The value of moral norms

Here is a very odd question that occurred to me: Is it good for there to be moral norms?

Imagine a world just like this one, except that there are no moral norms for its intelligent denizens—but nonetheless they behave as we do. They feel repelled by the idea of murder and torture, and find the life of a Mother Teresa attractive, but there are no moral truths behind these things.

Such a world would have one great advantage over ours: there would be no moral evil. That world’s Hitler and Stalin would cause just as much pain and suffering, but they wouldn’t be wicked in so doing. Given the Socratic insight that it is worse to do than to suffer evil, a vast amount of evil would disappear in such a world. At least a third of the evil in the world would be gone. Our world has three categories of evil:

I. Undergoing of natural evils

2. Undergoing of moral evils, and

3. Performance of moral evils.

The third category would be gone, and it is probably the biggest of the three. Wouldn’t that be worth it?

Here is one answer. For cooperative intelligent social animals, a belief in morality is very useful. But to live one’s life by a belief that is false seems a significant harm. Cooperative intelligent social animals in the alternative world would be constantly deceived by their belief in morality. That is a great evil. But is it as great an evil as all Category III evils taken together? I suspect it is but a small fraction of the sum of all Category III evils.

Here is a second answer. In removing moral norms, one would admittedly remove a vast category of evils, but also a vast category of goods: the performance of moral good. If we have the intuition that having moral norms is a good thing—that it would be a disappointment to learn that moral norms were an illusion—then we have to think that the performances of moral good are a very great thing indeed, one comparable to the sum of all Category III evils.

I am attracted to a combination of the two answers. But I can also see someone saying: “It doesn’t matter whether it’s worth having moral norms or not, but it is simply impossible to have cooperative intelligent social animals that believe in morality without their being under moral norms.” A Platonist may say that on the grounds that moral norms are necessary. A theist may say it on the grounds that it is contrary to the character of a perfect God to manufacture the vast deceit that would be involved in us thinking there are moral norms if there were no moral norms. These aren’t bad answers. But I still feel it’s good that there really are moral norms.

More on non-moral and moral norms

People often talk of moral norms as overriding. The paradigm kind of case seems to be like this:

1. You are N-forbidden to ϕ but morally required to ϕ,

where “N” is some norm like that of prudence or etiquette. In this case, the moral requirement of ϕing overrides the N-prohibition on ϕing. Thus, you might be rude to make a point of justice or sacrifice your life for the sake of justice.

But if there are cases like (1), there will surely also be cases where the moral considerations in favor of ϕing do not rise to the level of a requirement, but are sufficient to override the N-prohibition. In those cases, presumably:

2. You are N-forbidden to ϕ but morally permitted to ϕ.

Cases of supererogation look like that: you are morally permitted to do something contrary to prudential norms, but not required to do so.

So far so good. Moral norms can override non-moral norms in two ways: by creating a moral requirement contrary to the non-moral norms or by creating a moral permission contrary to the non-moral norms.

But now consider this. What happens if the moral considerations are at an even lower level, a level insufficient to override the N-prohibition? (E.g., what if to save someone’s finger you would need to sacrifice your arm?) Then, it seems:

3. You are N-forbidden to ϕ and not morally permitted to ϕ.

But this would be quite interesting. It would imply that in the absence of sufficient moral considerations in favor of ϕing, an N-prohibition would automatically generate a moral prohibition. But this means that the real normative upshot in all three cases is given by morality, and the N-norms aren’t actually doing any independent normative work. This suggests strongly that on such a picture, we should take the N-norms to be simply a species of moral norms.

However, there is another story possible. Perhaps in the case where the moral considerations are at too low a level to override the N-prohibition, we can still have moral permission to ϕ, but that permission no longer overrides the N-prohibition. On this story, there are two kinds of cases, in both of which we have moral permission, but in one case the moral permission comes along with sufficiently strong moral considerations to override the N-prohibition, while in the other it does not. On this story, moral requirement always overrides non-moral reasons; but whether moral considerations override non-moral considerations depends on the relative strengths of the two sets of considerations.

Still, consider this. The judgment whether moral considerations override the non-moral ones seems to be an eminently moral judgment. It is the person with moral virtue who is best suited to figuring out whether such overriding happens. But what happens if morality says that the moral considerations do not override the N-prohibition? Is that not a case of morality giving its endorsement to the N-prohibition, so that the N-prohibition would rise to the level of a moral prohibition as well? But if so, then that pushes us back to the previous story where it is reasonable to take N-considerations to be subsumed into moral considerations.

I don’t want to say that all norms are moral norms. But it may well be that all norms governing the functioning of the will are moral norms.

Nonoverriding morality

Some philosophers think that sometimes norms other than moral norms—e.g., prudential norms or norms of the meaningfulness of life—take precedence over moral norms and make permissible actions that are morally impermissible. Let F-norms be such norms.

A view where F-norms always override moral norms does not seem plausible. In the case of prudential or meaningfulness, it would point to a fundamental selfishness in the normative constitution of the human being.

So the view has to be that sometimes F-norms take precedence over moral norms, but not always. There must thus be norms which are neither F-norms nor moral norms that decide whether F-norms or moral norms take precedence. We can call these “overall norms of combination”. And it is crucial to the view that the norms of combination themselves be neither F-norms nor moral norms.

