological considerations of population studies? Not one philosopher is willing to look at the busts following booms of animal populations and say we ought not go there? Seriously, how removed from reality are philosophers?? But this is what happens when a field considers the naturalistic fallacy some kind of electrified third rail one dares not approach and the is-ought divide as an unbridgeable chasm. Philosophers have refused to look at what is to help tell us what ought to be. Fortunately, this isn't a problem for me.

According to my evolutionary ethics, our moral oughts are derived from natural desires to remain alive. Oughts follow from wants, which are based on what is. Of course, we can't just follow any old want. We evolved from the tiniest of organisms with the narrowest views of what is in the world, so we still feel competing wants up and down the entire spectrum of possibilities. If we want a truly universal and objective morality though, we have to listen to a universal and objective want—the need for "life in general" to survive over an evolutionarily long timespan. This is one of my main tenets: a universal definition of good arises from nature. Good is that which enables the long-term survival of life.

As I regularly note, E.O. Wilson gave us a total and consilient view of "life in general." Biology is literally "the study of life" and so all the biological sciences strung together give us a complete picture of life that looks like this:

(1)  Biochemistry → (2) molecular biology  → (3) cellular biology  → (4) organismic biology  → (5) sociobiology  → (6) ecology  → (7) evolutionary biology.

So, when Derek Parfit starts with his premise of the nonidentity problem, which says good is independent of specific future individuals, I say, of course. The good of specific individuals is only relevant within the narrow level 4 picture of organismic biology. When Parfit goes on to calculate his moral math using only the totals of individual and collective well-being, he has expanded the purview of his considerations to levels 4 and 5, but as he reaches his repugnant conclusion, he doesn't understand why. Why would 100 billion humans be miserable on Earth? Precisely because they would be butting up against real constraints in the 6th and 7th levels of life—the ecological constraints that impact the continued evolution of a species. Without taking that into consideration, Parfit's morality is too small. And this, apparently, is true of all other philosophers as well. This is what stops them from seeing the way out of the dilemma they are boxed inside of.

To really drive home just how boxed in philosophers' thinking is on this, let me quote again from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the Repugnant Conclusion. The author there states:

It might be tempting for people who have little sympathy with utilitarian thought to try to set the problems raised by the Repugnant Conclusion to one side, thinking that it constitutes a problem only for utilitarians. However, most people tend to believe that we have some obligation to make the world a better place, at least if we can do so without violating any deontological constraints, and at a not too high cost to ourselves. Clearly all who think along these lines, even without being utilitarians, are faced with the problem of the Repugnant Conclusion. We can assume that other values and considerations are not decisive for the choice between populations....[so the] Repugnant Conclusion is a problem for all moral theories which hold that welfare at least matters when all other things are equal. (my emphasis added)

This is the wrong assumption! 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 let's turn now to see how I do that.

To restate the original problem, Parfit said it was "to find an adequate theory about the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives, and their identities may vary." To answer this all at once in summary, my theory states that identities may vary, and both the number of people and the quality of their lives ought to exist within some range that balances scientific progress against existential robustness. What do I mean by that? Here are some details to flesh out the picture.

In my journal article, I wrote:

We can learn from...what has worked in the past to generalize about how we as a species must move forward into the future. What traits do we currently believe will lead to survival over the long term? Suitability to an environment. Adaptability to changes in the environment. Diversity to handle fluctuations. Cooperation to optimize resources and reduce the harm that comes from conflict. Competition to spur effort and progress. Limits to competition to give losers a chance to cooperate on the next iteration. Progress in learning, to understand and predict actions in the universe. Progress in technology, to give options for directing outcomes where we want them to go. These are the virtues and outcomes we must cultivate to face our existential threats and remain determined to conquer them.

This view of diversity, adaptability, suitability, and cooperation is part of what I mean when I said "identities may vary." Starting with my view that morality is best understood from a universal and objective perspective, I therefore not only agree with Parfit's precondition that identities may vary, but I also go further by saying that they should vary.

So, we can now move on to the more difficult bracketing of quantity and quality of lives. What are the minimums and maximums that frame this debate? If we are going to talk about numbers and types of lives, first we must give an answer to one of the very biggest philosophical questions—what is the meaning of life? I recently finished an excellent book by philosopher John Messerly on this topic called The Meaning of Life: Religious, Philosophical, Transhumanist, and Scientific Perspectives. It is an excellent summary of the best modern answers to this question from all the major philosophical positions. In the book, Messerly notes that none of these positions have generated an accepted viewpoint yet, but his analysis along the way caused me to generate my own thoughts on the question, which I shared with him in a private exchange. I wrote:

