Archive for the ‘Ethics’ Category
Posted by Colin Temple on December 15, 2009 in Ethics, Metaphysics
Determinism is the view that all things in the physical world are determined by previous physical causes, including human action. Two asteroids collide in space because they’re on a path that brings them together. Water falls off a cliff because gravity pulls it down. And you are reading this because some physical process in your brain has led you to browse the Internet and stumble across this article.
Determinism is the result of applying our scientific notion of causality to ourselves, which we intuitively believe to be somehow immune to the tides of causality. But determinism says that we’re a part of the system.
What, exactly, that system is, we’re not sure. It may be that everything has been determined since the beginning of the universe — the big bang set things in motion, and everything that has happened is simply further consequence of that event, or even an earlier one. It may be that things are determined by the quantum nature of the universe — if quantum mechanics is true, then there’s some element of randomness, but things are still determined by physical events. But both of these are forms of determinism.
So, no free will?
If determinism is true, there’s no free will. (The compatibilists will disagree with me — compatibilism tries to marry the ideas of determinism in the physical world and freedom of will in consciousness.)
In other words, the things you do have been determined by physical events, and, when you act, you could not have acted differently.
Why should I be OK with that?
If your will is not free then every action you make has been determined by something outside of yourself. You can’t choose what you’re going to do, or rather, you can’t choose to act differently than you do.
When some people encounter the possibility that we lack free will, they freak out. What they imagine is a situation in which they want to do something, but are unable to act according to their will. They imagine that they want to make one choice, but are forced into another.
This is not the consequence of determinism. If determinism is true, then, like actions, the will is determined. You’ll never will something you don’t want to will, because your desires, your thoughts, your will itself is the result of a physical process. It will never be the case that you will against your own will — this is a logical impossibility.
So, your actions will always correspond to your will. You may still err, experience internal compulsions, or be forced into things just as you would if your will were objectively free. But you’ll never be in the situation where you want to will something other than you will, or where you will one thing but act differently. You will never experience the force of determinism, because you will always feel that you are doing what you will to do.
As a result, you are OK with determinism, because if determinism is true, it has absolutely no bearing on what you want. You’ll always be able to act as you will to, exactly as you would if determinism were false and your will were “free” in the sense that it was undetermined.
Hard determinism says that all events, including your actions, are caused by a
chain of causality, like the movement of balls in a game of pool.
What about responsibility?
The biggest problem with the absence of free will is an ethical one. Here is where we have a problem coping with the lack of free will, because we have the notion that we must be responsible for our actions. If our actions are ultimately caused by things external to us, then it seems wrong that we should be punished for those actions, or that we should feel any guilt. If I were to steal money, unjustifiably, in a determined world, that theft would not be my fault, or not totally my fault, because my decision to steal, and my action to do so, was determined by some physical processes that I do not control.
There are two ways to deal with such a problem. The first is to point out that, even though I may not have chosen to unjustifiably steal because of a strictly internal decision, it is still my will to steal. My consciousness believes that, whether or not the idea originated with me, I chose to steal. Even if the desire to steal came from outside of me, there is no desire within me strong enough to have stopped me from stealing. So, even though perhaps I am not at fault for the theft as if I were an individual self-contained agent, there is no claiming that I am truly innocent, either. I stole because some physical process both made me steal and made me want to steal. It may not be my own choice that led to my moral corruption in this example, but nevertheless, I am a thief.
(I’ll clarify that this is just an example — believe what you will, I am not a thief.)
The second way to deal with this is by pointing out that whether it’s right or wrong, both my actions and the response of others are determined. The idea that we ought to do something else is pointless, because we will do what we will necessarily do. There are no alternative possibilities. If I am determined to commit a crime, I will commit it. If you are determined to punish me, then you will punish me.
That’s not to say that we do not influence each other. It would be an interesting world if everyone suddenly thought in this manner. If everyone suddenly believed in determinism, people may become apathetic. Economies may fall apart, the justice system may disappear, and anarchy would result. This may make people suddenly believe in free will again, since their actions obviously changed based on their belief.
But that would not actually imply free will. Rather, it would merely be the case that the determined system led us to that unorganized social state because of our determined attitudes. If we believe that morality is important we will behave according to morality, but not because we chose to believe that morality is important, but because we were determined to form this structure and follow it.
What about predictions?
