This week's thought experiment takes its title from the 1902 book Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, published eight years after The Jungle Book. Since these children's stories have been in the public domain for so long, they are freely available on the internet so I thought I'd share the central passage of one to give you a flavour for what they are like. Here is an excerpt from the tale of ​How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin

​"...there was a heat wave in the Red Sea, and everybody took off all the clothes they had. ... the Rhinoceros took off his skin and carried it over his shoulder as he came down to the beach to bathe. ... He waddled straight into the water and blew bubbles through his nose, leaving his skin on the beach. Presently the Parsee came by and found the skin, and he smiled one smile that ran all round his face two times. Then he danced three times round the skin and rubbed his hands. Then he went to his camp and filled his hat with cake-crumbs, ... He took that skin, and he shook that skin, and he scrubbed that skin, and he rubbed that skin just as full of old, dry, stale, tickly cake-crumbs and some burned currants as ever it could possibly hold. Then he climbed to the top of his palm-tree and waited for the Rhinoceros to come out of the water and put it on. And the Rhinoceros did. He buttoned it up with the three buttons, and it tickled like cake crumbs in bed. Then he wanted to scratch, but that made it worse; and then he lay down on the sands and rolled and rolled and rolled, and every time he rolled the cake crumbs tickled him worse and worse and worse. Then he ran to the palm-tree and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed himself against it. He rubbed so much and so hard that he rubbed his skin into a great fold over his shoulders, and another fold underneath, where the buttons used to be (but he rubbed the buttons off), and he rubbed some more folds over his legs. And it spoiled his temper, but it didn't make the least difference to the cake-crumbs. They were inside his skin and they tickled. So he went home, very angry indeed and horribly scratchy; and from that day to this every rhinoceros has great folds in his skin and a very bad temper, all on account of the cake-crumbs inside."

How cute. Like the rest of these tales, this one is obviously intended to mostly just entertain us while perhaps reminding us of the characteristics of some different animals. Let's read this week's thought experiment now and see if it does the same.

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     "There is not a single piece of human behaviour that cannot be explained in terms of our history as evolved beings," Dr. Kipling told his rapt audience. "Perhaps someone would like to test this hypothesis?"
     A hand flew up. "Why do kids today wear their baseball caps the wrong way round?" asked someone wearing his peak-forward.
     "Two reasons," said Kipling, confidently and without pause. "First, you need to ask yourself what signals a male needs to transmit to a potential mate in order to advertise his suitability as a source of strong genetic material, more likely to survive than that of his competitor males. One answer is brute physical strength. Now consider the baseball cap. Worn in the traditional style, it offers protection against the sun and also the gaze of aggressive competitors. By turning the cap around, the male is signalling that he doesn't need this protection: he is tough enough to face elements and the gaze of any who might threaten him.
     "Second, inverting the cap is a gesture of non-conformity. Primates live in highly ordered social structures. Playing by the rules is considered essential. Turning the cap around shows that the male is above the rules that constrain his competitors and again signals his superior strength.
     "Next?"

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 91.
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I'm sure Baggini doesn't think this is equivalent to claiming there are cake crumbs tickling rhinoceroses from their insides, but he does have this to say in his explanation of the experiment he apparently penned himself:

​"Evolutionary psychology is one of the most successful and controversial movements in thought of the last few decades. ... The controversy concerns just how far you can take this. The more zealous evolutionary psychologists claim that virtually every aspect of human behaviour can ultimately be explained in terms of the selective advantage it gave our ancestors in their Darwinian struggle for survival. If you buy into this, it is not difficult to come up with plausible sounding evolutionary explanations for any behaviour you choose. ... The trouble is that this suggests these are not genuine explanations at all, but "just so" stories. Evolutionary psychologists simply invent "explanations" on the basis of no more than prior theoretical commitment. But this gives us no reason to believe the accounts they offer rather than any other piece of speculation. ... Evolutionary psychologists are well aware of this criticism, of course. They argue that their accounts are much more than "just so" stories. For sure, they may generate hypotheses by indulging in the kind of speculation exemplified by Kipling's off-the-cuff explanation. But  these hypotheses are then tested. However, there seem to be serious limits on how far testing is possible. ... [P]sychological and anthropological studies could show whether males in different cultures make public displays of their strength, as evolutionary psychologists would predict. What you can't do, however, is test whether any particular behaviour, such as inverting one's baseball cap, is a manifestation of this tendency to display strength or is the result of something quite different. The big argument between evolutionary psychologists and their opponents is thus mainly concerned with how much can be explained by our evolutionary past."