But here is an oddity. Morality already combines F-considerations and first order paradigmatically moral considerations. Consider two actions:

1. Sacrifice a slight amount of F-considerations for a great deal of good for one’s children.

2. Sacrifice an enormous amount of F-considerations for a slight good for one’s children.

Morality says that (1) is obligatory but (2) is permitted. Thus, morality already weighs F and paradigmatically moral concerns and provides a combination verdict. In other words, there already are moral norms of combination. So the view would be that there are moral norms of combination and overall norms of combination, both of which take into account exactly the same first order considerations, but sometimes come to different conclusions because they weigh the very same first order considerations differently (e.g., in the case where a moderate amount of F-considerations needs to be sacrificed for a moderate amount of good for one’s children).

This view violates Ockham’s razor: Why would we have moral norms of combination if the overall norms of combination always override them anyway?

Moreover, the view has the following difficulty: It seems that the best way to define a type of norm (prudential, meaningfulness, moral, etc.) is in terms of the types of consideration that the norm is based on. But if the overall norms of combination take into account the very same types of consideration as the moral norms of combination, then this way of distinguishing the types of norms is no longer available.

Maybe there is a view on which the overall ones take into account not the first-order moral and F-considerations, but only the deliverances of the moral and F-norms of combination, but that seems needlessly complex.

Bayesian reasoning isn't our duty

Ought implies can. Most people can’t do Bayesian reasoning correctly. So Bayesian reasoning is not how they ought to reason. In particular, a reduction of epistemic ought to the kinds of probability fcts that are involved in Bayesian reasoning fails.

I suppose the main worry with this argument is that perhaps only an ought governing voluntary activity implies can. But the epistemic life is in large part involuntary. An eye ought to transmit visual information, but some eyes cannot—and that is not a problem because seeing is involuntary.

However, it is implausible to think that we humans ought to do something that nobody has been able to do until recently and even now only a few can do, and only in limited cases, even if the something is involuntary.

If Bayesian reasoning isn’t how we ought to reason, what’s the point of it? I am inclined to think it is a useful tool for figuring out the truth in those particular cases to which it is well suited. There are different tools for reasoning in different situations.

Requests and naturalism

If someone asks me to ϕ, typically that informs me that they want me to ϕ. But the normative effect of the request cannot be reduced to the normative effect of learning about the requester’s desires.

First, when you request that I ϕ, you also consent to my ϕ, and hence the request has the normative effects of consent. But one can want something done without consenting to it. For instance, if I have a lot of things on my plate, I might desire that a student give me their major paper late so that I don’t have to start grading yet, but that desire is very different in normative consequences from my agreeing to the lateness of the paper, much less my requesting that it be late.

Second, considerate people often have desires that they do not wish to impose on others. A request creates a special kind of moral reason, and hence imposes in a way that merely learning of a desire does not.

Moreover, we cannot understand requests apart from these moral normative effects. A request seems to be in part or whole defined as the kind of speech act that typically has such normative effects: the creating of a permission and of a reason. Moreover, that reason is a sui generis one: it is a reason-of-request, rather than a reason-of-desire, a reason-of-need, etc.

There is something rather impressive in this creation of reasons. A complete stranger has the power to come up to me and make me have a new moral reason just by asking a question, since a question is in part a request for an answer (and in part the creation of a context for the speech acts that would be constitute the answer). Typically, this reason is not conclusive, but it is still a real moral reason that imposes on me.

Consider the first time anybody ever requested anything. In requesting, they exercised their power to create a moral reason for their interlocutor. This was a power they already had, and the meaningfulness of the speech act of requesting must have already been in place. How? How could that speech act have already been defined, already understandable? The speech act was largely defined by the kinds of reasons it gives rise to. But the kinds of reasons it gave rise to were ones that had never previously existed! For before the first request there were no reasons-of-request. So the speech act had a meaningfulness without anybody ever having encountered the kinds of reasons that came from it.

This is deeply mysterious. It suggests an innate power of the human nature, a power to request and thereby create reasons. This power seems hard to reconcile with naturalism, though I do not have any knock-down argument here.

Online talk: A Norm-Based Design Argument

Thursday November 11, 2021, at 4 pm Eastern (3 pm Central), the Rutgers Center for Philosophy of Religion and the Princeton Project in Philosophy of Religion present a joint colloquium: Alex Pruss (Baylor), "A Norm-Based Design Argument".

The location will be https://rutgers.zoom.us/s/95159158918

Has cultural relativism about norms of etiquette really been established?

Imagine a philosopher who argued that the norms of assertion are relative to culture on the grounds that in England we have the norm:

1. Only assert “It’s snowing” when it’s snowing

while in France we have the norm:

2. Only assert “Il neige” when it’s snowing.

This would be silly for multiple reasons. Foremost among these is that (1) and (2) are mere consequences of the norm of assertion:

3. Only assert what it is true.

(Of course, you may disagree that truth is the norm of assertion. You may prefer a knowledge or justified belief or belief or high credence norm. But an analogous point will apply.)

It is widely held that while the norm of assertion is essentially the same across cultures, norms of etiquette vary widely. But the main reason people give for believing that the norms of etiquette vary widely is akin to the terrible argument about norms of assertion I began the post with. People note such things as that in some countries when one meets acquaintances one bows, and in others one waves; or that in some one eats fish with two forks and in others with a fork and knife.