Another possible consequence of determinism is that we could, in theory, make very accurate predictions about the future if things are perfectly determined by past events. For instance, if the universe is determined in the sense that classical physical causality carries forward, and that all events were determined way back at the beginning of the universe, then we would simply need the technology to know the position and velocity of every particle in the universe in order to predict the future, and essentially create prophecy.
I use the term “simply” very liberally. It’s obviously no simple undertaking to record such vast amounts of information, and we’re nowhere close to this — so you don’t need to worry about someone calling your every move before it happens anytime soon.
Even if we had such technology, quantum mechanics seems to make this fundamentally impossible anyways. According to quantum mechanics, the more we know about the position of a particle, the less we know about its velocity, and vice-versa. Therefore, if quantum mechanics accurately describes physical processes, then it’s impossible to predict the future even if it is determined. Again, it looks like determinism wouldn’t be such a big problem.
Convinced?
This may not have you embracing the idea that you do not have freedom. The idea that we have free will is generally an important concept to the way we think about ourselves, and the way our societies function. We value responsibility and choice as important features of the human experience, and the idea that these are merely illusions can be unsettling.
My point is simply that, even if this position (of determinism and incompatibilism) turns out to be true, you won’t miss free will. There’s simply no practical consequence, at least in the sense that there’s nothing you would miss about free will.
(Sorry for coming back suddenly with such a long post! One note that I will make about this account of determinism and free will — the effect of determinism on free will described here presupposes a physicalist response to the mind-body problem. That is, we’re assuming that consciousness is caused by physical events, and that the mind is not a separate ontological substance from the body.)
What do you think? If free will turned out to not exist, would you be disappointed? Why? — Am I missing something important?
PHOTO CREDITS: (1) stevendepolo / (2) Nic’s events / CC BY 2.0
{ No Comments }
Posted by Colin Temple on July 15, 2009 in Ethics
I have rights. You have rights. She has rights. He has rights. They have rights. We all have rights! Hooray for rights.
So we have the right to live, to be free, to be treated equally, and to say and do whatever we want so long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others. Awesome. What a wonderful, modern world we live in where we’ve come to realize our inalienable human rights.
But if these rights are so fundamental to our being, where do they come from, anyways? So much about ethics today, especially in law and politics, concerns whether or not certain actions infringe upon human rights. It would probably be wise to be sure that these rights stand on solid ground.
So let’s consider a few sources of our beloved rights:
Natural Justice
Natural justice, or natural law, is the idea that there exists a fundamental idea of justice — one that is somehow either a property of humanity, of life, or of the universe or cosmos in general. Right is right. Wrong is wrong. They’re something real, beyond what any law says at any particular point in time. They’re obvious to us, and laws that oppose them are foolish, wrong and unjust.
The religious version of the natural justice idea is that rights are granted to us by the divine. Right is right and wrong is wrong, because God/the gods/the spirits will(s) it to be so. In some religions, not all rights are universal: some religions prescribe different rights to men than to women, to people of higher or lower social status, or to people of certain lineage.
But the idea is generally the same: some acts are just or unjust because there is some absolute morality driving our ideas of justice. United States law is one prime example of natural justice as the “official” source of human rights, as demonstrated by the U.S. Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The bolding is mine, to highlight the obvious.
The Social Contract
If you’re not inclined to believe that there exists some fundamental justice in the world, which may be the rational conclusion if you are an atheist, or perhaps an agnostic, then we need a source of rights that doesn’t depend upon some universal moral constant. If justice exists, it must be a human creation. But how did we create justice, and if so, how can it prescribe fundamental, universal rights?
Social Contract theory is important to ethics, but also to political philosophy. The idea for both is the same: human beings once existed in what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes called the “state of nature”. In his magnum opus, The Leviathan, he describes humanity in a state of constant war with itself, where men lead “brutish and short” lives. In the state of nature, morality does not exist.
The Social Contract is the man-made solution to this dilemma. We create societies, in which we agree to follow a set of rules because it’s the smart thing to do for our own survival and well-being. We agree to give some authority to our governments, because someone must maintain the peace. If we agree to this contract, we leave the state of nature and enter into the realm of law, where a sense of justice now rules us. The agreement need not be explicit — we obviously haven’t all signed a contract. But the fact that we live in countries with certain notions of rights, participate in those societies and, at least generally, abide by those laws, we are part of the social contract.