This is nonsense. If Baggini can find an evolutionary psychologist who would actually purport such a simple-minded analysis as his Dr. Kipling, then I'll join him in damning that person's logic. But any serious scientist I've read on this subject would also admit that wearing a baseball cap the right way around could display the intellectual strength of the ability to use tools correctly for a purpose that would enhance one's survival. Wearing the cap the right way around may also signal allegiance to one social group over another, which the individual believes is a more advantageous group to identify with (baseball cap conservatives rather than rebels in this case). So either baseball cap option could be "explained" from an evolutionary perspective, but that's precisely the point. We've evolved to have the power to choose from among a range of options to find the right ones that work for the survival of life over the long term. The main thing in evolutionary studies—psychology in this case, or philosophy in mine—is that we human animals can only draw from the range of all the forces that shaped us over our evolutionary history. Those are the choices we have for explaining and analysing why certain choices may be made. What other forces could be at play?

Sure, evolutionary zealots could go too far. But the history of philosophers inventing religious motivations of supernatural origin shows they are much more likely to contain "just so" stories than any modern sophisticated evolutionary thinker. Baggini may be able to find straw men out there who have naively acted like his Dr. Kipling, but that's all they'll be. Straw men. Straw men who got that way because one day they were playing in a barn when they took out and shook out their bones we could look at.....

Oh boy. Baggini is going straight for my heart with this week's thought experiment. Let's see what he has to say.

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     "There is not a single piece of human behaviour that cannot be explained in terms of our history as evolved beings," Dr. Kipling told his rapt audience. "Perhaps someone would like to test this hypothesis?"
     A hand flew up. "Why do kids today wear their baseball caps the wrong way round?" asked someone wearing his peak-forward.
     "Two reasons," said Kipling, confidently and without pause. "First, you need to ask yourself what signals a male needs to transmit to a potential mate in order to advertise his suitability as a source of strong genetic material, more likely to survive than that of his competitor males. One answer is brute physical strength. Now consider the baseball cap. Worn in the traditional style, it offers protection against the sun and also the gaze of aggressive competitors. By turning the cap around, the male is signalling that he doesn't need this protection: he is tough enough to face elements and the gaze of any who might threaten him.
     "Second, inverting the cap is a gesture of non-conformity. Primates live in highly ordered social structures. Playing by the rules is considered essential. Turning the cap around shows that the male is above the rules that constrain his competitors and again signals his superior strength.
     "Next?"

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 91.
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​So what do you think? Are evolutionary explanations of human behaviour really Just So Stories in a slightly more scientific disguise? Of course I disagree with that, but just how much? Back on Friday to discuss.

I've flipped the picture above since Monday. Did you notice? Which way will you remember it now? If you've read through Wired's long article on The Forgetting Pill, you'll know that memories are rebuilt at the synaptic level each time we access them, which allows them to change or disappear over time, but let's not get into all those technical details yet about memory and whether or not this week's thought experiment is actually feasible. Let's just read it and accept it at face value first.

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     Alicia clearly remembers visiting the Parthenon in Athens, and how the sight of the crumbling ruin up close was less impressive than the view of it from a distance, perched majestically on the Acropolis. But Alicia had never been to Athens, so what she remembers is visiting the Parthenon, but not her visiting the Parthenon.
​     It is not that Alicia is deluded. What she remembers is actually how it was. She has had a memory implant. Her friend Mayte had been to Greece for a holiday, and when she came back she went to the Kadok memory processing shop to have her holiday recollections downloaded to a disc. Alicia had later taken this disc back to the same shop and had the memory uploaded to her brain. She now has a whole set of Mayte's holiday memories, which to her have the character of all her other memories: they are all recollections from the first person point of view.
     The slightly disturbing thing, however, is that Mayte and Alicia have exchanged such memories so many times that it seems they have quite literally inhabited the same past. Although Alicia knows she should really say that she remembers Mayte's holiday to Greece, it feels more natural simply to say she remembers the holiday. But how can you remember what you never did?

