Instrumental and non-instrumental goods

Aristotle writes at times as if the fact that something is non-instrumentally good for one makes it a greater good than merely instrumental goods. That’s surely false. Among the non-instrumental goods are many quite trivial goods: knowing how many blades of grass there are on one’s front lawn, enjoying a quick game of Space Invaders, etc.

What am I "really"?

What am I? A herring-eater, a husband, a badminton player, a philosopher, a father, a Canadian, a six-footer and a human are all correct answers. There is an ancient form of the “What is x?” question where we are looking for a “central” answer, and of course “a human” is usually taken to be that one. What makes for that answer being central?

Sometimes the word “essential” is thrown in: I am essentially human. But what does that mean? In contemporary analytic jargon, it just means that I cannot exist without being human. But the “central” answer to “What am I?” is not just an answer that states a property that I cannot lack. There are, after all, many such properties essential in such a way that do not answer the question. “Someone conceived in 1972” and “Someone in a world where 2+2=4” attribute properties I cannot lack, but are not the central answers.

So the sense of the “What am I centrally, really, deep-down, essentially?” question isn’t just modal. What is it?

Here is a start.

1. Necessarily, I am good and a human if and only if I am a good human.

But the same is not true for any other attribute besides “human” among those of the first paragraph. I can be good and a badminton player while not being a good badminton player, and I can be a good herring-eater without being good and a herring-eater. And I have no idea what it is to be a good six-footer, but perhaps the fact that I am a quarter of an inch short of six feet right now makes me not be one. (In some cases one direction may hold. It may be that if I am good and a human, then I am a good human.)

So our initial account of what is being asked for is that we are asking for an attribute F such that:

2. Necessarily, x is a good F if and only if x is good.

But that’s not quite right. For:

3. Necessarily, I am good and a virtuous human if and only if I am a good virtuous human.

And yet “a virtuous human” would not be the answer to the ancient “What am I centrally, really, deep-down, essentially?” question even if I were in fact a virtuous human.

But perhaps we can do better. The necessary biconditional (2) holds in the case “virtuous human”, but in a kind of trivial way: “a good virtuous human” is repetition. I think that, as often, we need to pass from a modal to a hyperintensional characterization. Consider that not only is (1) true, but also:

4. Necessarily, if I am human, what it is for me to be good is for me to be a good human.

In other words, if I am a human, being a good human explains my being good. On the other hand, even if I were a virtuous human, my being a good virtuous human would not explain my being good. For redundancy is to be avoided in explanation, and “good virtuous human” is redundant.

Thus, I propose that:

5. x is “centrally, really, deep-down, essentially” F just in case what it is for x to be good is for x to be a good F.

In other words, that which I am centrally, really, deep-down and essentially is that which sets the norms for me to be good simpliciter.

Objection 1: Some things are “centrally” electrons, but something’s being good at electronicity is absurd.

Response: I deny that it’s absurd. It’s just that all the electrons we meet are good at electronicity.

Objection 2: “Good” is attributive, and hence there is no such thing as being good simpliciter.

Response: “Good” is attributive in the sense that the schema

6. x is good and x is F if and only if x is a good F

is not generally logically valid. But some instances of a schema can be logically valid even if the schema is not logically valid in general.

The right can be derived from the good

There is a way to connect the right and wrong with the good and bad:

1. An action is right (respectively, wrong) if and only if it is noninstrumentally good (respectively, bad) to do it.

This is compatible with there being cases where it is bad for one to do the right thing. Thus, refraining from stealing the money that one would need to sign up for a class on virtue is right and noninstrumentally good, but if the class is really effective then stealing the money might be instrumentally good for one, though noninstrumentally ba.

I think (1) is something that everyone should accept. Even consequentialists can and should accept (1) (though utilitarian consequentialists have too shallow an axiology to make (1) true). But natural law theorists might add a further claim to (1): the left-hand-side is true because the right-hand-side is true.

The title of this post contradicts the title of another recent post, but the contents do not.

The right cannot be derived from the good

Consider the following thesis that both Kantians, utilitarians and New Natural Law thinkers will agree on:

1. All facts about rightness and wrongness can be derived from descriptive facts, facts about non-rightness value, and a small number of fundamental abstract moral principles.

The restriction to non-rightness good and bad is to avoid triviality. By “rightness value” here, I mean only the value that an action or character has in virtue of its being right or wrong to the extent that it is.

I don’t have a good definition of “abstract moral principle”, but I want them to be highly general principles about moral agency such as “Choose the greater over the lesser good”, “Do not will the evil”, etc.

I think (1) is false.

Consider this:

2. It is not wrong for the government to forcibly and non-punitively take 20% of your lifetime income, but it is wrong for the government to forcibly and non-punitively take one of your kidneys.

I don’t think we can derive (2) in accordance with the strictures in (1). If a kidney were a lot more valuable than 20% of lifetime income, we would have some hope of deriving (2) from descriptive facts, non-rightness value facts, and abstract moral principles, for we might have some abstract moral principle prohibiting the government from forcibly and non-punitively taking something above some value. But a kidney is not a lot more valuable than 20% of lifetime income. Indeed, if it would cost you 20% of your lifetime income to prevent the destruction of one of your kidneys, it need not be unreasonable for you to refuse to pay. Indeed, it seems that either 20% of lifetime income is incommensurable with a kidney, or in some cases it is more valuable than a kidney.