However, if one decides to reject the contract, that person exists in the state of nature. If someone is in the state of nature, we can choose to punish them in any way we please. They have no rights, because they rejected the source of rights, and nothing we do to them can be deemed just or unjust — moral or immoral.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism, as a moral theory, is a little different. In general, utilitarianism holds that what is just is what produces the maximum amount of happiness for the largest number of people, and the least amount of misery. Utilitarianism is all about the math — whatever produces the most positive effect and/or the least negative effect is the correct, or just, course of action.
What does that mean for rights? Not much. In a purely utilitarian view of morality, the rights of the individual are of little consequence to the more important needs. It sounds pretty Vulcan: “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. (That’s right, a Star Trek reference.)
But we quickly find scenarios in which Utilitarianism produces “just” actions that seem wrong to most people. For example, let’s consider Jimmy Winters. Jimmy Winters is an investor, and a banker. Jimmy Winters loans people money when they need it most, and charges huge amounts of interest. Jimmy Winters helps people buy houses they can’t afford, and then sells their mortgages for a profit. Jimmy Winters is the reason the housing market fell apart in 2008. Jimmy Winters then took money from the government, and paid himself a nice bonus with it. Jimmy Winters sleeps on top of a pile of money with three different women he’s paid to sleep with him every night. Jimmy Winters has never given a dime to charity. Jimmy Winters is worth $50 million that the government knows about, and at least $30 million more in offshore holdings. Jimmy Winters is a douchebag.
You could feed a lot of people with that money. You could build hospitals and save many lives with that money. You could do great things with that money. So if what’s right is the thing that has the greatest positive effect for the most people, the just and correct thing to do is to kill Jimmy Winters, steal his money, and do good things with it.
It’s Robin Hood on crack, and as much as we may think that Jimmy Winters deserves such a fate, and nobody would miss him, most people feel that it’s still wrong to kill someone for their stuff.
(Jimmy Winters is a fictional guy, by the way. I just made that up. If there’s some Jimmy Winters out there reading this, I’m sorry. You’re probably not a douchebag.)
In the case of utilitarianism, rights appear as a “fix” to this kind of problem. We have the sense that this is wrong because it infringes upon a right to life — there are certain rights that are paramount, that have a value so high that the situation must be incredibly dire for them to be outweighed by anyone else’s needs or wants. The right to life is such a right.
So, uh, where do they come from?
We’ve looked at three possible sources of rights: natural justice, the social contract, and a fix for utilitarianism. As with any important question in philosophy, none of the answers are perfect.
In the case of natural justice, we’re relying on some idea of universal morality which is essentially unverifiable. We’re never going to agree on the source: good luck getting religious groups to agree on anything, and if you’re not considering a divine source, it’s hard to pin natural justice on any real source.
In the case of social contract theory, we may be closer to something that makes sense, but it doesn’t cover everything. What about children who aren’t able to make the decision to join the social contract on any level, conscious or unconscious? What about those with mental disabilities, especially if they have no close relatives who can make the agreement on their behalf? We seem to want to grant them rights, even if they don’t have the ability to truly participate in the moral community. And what about future, nonexistent people? Surely they have no rights by this theory — but then why are we so concerned about ruining their lives with global warming? Why do we feel a moral duty to future generations?
And for utilitarianism, as I mentioned, rights only appear as a fix to a moral theory that gives us so much moral ambiguity that we must assign rights before we slip into a world of vigilante justice.
The alternative to all of these is that rights don’t exist until they are assigned directly by law. So, in the U.S., the right to bear arms is a constitutional right because it is a constitutional right. It exists because it is written into the laws of that country. In Canada, that right does not exist, and there’s no truth to the ideas that it “should exist” or “should not exist”. It simply does not, because justice is law. That’s a great idea in countries that have laws which are, for the most part, compatible with our values. But there’s a huge flaw there: how confident are you that lawmakers are and always will be just?
Yeah, me either.
So much for solid ground. Many of these ideas come close to our common understanding of rights, but most people don’t agree whole-heartedly with any one, and if they do, they don’t agree with everyone else.
But despite all of these inconsistencies, we tend to believe that we have rights. We believe our rights exist because we feel they ought to. We believe in a right to live, a right to believe and say what we choose, a right to be somewhat secure and free, and perhaps most generally, a right not to be subjected to suffering by others.
That last one — the right not to suffer, or be forced into suffering — is something I’m going to come back to very soon. I have more to say about rights in a future post. We’re just glazing over the basics here, of course.
