Glitches in the moral law?

Human law is a blunt instrument. We often replace the thing that we actually care about by a proxy for it, because it makes the law easier to formulate, follow and/or enforce. Thus, to get a driver’s license, you need to pass a multiple choice test about the rules of the road. Nobody actually cares whether you can pass the test: what we care about is whether you know the rules of the road. But the law requires passing a test, not knowledge.

When a thing is replaced by (sometimes we say “operationalized by”) a proxy in law, sometimes the law can be practically “exploited”, i.e., it is possible to literally follow the law while defeating its purpose. Someone with good test-taking skills might be able to pass a driving rules test with minimal knowledge (I definitely had a feeling like that in regard to the test I took).

A multiple-choice test is not a terrible proxy for knowledge, but not great. Night is a very good proxy for times of significant natural darkness, but eclipses show it’s not a perfect proxy. In both cases, a law based on the proxy can be exploited and will in more or less rare cases have unfortunate consequences.

But whether a law can be practically exploited or not, pretty much any law involving a proxy will have unfortunate or even ridiculous consequences in far-out scenarios. For instance, suppose some jurisdiction defines chronological age as the difference in years between today’s date and the date of birth, and then has some legal right that kicks in at age 18. Then if a six-month-old travels to another stellar system at close to the speed of light, and returns as a toddler, but 18 years have elapsed on earth, they will have that the legal rights accruing to an 18-year-old. The difference in years between today’s date and the date of birth is only a proxy for the chronological age, but it is a practically nearly perfect proxy—as long as we don’t have near-light-speed travel.

If a law involves a proxy that does not match the reality we care about in too common or too easy to engineer circumstances, then that’s a problem. On the other hand, if the mismatch happens only in circumstances that the lawmaker knows for sure won’t actually happen, that’s not an imperfection in the law.

Now suppose that God is the lawmaker. By the above observations, it does not reflect badly on a lawmaker if a law involves a proxy that fails only in circumstances that the lawmaker knows for sure won’t happen. More generally, it does not reflect badly on a lawmaker if a law has unfortunate or ridiculous consequences in cases that the lawmaker knows for sure won’t happen. Our experience with human law suggests that such cases are difficult to avoid without making the law unwieldy. And while there is no great difficulty for God in making an unwieldy law, such a law would be hard for us to follow.

In a context where a law is instituted by God (whether by command, or by desire, or by the choice of a nature for a created person), we thus should not be surprised if the law “glitches” out in far-out scenarios. Such “glitches” are no more an imperfection than it is an imperfection of a helicopter that it can’t fly on the moon. This should put a significant limitation on the use of counterexamples in ethics (and likely epistemology) in contexts where we are allowing for the possibility of a divine institution normativity (say, divine command or theistic natural law).

One way that this “glitching” can be manifested is this. The moral law does not present itself to us as just as a random sequence of rules. Rather, it is an organized body, with more or less vague reasons for the rules. For instance “Do not murder” and “Do not torture” may come under a head of “Human life is sacred.” (Compare how US federal law has “titles” like “Title 17: Copyright” and “Title 52: Voting and Elections”, and presumably there are vague value-laden principles that go with the title, such as promoting progress with copyright and giving voice to people with voting.) In far-out scenarios, the rules may end up conflicting with their reasons. Thus, to many people “Do not murder” would not seem a good way to respect to respect the sacredness of human life in far-out cases where murdering an innocent person is the only way to save the human race from extinction. But suppose that God in instituting the law on murder knew for sure that there would never occur a situation where the only way to save the human race from extinction is murder. Then there would be no imperfection in making the moral law be “Do not murder.” Indeed, this would be arguably a better law than “Do not murder unless the extinction of humanity is at stake”, because the latter law is needlessly complex if the extinction of humanity will never be at stake in a potential murder.

Thus the theistic deontologist faced with the question of whether it would be right to murder if that were the only way to save the human race can say this: The law prohibits murder even in this case. But if this case was going to have a chance of happening, then God would likely have made a different law. Thus, there are two ways of interpreting the counterfactual question of what would happen if we were in this far-out situation. We can either keep fixed the moral law, and say that the murder would be wrong, or we can keep fixed God’s love of human life, and say that in that case God would likely have made a different law and so it wouldn’t be wrong.