Source: Section 80 of Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit (Oxford University Press, 1984).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 88.
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This is now the second thought experiment inspired by Derek Parfit, who has been highly influential among contemporary philosophers on the subject of personal identity. Parfit is a reductionist, "believing that since there is no adequate criterion of personal identity, people do not exist apart from their components." In a late 1990's documentary on Channel 4 called Brainspotting, Parfit described four traditional theories of what components might constitute the self: the body, the brain, memories, or a soul. (You can see Parfit discuss this in two 10-minute clips here: Part 1, Part 2.) As an evolutionary philosopher looking at the evidence in nature, I've already dispatched with the idea of the soul. Descartes' dualism was thrown out long ago too, so we can rule out the body or the brain as separate entities that are able to work one without the other. And in the first Parfit-inspired thought experiment on the teletransporter, we saw that memories alone are also not able to necessarily and sufficiently explain personal identity. For example, what if the teletransporter made three of you that all remembered the same things? It's obvious that the three of you would diverge quickly into independent beings, but even before the divergence happened, there wouldn't only be one of you after the other physical copies had been made.

So if none of the four traditional components tell the story of identity, what are we left with? The way Parfit explains it in Brainspotting, he sees personal identity rather like David Hume saw the definition of a nation. A nation is generally considered to be a group of people living on a portion of land, but it's not just "those people" nor just "that land". However, it's also not something over and above that either—the nation is not some permanent immaterial entity, it's just an ever-changing definition. To Parfit, the individual self can be regarded the same way. It is the totality of a set of perceptions within a body (which includes a brain); it is not just the body or just the perceptions. Problems arise when we mistakenly try to insist on one permanent definition of a single self. We are beings who change over time and our identities do as well.

I'm very sympathetic to these arguments, as I explained in my Response to Thought Experiment 11: The Ship Theseus, when I said:

The universe and everything in it are always changing in almost infinitesimally continuous ways. We've developed the branch of mathematics called calculus to help describe these tiny changes, but it would be incredibly difficult to keep track of reality this way by calling everything x, then x1, then x2, then x3, etc. on into infinity. It's much easier for our brains and our languages to just call something X and treat this x as a concrete thing even though it actually has very fuzzy borders at the edges.

So when Alicia and Mayte exchange memories (assuming that is possible), they aren't slowly becoming one person, they are just each changing slightly to be bodies with some shared perceptions. In my post on John Locke (whose theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self), I gave another analogy for this that might be helpful:

Identity lies at the Mind x Body intersection. One helpful analogy is to say identity is like a river. Not the water that flows through it, but the channel that actually forms the river. When storms occur and water is high, the river is deepened. When drought occurs, the river slows and silts up. When earthquakes or glaciers reshape the landscape, the riverbed may hold no water at all. If we know the events that carved the river, we can recognize its identity no matter what state it is in. Likewise, we can recognize identity when we know the events that shaped it. If you know the river and are told the volume of water that will flow its way, you know what the river will look like. If you know a person and are told the events that will occur to them, you will recognize how they handle it. This is how we know people after long absences, and this is how changes during brief separations can surprise us.

These questions of personal identity are the major points of discussion intended by this thought experiment, but what of the final parting question that Baggini throws in: "how can you remember what you never did?" I have serious doubts that we will ever be able to download and upload synaptic connections such that all the sense connections attached to one memory in one specific body with a very particular set of sense organs, could ever be replicated in a convincing manner in another brain composed of connections formed from sensory impressions using another set of sense organs, but if we ever figured that all out, then sure, we could "remember what we never did." In fact, as long as the upload process got close enough, as we recalled the uploaded events over and over and rebuilt and altered the connections surrounding those events, the memory would become our own. This already happens all the time with false implanted memories. But then again, in the context of this thought experiment, then Alice and Mayte would no longer keep rebuilding their memories in the same way and they would start to diverge, once again separating their personal identities. And thus the river would flow on...