But just as the fact that in England one should follow (1) and in France (2) is compatible with the universality of norms of assertion, likewise the variation in greeting and eating rituals can be compatible with the universality of norms of etiquette. It could, for instance, be that the need to eat fish with two forks in Poland and with a fork and knife in the USA derives simply from a universal norm of etiquette:

4. Express respect for your fellow diners.

But just as one asserts the truth with different words in different languages, one expresses respect for one’s fellow diners with different gestures in different cultures.

Indeed, presumably nobody thinks that the fact that in France one says “Merci” and in England “Thank you” implies a cultural relativism in etiquette. In both cases one is thanking, but the words that symbolize thanks are different. But what goes for words here also applies to many gestures (there may turn out to be universal gestures, like pointing).

One object that among the norms of etiquette there are norms that specify which gestures signify, say, respect or thanks. But a specification of what signifies what is not the specification of a norm. That “Merci” signifies gratitude and that eating fish with two forks signifies respect are not norms, because norms tell us what to do, and these do not.

5. “Merci” signifies thanks

is grammatically not a norm but a statement of fact. We might try to make it sound more like a norm by saying:

6. Signify thanks with “merci”!

But that is bad advice when taken literally. For thanks are not to be signified always, but only when thanks are appropriate. A more correct norm would be:

7. When a service has been done for you, signify thanks with “merci”!

But this is just a consequence of the general norm of etiquette:

8. When a service has been done for you, signify thanks!

together with the fact (5).

So, we see that the mere variation in rituals should not be taken to imply that there is cultural relativity of norms of etiquette.

If there is to be a cultural relativity of norms of etiquette, it will have to be at a higher level. If in some cultures, etiquette requires one to show respect for all fellow diners and at others to show disrespect for some—say, those from an underprivileged group—then that would indeed be a genuine relativity of norms of etiquette.

But it’s not clear that me that in a culture where one is expected to show disrespect to fellow diners in some underprivileged group that expectation is actually a norm of etiquette. Not all social expectations, after all, are actually norms of etiquette, or even norms at all. A norm (of behavior) gives norm-based reasons. But an expectation that one show disrespect to members of an underprivileged group has no reason-giving force at all.

We can imagine a culture where there is no way to symbolize respect for members of an underprivileged group when dining. On the view I wish to defend, such a lack would not exempt one from the duty to show respect to all one’s fellow diners—it would just make it more difficult to do so, because it would require one to create new ways of showing respect (say, by adapting the forms of showing respect to members of privileged groups, much as in some European languages the polite forms of address are derived from forms in which one used to address nobility in less democratic times).

I am not sure if there is cultural variation in norms of etiquette. But if there is, that variation will not be proved by shallow differences between rituals, and may not even follow from deeper variation, such as a culture where it is not appropriate to thank one’s subordinates for work well done. For in the case of deeper variation, it could simply be that some in some cultures violation of certain norms of etiquette is nearly universal, and there are no accepted ways to show the relevant kind of respect.

In fact, it could even be the case that there is only one norm of etiquette, and it is culturally universal:

9. Signify respect to other persons you interact with in ways fitted to the situation.

If this is right, then social rules designed to show disrespect, no matter how widespread, are not norms of etiquette.

A multiple faculty solution to the problem of conscience

I used to be quite averse to multiplying types of normativity until I realized that in an Aristotelian framework it makes perfect sense to multiply them by their subject. Thus, I should think that 1 = 1, I should look both ways before crossing the street, and I should have a heart-rate of no more than 100. But the norms underlying these claims have different subjects: my intellect, my will and my circulatory system (or perhaps better: I as thinking, I as willing and I as circulating).

In this post I want to offer two solutions to the problem of mistaken conscience that proceed by multiplying norms. The problem of mistaken conscience is two-fold as there are two kinds of mistakes of conscience. A strong mistake is when I judge something is required when it is forbidden. A weak mistake is when I judge something is permissible when it is forbidden.

Given that I should follow my conscience, a strong mistake of conscience seems to lead to two conflicting obligations: I should ϕ, because my conscience says so, and I should refrain from ϕing, because ϕing is forbidden. Call the claim that strong mistakes of conscience lead to conflicting obligations the Dilemma Thesis. The Dilemma Thesis is perhaps somewhat implausible on its face, but can be swallowed (as Mark Murphy does). However, more seriously, the Dilemma Thesis has the unfortunate result that strong mistakes of conscience are not, as such, mistakes. For the mistake was supposed to be that I judge ϕing as required when it is forbidden. But that is only a mistake when ϕing is not required. But according to the Conflict Thesis, it is required. So there is no mistake. (There may be a mistake about why it is required, and perhaps one can use that to defuse the problem, but I want to try something else in this post.) Moreover, a view that embraces the Dilemma Thesis needs to explain the blame asymmetry between the obligation to ϕ and the obligation not to ϕ: I am to blame if I go against conscience, but not if I follow conscience.

Weak mistakes are less of a problem, but they still raise the puzzle of why I am not blameworthy if I do what is forbidden when conscience says it’s permissible.