If loss of a kidney were to impact one’s autonomy significantly more than loss of 20% of your lifetime income, then again there would be some hope for a derivation of (2). But whether loss of a kidney is more of an autonomy impact than loss of 20% of income will differ from person to person.

One might suppose that among the small number of fundamental abstract moral principles one will have some principles about respect for bodily integrity. I doubt it, though. Respect for bodily integrity is an immensely complex area of ethics, and it is very unlikely that it can be encapsulated in a small number of abstract moral principles. Respect for bodily integrity differs in very complex ways depending on the body part and the nature of the relationship between the agent and the patient.

I think counterexamples to (1) can be multiplied.

I should note that the above argument fails against divine command theories. Divine command theorists will say that about rightness and wrongness are identified with descriptive facts about what God commands, and these facts can be very rich and hence include enough data to determine (2). For the argument against (1) to work, the “descriptive facts” have to be more like the facts of natural science than like facts about divine commands.

Two versions of the guise of the good thesis

According to the guise of the good thesis, one always acts for the sake of an apparent good. There is a weaker and a stronger version of this:

• Weak: Whenever you act, you act for an end that you perceive is good.

• Strong: Whenever you act, you act for an end, and every end you act for you perceive as good.

For the strong version to have any plausibility, “good” must include cases of purely instrumental goodness.

I think there is still reason to be sceptical of the strong version.

Case 1: There is some device which does something useful when you trigger it. It is triggered by electrical activity. You strap it on to your arm, and raise your arm, so that the electrical activity in your muscles triggers the device. Your raising your arm has the arm going up as an end, but that end is not perceived as good, but merely neutral. All you care about is the electrical activity in your muscles.

Case 2: Back when they were dating in high school, Bob promised to try his best to bake a nine-layer chocolate cake for Alice’s 40th birthday. Since then, Bob and Alice have had a falling out, and hate each other’s guts. Moreover, Alice and all her guests hate chocolate. But Alice doesn’t release Bob from his promise. Bob tries his best to bake the cake in order to fulfill his promise, and happens to succeed. In trying to bake the cake, Bob acted for the end of producing a cake. But producing the cake was worthless, since no one would eat it. The only value was in the trying, since that was the fulfillment of his promise.

In both cases, it is still true that the agent acts for a good end—the useful triggering of the device and the production of the cake. But in both cases it seems they are also acting for a worthless end. Thus the cases seem to fit with the weak but not the strong guise of the good thesis.

I was going to leave it at this. But then I thought of a way to save the strong guise of the good thesis. Success is valuable as such. When I try to do something, succeeding at it has value. So the arm going up or the cake being produced are valuable as necessary parts of the success of one’s action. So perhaps every end of your action is trivially good, because it is good for your action to succeed, and the end is a (constitutive, not causal) means to success.

This isn’t quite enough for a defense of the strong thesis. For even if the success is good, it does not follow that you perceive the success as good. You might subscribe to an axiological theory on which success is not good in general, but only success at something good.

But perhaps we can say this. We have a normative power to endow some neutral things with value by making them our ends. And in fact the only way to act for an end that does not have any independent value is by exercising that normative power. And exercising that normative power involves your seeing the thing you’re endowing with value as valuable. And maybe the only way to raise your arm or for Bob to bake the cake in the examples is by exercising the normative power, and doing so involves seeing the end as good. Maybe. This has some phenomenological plausibility and it would be nice if it were true, because the strong guise of the good thesis is pretty plausible to me.

If this story is right, it adds a nuance to the ideas here.

Reducing goods to reasons?

In my previous post I cast doubt on reducing moral reasons to goods.

What about the other direction? Can we reduce goods to reasons?

The simplest story would be that goods reduce to reasons to promote them.

But there seem to be goods that give no one a reason to promote them. Consider the good fact that there exist (in the eternalist sense: existed, exist now, will exist, or exist timelessly) agents. No agent can promote the fact that there exist agents: that good fact is part of the agent’s thrownness, to put it in Heideggerese.

Maybe, though, this isn’t quite right. If Alice is an agent, then Alice’s existence is a good, but the fact that some agent or other exists isn’t a good as such. I’m not sure. It seems like a world with agents is better for the existence of agency, and not just better for the particular agents it has. Adding another agent to the world seems a lesser value contribution than just ensuring that there is agency at all. But I could be wrong about that.

Another family of goods, though, are necessary goods. That God exists is good, but it is necessarily true. That various mathematical theorems are beautiful is necessarily true. Yet no one has reason to promote a necessary truth.

But perhaps we could have a subtler story on which goods reduce not just to reasons to promote them, but to reasons to “stand for them” (taken as the opposite of “standing against them”), where promotion is one way of “standing for” a good, but there are others, such as celebration. It does not make sense to promote the existence of God, the existence of agents, or the Pythagorean theorem, but celebrating these goods makes sense.