I'm not so sure this week's thought experiment is possible, but let's try to entertain it anyway.

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     Alicia clearly remembers visiting the Parthenon in Athens, and how the sight of the crumbling ruin up close was less impressive than the view of it from a distance, perched majestically on the Acropolis. But Alicia had never been to Athens, so what she remembers is visiting the Parthenon, but not her visiting the Parthenon.
​     It is not that Alicia is deluded. What she remembers is actually how it was. She has had a memory implant. Her friend Mayte had been to Greece for a holiday, and when she came back she went to the Kadok memory processing shop to have her holiday recollections downloaded to a disc. Alicia had later taken this disc back to the same shop and had the memory uploaded to her brain. She now has a whole set of Mayte's holiday memories, which to her have the character of all her other memories: they are all recollections from the first person point of view.
     The slightly disturbing thing, however, is that Mayte and Alicia have exchanged such memories so many times that it seems they have quite literally inhabited the same past. Although Alicia knows she should really say that she remembers Mayte's holiday to Greece, it feels more natural simply to say she remembers the holiday. But how can you remember what you never did?

Source: Section 80 of Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit (Oxford University Press, 1984).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 88.
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I'll be back on Friday to discuss my thoughts on this. Or someone's thoughts. I don't know if I can tell anymore...

You probably already have an intractable position on the theme of this week's thought experiment so I feel I have little hope of persuading anyone to change that via a single blog post. I'll defend my own position for posterity though and try to have some honest entertainment along the way, so let's get to it..

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     Dick had made a mistake, but surely the price he was paying was too high. He of course knew that level six of the hospital was a restricted area. But after he had drunk one too many glasses of wine with his colleagues at the finance department Christmas party, he had inadvertently staggered out of the elevator on the sixth floor and passed out on one of the empty beds.
     When he woke up, he discovered to his horror that he had been mistaken for a volunteer in a new life-saving procedure. Patients who required vital organ transplants to survive were being hooked up to volunteers, whose own vital organs kept both alive. This would continue until a donor organ could be found, which was usually around nine months later.
     Dick quickly called over a nurse to explain the mistake, who in turn brought over a worried-looking doctor.
     "I understand your anger," explained the doctor, "but you did behave irresponsibly, and now you are in this position, the brutal truth is that if we disconnect you, the world-renowned violinist who depends on you will die. You would in fact be murdering him."
     "But you have no right!" protested Dick. "Even if he dies without me, how can you force me to give up nine months of my life to save him?"
​     "I think the question you should be asking," said the doctor sternly, "is how you could choose to end the violinist's life."

Source: 'A defence of abortion' by Judith Jarvis Thomson, in Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971), and widely anthologised.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 85.
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"Just swap me out for someone else," I can hear you say, but that's not the way these philosophy thought experiments work. You must take them at face value, so when Baggini says, "the truth is that if we disconnect you, the world-renowned violinist who depends on you will die," we must accept those conditions.

But before we make any rash decisions, we should explore those conditions imposed on us and make them a little more vivid. Take a 5-minute break to watch this video with amazing footage of the #5 violinist of all time playing the most famous piece ever written by the #1 violinist of all time. (Paganini's Caprice No. 24, performed by Jascha Heifetz.)

Would I spend nine months hooked up to that guy? With pleasure! And what a privilege it would be. In fact, I'd be encouraged to get drunk at hospital parties quite a lot more often if that was the likely outcome.

I kid of course, but just to show that this thought experiment isn't very analogous to an unintended pregnancy that may or may not be aborted, as is clearly the intended comparison. The expected commitment isn't the same—9 months vs. a lifetime of responsibility (or wonder in the case of adoption)—and neither is the personal bond you can expect to develop. The answer to this thought experiment also seems highly dependent on the known quality of the person you are being hooked up to, rather than the (somewhat) unknown future of a child. The burden of costs are completely different, the support from family and society wouldn't be the same, the question of when life begins has been thrown out, the infringement on your own freedom is different by type and degree, etc., etc.