Moving towards a solution, or actually a pair of solution, start with this thought. When I follow a mistaken conscience, my will does nothing wrong but the practical intellect has made a mistake. In other words, we have two sets of norms: norms of practical intellect and norms of will. In these cases I judged badly but willed well. And it is clear why I am not blameworthy: for I become blameworthy by virtue of a fault of the will, not a fault of the intellect.

But there is still a problem analogous to the problem with the Dilemma Thesis. For it seems that:

1. In a mistake of conscience, my judgment was bad because it made a false claim as to what I should will.

In the case of a strong mistake, say, I judged that I should will my ϕing whereas is in fact I should have nilled my ϕing. But I can’t say that and say that the will did what it should in ϕing.

This means that if we are to say that the will did nothing wrong and the problem was with the intellect, we need to reject (1). There are two ways of doing this, leading to different solutions to the problem of conscience.

Claim (1) is based on two claims about practical judgment:

2. The practical intellect’s judgments are truth claims.

3. These truth claims are claims about what I should will.

We can get out of (1) by denying (2) (with (3) then becoming moot) or by holding on to (2) but rejecting (3).

Anscombe denies (2), for reasons having nothing to do with mistakes of conscience. There is good precedent for denying (2), then.

I find the solution that denies (2) a bit murky, but I can kind of see how one would go about it. Oversimplifying, the intellect presents actions to the will on balance positively or negatively. This presentation does not make a truth claim. The polarity of the presentation by the intellect to the will should not be seen as a judgment that an action has a certain character, but simply as a certain way of presenting the judgment—with propathy or antipathy, one might say. Nonetheless there are norms of presentation built into the nature of the practical intellect. These norms are not truth norms, like the norms of the theoretical intellect, but are more like the norms of the functioning of the body’s thermal regulation system, which should warm up the body in some circumstances and cool it down in others, but does not make truth claims. There are actions that should be positively presented and actions that should be negatively presented. We can say that the actions that should be positively presented are right, but the practical intellect’s positive presentation of an action is not a presentation that the action is right, for that would be an odd circularity: to present ϕing positively would be to present ϕing as something that should be presented positively.

(In reality, the “on balance” positive and negative presentations typically have a thick richness to them, a richness corresponding “in flavor” to words like “courageous”, “pleasant”, etc. However, we need to be careful on this view not to think of the presentation corresponding “in flavor” to these words as constituting a truth claim that a certain concept applies. I am somewhat dubious whether this can all be worked out satisfactorily, and so I worry that the no-truth-claim picture of the practical intellect falls afoul of the thickness of the practical intellect’s deliverances.)

There is a second solution which, pace Anscombe, holds on to the idea that the practical intellect’s judgments are truth claims, but denies that they are claims about what I should will. Here is one way to develop this solution. There are times when an animal’s subsystem is functioning properly but it would be better if it did something else. For instance, when we are sick, our thermal regulation system raises our temperature in order to kill invading bacteria or viruses. But sometimes the best medical judgment will be that we will on the whole be better off not raising the temperature given a particular kind of invader, in which case we take fever-reducing medication. We have two norms here: a local norm of the thermal regulation system and a holistic norm of the organism.

Similarly, there are local norms of the will—to will what the intellect presents to it overall in a positive light, say. And there are local norms of the intellect—to present the truth or maybe that which the evidence points to as true. But there are holistic norms of the acting person (to borrow Wojtyla’s useful phrase), such as not to kill innocents. The practical intellect discerns these holistic norms, and presents them to the will. The intellect can err in its discernment. The will can fail to follow the intellect’s discernment.

The second solution is rather profligate with norms, having three different kinds of norms: norms of the will, norms of the intellect, and norms of the acting person, who comprises at least the will, the intellect and the body.

In a strong mistake of conscience, where we judge that we should ϕ but ϕing is forbidden, and we follow conscience and ϕ, here is what happens. The will rightly follows the intellect’s presentation by willing to ϕ. The acting person, however, goes wrong by ϕing. We genuinely have a mistake of the intellect: the intellect misrepresented what the acting person should do. The acting person went wrong, and did so simpliciter. However, the will did right, and so one is not to blame. We can say that in this case, the ϕing was wrong, but the willing to ϕ was right. And we can say how the pro-ϕing norm takes priority: the norm to will one’s ϕing is a norm of the will, so naturally it is what governs the will.

In a weak mistake of conscience, where we judge that it is permissible to ϕ but it’s not, again the solution is that under the circumstances it was permissible to will to ϕ, but not permissible to ϕ.

There is, however, a puzzle in connecting this story with failed actions. Consider either kind of mistake of conscience, and suppose I will to ϕ but I fail to ϕ due to some non-moral systemic failure. Maybe I will to press a forbidden button, but it turns out I am paralyzed. In that case, it seems that the only thing I did was willing to ϕ, and so we cannot say that I did anything wrong. I think there are two ways out of this. The first is to bite the bullet and say that this is just a case where I got lucky and did nothing wrong. The second is to say that my willing to ϕ can be seen as a trying to ϕ, and it is bad as an action of the acting person but not bad as an action of the will.

The Grotius view of lying

Grotius had a weird view: it is never permissible to lie, but “for purposes of natural law”, only assertions to people who had a right to the truth were lies. Nazis at the door, he would have said, have no right to the truth, so one isn’t lying when one asserts known falsehoods to them. This view has always seemed clearly wrong.