However, while it might be the case that something is good just in case an agent should “stand for it”, it does not seem right to think that it is good to the extent that an agent should “stand for it”. For the degree to which an agent should stand for a good is determined not just by the magnitude of the good, but the agent’s relationship to the good. I should celebrate my children’s accomplishments more than strangers’.

Perhaps, though, we can modify the story in terms of goods-for-x, and say that G is good-for-x to the extent that x should stand for G. But that doesn’t seem right, either. I should stand for justice for all, and not merely to the degree that justice-for-all is good-for-me. Moreover, there goods that are good for non-agents, while a non-agent does not have a reason to do anything.

I love reductions. But alas it looks to me like reasons and goods are not reducible in either direction.

Towards a great chain of being

Here is one way to generate a great chain of agency: y is a greater agent than x if for every major type of good that x pursues, y pursues it, too, but not vice versa.

Take for instance the cat and the human. The cat pursues major types of good such as nutrition, reproduction, play, comfort, health, life, truth, and (to a limited degree) social interaction. The human pursues all of these, but additionally pursues virtue, beauty, and union with God. Thus the human is a greater agent than the cat.

Is it the case that humans are at the top of the great chain of agency on earth?

This is a difficult question to answer for at least two reasons. The first reason is that it is difficult to identify the relevant level of generality in my weaselly phrase “major type of good”. The oak pursues photosynthetic nutrition, the dung beetle does its thing, while we pursue other forms of nutrition. Do the three count as pursuing different “major types” of good? I want to say that all these are one major type of good, but I don’t know how to characterize it. Maybe we can say something like this: Good itself is not a genus but there are highest genera of good, and by “major type” we mean these highest genera. (I am not completely sure that all the examples in my second paragraph are of highest genera.)

The second reason the question is difficult is this. The cat is unable to grasp virtue as a type of good. A cat who had a bit more scientific skill might be able to see an instrumental value in the human virtue—could see the ways that it helps members of communities gain cat-intelligible goods like nutrition, reproduction, health, life, etc. But the cat wouldn’t see the distinctive way virtue in itself is good. Indeed, it is not clear that the cat would be able to figure out that virtue is itself a major type of good, no matter how much scientific skill the cat had. Similarly, it is very plausible that there are major types of good that are beyond human knowledge. If we saw beings pursuing those types of good, we would likely notice various instrumental benefits of the pursuit—for the pursuit of various kinds of good seems interwoven in the kinds of evolved beings we find on earth (pursuing one good often helps with getting others)—but we just wouldn’t see the behavior as the pursuit of a major type of good. Like the cat scientist observing our pursuit of virtue, we would reduce the good being pursued to the goods intelligible to us.

Thus, if octopi pursue goods beyond our ken, we wouldn’t know it unless we could talk to octopi and they told us that what they were pursuing in some behavior was a major type of good other than the ones we grasp—though of course, we would still be unable to grasp what was good in it. And as it happens the only beings on earth we can talk to are humans.

All that said, it still seems a reasonable hypothesis that any major type of good that is pursued by non-human organisms on earth are pursued by us.

The Fifth Way, remixed even more

In the previous two posts (here and here) I offered interpretations or remixes of Aquinas’s Fourth and Fifth ways read as ways of showing how a theistic Aristotelianism solves a pressing problem that the basic Aristotelian metaphysics cannot solve.

Here I want to do again for the Fifth Way, but now I will depart further from the text, and so while the previous two posts might have been interpretations, this one is much more of just a remix of the Fifth Way, with some ingredients from my version of the Fourth Way thrown in.

On Aristotelian metaphysics, each substance aims at its own good. The good of a substance is defined by the substance’s form, and the form points the substance at that good. But this good is just an internal good of the substance. Think of this internal good as akin to MacIntyre’s internal goods of a practice. The directedness at the internal goods is largely a matter of a priori metaphysical reasoning about substance. But now let’s go back to the things themselves—for, after all, the Five Ways are supposed to be empirical. If we do that, we come across two facts I want to stress.

First, the internal goods of substances tend to be intelligible to us as goods independently of the forms of these substances. Squirrels grow and reproduce. We understand growing and reproduction as valuable features. Imagine that squirrels instead characteristically scratched themselves to near-death. Even if their nature specified such self-scratching as their end, without a further more comprehensive story such self-scratching wouldn’t be intelligible to us as a good. Now, it is true that we tend to judge things by ourselves: it is also our human good to grow and to reproduce, and so it is easy for us to recognize that as good in squirrels. But I do not think we should say that when we judge squirrels’ growth and reproduction as a good thing independently of the form of the squirrel we are simply mistaken—and yet if we were just imposing merely human standards, we would be mistaken.

We might make the point as follows. It is good for a squirrel to fulfill its form by growing and reproducing. But it is also good, in a different sense of “good”, that the squirrel’s form includes growth and reproduction. This different sense of “good” is missing from basic Aristotelianism, a point central to my reading of the Fourth Way.

So we have something that calls for an explanation: Why is the squirrel’s form aimed at something that is actually good in this further sense?

And here is a related and but less abstract question. The teleology of a squirrel harmonizes to a significant extent with the goods of other species. We have an ecology. A “circle of life”.