When asking the question, “what is the meaning of life?”, a fundamental clarifying question must be “for whom?”. Wants and meaning must be applied to someone. The "universe" doesn't want anything, and nothing is meaningful to it. This is why searches for "ultimate meanings" are senseless. They look for emotionally-led oughts where there can be no emotion. But life does want. So life ought to live. (See my ASEBL Journal article.) The scope of the universe is too large for one human life to have an impactful meaning upon it. Our imagination scales infinitely though, so we can imagine that we could. The story of life in general, however, is big enough to have meaning in the universe. And our role in the story of life could actually be quite large. Even if individually a life were not very important, we've evolved to feel pleasure at the scale we can affect life, so our lives can still feel quite meaningful when we accept the size of the role we've inherited. We don’t long for the role of a stellar nursery giving birth to stars, nor are we satisfied with the accomplishments of a mayfly. The 'big freeze' or the 'big crunch' are still possibilities for universal death within this universe, which would render everything meaningless, but maybe those outcomes can one day be affected by life within this universe. Maybe dark energy, dark matter, or something else altogether unknown can be manipulated in such a way as to balance things for survival. Until we can do that, that is a goal which gives meaning to life. We may not be able to answer any ultimate questions now of why the universe and life exist, but maybe someone will be able to someday. It is our job to do what we can to get to that. Survival and scientific progress are prerequisites along that path. Just as Renaissance people (to take one example) could be said to have found meaning in supporting a society that lead to the growth of the scientific method, which helped us get this far, we can find meaning today by doing our job to support a society laying the groundwork for future knowledge explorers too.

Messerly turned this into a blog post on his wonderful site Reason and Meaning, where he quoted my response as "from an astute reader," and then said:

I think the reader has it about right. The only way our individual lives have objective meaning is if they are part of something larger. We hope then that we are links in a golden chain leading onward and upward toward higher levels of being and consciousness. The effort we exert as we travel this path provides the meaning to our lives as we live them. And if our descendents, in whatever form they take, live more meaningful lives as a result of our efforts, then we will have been successful.

So this is what I mean when I said in my journal article that we need "Progress in learning, to understand and predict actions in the universe. Progress in technology, to give options for directing outcomes where we want them to go." In Matt Ridley's bullishly optimistic TED Talk "When Ideas Have Sex", Ridley pointed out how science has continued to solve major problems that chicken littles have been worrying about for decades. His perspective is leading the charge of the futurist technocrats who believe that more people leads to more ideas, which leads to more solutions to our problems. But as Aldo Leopold pointed out decades earlier, just because we have seen some increase in benefits due to early increases in population density, this does not prove that all further increases in density will lead to further increases in benefits. In fact, we have seen quite the opposite when numerous populations in the past have outgrown the ecology that supports them. At some point, "mere-additions" (another name for the Repugnant Conclusion) will bring species to a tipping point that push the whole population from "robustness" into "fragility" as Nassim Taleb described in The Black Swan.** In other words, I believe there is a curve for population quantity and quality where having too few people, or living in societies too repressive for science to flourish, causes a stagnation in the growth of technology that we need to stave off mass extinctions from asteroids, exploding suns, and collapsing universes. On the other side of that curve, we can have too many people so as to cause our own mass extinction—to be the potato bug who exterminated the potato and then itself, as Aldo Leopold said in his 1924 essay, “The River of the Mother God.”

In my moral theory, therefore, the numbers of people and the quality of their lives ought to remain in some range between the constraints I've outlined in order for the population as a whole to move towards a positive moral outcome. Do we know exactly how the size of that range is defined? No. Although we've barely begun to ask the right questions to find it. Going b
ack to my journal article though, I addressed this uncertainty when I wrote:

The probabilistic nature of knowledge means we won’t always know how to solve our moral conflicts – in fact, we may never be certain of some of the answers either before or after we make a decision. How do we proceed then where we don’t know? Carefully of course, and taking a cue from The Black Swan, which made a study of this fuzzy realm where consequences of improbable events may be large and especially terrible. Limited trial and error is the way life has blindly found its way through these dark minefields of existence in the past, and anyone that takes a big bet on a non-diversified strategy will eventually lose everything over the billions of repetitions that our existence in evolutionary timescales allows. So even if we become confident about the direction we would like to go, humans should not be lured into racing there using existentially risky behavior.

Based on the best available science, we are not heeding that final warning. We do not seem to be in danger of having too few people or too little scientific progress to worry about existential stagnation. Quite the contrary. In a recent piece that I wrote for theHumanist.com, titled The Call of the Rewild, I wrote:

We may be in the middle of a sixth large extinction event, which prompted environmental scientists in 2009 to list biodiversity loss as one of the nine “planetary boundaries” that should be monitored for an overall picture of ecological stability. While it’s true there have been minor fluctuations in the environment since the last Ice Age, the relative stability during our current era compared to the rest of geologic history is what has allowed agriculture to develop and form the foundation of our complex and modern societies. Scientists believe that crossing one or more of the nine planetary boundaries may be globally disastrous due to the risk of triggering the kind of geologically sudden environmental change that most biological organisms cannot adapt to quickly enough to survive over the long term.

Frighteningly, we have already crossed three of the nine planetary boundaries and may only believe we’re okay because of the short-term focus of our evolutionary vision. In addition to crossing the prescribed boundaries for carbon in the atmosphere, and for nitrogen extracted from the atmosphere, we have also crossed the boundary for biodiversity loss. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the extinction rate of species lost per million of total species-years (E/MSY) has been estimated to be between 0.1 and 1. Scientists setting the criterion for this planetary boundary decided the “safe” limit of extinction was 10 E/MSY, but currently, driven by human activity, the value is over 100. In other words, the current rate of extinctions on this planet is 100 to 1,000 times greater than it was before humans evolved, and that’s over ten times worse than what our best estimates think the planet’s currently supportive ecosystems can handle. This needs to change.