We should, thus, avoid counterexamples in ethics that involve situations that we don’t expect to happen, unless our target is an ethical theory (Kantianism?) that can’t make the above move.

But what about counterexamples in ethics that involve rare situations that do not make a big overall difference (unlike the case of the extinction of the human race)? We might think that for the sake of making the moral law more usable by the limited beings governed by it, God could have good reason for making laws that in some situations conflict with the reasons for the laws, as long as these situations are not of great importance to the human species. (The case of murdering to prevent the extinction of the human race would be of great importance even if it were extremely rare!)

If this is right—and I rather wish it isn’t—then the method of counterexamples is even more limited.

Intentions and reasons

An interesting question is whether one’s intentions in an action supervene on facts about one’s reasons and desires in the action. I don’t know the answer, but I also don’t know of a good way to account for intentions in terms of reasons and desires.

Judith Jarvis Thomson suggests this:

• for a person to X, intending an event E, is for him to X because he thinks his doing so will cause E, and he wants E.

This is false. The standard (at least for me) method of generating counterexamples to conjunctive principles is to find cases where the conjuncts are coincidentally satisfied in ways other than what one had in mind in formulating the principles.

So, here is the counterexample. I am alone in an eccentric friend’s house, and I want to take an ibuprofen. I look in the medicine cabinet, and I see a jar full of pills of different sizes, colors and shapes all jumbled together. I call up my friend asking where the ibuprofen is. My friend says: “Ah, ibuprofen. That’s the pill that will hurt your throat when you swallow them.” I look in the jar, and indeed there is exactly one pill that is large enough to hurt the throat upon swallowing. I swallow the pill because I think doing this will hurt my throat. But I don’t intend my throat to get hurt. So far I don’t have a counterexample: I have failed to satisfy the “he wants E” conjunct. But now just throw that conjunct into the story in a motivationally irrelevant way. Perhaps I want my throat to be hurt, due to my being a masochist. But I promised my accountability partner that I would refrain from intentionally hurting myself, and I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping this promise, so I don’t intend to get hurt.

One could add to Thomson’s conditions:

• and his wanting E is a cause of his action.

But we can just multiply the the coincidental satisfaction of conditions. For instance, perhaps my psychiatrist informed me that my masochistic desires are caused by headaches, and so if I get rid of my headache, my masochistic desires will disappear. Thus, my desire to hurt my throat is a cause of my relieving my headache. But I don’t relieve my headache in order to hurt my throat.

All this makes me think that it’s not unlikely that having a particular intention in an action is a primitive datum about the action: perhaps actions are teleological entities, and the intentions are their telê.

Bizarre consequences in bizarre circumstances

In strange physical circumstances, we would not be surprised by strange and unexpected behavior of a system governed by physical laws.

Under conditions a device was not designed for, we would not be surprised by odd behavior from the device.

Nor should we be surprised by bizarre behavior by an organism far outside its evolutionary niche.

Therefore, it seems that we should not be surprised by how an entity governed by moral or doxastic laws would behave in out-of-this-world moral or evidential circumstances.

In particular perhaps we should be very cautious—in ways that I have rarely been—about the lessons to be drawn from the ethics or epistemology in bizarre counterfactual stories. Instead, perhaps, we should think about how it could be that ethics or epistemology is tied to our niche, our proper environment, and we should be suspicious of Kantian-style ethics or epistemology grounded in niche- and kind-transcending principles, perhaps preferring a more Aristotelian approach with norms for behavior in our natural environment being grounded in our own nature.

Avoiding gerrymandering

Occasionally a philosopher tries to avoid some gerrymandered counterexamples to a theory by specifying that some sentence s involved in the theory must be atomic. But every sentence is equivalent to an atomic sentence. After all, the sentence s is equivalent to the atomic sentence "s is true". So it's a move we should beware of. I guess we do better if we restrict to first order sentences. But even so, one can always just stipulate a new predicate. Thus, "The sky is blue or snow is white" is equivalent to "CreatedBlueSkyOrWhiteSnow(God)". So not only must one restrict to first order atomic sentences, but probably to first order atomic sentences with perfectly natural terms.