The squirrel’s activity, thus, is not only directed at its internal good, and that internal good is intelligible as a good apart from its internal form, but the pursuit of that internal good harmonizes with the goods of other things in nature. This coordination between the ends of different species is something that basic Aristotelianism has a serious difficulty explaining.

There are thus two senses in which there are external goods found in nature: first, the internal goods are themselves typically intelligible as goods independently of the forms that define them; second, the end-directed activities of the organisms are good for the ecology at large. Both of these call for an explanation, and Aquinas’ suggested explanation seems excellent: “Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end.”

Note that the ecological dimensions might be explained evolutionarily, as long as we have an explanation of the coincidence between the normative and the statistical, a coincidence that forms the heart of my previous reading/remix of the Fifth Way.

The Fourth Way, remixed

I’m playing with a reading—or perhaps remix—of Aquinas’ Fourth and Fifth Ways as giving a theistic solution to a problem that non-theistic Aristotelianism has no solution to. In this post, I will discuss the Fourth Way, and in the next, the Fifth.

The Fourth Way starts with the principle that degreed predicates, predicates where it makes sense to talk of “more” and “less”, are predicated in comparison to a maximal case. Infamously, however, given modern science, Aquinas’ down-to-earth illustration of that principle, namely that heat is predicated in comparison to the maximal case—allegedly, fire—is not not an example of the principle, but is actually a counterexample to it. There just is no such thing as maximum heat.

But nevermind heat. Aquinas wants to apply the Fourth Way to goodness. Now, the Aristotelian system that he has adopted already has an account of the good: a thing is good to the extent that it fulfills its proper function, a proper function that is defined by the thing’s form. Note that this account, too, does not match Aquinas’ gradation principle: unlike in Plato, forms are not self-predicating, so rather than the Form of the Sheep being the most ovine thing possible, the Aristotelian form of the sheep is immanent in each sheep, directing each sheep to an ovine perfection that no object actually meets.

But the Aristotelian account of the good is incomplete. While it allows us to compare the goodness of things within a kind—the four-legged sheep better fulfills its form than a three-legged one—there are also meaningful value comparisons between kinds. When Jesus says that we are “worth more than many sparrows” (Mt. 10:31), what he is saying is entirely commonsense. The human has much more good than the sparrow. The sparrow has more good than the worm. And the worm has more good than a mushroom. There really is a something like a great chain of being in reality. These comparisons, however, are not simply grounded in the immanent forms of things. The form of the worm need make no reference to mushrooms, nor that of a mushroom to worms.

Note that these interspecies value comparisons not only cannot be read off from the immanent forms, but sometimes they are in a kind of tension with the immanent forms. An earthworm’s form limits the neural development of the worm. Were the worm to grow a brain as big as a dog’s, it wouldn’t be able to burrow as well. And a mushroom that walked around would fail to be properly rooted as a mushroom ought.

Interspecies value comparison is a genuine problem that Aristotelianism faces, though some Aristotelians are willing to bite the bullet and deny the meaningfulness of such comparisons. Platonism did not face this problem—it could just talk of varying degrees of participation in the Form fo the Good—but Platonism lacked a satisfactory solution to the problem of intraspecies comparisons (Platonism’s solution would be to posit a self-exemplified Form for each species, which would involve the absurd idea that there is a perfect Sheep, which somehow manages to be both a sheep and immaterial, and we have all sorts of silly questions about whether it is male or female, what color it is, whether it has an even or an odd number of hairs, etc.)

A theistic Aristotelianism, however, has a solution to the problem of interspecies value comparison, in addition to non-theistic Aristotelianism’s solution to the intraspecies’ problem. There is a great chain of being defined by the ways in which the various species participate in the being that has all perfections. The human exemplifies intellection, the sparrow approximates omnipresence through rapid movement and exemplifies a significant degree of intelligence, the worm approximates omnipresence less well and has a lower degree of intelligence, while the mushroom at least exemplifies life. What grounds the goodness of these qualities independently of the forms of the things they are found in, and what makes for their axiological directionality (more intelligence is better than less), is then comparison to the maximal case, namely God.

Note that while this gives something like a great chain of being, it need not exactly be a great chain of being. We should not seek after a strictly total ordering—a partial ordering matches intuition better.

I don’t have a knock-down argument that theistic Aristotelianism is the only good Aristotelian solution to the problem of interspecies comparison. But it is a very good solution, and so once we have accepted basic Aristotelianism, it gives us significant reason to adopt the theistic version.

An earlier, more compact, version of this argument is here.

Counting good and bad things

People sometimes wonder, perhaps in connection with the problem of evil, whether there is in total more good than evil in the world. The connection with the problem of evil is somewhat tenuous, of course. Even if it were agreed there is more good than evil, it could still be argued that there is gratuitous evil, inconsistent with the existence of God. And even if there is a God, there could presently be more evil than good, if, say, the evil is justified in connection with future good.

All that said, here is a question related to the question whether there is more good than evil:

• Are there more good things than bad things in the world?

I will argue that on two different takes on “things”, there are vastly more good things than bad—or even bad or neutral—things in the world as we know it. Even if we can generalize from the world as we know it, this still does not show that there is more good than evil: perhaps there are more goods, but the bad things are so very bad that the total evil is greater than the total good. Nonetheless, I think the answer has evidential bearing on the existence of God, because it would intuitively be at least a little bit more likely for there to be vastly more good things than bad or neutral things in the observed part of the world if God existed than if God didn’t exist.