Probably the biggest thing holding us back from making this change is bad philosophy. As we can see in this week's thought experiment, our best thinkers have no good ethical systems, and as a result of this they have remained stuck arguing about individual vs. social consequences for so long that they haven't been able to give the rest of society a framework to notice that we're about to render all those smaller problems moot by acting immorally with respect to ecological and evolutionary concerns about life.

Back at the beginning of this long post, I noted how Derek Parfit said, "I believe that these main systematic [ethical] theories all need to be revised, in ways that would bring them together." The moral system I have outlined above, revises and brings all of the others together. It is based upon a deontological rule — "good is that which enables the long-term survival of life" — and it gives us an objective and universal consequence towards which we ought to act using virtues derived from evolutionary studies that scientifically prove to us which traits are successful in leading life towards that goal.

So, to wrap the discussion of this thought experiment up completely, 
the rich philanthropist Carol ought to drop her mathematical questions about individual vs. social well-being, and teach the impoverished village about birth control if she really wants to help. On second thought, it sounds like she ought to forget about the tiny village in Tanzania altogether since they probably already know more than she does about ecological constraints on their lives. She, and the rest of us who know better, ought to spread that moral message to the rest of the modern world, which is in such great peril.

--------------------------------------------------------
** I love the paperback edition of The Black Swan so much, with its addition titled "On Robustness and Fragility," that I'd like to quote a few of its passages at length here. Check these out, and then consider reading the whole book.

p.347:
Before The Black Swan, most of epistemology and decision theory was, to an actor in the real world, jut sterile mind games and foreplay. Almost all the history of thought is about what we know, or think we know. The Black Swan is the very first attempt (that I know of) in the history of thought to provide a map of where we get hurt by what we don't know, to set systematic limits to the fragility of knowledge—and to provide exact locations where these maps no longer work.

pp.370-373:
We can subscribe to the following rules of wisdom to increase robustness:
1. Have respect for time and nondemonstrative knowledge
2. Avoid optimization; learn to love redundancy
3. Avoid prediction of small-probability payoffs—though not necessarily of ordinary ones
4. Beware the "atypicality" of remote events
5. Beware moral hazard with bonus payments
6. Avoid some risk metrics (mediocristan in extremistan)
7. Positive or negative Black Swan?
8. Do not confuse absence of volatility with absence of risk
9. Beware presentations of risk numbers

pp.374-376:
The Ten Principles for a Black Swan-Robust Society:
1. What is fragile should break early, while it's still small.
2. No socialization of losses and privatization of gains.
3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.
4. Don't let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant—or your financial risks.
5. Compensate for complexity with simplicity.
6. Do not give children dynamite sticks, even if they come with a warning label.
7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to "restore confidence."
8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.
9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets as a repository of value and should not rely on fallible "expert" advice for their retirement.
10. Make an omelet with broken eggs.

p. 376:
Then we will see an economic life close to our biological environment: smaller firms, a richer ecology, no speculative leverage—a world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks, and in which companies are born and die every day without making the news.
4 Comments

Thought Experiment 52: More or Less

4/25/2016

4 Comments

 
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Ooh, I was hoping we'd get to this. A few weeks ago when I dealt with thought experiment 46, I mentioned that it didn't look like we were going to cover Derek Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion, but here it is! There is an error in the index of The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, so it looked like we were done with Parfit, but apparently not. Anyway, let's read the experiment and see what I'm talking about.

---------------------------------------------------
     Carol had decided to use a large slice of her substantial wealth to improve life in an impoverished village in southern Tanzania. However, since she had reservations about birth-control programmes, the development agency which she was working with had to come up with two possible plans.
     The first would involve no birth-control element. This would probably see the population of the village rise from 100 to 150 and the quality of life index, which measures subjective as well as objective factors, rise modestly from an average of 2.4 to 3.2.
     The second plan did include a non-coercive birth-control programme. This would see the population remain stable at 100, but the average quality of life would rise to 4.0.
     Given that only those with a quality of life ranked as 1.0 or lower consider their lives not to be worth living at all, the first plan would lead to there being more worthwhile lives than the second, whereas the second would result in fewer lives, but ones which were even more fulfilled. Which plan would make the best use of Carol's money?

Source: Part four of Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit, 1984.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 154.

---------------------------------------------------

After showing the mathematical error in last week's thought experiment, you might be tempted to try the same method here to arrive at a conclusion, but what do you think? Is that the right way to consider this issue? I'll be back on Friday with an answer that shows my work.

4 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 51: Living in a Vat

4/22/2016

1 Comment

 
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Can you see the glitch in the numbers?
Have you ever felt like Neo in The Matrix? Like you are the only one seeing through everyone else's reality to the truth that lies behind their perceptions? Nah, me neither.  ;-)  But still, let's look at the perceptions involved with this week's thought experiment and see if we can spot something interesting in them.

​---------------------------------------------------
     Ever since the accident, Brian had lived in a vat. His body was crushed, but quick work by the surgeons had managed to salvage his brain. This procedure was now carried out whenever possible, so that the brain could be put back into a body once a suitable donor had been found.
     But because fewer brains than bodies terminally fail, the waiting list for new bodies had got intolerably long. To destroy the brains, however, was deemed ethically unacceptable. The solution came in the form of a remarkable supercomputer from China, Mai Trikks. Through electrodes attached to the brain, the computer could feed the brain stimuli which gave it the illusion that it was in a living body, inhabiting the real world.
     In Brian's case, that meant he woke up one day in a hospital bed to be told about the accident and the successful body transplant. He then went on to live a normal life. All the time, however, he was really no more than his old brain, kept alive in a vat, wired to a computer. Brian had no more or less reason to think he was living in the real world than you or I. How could he—or we—ever know differently?