All of those problems aside, the thought experiment wants to bring up abortion, so let's discuss that quickly. I've no doubt that you've already heard all or most of the ethical question regarding abortion, which usually include:

• Are embryos, zygotes and fetuses "persons" worthy of legal protections?
• Should the potential to be a person give embryos, zygotes and fetuses a right to life?
• Does a fetus gain rights as it gets closer to birth?
• Does a woman have an absolute right to determine what happens in and to her body?
• Is abortion acceptable in cases of rape, incest, or contraception failure?
• If abortion is acceptable only under these circumstances, does it subject the rights of a fetus to circumstances of its conception?
• Is abortion acceptable in cases where the fetus is deformed?
• If abortion is acceptable only if the fetus is deformed, does it subject the rights of a fetus to its physical health?
• Is abortion acceptable in cases where if the pregnancy were to continue, it would pose a direct threat to the life of the mother?

I don't want to go down the long path of giving answers for each of these questions by rigorously exploring the evidence and circumstances surrounding each issue, but in my ​FAQs for my journal article, I wrote about applied ethics and how my theory of morality would be applied to the abortion debate in order to keep it open and frame the discussions. Here's what I said:

Although the question of the morality of abortion is often framed within religious arguments, let’s prove that this issue is also, in the end, a question about the survival of life. The easiest way to hem in this debate is to look at the two extremes of rampant abortions and no abortions. If it were suddenly considered a moral imperative for everyone to have abortions, the continuation of the species would come to a crashing halt. Abortions for all cannot possibly be the moral rule. If no one ever had abortions, or practiced any form of birth control, overcrowding, social inequality, and resource constraints could eventually lead to a dystopia that hinders the cooperative progress of mankind—another way for our species to eventually grind to an extinct halt. At some point in the future, if the planet was completely full and we knew that adding any more children to the mix could crash the system, then having abortions would become the moral thing to do. So once again, at base, survival is the ultimate arbiter of what is or is not moral. Religious proclamations do not enter into it. Now, in the case of our current world, we are clearly somewhere in between these two extreme cases. Abortions neither threaten nor ensure our survival as a species. In this world, it is unclear what the right actions are, and so, quite understandably, we argue and fight over the choices. There are competing values at work here and it is very difficult to choose between these values. One is the general value of life. By permitting abortions, do we cheapen our value for life and does that leak into other debates about war, capital punishment, health care, poverty, etc.? (The varied arguments between the political Left and Right on the value of life in each of these matters would suggest the leak in values is not very high.) Other values to consider are the ones we give to self-determination, correcting mistakes, and seeking to control our biological impulses. If no abortions are permitted, are we saying that entire lifetimes of obligation must be the penalty for momentary lapses? And surely the penalty's disproportionate cost on one gender of the species (and weighing more heavily on some social strata than others) based on rule-making decisions that generally come from the other gender of the species (and generally from another social strata as well) is incredibly costly in terms of sacrificing the cooperative spirit in society. In these moral gray areas, as in others like them, judgment, wisdom, individual consideration, and options are needed. The place that the majority of society has come to is probably the right one: fewer abortions are better; prevention by education, contraception, and abstinence is best (about 40% of pregnancies in the US are unplanned); adoptions should be viable options; early abortions, if chosen, must be made safe; exceptions for late-term abortions should be allowed for medical reasons. This seems about the right mix of moral choices, but a rational debate about each point can still be had. What is hurting much of humanity is the belief that there is a black and white answer to this question. Recognizing that morals aren't handed down in stone from a god, but instead are just rules we are trying to discover about how to survive, would go a long way towards calming this overheated debate and many others like it.

What do you think? Would debates about this issue go better if we were all forced to listen to beautiful music while having those discussions?

I thought last week's thought experiment was quite uncontroversial, yet that erupted into a heated discussion. This week's experiment is intended to poke at one of the most heated arguments in America, so we'll see where this leads, but hopefully it can be discussed with more civility than is usually the case with this issue.