On to the argument. On a first take, “things” are substances. Now, I think the best story about substance is a neo-Aristotelian one on which in the part of the world we collectively know, the substances are the organisms and the fundamental physical entities.

Now, our three best theories as to what the fundamental physical entities are is that they are:

1. particles,

2. global entities like fields and the wavefunction of the universe, or

3. particles and global entities.

Suppose that the correct answer is (a) or (c). Then in the known universe, the vast majority of substances are particles. There may be a lot of organisms in the world, but there are way more particles. And the number of global entities, like fields and the wavefunction, on our best theories is in the single digits. But every particle is good: it perfectly fulfills its nature, which is to dance its dance according to the beautiful mathematical laws of the universe. So, on (a) and (c), the vast majority of substances are good. (Maybe good in a very minor way.)

Suppose that the correct answer is (b). Then the substances of the known universe consist of organisms and probably a handful of global entities like fields or the wavefunction. The organisms outnumber the global entities so much that we can neglect the global entities and, besides, the global entities are good, for the same reason the particles are. Among the known organisms there are some that are bad. The clearest cases are a sizeable proportion of humans.

Whether there are any bad non-human organisms on earth (essentialy the only place we know of with organisms) depends on whether we count instrumental value. For if we limit ourselves to intrinsic badness, plausibly all organisms that aren’t persons are good (and there are many good persons), and non-personal organisms vastly outnumber personal ones. If badness (and goodness), however, includes instrumental assessment, then there are bad organisms. But how many? There may be some species most of whose members are bad: perhaps some mosquito species are like that. But it seems very plausible that such species form a very small portion of the whole, and that the vast majority of species are such that the vast majority of their members are good. (Quick thought experiment: Suppose by pressing a button you could wipe out a randomly chosen non-human species? Surely it would be a very, very bad idea to press the button.) So, it seems quite plausible that the vast majority of organisms are good.

On a second take, “things” include events in addition to substances. Well, now, the vast majority of events in the known universe seem to be purely physical events that are neither good nor bad for living things, and they do no harm to non-living things either. But they are an intrinsically good part of the dance of nature according to beautiful mathematical laws. So, it seems, the vast majority of events is good.

State promotion of supernatural goods

Should a state promote supernatural goods like salvation? Here is a plausible argument, assuming the existence of supernatural goods:

1. Supernatural goods are good.

2. Any person or organization that can promote a good without detracting from any other good or promoting any bad should promote the good.

3. The state is an organization.

4. Thus, other things being equal, the state ought to promote supernatural goods when it can.

Here is a second one:

5. If a state can contribute to the innocent pleasure of someone (whether inside or outside the state) with no cost to anyone, it should.

6. Humans receiving supernatural goods gives the angels an innocent pleasure.

7. So, the state should promote human salvation when it can do so at no cost.

One might think that the above arguments show that we should have a theocracy. But there are two reasons why that does not follow.

First, it might be that the state is not an entity that can promote human salvation, or at least not one that can do so without cost to its primary defining tasks. This could be for reasons such as that any attempt by the state to promote supernatural goods is apt to misfire or that any state promotion of supernatural goods would have to come at the cost of natural goods (such as freedom or justice). I kind of suspect something of this sort is true, and hence that the conclusions of the arguments above are merely trivially true.

Second, and more interestingly to me, a theocratic view would hold that it is a part of the state’s special
duties of care towards its citizens that it promote their salvation. But the above arguments do not show that.

Indeed, the first argument applies to any organization, and I suspect the second one does as well. A chess club needs to promote salvation, other things being equal, perhaps every bit as much as the state. Free goods should always be promoted for all. (Worry: Am I too utilitarian here?)

Moreover, the state’s special defining duties of care are towards the state’s citizens. But it does not follow from the above arguments that the state has any special reason to promote the supernatural goods of its citizens. The arguments only show that the state, like any other organization, has a general duty to promote the supernatural goods of everyone (other things being equal).

Double Effect and symbolic actions

There is an intrinsic value to standing against evil. One way to do that is to intentionally act to reduce the evil. But that’s not the only way. Another way of standing against evil is to protest it even when one reasonably expects one’s protest to have no effect. When we see standing against evil as something of significant intrinsic value, then sometimes it will even make sense to stand against evil even when we foresee that doing so will unintentionally increase the evil. It can be legitimate to protest an abuse of power even if one foresees that such protest will lead to further abuses of power, such as a crackdown on the protesters. Of course, prudence is needed, and one must keep proportionality in mind: if the abuses of power inspired by the protest are likely to be much worse than the ones being protested, it is better not to protest. Another way to stand against evil is to punish it. Again, this can make sense even when one does not expect the punishment to reduce the evil (e.g., perhaps the evil is a one-off and it is unlikely that there will be any further temptations to deter people from).

Similarly, there is an intrinsic value to standing for good. A central way to stand for good is to act to increase the good. But, again, it’s not the only way. Admiring, rewarding and praising also are ways of standing for good, even when they are not expected to increase the good.