In the meantime, what do you think about rights? Are our rights as fundamental as we tend to believe they are? And if so, do any of these theories adequately describe why? Have I missed something important?
{ No Comments }
Posted by Colin Temple on March 28, 2009 in Ethics
I recently wrote a paper for a Moral Reasoning course in defense of human cloning. The concept of human cloning seems a bit frightening to me, but I don’t think that’s altogether rational.
Let me first define human cloning by the current hypothetical techniques for doing so. Human cloning is the creation of a human being, or human tissues, using 100% of the nuclear genetic material from a donor. You have to know a little bit about biology to fully understand this, but essentially the process means that instead of having two parents — each donating 50% of their genetic code, randomly — only one parent donates complete DNA, making the child, or clone, a genetic duplicate of the parent.
To examine the issue of human cloning, let’s consider the following benefits — why would we even consider cloning humans in the first place? I won’t lay out the entire list of benefits, but instead present the four general categories of benefit:
- To create donor organs or tissues (rather than new people) for therapy to cure diseases;
- To create donor tissues to prevent aging and prolong lifespan;
- As an alternate means of reproduction;
- To learn more about genetics through the process of studying and implementing cloning in practice.
There are a number of objections and fears about cloning, as well:
- The fear that cloned humans will lack individuality, or infringe upon the uniqueness of the donor.
- The fear that cloned humans will experience social hardships;
- The fear that genetic diversity will be reduced, threatening humanity as a species;
- The fear that cloning will result in the manufacturing and marketing of human beings;
- The religious objection that human cloning is playing God;
- The objection that until a human is cloned, the risk to the clone is uncertain, making it unethical to attempt cloning.
…to which offer the following points:
- On concerns about individuality: Reasearch into human cloning may also allow A cloned human will be no less an individual than monozygotic (or identical) twins are individuals. Identical twins share 100% of their genetic material, and occur in nature. They do not lack individuality. What’s more, they are further separated in time than identical twins, and more likely to be raised in different environments, making their individuality potentially greater than that of natural twins.
- On concerns about social norms: A cloned human may appear to lack the “normal” structure of a family. It has also been suggested that the fact that clones effectively have three parents — a genetic mother and father (the same parents as the original donor), and a direct parent (the donor). They may also have adoptive parents who are none of these three. While the social dynamic of a cloned person’s family may be unusual or difficult to assimilate, it is not much different than cases of adopted children, children born to surrogate mothers, or children born to single parents (to widows, or by in-vitro fertilization). The law allows these situations to arise, and it can be argued that cloning presents little difference.
- On concerns about genetic diversity: The argument here is simple. Unless the genetic diversity of the human race dwindles so much that there are fewer than 1000 genetically unique individuals, we have little cause for concern about the survival of the human race as a whole.
- On the manufacturing of human beings: The idea that we’ll end up with designer babies if cloning is allowed is a slippery-slope argument. We can easily restrict these things without banning cloning entirely. Yes, cloning opens these things up as a possibility, but so do most forms of genetic manipulation. The cloning of human beings still requires surrogate mothers, which prevents visions of clone factories from appearing. In societies that do not allow the sale of human beings anyways, this may not be much of a concern.
- On religious concerns: I do have respect for religion, but in democratic societies where government is secular, this cannot be a driving principle. While certain groups may decline to participate in cloning, religious principles are not grounds for legal restriction.
- On the ethics of even trying: This, I think, is one of the biggest problems. When creating the first human clone, we run the risk of producing a person who will suffer some hardships — they may experience medical problems, age unexpectedly quickly, or have trouble integrating into society if their origin is known publicly, especially when clones are uncommon. It’s also possible that failed attempts at cloning may produce deformed, disabled or short-lived humans who will undergo unneccessary suffering. The fact that we cannot be certain of the risks in cloning a human until we clone a human successfully. The best counter-argument against these concerns is that the process must not be done hastily, and must see success in other animals first. We may wish to clone other primates, and eventually chimpanzees (who are the animals most similar to humans, genetically), before attempting to clone a human being. Only with repeated success in other animals will this concern start to fade.
I’m not convinced that an outright ban on human clothing is justifiable. I think there are certainly valid ethical concerns, but the result should be regulation and care, rather than a reluctance to even try.
What do you think… should we ban cloning? Did I fail to address any key concerns?
{ 9 Comments }