But I just realized that there is actually an interesting argument for a very similar view. Start with these three principles:

1. Every lie is an assertion.

2. A defining feature of an assertion is that it is the sort of speech act that the sincerity norm (e.g., “Don’t say what you think is false!”) applies to.

3. No norm applies in contravention of unequivocal moral norms.

Premise (1) is clearly true. Premise (2) is part and parcel of normative accounts of assertion (there is room for variance on what the sincerity norm exactly is, but that variance will not affect our main argument).

Premise (3) is highly controversial. It is a generalization of Aquinas’ principle that immoral “laws” are not really laws. The general idea is that morality not only overrides other norms that contradict it, but as it were sucks all the power out of them. When one knows that ϕing is morally forbidden, responses like “But the law of the land requires it” or “I’d be breaking the rules of the game if I ϕed” make no sense. For there is no normative force against morality. Here are two reasons to accept premise (3). The first is the controversial claim that all norms of action are a species of moral norms. (Here is a theistic argument for this: Norms are appropriately action-guiding; the only thing that can appropriately guide our action is what the love of God requires (we are to love God with all our heart); but to be guided by the love of God and to be guided by morality is the same thing.) The second is that if there are norms other than moral norms, they are created by our normative powers, but it is not plausible that we have the normative power to create norms that stand against the norms of morality (that is, for instance, why immoral promises are null and void).

Then:

4. If the sincerity norm for a speech act ϕ contravenes unequivocal moral norms, the speech act is not an assertion. (By 2 and 3)

5. If the sincerity norm for a speech act ϕ contravenes unequivocal moral norms, the speech act is not a lie. (By 1 and 4)

Now here is one way to fill out the rest of the argument:

6. In Nazi at the door cases, we are morally required to say what we disbelieve (i.e., go against what the sincerity norm would require).

7. So, in Nazi at the door cases, saying what we disbelieve is not a lie. (By 5 an 6)

And that gives us a version of the Grotius view.

My own view is to flip the last two steps of the argument, replacing 6 and 7 with:

8. In Nazi at the door cases, saying what we disbelieve is a lie.

9. So, in Nazi at the door cases it is still false that we are morally required to say what we disbelieve. (By 5 and 8)

10. In Nazi at the door cases, if it is morally permissible to say what we disbelieve, it is morally required.

11. So, in Nazi at the door cases, it is not morally permissible to say what we disbelieve. (By 9 and 10)

But a lot of people balk at 9. And they then have reason to accept the Grotius-like thesis 7.

So, all in all, if one accepts the normative view of assertion and one accepts the contravention principle 3, one has a choice between Kantian absolutism about lying and a Grotius-like view.

Multidimensionality of game scoring

One obvious internal good of a game is victory. But victory generally isn’t everything, even when one restricts oneself to the internal goods. Score is another internal good: it is internally better to win by a larger amount—though a narrower victory (but not so narrow that it look like it was just a fluke) is typically externally more enjoyable. Similarly, there can be the additional internal good—often created ad hoc—of winning without making use of some resource—winning a video game without killing any character, or climbing a route while using only one hand. But there are other internal goods that are not just modifications of victory. For instance, in role-playing games, being true to your character’s character is an internal good that can be in conflict with victory (this is important to the plot of the film The Gamers: Dorkness Rising). There is an honor-like internal good found in many games: for instance, in versions of cut-throat tennis with rotation, it makes sense to throw a game to prevent your doubles partner from winning—but it would feel dishonorable and like poor sportsmanship. Elegance and “form” are other internal goods found in many sports.

Enumerating these internal goods would be an endless task. Probably the better thing to do is to say that we have the normative power of creating a plurality of internal-value partial orderings between possible playthroughs and labeling them as we wish, often using terms that provide an analogy to some external value comparison: “more honorable than”, “more peaceable than”, “more victorious than”, “more elegant than”, etc.

Gamification

Most philosophers don’t talk much about games. But games actually highlight one of the really amazing powers of the human being: the power to create norms and to create new forms of well-being.

Lately I’ve been playing this vague game with vague rules and vague non-numerical points when out and about:

• Gain bonus points if I can stay at least nine feet away from non-family members in circumstances in which normally I would come within that distance of them; more points the further away I can be, though no extra bonus past 12 feet.

• Win game if I avoid inhaling or exhaling within six feet of a non-family member. (And of course I have to be careful that the first breath past the requisite distance be moderate in size rather than a big huff.)

When the game goes well, it’s delightful, and adds value to life. On an ordinary walk around campus, I almost always win the game now. Last time I went shopping at Aldi, I would have won (having had to hold my breath a few times), except that I think I mumbled “Thank you” within six feet of the checkout worker (admittedly, if memory serves, I think I mumbled it quietly, trying to minimize the amount of breath going out, and then stepped back for the inhalation after the words; and of course I was wearing a mask, but it's still a defeat). Victory, or even near-victory, at the social distancing game is an extra good in life, only available because I imposed these game norms on myself, in addition to the legal and prudential norms that are independent of my will. Yesterday, I think I won the game all day despite going on a bike ride and a hike, attending Mass (we sat in the vestibule, in chairs at least nine feet away from anybody else, and the few times someone was passing by I held my breath), and playing tennis with a grad student. That's satisfying to reflect on. (At the same time, playing a game also generally adds a bit of extra stress, since there is the possibility, and sometimes actuality, of defeat. And it's hard to concentrate on the Mass while all the time looking around for someone who might be approaching within the forbidden distance. And, no, I didn't actually think of it as a game when I was at Mass, but rather as a duty of social responsibility.)