The actions that constituting standing for good or against evil but that are not intentional acts to increase the good or reduce the evil may be called symbolic. “Symbolic” is often used as a way to downplay the importance of something. That is a mistake: the symbolic can be of great importance. Moreover, “symbolic” suggests a social dimension that need not be relevant. When an atheist hikes alone in order to contemplate the goodness of nature, that is a way of standing for the good of nature that is symbolic in the above sense but not social. Moreover, “symbolic” suggests a certain arbitrariness of choice of symbol. But there need not be such. There is nothing arbitrary in virtue of which admiring a beautiful view is a way of symbolically standing for the good. We thus need to understand “symbolic” in a broad way that is compatible with great intrinsic value, that need not be social in nature, and need not involve arbitrary socially instituted representations.

If we do this, then here is a promising way to make the kinds of deontological views that are tied to the Principle of Double Effect plausible. On these views, certain fundamental evils are wrong to intentionally produce but may be tolerated as side-effects. But now things look puzzling. Let’s say that we can end a war by dropping a bomb on the wicked leaders in the enemy headquarters in a busy city, and which bomb will also kill and maim thousands of innocents in the surrounding buildings, or one can end the war by kidnapping and maiming the enemy leader’s innocent child. The attack on the child is wrong while the attack on the headquarters is permissible on this deontological ethics, but that may just feel wrong. But if we see symbolic standing for good and against evil as really important, the difference becomes more plausible. In intending the maiming of the child, one is standing for evil: for it is unescapable that by intending an evil one stands for it. In refusing to maim the child, one is standing against evil. But in dropping the bomb, the mere foresight of the plight of thousands of innocents does not make one be standing for evil. One can still count as standing against evil by intending to kill the evildoers in the headquarters.

It is tempting to think that when standing against evil does not actually reduce evil, as in the case of the refusal to maim the child, the the action is merely symbolic, and moral weight of the obligation is low. But that is a mistake: “merely” is a poor choice of words when connected with “symbolic”. Symbolic actions can be of great import indeed.

Non-instrumental pursuits and uncaused causes

Here’s a curious fact: It is one thing to pursue something because it is a non-instrumental good and another to pursue it as a non-instrumental good, or to pursue it non-instrumentally. A rich eccentric might offer me $100 for pursuing some non-instrumental good. I might then do a Google Image search for “great art”, and spend a few seconds contemplating some painting. I would then be pursuing the good of contemplation because it is a non-instrumental good, but not as a non-instrumental good. (What if the eccentric offered to double the payment if I pursued the good non-instrumentally? My best bet would then be to just forget all about the offer and hope I end up pursuing some good non-instrumentally anyway.)

Thinking about the above suggests an important thesis: To pursue a good non-instrumentally is something positive, not merely the denial of instrumentality. Simply cutting out of the world the story about the rich eccentric and keeping my contemplation in place does not make the contemplation be pursued as a non-instrumental good. Rather, such world surgery makes the contemplation non-rational. To make the contemplation a non-instrumental pursuit of a good requires that I add something—a focus on that good in itself. We don’t get non-instrumental pursuit by simply scratching out the instrumentality, just as we don’t get an uncaused cause by just deleting its cause—rather, an uncaused cause is a cause of a different sort, and a non-instrumental pursuit is a pursuit of a different sort.

The coincidence between the right and the beneficial

One of the earliest and most important discoveries in Western philosophy was:

1. Doing the right thing is sometimes bad for you (in non-moral ways).

This precludes any easy reduction of morality to self-interest. But at the same time, the philosophers could see that:

2. Doing the right thing is usually good for you (even in non-moral ways).

This leads to an interesting problem that has occasionally been discussed, but not as much as one might hope:

3. What explains why acting morally well tends to be good for you (even in non-moral ways).

Living in accordance with one’s conscience, while having that conscience be well-formed, tends to lead to a kind attractive happiness that we can often see in people. There is that smile which reflects both a kindliness of nature and an inner joy. Why is there this harmony between the right and the beneficial?

If we were non-realists about morality, we might give an evolutionary explanation: our moral beliefs evolved to benefit us. But if we are realists about morality, then that only makes it puzzling: why is it that the true moral beliefs are the ones that tend to benefit us?

Divine command ethics has a plausible story grounded in God’s loving desire that we live under moral rules that are good for us. Natural law ethics has a different story: our natures are harmonious, and hence the many ends we have are mutually supportive. That story, of course, only shifts the problem to the more general question of the mutual support of our ends, and I suspect that this more general question cannot be answered without bringing in theism, either by positing that God is more likely to instantiate harmonious natures or that because created natures are way of participating in the God whose inner life is a harmony of love, they tend to be (or maybe even all are) harmonious.

Theism and qualia

The following six premises are logically incompatible:

1. Pain is intrinsically bad.

2. Pain is a quale.

3. Qualia are real entities.

4. All real entities are God or created by God.

5. God isn’t intrinsically bad.

6. Nothing created by God is intrinsically bad.

A theist could turn this into an argument against qualia.

I myself am inclined to deny premise (1).

Reducing the right to the good

Here is a simple reductive account of right and wrong that now seems to me to be obviously correct:

1. An action is right if and only if it is non-instrumentally wholly good; it is wrong if and only if it is non-instrumentally at least partly bad.