Sources: The first meditation from Meditations by Rene Descartes, 1641; chapter 1 of Reason, Truth, and History by Hilary Putnam, 1982; The Matrix, directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999; Nick Bostrum's Simulation argument, www.simulation-argument.com.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 151.
---------------------------------------------------

This is very familiar ground by now, so let's try to cover it quickly. A few months ago in my Response to Thought Experiment 38: I Am a Brain, I considered how unsatisfying it would be to interact with the present world as just a brain in a vat. Now, however, Baggini has upped the ante by making us consider the scenario where a "computer could feed the brain stimuli which gave it the illusion that it was in a living body, inhabiting the real world." Is such a scenario possible? Perhaps. So, by the rules of philosophical thought experiments, we must consider it, and we must consider it to be a perfect simulation with no hint of betrayal about its background operations.

Fortunately, I've already discussed the problem with this idea too. Twice. Way back in my Response to Experiment 1: The Evil Demon, we considered the (seemingly very remote) possibility that all of reality is a delusion caused by some malevolent god. Later, in my Response to Thought Experiment 28: The Nightmare Scenario, we wondered how we could know if this was all a dream that only seemed real. In the first case, I said:

Sure, the evil demon is a possibility. And so is a universe run by a Judeo-Christian god, or by a host of gods on Mount Olympus, or in an advanced civilisation's computer simulation, or in an infinite number of other imagined scenarios. But we see no evidence of this. The laws of nature don't suddenly change from one day to the next at the whim of these puppet masters. If anything is up there pulling the strings...so what? Does that mean we should do anything differently? No, it does not.

The second time around, I again nearly answered all of this ​week's experiment when I wrote:

Dude, what if this is all, like:
   a) the Matrix and we're all actually lying in alien tubs.
   b) a computer simulation from a really advanced race trying to figure out evolution.
   c) a universe within a universe within a universe of nested nuclear explosions for each big bang.
   d) a 3D hologram in a 6D multiverse that we don't have the senses to understand.
   e) a trick being played on us by God who really set everything up in one day 6,000 years ago.
   f) the dream of that bird over there and as soon as he wakes up we'll all disappear.
   g) etc., etc., etc.
Whoa.... Pass me another slice of pizza bro... This week's thought experiment is the kind of head-in-the-cloud nonsense that used to plague philosophy and caused  ​Ludwig Wittgenstein to react by saying: "The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know." and "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence." ... And so what exactly are we supposed to do about any entry on the infinite list of infinitely remote possibilities that we're all just really acting under a monstrously big and fiendish illusion? Should we all give up trying to live good lives because, hey, you never know if the answer to life is really, a, b, c, d, e, f, or g from above? Of course not. So let's just move on and deal with the world as we see it.


In some back-and-forth that followed this analysis, I was required to point out the difference between productive speculation, which is the hallmark of good science, and pernicious speculation that specifically eliminates the possibility of testable hypotheses. The second one is the kind that is pointless to discuss. I mentioned the computer simulation argument in each of my previous responses because I consider that to be another of these pernicious examples, but I didn't address it fully at the time. Now's my chance, however, as Baggini wants us to consider it specifically. He does a good job in his discussion of this thought experiment of summarising the original argument from Nick Bostrom, so lets start with that:

Indeed, a recent argument has even suggested that it is overwhelmingly probable that we are living in a virtual reality environment, not perhaps as brains in vats, but as artificially created intelligences. The argument is that, given time, we or another civilisation will almost certainly be able to create artificial intelligences and virtual-reality environments for them to live in. Further, because these simulated worlds do not require the huge amount of natural resources to keep them going that biological organisms do, there is almost no limit to how many such environments could be created. There could be the equivalent of an entire planet Earth 'living' in one desktop computer of the future. If all this is possible, we have only to do the maths to see that it is probable we are in one such simulation. Let us say that over the whole course of human history, for every human being that ever lives, there are another nine that are the creation of computer simulations. Both the simulations and the humans would believe that they are biological organisms. But 90 per cent of them would be wrong. And since we cannot know if we are simulations or real beings, there is a 90 percent chance that we are wrong to think we are the latter. The question we need to ask is not whether it sounds incredible, but whether there is anything wrong with its logic. And identifying its flaws is a very difficult, if not impossible, task.

Impossible?? Pshaw. In some of the nineteen academic papers listed on Bostrom's site that discuss the simulation argument—(nineteen!?!?)—none made any headway with this, but a few scientists debated whether such a simulation is actually possible and discussed what flaws we might expect to see according to our understanding of physics. That is reasonable, if highly speculative, speculation. But, as I showed by adding the bolded emphasis above, this is beside the point. The simulation is indeed hypothesised to be so perfect as to be untestable. So now what? Luckily, we don't need testing to show the simulation argument is still flawed and therefore pointless.