I think the only other person in my family who has gamified social distancing is my seven-year-old.

The Need for Human Nature

A popular article of mine on “The Need for Human Nature” has just been posted on Sapientia. One can think of it as a precis of the main ideas in my in-progress Norms, Natures, and God book.

Community norms

One of our grad students brought to my attention a question I never thought about: Which communities have genuine authority? (Furthermore, this needs to be fine-grained as the question of which communities have genuine authority in which respect.)

If I move to a neighborhood with a home owners’ association, and the neighborhood tells me that zip lines are forbidden, that is presumably an authoritative norm. But if I move to neighborhood without any such association, and all my neighbors come and tell me that zip lines just aren’t done around here, and that I am not to build one, the command not to build a zip line is just bluster. I may have reasons of peaceful coexistence or prudence not to build a zip line, but the command does not constitute an authoritative norm.

The question of what conditions a state-like entity has to satisfy (say, not being radically unjust) to have authority has been very widely discussed. This isn’t my area of philosophy, but I feel that the question of which non-state communities have authority is much less discussed. Here, think of clubs, committees, religious congregations, families, neighborhoods, Internet forums, etc. And it’s not just a question of when, say, a neighborhood is being unjust. There may be nothing unjust about having a standard that forbids zip lines, but nonetheless if the community lacks authority, that standard is not an authoritative norm, and has no reason-giving force (beyond reasons of peaceful coexistence or the like).

And of course the question needs to be more fine-grained. Even with a home owners’ association, the authority of the neighborhood only applies to a limited number of things—it cannot, for instance, govern the content of private conversations inside the house.

The problem is particularly pressing for anyone who is a social relativist about some domain and thinks that norms of some sort (e.g., moral, aesthetic, or epistemic) come from community standards. For intuitively not every community standard is authoritative.

Norms and the causal theory of reference

1. We can refer to norms.

2. We can only refer to the kinds of things that cause effects in us. (Causal theory of reference.)

3. So, norms are a kind of thing that causes an effect in us.

4. Norms are non-physical.

5. So, something non-physical causes an effect in us.

6. So, either we are not entirely physical, or the non-physical affects the physical, or both.

Normative powers

Consider:

1. Purely physical things have only physical powers.

2. Normative powers (i.e., powers of producing normative effects, such as promises and commands) are not physical powers.

3. We have normative powers.

4. So, we are not purely physical.

I guess what I am not sure about in this argument is whether “power” is used univocally between “physical powers” and “normative powers”.

Lying and normative views of assertion

I find some version of the following normative partial analysis of assertion very plausible:

1. At least a part of what makes a speech act an assertion of p is that it is the kind of speech act that should not be made if one believes p to be false.

But now:

2. If it is sometimes permissible to lie, it is sometimes obligatory to lie.

Why? Well, people’s main intuitions that it is sometimes permissible to lie are driven by cases—such as the murderer at the door—where they think it is obligatory to lie. Moreover, if an action is permissible, then typically it becomes obligatory when there is enough at stake. Thus, if it’s permissible to eat meat, it’s obligatory to eat meat when doing so is necessary to save an innocent life (e.g., an evildoer says: “Eat this burger or this innocent dies”).

Thus, to argue that lying is never permissible I just need to argue that it is never obligatory.

Now here is a flatfooted argument against lying ever being obligatory. If lying is ever obligatory, then sometimes one should assert that p when one believes p to be false. But that contradicts (1).

Of course, this is a bad argument, for two reasons. The first is that perhaps all the argument shows is that there is a real dilemma sometimes: one should lie and one shouldn’t lie. The second, and more serious, is that the norms in (1) and (2) are different: the norm in (1) is a social norm of assertion, while that in (2) is a moral norm.

However, the argument can be fixed to get around both problems. For morality is overriding in the following strong way:

3. A non-moral norm is null and void insofar as it requires what is morally forbidden.

E.g., a law requiring an immoral action is just a piece of paper with no normative force. But this means that a norm of assertion that forbids one from a speech act under circumstances in which in which that speech act is morally required is null and void under those circumstances. But a null and void norm is no norm at all and generates no “should” of the action-guiding sort. And the “should” in (1) is of the action-guiding sort. And hence the idea that sometimes lying is morally obligatory contradicts (1) precisely when we understand the “should” in (1) as expressive of an action-guiding non-moral norm.

Here’s another way to show the intuition behind the argument. The normative picture of language nicely fits with the following modified Wittgensteinian picture of language: The meaning of language comes from its normative use. But if lying is permissible, then a norm-abiding speaker of English will say “Bob is not at home” when asked by someone at the door who wants to murder Bob. Thus, the norm-abiding use of “Bob is not at home” will fail to distinguish between two candidate norms:

4. Say “Bob is not at home” only when you believe Bob is not at home.

5. Say “Bob is not at home” only when you believe that either Bob is not at home or the interlocutor wants to murder Bob.