Think, after all, how easily we move between saying that someone acted badly and that someone acted wrongly.

If (1) is a correct reduction, then we can reduce facts about right and wrong to facts about the value of particular kinds of things, namely actions.

By the way, if we accept (1), then consequentialism is equivalent to the following thesis:

2. An action is non-instrumentally good if and only if it is on balance (instrumentally and non-instrumentally) best.

But it is quite strange to think that there be an entity that is non-instrumentally good if and only if it is on balance best.

Van Inwagen on evil

Peter van Inwagen argues that because a little less evil would always serve God’s ends just as well, there is no minimum to the amount of evil needed to achieve God’s ends, and hence the arguer from evil cannot complain that God could have achieved his ends with less evil. Van Inwagen gives a nice analogy of a 10-year prison sentence: clearly, he thinks, a 10-year sentence can be just even if 10 years less a day would achieve all the purposes of the punishment just as well.

I am not convinced about either the punishment or the evil case. Perhaps the judge really shouldn’t choose a punishment where a day less would serve the purposes just as well. I imagine that if we graph the satisfaction of the purposes of punishment against the amount of punishment, we initially get an increase, then a level area, and then eventually a drop-off. Van Inwagen is thinking that the judge is choosing a punishment in the level area. But maybe instead the judge should choose a punishment in the increase area, since only then will it be the case that a lower punishment would serve the purposes of the punishment less well. The down-side of choosing the punishment in that area is that a higher punishment would serve the purposes of the punishment better. But perhaps there is a moral imperative to sacrifice the purposes of punishment to some degree, in the name of not punishing more than is necessary. Mercy is more important than retribution, etc.

Similarly, perhaps, God should choose to permit an amount of evil that sacrifices some of his ends (ends other than the minimization of evil), in order to ensure that the amount of evil that he permits is such that any decrease in the evil would result in a decrease in the satisfaction of God’s other ends. If van Inwagen is right about there not being sharp cut-offs, then this may require God to choose to permit an amount of evil such that more evil would have served God’s other ends better.

The above fits with a picture on which decrease of evil takes a certain priority over the increase of good.

Generating and destroying

Thanks to emails with a presentist-inclining graduate student, I have come to realize that on eternalism there seems to be a really interesting disanalogy between the generation of an item and its destruction, at least in our natural order.

Insofar as you generate an item, it seems you do two things:

• Cause the item to have a lower temporal boundary at some time t₁.

• Cause the item to exist simpliciter.

But insofar as you destroy an item, you do only one thing:

• Cause the item to have an upper temporal boundary at some time t₂.

You certainly don’t cause the item not to exist simpliciter, since if an item is posited to exist simpliciter, it exists simpliciter (a tautology, of course). It is a conceptual impossibility to act on an existing item and make it not exist, though of course you can act on an item existing-at-t₁ and make it not exist-at-t₂ and you can counteract the causal activity of something that would otherwise have caused an item to exist. However, existing-at-t isn’t existing but a species of location, just as existing-in-Paris isn’t existing but a species of location.

I suppose one could imagine a world where generation always involves two separate causes: one causes existence simpliciter and another selects when the object exists. In that world there would be an analogy between the when-cause and the destroyer.

(Maybe our world is like that with respect to substance. Maybe only God causes existence simpliciter, while we only cause the temporal location of the substances that God causes to exist?)

I suppose one could see in all this an instance of a deep asymmetry between good and evil.

Practice-internal goods

I’m hereby instituting a game: the breathing game. My score in the game ranges from 0 to 10. I get 0 points if I hold my breath for a minute. Otherwise, my score equals the number of breaths I took during the minute, up to ten (if I took more than eight breaths, my score is still ten).

It is good to do well at games. And I am really good at the breathing game, as are all other healthy people. For every game, there is a practice-internal good of victory. Thus, by choosing to play the breathing game, my life is enriched by a new practice-internal good, the good of winning the breathing game over and over. And of course there is an immense practice-external good at stake: this is a game where victory is life, as the Jem’Hadar say.

There is something absurd about the idea that I have significantly enhanced my life simply by deciding to be a player of the breathing game and thus attaining victory about 1440 times a day.

It is widely thought that there can be significant practice-internal goods in practices we institute. The breathing game’s practice-internal good of victory is not significant. Why not? Maybe because the game hasn’t caught on: I am the only one playing it. (Everybody is else is just breathing.) But if the good of victory would become significant were the game to catch on, then we have good consequentialist reason to promote the breathing game as widely as we can, so that as many people as possible could get a significant good 1440 times a day, thereby brighting up many drab lives. But that’s silly. It’s not that easy to improve the lot of humankind.

An intuitive thing to say about the breathing game is that it’s not very challenging. Healthy people can win without even trying. It’s a lot harder to get a score of 0 than a score of 10. The lack of challenge certainly makes the game less fun. But fun is a practice-external good. Does the lack of challenge make the practice-internal good less?