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     Dick had made a mistake, but surely the price he was paying was too high. He of course knew that level six of the hospital was a restricted area. But after he had drunk one too many glasses of wine with his colleagues at the finance department Christmas party, he had inadvertently staggered out of the elevator on the sixth floor and passed out on one of the empty beds.
     When he woke up, he discovered to his horror that he had been mistaken for a volunteer in a new life-saving procedure. Patients who required vital organ transplants to survive were being hooked up to volunteers, whose own vital organs kept both alive. This would continue until a donor organ could be found, which was usually around nine months later.
     Dick quickly called over a nurse to explain the mistake, who in turn brought over a worried-looking doctor.
     "I understand your anger," explained the doctor, "but you did behave irresponsibly, and now you are in this position, the brutal truth is that if we disconnect you, the world-renowned violinist who depends on you will die. You would in fact be murdering him."
     "But you have no right!" protested Dick. "Even if he dies without me, how can you force me to give up nine months of my life to save him?"
​     "I think the question you should be asking," said the doctor sternly, "is how you could choose to end the violinist's life."

Source: 'A defence of abortion' by Judith Jarvis Thomson, in Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971), and widely anthologised.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 85.
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Any initial thoughts? If you are pro-life or pro-choice, is your judgment of Dick's situation consistent with your stance on abortion? Does it need to be? I'll be back on Friday with more of my own thoughts.

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.

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     Lucy was having the most awful nightmare. She was dreaming that wolf-like monsters had burst through the windows in her bedroom while she was asleep and then started to tear her apart. She fought and screamed  but she could feel their claws and teeth tear into her.
     Then she awoke, sweating and breathing heavily. She looked around her bedroom, just to be sure, and let out a sigh of relief that it had all, indeed, been a dream.
​     Then, with a heart-stopping crash, monsters burst through her window and started to attack her, just as in her dream. The terror was magnified by the remembrance of the nightmare she had endured. Her screams were mixed with sobs as she felt the helplessness of her situation.
     Then she awoke, sweating even more, breathing even faster. This was absurd. She had dreamed within a dream, and so the first time she had apparently woken up she was in fact still in her dream. She looked around her room again. The windows were intact, there were no monsters. But how could she be sure she had really woken up this time? She waited, terrified, for time to tell.

Sources: The first meditation from Meditations by René Descartes (1641); An American Werewolf in London, directed by John Landis (1981)

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 82.
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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.

What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

Wittgenstein went too far as he helped create the school of thought known as analytical philosophy and described it by saying:

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.

That is drawing the circle around the love of wisdom much too narrowly, but reading this thought experiment makes me a little more sympathetic to his overreaction. In his discussion of this chapter, Baggini says:

"Everything I 'remember' could be popping into my mind for the first time. This life, which feels as though it is more than thirty years old, could have begun in a dream only moments ago. ... Perhaps only when you awake will you realise just how absurd what seems normal to you right now really is."

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. I'm sorry to have wasted your time with this particular diversion as much as I already have.

Wake up! It's time for this week's thought experiment.

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     Lucy was having the most awful nightmare. She was dreaming that wolf-like monsters had burst through the windows in her bedroom while she was asleep and then started to tear her apart. She fought and screamed  but she could feel their claws and teeth tear into her.
     Then she awoke, sweating and breathing heavily. She looked around her bedroom, just to be sure, and let out a sigh of relief that it had all, indeed, been a dream.
​     Then, with a heart-stopping crash, monsters burst through her window and started to attack her, just as in her dream. The terror was magnified by the remembrance of the nightmare she had endured. Her screams were mixed with sobs as she felt the helplessness of her situation.
     Then she awoke, sweating even more, breathing even faster. This was absurd. She had dreamed within a dream, and so the first time she had apparently woken up she was in fact still in her dream. She looked around her room again. The windows were intact, there were no monsters. But how could she be sure she had really woken up this time? She waited, terrified, for time to tell.