As Baggini says, "we have only to do the maths to see that it is probable we are in one such simulation." But, like most English humanities students, he probably stopped taking mathematics courses around the age of 13. Otherwise he (or someone!) would have seen through this already. The probabilities would only show we were "likely" to be in a simulation if the only possible choices for reality were "Computer Simulated Reality" or "The One Actual Reality". But as we've seen in other thought experiments, there is an infinity of other untestable possibilities too. The mathematical argument that Bostrom makes completely breaks down under this dueling list of infinities. Therefore, there is no overwhelming possibility for any of these alternative explanations for our existence. We are still left with the parsimony of Occam's razor, and the evidence in front of us, that reality is best considered simply as it appears.

What do you think? Did you see the math error too? If so, then you too can be like Neo and be "the one" in this Mai Trikks. Sit back and enjoy this 2-minute climactic scene of him stopping bullets and imagine yourself waiting for more flawed philosophical arguments to come flying at you in the weeks ahead...
1 Comment

Thought Experiment 51: Living in a Vat

4/18/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
Morpheus has a choice for you...
Do you remember how in The Matrix, Neo started to see "glitches" in reality where small occurrences would sometimes skip and repeat themselves? Well this week's thought experiment is starting to give me that feeling.

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     Ever since the accident, Brian had lived in a vat. His body was crushed, but quick work by the surgeons had managed to salvage his brain. This procedure was now carried out whenever possible, so that the brain could be put back into a body once a suitable donor had been found.
     But because fewer brains than bodies terminally fail, the waiting list for new bodies had got intolerably long. To destroy the brains, however, was deemed ethically unacceptable. The solution came in the form of a remarkable supercomputer from China, Mai Trikks. Through electrodes attached to the brain, the computer could feed the brain stimuli which gave it the illusion that it was in a living body, inhabiting the real world.

     In Brian's case, that meant he woke up one day in a hospital bed to be told about the accident and the successful body transplant. He then went on to live a normal life. All the time, however, he was really no more than his old brain, kept alive in a vat, wired to a computer. Brian had no more or less reason to think he was living in the real world than you or I. How could he—or we—ever know differently?

Sources: The first meditation from Meditations by Rene Descartes, 1641; chapter 1 of Reason, Truth, and History by Hilary Putnam, 1982; The Matrix, directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999; Nick Bostrum's Simulation argument, www.simulation-argument.com.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 151.

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I've already grappled with this issue in three other thought experiments, but I'll do my best to bring something else to the table on Friday when I look at the new wrinkles in time presented here. Until then, try to act as though you've taken the blue pill and remained grounded in your reality.
0 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 50: The Good Bribe

4/15/2016

4 Comments

 
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Faced with a dilemma? How do you choose?
Sorry I'm a day late with this week's thought experiment. About a week ago I received a request to write an article for a magazine I've contributed to in the past and I've been extra busy prepping that piece for yesterday's deadline. So, is it okay if I put forth a crappy effort here in return for the really polished and important argument I'm publishing elsewhere? I've been so preoccupied I've practically forgotten what this week's thought experiment is even about, so let's read it now as a reminder and then see if it affects my conundrum.

---------------------------------------------------
     The Prime Minister liked to think of himself as a 'pretty straight kind of guy'. He genuinely despised corruption and sleaze in government and wanted to run a cleaner, more honest administration.
     Something had happened, however, that presented him with a real dilemma. At a Downing Street reception, a businessman known for his lack of scruples, but who did not have a criminal or civil conviction against him, took the PM aside. Whispering conspiratorially into his ear, he said, "Many people don't like me and don't respect the way I run my affairs. I don't give a damn about that. What does annoy me is that my reputation means I'll never be honoured by my country.
     "Well," he continued, "I'm sure you and I can do something about that. I'm prepared to give £10 million to help provide clean water for hundreds of thousands of people in Africa, if you can guarantee me that I'll be knighted in the New Year's honours list. If not, then I'll just spend it all on myself."
     He slapped the PM on the back, said, "Think it over," and slipped back into the crowd. The Prime Minister knew this was a kind of bribe. But could it really be wrong to sell one of this country's highest honours when the reward would be so obviously for the good?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 148.
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Right. So this is a pretty clear case of attempted quid pro quo, where:

quid (this) = a good thing (giving £10M to help people in Africa)
pro (for)
quo (that) = a bad thing (honouring a person with a bad reputation)

The experiment then is essentially asking what bad can we do in order to get a good outcome. In other words, can the ends justify the means? We could spend some time debating how good knighthoods actually are, or how beneficial more development money in Africa would really be. That might be expected to change the math a bit, since a lot of good for a little bad is surely a better bargain than the other way around. But is that the right way to look at this?

The most common ways that traditional moral philosophers talk about this kind of issue depends on which type of ethics they ascribe to. For the utilitarian who wants to tally up the consequences of the actions and determine which decisions contribute "the greatest good to the greatest number," the deal for the knighthood seems to be a good one. For a virtue ethicists concerned with honour and integrity, the Prime Minister ought to reject the offer out of hand as a violation of important principles. These two moral camps disagree so we can't yet come to a decision.

