Comparing axiologies

Are there ways in which it would be better if axiology were different? Here’s a suggestion that comes to mind:

1. It would be better if cowardice, sloth, dishonesty, ignorance, suffering and all the other things that are actually intrinsic evils were instead great intrinsic goods.

For surely it would be better for there to be more goods!

On the other hand, one might have this optimistic thought:

2. The actually true axiology is better than any actually false axiology.

(Theists are particularly likely to think this, since they will likely think that the true axiology is grounded in the nature of a perfect being.)

We have an evident tension between (1) and (2).

What’s going on?

One move is to say that it makes no sense to discuss the value of impossible scenarios. I am inclined to think that this isn’t quite correct. One might think it would be really good if the first eight thousand binary digits of π encoded the true moral code in English using ASCII coding, even though this is impossible (I assume). Likewise, it is impossible for a human to know all of mathematics, but it would be good to do so.

The solution I would go for is that axiology needs to be kept fixed in value comparisons. Imagine that I am living a blessed life of constant painless joy, and dissatisfied with that I find myself wishing for the scenario where joyless pain is even better than painless joy and I live a life of joyless pain. If one need not keep axiology fixed in value comparisons, that wish makes perfect sense, but I think it doesn’t—unlike the wish about π or the knowledge of mathematics.

The 2018 Belgium vs Brazil World Cup game

In 2018, the Belgians beat the Brazilians 2-1 in the 2018 World Cup soccer quarterfinals. There are about 18 times as many Brazilians and Belgians in the world. This raises a number of puzzles in value theory, if for simplicity we ignore everyone but Belgians and Brazilians in the world.

An order of magnitude more people wanted the Brazilians to win, and getting what one wants is good. An order of magnitude more people would have felt significant and appropriate pleasure had the Brazilians won, and an appropriate pleasure is good. And given both wishful thinking as well as reasonable general presumptions about there being more talent available in a larger population base, we can suppose that a lot more people expected the Brazilians to win, and it’s good if what one thinks is the case is in fact the case.

You might think that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, and Belgians are few. But, clearly, the above facts gave very little moral reason to the Belgian players to lose. One might respond that the above facts gave lots of reason to the Belgians to lose, but these reasons were outweighed by the great value of victory to the Belgian players, or perhaps the significant intrinsic value of playing a sport as well as one can. Maybe, but if so then just multiply both countries’ populations by a factor of ten or a hundred, in which case the difference between the goods (desire satisfaction, pleasure and truth of belief) is equally multiplied, but still makes little or no moral difference to what the Belgian players should do.

Or consider this from the point of view of the Brazilian players. Imagine you are one of them. Should the good of Brazil—around two hundred million people caring about the game—be a crushing weight on your shoulders, imbuing everything you do in practice and in the game with a great significance? No! It’s still “just a game”, even if the value of the good is spread through two hundred million people. It would be weird to think that it is a minor pecadillo for a Belgian to slack off in practice but a grave sin for a Brazilian to do so, because the Brazilian’s slacking hurts an order of magnitude more people.

That said, I do think that the larger population of Brazil imbues the Brazilians’ games and practices with some not insignificant additional moral weight than the Belgians’. It would be odd if the pleasure, desire satisfaction and expectations of so many counted for nothing. But on the other hand, it should make no significant difference to the Belgians whether they are playing Greece or Brazil: the Belgians shouldn’t practice less against the Greeks on the grounds that an order of magnitude fewer people will be saddened when the Greeks lose than when Brazilians do.

However, these considerations seem to me to depend to some degree on which decisions one is making. If Daniel is on the soccer team and deciding how hard to work, it makes little difference whether he is on the Belgian or Brazilian team. But suppose instead that Daniel is has two talents: he could become an excellent nurse or a top soccer player. As a nurse, he would help relieve the suffering of a number of patients. As a soccer player, in addition to the intrinsic goods of the sports, he would contribute to his fellow citizens’ pleasure and desire satisfaction. In this decision, it seems that the number of fellow citizens does matter. The number of people Daniel can help as a nurse is not very dependent on the total population, but the number of people that his soccer skills can delight varies linearly with the total population, and if the latter number is large enough, it seems that it would be quite reasonable for Daniel to opt to be a soccer player. So we could have a case where if Daniel is Belgian he should become a nurse but if Brazilian then a soccer player (unless Brazil has a significantly greater need for nurses than Belgium, that is). But once on the team, it doesn’t seem to matter much.

The map from axiology to moral reasons is quite complex, contextual, and heavily agent-centered. The hope of reducing moral reasons to axiology is very slim indeed.

Human worth and materialism

1. A typical human being has much more intrinsic value than any 80 kg arrangement of atoms.

2. If materialism is true, a typical human being is an 80 kg arrangement of atoms.

3. So, materialism is not true.

Is pollution bad for the earth?

A curious thought hit me today: What could it mean for something, say pollution, to be bad for the earth? We have, I think, a fairly good idea of what it is for something to be good or bad for a human, a dog, a wasp, a tree and maybe even a bacterium. But for a planet? For humans, dogs, etc., there are roughly three accounts of well-being: (a) the hedonist account that well-being is pleasure and absence of pain, (b) the desire account that well-being is (roughly) fulfillment of desires and lack of frustration of desires, and (c) the flourishing account. Now, (a) requires consciousness and (b) requires mind, so neither is applicable to a tree, a bacterium or the earth.