Maybe, but I am dubious. Challenge really seems rather external, while practice-internal goods are supposed to be instituted. Maybe, though, the story is this. When I institute a game, I am filling out a template provided by a broader social practice, the practing of playing games, and the broader social practice includes a rule that says that unchallenging victory is not worth much. I can’t override that rule while still counting as instituting a game.

That may be. But if the larger social practice, the one of games in general, is itself one that we have instituted, then we have good moral reason to institute another social practice, a practice of shgames. The practice of shgames is just like the practice of games, except that the practice-internal good of victory is stipulated as being a great good even when victory comes easily. We have very good reason to institute the practice of shgames, as this would allow everybody to play the breathing shgame (which has the same rules as the breathing game), and thus enrich their lives by 1440 valuable victories a day.

That’s absurd, too.

Here’s where the line of thought is leading me: We have significant limits on our normative power to set the value of the practice-internal goods of the practices we create. In particular, the practice-internal goods that are entirely our creation are only of little value—like the value of victory in a game.

One might think that this is just an artifact of games and similar practices, which are not very significant practices. Perhaps in our political practices, we can institute great practice-internal goods. I don’t think so. The state can bestow a title on everyone who scores a perfect ten in the breathing game, but the state cannot by mere stipulation make that title have great value of a practice-internal sort. Otherwise, it’s too easy to create value. (One may think that the issues here are related to why the state can’t just print more money to create wealth. But I think this is quite different: the reason the state can’t just print more money to create wealth is that wealth is defined partly in terms of practice-external goods, and mere printing doesn’t affect those. But purely internal goods can be broadcast widely.)

I am not claiming that there are no great practice-internal goods. There are great internal goods in marriage, for instance. But here is my hypothesis: wherever there are great practice-internal goods, these goods derive their value from a practice we do not instituted. For instance, if there are great internal goods in marriage, that is because either we have not institute marriage or because marriage is itself the filling out of a template provided by a broader practice that we have not instituted (I think the former is the case).

If we could institute practices with great practice-internal value, we should, just for the sake of the practice-internal value. But that is wrong-headed. In fact, I think that when we institute practices, it is for the sake of goods that we are not instituting. We get the practice-internal goods, then, but they are just icing on the cake, and not a good icing even.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding practice-internal goods, though. Maybe they have the following property: they provide reasons to pursue them for those who participate in the practice, but they do not provide any reasons for those who do not participate in the practice. On this picture, one could have a great practice-internal good, one that provides very significant reasons, but it would provide no reason at all to a non-participant, and hence it would provide no reason to institute the practice. This seems wrongheaded. Only real goods provide real reasons. If practice-internal goods were to provide real reasons to the participants, they would have to be real goods. But if something—say, the institution of a practice—would result in the existence of real goods to people, that does provide a reason to bring about the something. That’s part of what is true in consequentialism. Moreover, even if one removes the absurdity of thinking that there is reason to institute the breathing game, one does not remove the absurdity of thinking that people who play the breathing game are racking up much good.

The value of communities

A men's lacrosse team has twice as many members as a basketball team. But that fact does not contribute to making a men's lacrosse team twice as valuable as a basketball team. Likewise, China as a country isn't about 500 times as valuable as Albania just because it is about 500 times as populous. This suggests that an otherwise plausible individualist theory about the value of a community is false: the theory that a community's value resides in the value it gives to individuals. For the kind of value that being on a basketball team confers to its players, being on a lacrosse team confers on twice as many; and the kind of value that being Albanian confers on its members, being Chinese confers on almost 500 times as many people. One possibility is to see the relevant goods as goods of instantiation: it is good that the values of there being a lacrosse team (or at least of a pair of lacrosse teams: a single team being pointless), there being a basketball team (or a pair of them), there being a China and there being an Albania be realized. But I think that isn't quite right. For while changing the rules of basketball to admit twice as many players to a team wouldn't automatically double the community good, doubling the number of basketball teams does seem to significantly increase the community goods by making there be twice as many basketball communities.

In fact, there seem to be three goods in the case of basketball: (a) the good of instantiation of there being basketball teams (and their playing); (b) the community good of each team; and (c) the good for each involved in these communities. Good (a) is unaffected by doubling the number of teams (unless we double from one to two, and thereby make playing possible); good (b) is doubled by doubling the number of teams; good (c) is doubled both by doubling the number of teams and by doubling the team size. Thinking about the behavior of (b) gives us good reason to think that this good does not reduce to the goods of the individuals as such.

But perhaps this reason isn't decisive. For maybe the goods of individuals can overlap, in the way that two Siamese twins seem to be able to share an organ (though the right ontology of shared organs may in the end undercut the analogy), and in such a case the goods shouldn't be counted twice even if they are had twice. For in these cases, perhaps, the numerically same good is had by two or more individuals. If you and I are both friends of John, and John flourishing, then John's flourishing contributes to your and my flourishing, but it doesn't contribute thrice over even though this flourishing is good for three--we should count overall value by goods and not by participants. Maybe. This would be a kind of middle position between the individualist and communitarian pictures of the value of community: there is a single good of type (b), but it is good by being participated in by individuals.

I don't know. I find this stuff deeply puzzling. I have strong ontological intuitions that communities don't really exist (except in a metaphorical way--which may well be importNt) that pull me towards individualist pictures, but then I see these puzzles...