What, then, would an evolutionary ethicist say? For moral dilemmas in general, I try to evaluate the long-term consequences of actions as to whether they lead toward or away from the long-term survival of life. That's my universal definition of good, so that's always the ultimate test of whether a choice is right or wrong. In this scenario, if you evaluate it in the short term as if it were a one-off event with no other consequences, then to me the help for Africa would be worth the perception of offering one questionable knighthood. Over the long term, however, there is a real risk that the sleazy businessman would expose the details of his transaction, hoping to show that everyone was corrupt like him, which would threaten to take down the whole inspirational edifice of the government's system of honors. That might also do lasting harm to the fabric of trust that binds a society together, making it quite possible the country would lose far more than £10M from future foreign aid budgets. As the great writer and philosopher Montesquieu said:

"The deterioration of a government begins almost always by the decay of its principles."

So to me, the Prime Minister ought to reject the offer as it stands. However, the reason he should do so—the fact that a baldfaced quid pro quo would be a threat for the long-term—hints that an alternative solution might be the best of all. If I were the PM, I'd tell the businessman that his assumption is wrong that he could be honoured by his country without being honoured by the people of his country. Governments are of the people, by the people, for the people, (to think "the country" is something separate is a category error), so if the businessman is truly serious about receiving honours from the government, then he should go ahead and donate the money to Africa, and we would see where those actions took him with respect to the opinion of the people of England. (Having lived in the UK for five years now, and seeing the system of honours mainly reserved for the province of the rich and famous, I suspect the businessman could get his way eventually without demanding any backroom dealings. But who really knows?) In other words, the choice of the quid for the quo is a false one since one doesn't have to be caused by the other, even though they may be correlated and follow one another.

What do you think? When do ends justify means for you? Hopefully, my own dilemma of putting forth a crappy effort here in return for a better effort elsewhere has also proven false, but maybe you have other alternatives for the PM that you would like me to have considered. Let me know if you have a chance. I'll honour you any way that you want.
4 Comments

Thought Experiment 50: The Good Bribe

4/11/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
What price to buy your way past this protector of virtue?
In the wake of the release of the Panama Papers, this week's thought experiment is a pretty apt inquiry into the nature of privilege. Let's take a look.

---------------------------------------------------

     The Prime Minister liked to think of himself as a 'pretty straight kind of guy'. He genuinely despised corruption and sleaze in government and wanted to run a cleaner, more honest administration.
     Something had happened, however, that presented him with a real dilemma. At a Downing Street reception, a businessman known for his lack of scruples, but who did not have a criminal or civil conviction against him, took the PM aside. Whispering conspiratorially into his ear, he said, "Many people don't like me and don't respect the way I run my affairs. I don't give a damn about that. What does annoy me is that my reputation means I'll never be honoured by my country.
     "Well," he continued, "I'm sure you and I can do something about that. I'm prepared to give £10 million to help provide clean water for hundreds of thousands of people in Africa, if you can guarantee me that I'll be knighted in the New Year's honours list. If not, then I'll just spend it all on myself."
     He slapped the PM on the back, said, "Think it over," and slipped back into the crowd. The Prime Minister knew this was a kind of bribe. But could it really be wrong to sell one of this country's highest honours when the reward would be so obviously for the good?


Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 148.

---------------------------------------------------

What do you think? Are honours something that can be bought? Should they be for sale? Are they already for sale? I'll be back on Friday to discuss how my evolutionary ethics would deal with this.
0 Comments

Response to Experiment 49: The Hole in the Sum of the Parts

4/8/2016

6 Comments

 
Picture
♫ ...three of these boxes are not like the other... ♫
This week's thought experiment seems simple and obvious on the face of it, but it actually introduces us to a very important philosophical concept. It's a concept, introduced by  Gilbert Ryle, that was "seen to have put the final nail in the coffin of Cartesian dualism." That's quite a big deal! So let's take a look at the experiment and then I'll unveil the concept and show how it applies it to a couple of foundational problems.

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     Barbara and Wally jumped into the taxi at Oxford station. "We're in a hurry," said Barbara. "We've just done London and are heading to Stratford-upon-Avon this afternoon. So please could you just show us the university and then bring us back to the station."
     The taxi driver smiled to himself, set the meter running and looked forward to receiving a big fare.
     He took them all round the city. He showed them the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers museums, as well as the botanic gardens and the museums of natural history and the history of science. His tour took in not only the famous Bodleian library, but the lesser known Radcliffe, Sackler, and Taylor libraries too. He showed them all thirty-nine colleges as well as the seven permanent private halls. When he finally pulled up at the station, the meter showed a fare of £64.30.
     "Sir, you are a fraud!" protested Wally. "You showed us the colleges, the libraries, and the museums. But damn you, we wanted to see the university!"
     "But the university is the colleges, libraries, and museums!" replied the indignant cabbie.
     "You expect us to fall for that?" said Barbara. "Just because we're American tourists doesn't mean we're stupid!"

Source: Chapter 1 of The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle, 1949.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 145.
---------------------------------------------------

This experiment isn't so much a question as it is a cunning demonstration of how many philosophers have been as dumb as these American tourists. Baggini, explains this very well and clearly, so let's turn the big reveal over to him. In his discussion of this thought experiment, Baggini said:

"[This is] a striking example of a form of fallacious thinking that even the smartest minds fall foul of. Barbara and Wally have made what the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a category mistake. They have thought of Oxford University as though it were the same kind of thing as the colleges, libraries, and museums which comprise it: an institution housed in a specific building. But the university is not that kind of thing at all. There is no one place or building which you can point to and say, 'that is the university.' ... But that does not mean that the university is a ghostly presence that mysteriously unites all the colleges, libraries, and other parts of it. To think that would be to make another category mistake. It is neither a single material nor immaterial thing. We should not be misled by language and assume that because it is a singular noun it is a singular object."