And hence it will not be possible to read the meaning of “Bob is not at home” from its norm-abiding usage.

The argument works with minor modifications if we replace the belief norm by a truth norm, a knowledge norm or a justified belief norm.

I do, however, have a serious objection to the argument. The argument as it stands only works when the norm of assertion is of an action-guiding sort. But norms of assertion could be a different critter altogether: they could be Aristotelian teleological norms. These aren’t norms that say, at least directly, what is or is not to be done. Rather, they are norms that say what is or is not defective. Thus, a broken leg is defective, but it is, of course, a category mistake to say that a broken leg is something not to be done (and it’s a moral mistake to say that a broken leg is something not to be produced: there are times when it is obligatory to break a leg, say in the defense of the innocent). Thus, it could be that what (1) says is that a part of what makes a speech act be an assertion of p is that it is a speech act that would be defective should p turn out to be false.

I do not know how satisfactory this reading of (1) is. It seems to me that we think of the norms of assertion as something that persons are criticizable for failing to meet in a way in which no one is criticizable for having a broken leg (though one might be criticizable for breaking one’s leg).

Book in Progress: Norms, Natures and God

I have begun work with a working title of Norms, Natures and God, which should be a book on how positing Aristotelian natures solves problems in ethics (normative and meta), epistemology, semantics, metaphysics and mind, but also how, especially after Darwin, to be an intellectually satisfied Aristotelian one must be a theist. The central ideas for this were in my Wilde Lectures.

There is a github repository for the project with a PDF that will slowly grow (as of this post, it only has a table of contents) as I write. I welcome comments: the best way to submit them is to click on "Issues" and just open a bug report. :-)

The repository will disappear once the text is ready for submission to a publisher.

Belief, testimony and trust

Suppose that to believe a proposition is to have a credence in that proposition above some (perhaps contextual) threshold p_b where p_b is bigger than 1/2 (I think it’s somewhere around 0.95 to 0.98). Then by the results of my previous post, because of the very fast decay of the normal distribution, most propositions with credence above the threshold p_b have a credence extremely close to p_b.

Now suppose I assert precisely when my credence is above the threshold p_b. If you trusted my rationality and honesty perfectly and had no further relevant evidence, it would make sense to set your credences to mine when I tell you something. But normally, we don’t tell each other our credences. We just assert. From the fact that I assert, given perfect trust, you could conclude that my credence is probably very slightly above p_b. Thus you would set your credence to slightly above p_b, and in particular you would believe the proposition I asserted.

But in practice, we don’t trust each other perfectly. Thus, you might think something like this about my assertion:

If Alex was honest and a good measurer of own credences, his credence was probably a tiny bit above p_b, and if I was certain of that, I’d make that be my credence. but he might not have been honest or he might have been self-deceived, in which case his credence could very well be significantly below p_b, especially given the fast decay in the distribution of credences, which yields high priors for the credence being significantly below p_b.

Since the chance of dishonesty or self-deceit is normally not all that tiny, your overall credence would be below p_b. Note that this is the case even for people we take to be decent and careful interlocutors. Thus, in typical circumstances, if we assert at the threshold for belief, even interlocutors who think of us as ordinarily rational and honest shouldn’t believe us.

This seems to me to be an unacceptable consequence. It seems to me that if someone we take to be at least ordinarily rational and honest tells us something, we should believe it, absent defeaters. Given the above argument, it seems that the credential threshold for assertion has to be significantly higher than the credential threshold for belief. In particular, it seems, the belief norm of assertion is insufficiently strong.

Intuitively, the knowledge norm of assertion is strong enough (maybe it’s too strong). If this is right, then it follows that knowledge has a credential threshold significantly above that for belief. Then, if someone asserts, we will think that their credence is just slightly above the threshold for knowledge, and even if we discount that because of worries that even an ordinarily decent person might not be reporting their credence correctly, we will likely stay above the threshold for belief. The conclusion will be that in ordinary circumstances if someone asserts something, we will be able to believe it—but not know it.

I am not happy with this. I would like to be able to say that we can go from another’s assertion to our knowledge, in cases of ordinary degrees of trust. I could just be wrong about that. Maybe I am too credulous.

Here is a way of going beyond this. Perhaps the norms of assertion should be seen not as all-or-nothing, but as more complex:

1. When the credence is at or below p_b, we are forbidden to assert.

2. When the credence is above p_b, but close to p_b, we have permission to assert, but we also have a strong defeasible reason not to assert, with the strength of that reason increasing to infinity as we get closer we are to p_b.

If someone abides by these, they will be unlikely to assert a proposition whose credence is only slightly above p_b, because they will have a strong reason not to. Thus, their asserting in accordance with the norms will give us evidence that their credence is not insignificantly above p_b. And hence we will be able to believe, given a decent degree of trust.

Note, however, that the second norm will not apply if there is a qualifier like “I think” or “I believe”. In that case, the earlier argument will still work. Thus, we have this interesting consequence: If someone trustworthy merely says that they believe something, that testimony is still insufficient for our belief. But if they assert it outright, that is sufficient for our belief.

This line of thought arose out of conversations I had with Trent Dougherty a number of years ago and my wife more recently. I don’t know if either would endorse my conclusions, though.