Going far beyond the normal operating conditions of humans

What should an ordinary household thermometer show at temperatures close to absolute zero? There is no answer to this question. The question asks about what should happen in circumstances too far beyond the normal operating conditions of the instrument.

I wonder if something analogous doesn't happen in ethics. We have our normal operating conditions. These are very broad, because we are very adaptable beings, but nonetheless they are limited. Are there always going to be answer to questions about what we should do beyond these conditions?

One way of going beyond the conditions is to consider metaphysically impossible situations. If you promised to bring three oranges to the party and you are in the impossible world where four is less than three, do you fulfill your promise by bring four? Would you be obligated to honor yourself as your parent if you were your own cause? These questions seem to make little sense, and even we philosophers rarely think about them. But analytic ethicists do, on the other hand, sometimes ask questions about nomically impossible situations, and certainly we ask questions about situations far beyond ordinary life.

I think we should, however, take seriously the possibility that as we depart far enough from the normal operating conditions of human beings, some of the questions (a) have no answer or at least (b) have no answer available to us. This possibility undercuts some arguments.

For instance, one can argue that utilitarianism gives deeply implausible answers (e.g., that every action is equally permissible) in cases where there are infinitely many people. But suppose that there aren't in fact infinitely many people, and the situation of there being infinitely many people is far beyond humans' normal operating conditions. Then the fact that utilitarianism predicts something that seems implausible to us beyond those conditions is not a problem for the utilitarian--as long as she is willing to modestly limit the scope of ethics to humans in or near their normal operating conditions (if she's not, the argument is fair game).

Or consider this argument against deontology: It seems permissible to kill one innocent person to save a billion. But circumstances where we choose between one life and a billion lives might well be so far beyond our normal operating conditions that they fall beyond the scope of ethics.

The last case is interesting. For it raises this question: Might we not actually find ourselves in circumstances so far beyond our normal operating conditions that ethics doesn't apply, much as someone could actually throw a household thermometer into liquid helium? After all, it is sadly all too easy to imagine how someone might end up choosing whether to kill one innocent to save a billion: it seems physically possible for someone to end up in that position. It seems deeply troubling to suppose that some people end up in circumstances that go beyond the presuppositions in the moral law.

I think Christians have reason based on revelation to think this doesn't actually ever happen. The moral law is also embodied in revelation, and revelation presents itself as a guide to us in all the vicissitudes of life. But note that even if nobody ends up in circumstances that go beyond the presuppositions of the moral law, going beyond these presuppositions could be physically possible but for God's providential protection. A case of choosing whether to kill one innocent to save a billion may be like that: God makes sure we're not tried beyond the edge of ethics.

But what could one say without revelation?

Of course, the above line of thought fits best either with (a) divine command metaethics or (b) natural law metaethics on which what grounds ethical truths is our nature and an Aristotelian metaphysics of human beings on which it makes sense to ask what our normal operating conditions are. All this won't be an issue given a utilitarian or perhaps even Kantian metaethics. So that limits the applicability of the line of thought. But if we do find plausible the Aristotelian metaphysics and a natural law metaethics, then I think we should take seriously the worry that sometimes an analytic philosopher's ethics examples will go too far beyond our normal operating conditions. An argument for the above line of thought, and hence indirectly for either (a) or (b), is given by the apparently insuperable difficulties in ethics when one supposes that one's actions affect an infinite number of people.

A quick heuristic for testing conjunctive accounts

Suppose someone proposes an account of some concept A in conjunctive form:

• x is a case of A if and only if x is a case of A₁ and of A₂ and ... of A_n.

It may seem initially plausible to you that anything that is a case of A is a case of A₁,...,A_n. There is a very quick and simple heuristic for whether you should be convinced. Ask yourself:

• Suppose we can come up with a case where it's merely a coincidence that x is a case of A₁,A₂,...,A_n. Am I confident that x is still a case of A then?