From this origin of the category error term, we can see how clearly it applies to the differences that exist between abstract titles used for a group of things versus those concrete individual things themselves. I should point out, however, that philosophers have since extended the usage to also apply to any scenario where "a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property." Metaphors are easy examples of this further usage. When we say something like, "the day flew by", that too is literally a category error since days aren't physical objects that move. Of course, we allow those figurative figures of speech because they aren't literally meant to be literal.

Anyway, an important application of this for philosophy comes when considering the dualism of Descartes, who, as I explained in my post on him, laid out the mind-body problem thusly:

Descartes...suggested that the body works like a machine, that it has the material properties of extension and motion, and that it follows the laws of physics, whereas the mind (or soul), on the other hand, was described as a nonmaterial entity that lacks extension and motion, and does not follow the laws of physics. Descartes argued that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland. This form of dualism proposes that the mind controls the body, but that the body can also influence the otherwise rational mind, such as when people act out of passion. Most of the previous accounts of the relationship between mind and body had been uni-directional.

That pineal gland conjecture turned out to be pure nonsense of course, but the rest of Descartes' idea was punctured by this week's thought experiment too. Once again, Baggini does a nice job of explaining how:

Ryle thought that the most common way of thinking about the mind made a similar category mistake. Again, we have a singular noun—the mind—and so we tend to think there must be a singular thing which the noun labels. ... [But] the mind is not a single object at all. To say something has a mind is to say it wants, desires, understands, thinks, and so on. Because we do all these things we say we have minds. But that doesn't require us to identify any object as being the mind. ... It's a neat solution to an age-old problem.

I'm inclined to agree with this. For me, such a demonstration of the category mistake is a highly illuminating solution to the mind-body problem. I also think that the Hard Problem of consciousness can be dissolved away by this method, but let's leave that discussion for another time. To wrestle with that long topic now would probably be a "blog category mistake"...
6 Comments

Thought Experiment 49: The Hole in the Sum of the Parts

4/4/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
The Oxford Museum of Natural History
This week's thought experiment brings us back to a familiar theme of identity, but it was used in a way that introduced an important logical concept to the study of philosophy.

---------------------------------------------------
     Barbara and Wally jumped into the taxi at Oxford station. "We're in a hurry," said Barbara. "We've just done London and are heading to Stratford-upon-Avon this afternoon. So please could you just show us the university and then bring us back to the station."
     The taxi driver smiled to himself, set the meter running and looked forward to receiving a big fare.
     He took them all round the city. He showed them the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers museums, as well as the botanic gardens and the museums of natural history and the history of science. His tour took in not only the famous Bodleian library, but the lesser known Radcliffe, Sackler, and Taylor libraries too. He showed them all thirty-nine colleges as well as the seven permanent private halls. When he finally pulled up at the station, the meter showed a fare of £64.30.
     "Sir, you are a fraud!" protested Wally. "You showed us the colleges, the libraries, and the museums. But damn you, we wanted to see the university!"
     "But the university is the colleges, libraries, and museums!" replied the indignant cabbie.
     "You expect us to fall for that?" said Barbara. "Just because we're American tourists doesn't mean we're stupid!"

Source: Chapter 1 of The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle, 1949.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 145.

---------------------------------------------------

Besides the sadness of having to rush over Europe on a typical American holiday, can you identify the new type of error being described here? I'll be back on Friday to talk about it and why it matters to other age-old problems as well.
0 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 48: Evil Genius

4/1/2016

0 Comments

 
In the business world, it's very common now to use a 2 x 2 matrix to illustrate different outcomes in a system as if it consisted of two binary variables. The Boston Consulting Group popularised this method with its Growth-share matrix for analysing markets. In that matrix, your firm's market share is either high or low and the market growth in total is either high or low. If your product has high market share in a high-growth market, that's a "star" you should probably invest in to hold on to. If you have high market share in a low-growth market, that's a "cash cow" you should milk for all it's worth. If you have low market share in a low-growth market, that's a "dog" to get rid of. And if you have low market share in a high-growth market, that's a "question mark" asking whether you can invest to become a star or give up on before it becomes a dog. Got it? In the change management arena, there's another 2 x 2 matrix I've come across that I think is useful for this week's thought experiment. It looks something like this:
Picture
As you can see, this matrix says there are two things to consider when evaluating a task. The first is whether or not the task is being done well; the second is whether or not it is moving you toward the right goal. Quite obviously, when you are evaluating your operations, the best you can hope for is to be doing a task well and towards the right goal. That gives you the smiley face. A trap that many organisations fall into, however, is not realising when they are in the worst outcome. The worst outcome is to be headed toward the wrong goal, but doing your task...well. You might have reflexively thought it would be worse to do the wrong task poorly, and many groups will tell themselves that their day-to-day operations are running smoothly so they must be okay, but it's clearly better to be walking toward a cliff than running toward it. Let's look at this week's thought experiment now and see how this matrix analysis can help us sort it out.