Sources: The first meditation from Meditations by René Descartes (1641); An American Werewolf in London, directed by John Landis (1981)

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 82.
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Zzzzzzzzz......

Somehow, it's October and the weather outside is beautifully sunny and warm in northern England. It looks just like summer outside of my window and I feel like I need to go out and enjoy that while it lasts—the long dark nights are coming soon. But, I'm obliged to get this weekly blog done too. Where exactly does that duty come from? And what counts as having met that duty? I doubt a weather report and a few open-ended questions will do the job, so let's remind ourselves about this week's thought experiment and then get to the two points it raises.

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     Hew, Drew, Lou, and Sue all promised their mother they would regularly write and let her know how they were getting on during their round-the-world trip.
     Hew wrote his letters, but gave them to the other people to post, none of whom bothered. So his mother never received any letters from him.
     Drew wrote her letters and posted them herself, but she carelessly put them in disused boxes, attached too few stamps and made other mistakes which meant none of them ever arrived.
     Lou wrote and posted all her letters properly, but the postal system let her down every time. Mother didn't hear from her.
     Sue wrote and posted all her letters properly, and made brief phone calls to check they had arrived. Alas, none did.
     Did any of the children keep their promise to their mother?

Source: The moral philosophy of H.A. Prichard, as critiqued by Mary Warnock in What Philosophers Think, edited by J. Baggini and J. Stanghroom (Continuum, 2003)

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 79.
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The rhyming scheme doesn't help this from sounding a bit silly, but as Baggini writes in his brief discussion of this, "The problem of the holiday letter touches on one of the most fundamental issues in moral philosophy: the link between agents, actions, and their consequences. What this thought experiment suggests is that ethical reasoning cannot focus on just one of these aspects."

As always, extreme positions get us into trouble. If you try to say actions are all that count, then all four of the children met their promise to write their mother regularly. If you only care about consequences though, then all four children failed to meet their promise to use letters to let their mother know how they were getting on. Either lens yields a uniform result, but clearly there are some differences in how "good" each child was at living up to their obligations. Does this really matter? As Baggini also points out:

The context may be mundane, but the issue in moral theory is important. Do not be misled by the genteel scenario. The question is: at what point can we say we have discharged our moral responsibilities? It applies not only to sending news to parents, but to cancelling orders for nuclear attack. The idea of what is reasonable to expect is crucial here. If we were talking about an order to cancel a nuclear attack, then our expectation of the checks and extra measures that should be taken would be much higher. The extent to which we are required to make sure the desired outcome actually happens thus varies according to the seriousness of the outcome. It's OK to just forget to set the video recorder. Just forgetting to call off the troops is inexcusable.

This makes sense. In my own writing on justice, I made the point that:

Intention and causation are not necessary for an action to be judged good or evil. Those judgments are based on objective reality and whether or not the actions promote or hinder the long-term survival of life. Praise or blame for these actions is tied to intention or neglect of intention. The magnitude of reward or punishment doled out from society should be proportional to the intention or the neglect.

Based on these criteria, we see that Hew and Drew get very faint praise for their halfhearted attempts to achieve their goal, while Lou and Sue cannot really be blamed for the poor consequences of their undelivered letters. If news of the children's travels were as important to their mother as the calling off of a nuclear bomb, then only Sue would be judged as diligent enough to have found another means to convey this information—she alone called her mother, and presumably discussed more than just the state of her letters. Sue alone gets praise for going beyond the letter of her promise to uphold the spirit of it as well. Since we all know that mothers sometimes worry excessively though (hi Mom!), Sue's extra efforts may not be such a big deal. They may not even be laudable if those efforts served to enable a mother who's too neurotic to let her children live their lives (definitely not talking about you now Mom!).

This is all simple enough, but this first discussion touches on a much deeper issue: where do these obligations come from and how do we judge whether they are good or not? It's this second point that makes this thought experiment interesting to me.