In most cases the answer will be negative, and this gives you good reason to doubt the initial account. And to produce a counterexample, likely all you need to do is to think up some case where it's merely a coincidence that A₁,A₂,...,A_n are satisfied. But even if you can't think of a counterexample, there is a good chance that you will no longer be convinced of the initial account as soon as you ask the coincidence question. In any case, if the answer to the coincidence question is negative, then the initial account is only good if there is no way for the conditions to hold coincidentally. And so now the proponent of the account owes us a reason to think that the conditions cannot hold coincidentally. The onus is on the proponent, because for any conditions the presumption is surely that they can hold coincidentally.

Consider for instance someone who offers a complicated account of knowledge:

• x knows p if and only if (i) x believes p; (ii) p is true; (iii) x is justified in believing p; (iv) some complicated further condition holds.

Without thinking through the details of the complicated further condition, ask the coincidence question. If there were a way for (i)-(iv) to hold merely coincidentally, would I have any confidence that this is a case of knowledge? I suspect that the answer is going to be negative, unless (iv) is something weaselly like "(i)-(iii) hold epistemically non-aberrantly". And once we have a negative answer to the coincidence question, then we conclude that the account of knowledge is only good if there is no way for the conditions to hold coincidentally. So now we can search for a counterexample by looking for cases of coincidental satisfaction, or we can turn the tables on the proponent of the account of knowledge by asking for a reason to think that (i)-(iv) cannot hold coincidentally.

Most proposed accounts crumble under this challenge. Just about the only account I know that doesn't is:

• x commits adultery with y if and only if (i) x or y is married; (ii) x is not married to y; (iii) x and y have sex.

Here I answer the coincidence question in the positive: even if (i)-(iii) are merely coincidentally true (e.g., x believes that he is married to y but due to mistaken identity is married to someone else), it's adultery.

A quick way to question conjunctive accounts

Suppose someone proposes a philosophical account of the form:

• x is F if and only if x is G₁ and x is G₂ and x is G₃.

There is a quick way to question this that I think works most of the time. Just query the proponent: "What if the three conditions on the right hand side are satisfied merely coincidentally?"

The proponent can only give one of two answers while maintaining the biconditional: "Yes, x is still F when the conditions are satisfied merely coincidentally" or "The conditions are of such a nature that they cannot be satisfied merely coincidentally."

But it is implausible that that a coincidental satisfaction of conditions should suffice for a natural concept. Thus, if coincidental satisfaction of the conditions is sufficient for x to be F, pretty likely Fness is a stipulative rather than natural concept.

On the other hand, if the proponent insists that the conditions were so crafted that they cannot be satisfied coincidentally, it is likely that one of two possibilities is the case. The first is that the proponent lacks philosophical imagination, and you just need to think a little bit about how to make the conditions be satisfied coincidentally, and then you'll have a counterexample on hand. Just reflect a bit on Gettier-type cases, and if you're clever you should be able to find something. The second possibility is that the conditions are weaselly by including something like "relevantly" or "non-aberrantly". Here is an example of weaselly conditions:

• x knows p if and only if p is true and x believes p and x is justified in believing p and the anti-Gettier condition is met for x with respect to p.

These conditions cannot be satisfied coincidentally because the anti-Gettier condition is telling us that the first three conditions are satisfied non-coincidentally. But of course this is weaselly, since we aren't told at all about the kind of non-coincidentally that's required. Every coincidence is a non-coincidence from some point of view. So, really, such weaselly conditions need to tell us not just that the conditions are satisfied non-coincidentally, but that they are satisfied relevantly non-coincidentally.

Moreover, in the above example there is a pretty good chance that the weaselly final condition entails the other three. For what it says is basically that the other three conditions are satisfied in an un-Gettiered way! I think this isn't uncommon with weaselly conditions.

Note: In the example, one could try to formulate the weaselly condition as the denial of Gettiering: "and x is not Gettiered with respect to p". Then the weaselly condition wouldn't entail the other three. But then the resulting conditions would be too strict. For suppose that x has two sources of data on p. One source gives knowledge. The other gives Gettiered knowledge. Then x knows p but x is Gettiered with respect to p.

Philosophical accounts whose right hand sides are of the form

• x is F if and only if ∃y(G₁(x,y) and G₂(x,y) and G₃(x,y))

can use the quantification to avoid coincidentality sometimes, but often are subject to a similar criticism.