---------------------------------------------------
     The critics all agreed. The cinematography was breathtaking, the acting first rate, the dialogue crisp, the pacing perfect, and the original score both magnificent in its own right and used expertly in the service of the movie. But they also agreed that De Puta Madre was morally repulsive. The worldview it presented was one in which Hispanics are racially superior to other human beings, cruelty to the old is seen as necessary, and childless women are liable to be raped with impunity.
     There the consensus ended. For some, the moral depravity of the film undermined what would otherwise be its strong claims to being a great work of art. For others, the medium and the message needed to be separated. The film was both a great work of cinematic art and a moral disgrace. We can admire it for its former qualities and loathe it for the latter.
     The debate was more than academic, for so repugnant was the film's message that it would be banned, unless it could be argued that its artistic merits justified exemption from censorship. The director warned that a ban would be a catastrophe for free artistic expression. Was he right?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 142.

---------------------------------------------------

As Baggini admits in his discussion of this experiment, the most obvious real-life example of something like De Puta Madre is Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. That movie: "
chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters. The film contains excerpts from speeches given by Nazi leaders at the Congress, including Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, and Julius Streicher, interspersed with footage of massed Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) troops and public reaction. Hitler commissioned the film and served as an unofficial executive producer; his name appears in the opening titles." The film is still banned in Germany and is shocking to see. I watched it this week in preparation for this blog and the entire movie is available for free on youtube here:
While watching this well-executed film that is full of emotive speeches given to enormous, highly-ordered crowds captured in vivid, groundbreaking cinematography and accompanied by stirring classical music, I understood the point that Baggini wanted to make with this thought experiment. And I understood how movie critics (who generally come from moral relativist backgrounds) wound up giving this a score of 87% on Rotten Tomatoes. But for me, Triumph of the Will was a complete clunker. All of the emotions that Riefenstahl intended me to feel were completely rejected. The movie was an hour and forty-five minutes of unintentional wincing. It reminded me of the change management task matrix, and how the worst thing you can do is to do a job well towards the wrong goal. In fact, this crystallized to me why the Nazi's are so readily considered the worst evil in history. No matter how much hatred other lesser regimes or bumbling fools might harbor in their black little hearts, the Nazis have always been considered much worse—because they were good at what they did.
Picture
Can these two variables really be separated? The skill of the craft from the moral direction of the aim? Baggini listed two opposing views on this. The first comes from Oscar Wilde who wrote, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written." As Baggini noted, "Wilde's claim was that art was autonomous from morality, and so to apply the standards of ethics to art was simply a mistake." Countering that, however, Baggini is quick to point out the view of Keats who wrote, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Baggini takes this as meaning that, "a morally repugnant yet brilliant work of art would be a contradiction in terms, and those who admired De Puta Madre would be plain mistaken."

With apologies to Oscar Wilde (who said what he said at a time when society's norms about his homosexuality were deeply immoral), I side with Keats on this issue. As I wrote in my thoughts on aesthetics:

Science is the root method of gathering knowledge. Engineering is knowledge applied to the physical world. Business is knowledge applied to the economic world. Politics is knowledge applied to the realm of government. Medicine is knowledge applied to the body. 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.

Watching The Triumph of the Will, I couldn't help but think it was bad art—blind emotion purporting falsehoods for truth. As is the case for anything complex, Hume's bundle theory explains how we can see various properties of objects separately, so we might indeed be able to take cues from the good craftsmanship of a bad artist, but that doesn't mean the art he or she produces is any good, or even worth looking at except for the historically- or technically-minded student. In this week's thought experiment, De Puta Madre would similarly be judged as bad art. As for the question of its censorship, I wrote this in My Response to Thought Experiment 33: The Free-Speech Booth:

So to me, the limitations of free speech should be held to the higher standard of the harm principle. As distasteful as I find members of the Westboro Baptist Church or the KKK or preachers of Sharia law, I think these people have the right to offend us. Now, our ears should have the right not to hear them, so I don't think these people have the right to shout their beliefs (to be a public nuisance) towards others who are merely trying to go about their daily lives, but if people just want to speak their beliefs or share them in writing, they should be free to do so. I must caveat that, however, by pointing out how the line to harm can easily be crossed. When evangelists of any kind spout provably false claims in the hopes of recruiting members to their cause under false pretenses (which would materially harm their lives), such false speech should be restricted, just as it is within advertising laws. This is how I think a number of European countries that are generally considered strong upholders of freedom of speech can manage to correctly outlaw speech that might be interpreted as Holocaust denial.

Therefore, depending on the historical facts surrounding De Puta Madre and the country it is being considered within, the question of whether it may be banned or not depends on whether or not its message is likely to rise to the level of causing actual harm or only merely offense. The thought experiment stated that "it would be banned, unless it could be argued that its artistic merits justified exemption from censorship," but this is the wrong consideration. No matter how eloquent the message, intentionally threatening harm (e.g. shouting "Fire!" sonorously in six languages) can and should be banned. From the limited information in this week's thought experiment, I think De Puta Madre could be shown, but it would be a flop because it would bore its audience to tears in eye-rolling disbelief.

What do you think? Have you ever loved a movie or a book with a terrible message just because it was skillfully made? What does the obviously evil example of The Triumph of the Wills tell you about less overt or morally ambiguous examples? Can ethics and aesthetics really be united once an ethical stance has been accepted? As a philosopher and artist, I've made my point clear on this, but I wonder what the audience says.
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