Harold Arthur Prichard, whose philosophy was the inspiration for this thought experiment, wrote an influential paper in 1912 called "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" In it, Prichard "contended that moral philosophy rested chiefly on the desire to provide arguments for the principles of obligation that we pre-philosophically accept, such as the principle that one ought to keep one's promises or that one ought not steal. This is a mistake, he argued, both because it is impossible to derive any statement about what one ought to do from statements not concerning obligation (even statements about what is good), and because there is no need to do so since common sense principles of moral obligation are self-evident. The essay laid a groundwork for ethical intuitionism and provided inspiration for some of the most influential moral philosophers, such as John Rawls."

This is incredibly lazy thinking. Common sense principles of moral obligation are self-evident? To whom? And just how commonly held are these? How would Prichard resolve a moral dispute between an American evangelical Christian and an Afghani fundamental member of the Taliban? Both of those people uphold moral traditions from centuries of family and religious obligations and are certain that their common sense principles are self-evident. Does Prichard have any suggestions for what we should do in this case?

[Prichard] "explains how people should guarantee the accuracy of their moral intuitions. Clearly, observations can be misleading. For instance, if someone sees a pencil in water, he may conclude that the object in the water is bent. However, when he pulls the pencil from the water, he sees that it is straight. The same can occur with moral intuition. If one begins to doubt one's intuition, one should try to imagine oneself in the moral dilemma related to the decision. If the intuition persists, then the intuition is accurate."

Well that settles it, doesn't it? (Of course not.) At least Prichard is leaning on a type of Golden Rule thinking, which often proves effective, but since human emotions are motivated by underlying wants / desires, moral intuitions can be felt in very different directions once people become convinced they want a certain thing, whether that's 40 virgins in heaven, a higher form of reincarnation, or to wield power like a Neitzschean Superman. I appreciate that in the early 20th century Prichard is searching for something non-religious to rest his moral beliefs upon, but he ends up on such a non-existent foundation that he might as well just declare himself a relativist. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong elaborates:

"The deepest challenge in moral epistemology, as in general epistemology, is raised by a skeptical regress argument: Someone is justified in believing something only if the believer has a reason that is expressible in an inference with premises that the believer is already justified in believing. This requires a chain of inferences that must continue infinitely, close into a circle, or stop arbitrarily. Academic skeptics reject all three options and conclude that there is no way for anyone to be justified in believing anything. The same regress arises for moral beliefs . . . The simplest way to stop this regress is simply to stop. If a believer can work back to a premise that the believer is justified in believing without being able to infer that premise from anything else, then there is no new premise to justify, so the regress goes no further."

For Prichard, that stopping point is one's obligation. "While he believes that moral obligations are justified by reasons, he does not believe that the reasons are external to the obligation itself. For instance, if a person is asked why he ought not torture chipmunks, the only satisfying answer that could be given is that he ought not torture chipmunks. ... Prichard concludes that just as observation of other people necessitates that other people exist, the observation of a moral obligation necessitates that the obligation exists."

Nonsense. You shouldn't torture a chipmunk because that is not an action that leads to the long-term survival of life in general (my definition of good from an evolutionary philosophy point of view). Torturing a chipmunk obviously hurts that singular chipmunk's survival, and the action degrades the value of chipmunks in general in the mind of the torturer who is then more likely in the future to disregard the interests of this valuable species in support of its ecosystem, which we and many other forms of life share. I think that's a satisfying answer, and one that avoids an infinite regress or random stopping point. As I said in my published article on Bridging the Is-Ought Divide:

Existence is the ultimate end, and survival is the thing that must be desired on its own account. Prior to existence – or after it is extinguished – there are no human desires. If the state of existence is not satisfied, then there is no one to answer any further inquiries. There would be no more passions to drive our reason. Even if our ontological questions about the universe have no regressive end to them at the moment, our moral questions about our place in this universe do have an end. They end with whether or not we will continue to exist. The fundamental nature of being implied by the use of the word is, is the very thing that helps us get from is to ought. We are alive. We want to remain alive. We ought to act to remain so.

That is how I derive my duties and obligation, and hopefully I've met mine now for this ongoing blog project in my rather recently chosen career as an evolutionary philosopher and writer. But what do you think? How do you determine the obligations you try to live up to in your own life?