That leaves the flourishing account. But while I have some idea about canine and waspish flourishing, I have very little idea about planetary flourishing. For instance, does hosting life make a planet flourish, or to the contrary, do planets flourish more when they are devoid of life? After all, if the average member of a natural kind is likely to have a normal degree of flourishing, it appears that lifeless planets have a normal degree of flourishing. So as long as we don't literally blow the earth into pieces, it seems that whatever pollution we inflict on it, we won't push it below the normal level of well-being.

But perhaps we need to distinguish different kinds of planets, and different kinds of planets have different kinds of flourishing. Thus, maybe, a planet in a "habitable zone" in a stellar system has the support of organic life as part of its flourishing. But what kind of organic life is needed for flourishing? Is the planet better off for hosting more complex life-forms? (Is a house better off for having people rather than geckos in it?) Or for a greater diversity of life-forms? (Is a house better off for having people and cockroaches rather than just people?) It seems plausible that unless we have a metaphysical teleology, either of the Aristotelian or the theistic sort, for planets in the habitable zone, these questions have no answer. And even if we have such a teleology, the epistemology of that teleology will be difficult, because the earth is the only habitable planet we know of, and typically we learn about the teleological properties of a natural kind by observing multiple instances.

But perhaps it is a mistake to think of the earth as rocks, water and atmosphere. Rather, the suggestion goes, the ecosystem is not just hosted by the earth, but is a part of the earth. I am not sure we should buy that. While parthood might not in general be transitive, it seems plausible that since we are parts of the ecosystem, then if the ecosystem were a part of the earth, we would be parts of the earth. But surely we are not parts of the earth. We live on earth, but we are not parts of it any more than we are parts of the galaxy (though the earth is a part of the galaxy).

But let us grant that the ecosystem is a part of the earth—or maybe that "the earth" is sometimes a metonymy for the ecosystem. In that case, pollution that causes destruction of a part of the ecosystem without a compensating growth elsewhere does seem to be contrary to the flourishing of the earth. But more detailed study of flourishing still seems mired in epistemic problems. It is very hard to figure out the teleology of the ecosystem as a whole, unless we accept revelation and say that the teleology is the support of humanity.

God and the afterlife

The following arguments came out of a fascinating conversation with Sam Calvin. I think neither of us thinks they are conclusive, but they are suggestive and interesting.

Start with this argument:

1. (Premise) If the cosmos is an (axiologically) abhorrent place, then it is not the case that we should trust our moral beliefs.
2. (Premise) We should trust our moral beliefs.
3. Therefore, the cosmos is not an abhorrent place.

The thought here is that we get our moral beliefs from the cosmos that we live in (here the cosmos would be the sum total of what is, including ourselves and, if theism is true, God), and if the cosmos is a truly horrible place—an axiologically abhorrent place—it is not the case that we should trust the faculties by which we generate moral beliefs.

Now:

4. (Premise) If there is no life after death, then the cosmos is an (axiologically) abhorrent place.

The thought behind this premise (and perhaps behind the whole argument that this is a part of) is due to Gabriel Marcel: Think of someone you love, and think what a horror it would be if this person—this very individual—were to cease to exist forever. From this, we conclude:

5. There is life after death. (By 3 and 4)

Further

6. (Premise) If the space of all possibilities is (axiologically) abhorrent, then it is not the case that we should trust our moral beliefs.
7. Therefore, the space of all possibilities is not abhorrent. (By (2) and (6)).

Here, we can use the fact that the cosmos we inhabit is a part of the hypothetically abhorrent space of possibilities, and if the space of possibilities is so nasty, why should we think we're in a nice part of it? Next:

7. (Premise, perhaps only stipulative?) God is defined as that which most ought to exist.
8. (Premise) Necessarily: (if God exists, God necessarily exists).
9. (Premise) If that thich most ought to exist cannot exist, the space of all possibilities is axiologically abhorrent.
10. If God does not exist, God cannot exist. (By 8)
11. If God does not exist, then that which most ought to exist cannot exist. (By 7 and 10)
12. If God does not exist, the space of all possibilities is axiologically abhorrent. (By 9 and 11)
13. God exists. (By 6 and 12)

Laws of nature

It is a really interesting question for someone who believes in lower level laws (e.g., Aristotelian laws grounded in the natures of substances, or in separate laws of nature governing different kinds--electrical, gravitational, etc.--of interaction) how higher level laws like the law of conservation of mass-energy which depend on the appropriate coordination of lower level laws (e.g., in the Aristotelian case, that no entity can increase its mass-energy without some other entity decreasing its mass-energy at the same time) get to be explanatory. One answer is that the higher level laws entail the lower level ones and are ontologically more basic. Aristotelians will deny this, though, and I am not sure we have reason to think so. Certainly, the law of conservation of mass-energy does not by itself entail various electromagnetic laws--other assumptions need to be added. It seems at least possible, and I think plausible, that the lower level laws are in fact ontologically more basic, and the higher level ones supervene on them.

I wonder whether the right answer to that question isn't Leibnizian. The lower level laws (perhaps combined with certain boundary conditions) entail the higher level ones. The explanation of the coordination of lower level laws to produce certain cool results like conservation of mass-energy is that it is good that the lower level laws be such as to result in these higher level laws (which have various positive axiological features, such as elegance), and God does what is good.

There may also be a nice teleological answer, if one can make sense of a teleological dependence between laws. In fact, the theistic answer might have two takes: a more voluntarist one and a more teleological one.