Emotions and naturalism

On occasion, I’ve heard undergraduates suggest that naturalism faces a problem with emotions. They feel that a mere computational system would not have emotional states.

One might take this to be a special case of the problem of qualia, and I think it has some plausibility there. It is indeed hard to see how an emotionless Mary would know what it’s like to be scared or in love. Is it harder than in the case of ordinary sensory qualia, like that of red? I don’t know.

But I think it’s more interesting to take it to be a special case of the problem of intentionality or content. Emotions are at least partly constituted by intentional (quasi?) perceptual states with normative content: to be scared involves perceiving reality as containing something potentially bad for one and being in love involves perceiving someone as wonderful in some respects.

The standard materialist story about the content of perceptual states is causal: a perception of red represents an object as reflecting or emitting light roughly of a certain wavelength range because the perception is typically triggered by objects doing this. But on standard naturalist stories do not have room for normative properties to play a causal role. Post-Aristotelian scientific explanations are thought not to invoke normative features.

There is, of course, nothing here to worry an Aristotelian naturalist who believes that objects have natures that are both normative and causally explanatory.

Over the past year, I’ve been coming to appreciate the explanatory power of the Aristotelian story on which the very same thing grounds normativity and provides a causal explanation.

Causal theories of normative statuses

Utterances cause a variety of outcomes. For instance, a request often causes an action by another person, while saying “Alexa, turn on the lights” can cause the lights to turn on. This is not the paradigmatic thing that happens with performatives. With performatives, the outcome is (at least partially) constituted by the utterance. When the Queen utters the words of knighting, the newly created knight’s knightliness is not caused by but constituted by the utterance. One plausible argument for this is that causation has a speed of light limit, but knighting does not: the Queen could knight someone a light-year away, effective immediately.

So we have two kinds of outcome for an utterance: causal outcomes and constituted outcomes. It is plausible that sometimes utterances have both kinds. For instance, knighting someone can both constitute them as a knight and cause them to do knightly deeds.

It is widely, though perhaps often only implicitly, held that the normative statuses involved in marriages, promises and reasons of request are constituted outcomes of performative utterances.

It is, I think, worth thinking about what reasons we have to accept this performative constitution thesis. For here is another possibility: these social statuses are constituted by contingent normative properties that are caused to exist by the utterance. In such a case, the utterances producing these statuses are not performatives, but function causally, like the “Alexa, turn on the light” example.

If naturalism is true, so is the performative constitution thesis. For if naturalism is true, then normative properties supervene on physical properties, and there is no plausible physical property that is caused by uttering a promise on which the relevant normative property could supervene. Here is a quick argument: Any physical property that can be produced by promising can be produced impersonally by random quantum phenomena, but such random quantum phenomena will not result in the relevant normative properties of promise. Hence the physical act of promising must be a part of the supervenience base of the relevant normative properties.

But if naturalism is false, then we have a new possibility. It could be that marrying, promising and requesting non-physically cause relevant normative properties. The quick argument above no longer works, since random quantum phenomena need not have the power to produce these normative properties. In fact, even the speed-of-light argument concerning knighting doesn’t work, because non-physical causation need not have a speed-of-light limit.

Do we have good reason, beyond an incredulous stare, to dismiss the causal theory of these normative statuses?

I think classical theists have some reasons to opposed the causal theory. First, God has the power to directly cause all the kinds of effects we have the power to cause. So if I can cause myself to have the normative property of having promised you a dollar, God can directly cause me to have his normative property. But that’s absurd: for while God can directly cause me to promise you a dollar, it is a contradiction for the state of having promised to be caused by any means other than the making of that promise.

This is, however, only a limited opposition to the causal theory. For while God cannot directly cause me to be in a promissory state, it may well be that God can directly cause me to have the paradigmatic normative property constituting the promissory state, namely an obligation of performance with exactly the kind of weight that the promise carried. Thus, the first argument is compatible with a hybrid causal-constitutive view on which my making a promise causes the obligation but constitutes the obligation as a promissory one. Compare how my carving a statue would cause the statue but constitute it as hand-made.

The second argument against the causal theory is this. By divine simplicity, God’s contingent properties are all constituted by contingent entities outside of himself. But when God promises something, he acquires a contingent obligation. By divine simplicity, that obligation must be constituted by something contingent outside of God. And the most plausible candidate is that the it is constituted by the physical manifestation making up the promise (e.g., the voice that the promisee heard). So in the case of divine promises, neither the original causal theory nor the hybrid theory is plausible.

That said, the second argument is not very strong. For contingent beliefs are internally constituted in us and yet by exactly the same divine simplicity argument externally constituted in God. So while the fact that God’s promissory normative statuses are externally constituted gives us some reason to think ours are, this is far from conclusive. Moreover, what goes for promises may not go for other things. God (qua God) cannot marry. So the argument doesn’t apply to marriage.

In summary, if naturalism is false, then it could be the case that some of the normative statuses that are generally thought to be constituted by performative utterances are in fact caused by utterances, though classical theists have some reason to prefer the performative constitution theory in many cases.

Finally, note that there is a third option besides constitution and causation: something I call quasi-causation. If I pray for an effect, and as an outcome of my prayer, God produces the effect, I don’t want to say that my prayer caused God to produce the effect. It just seems contrary to divine transcendence to suppose we can cause God to do things. Yet there is something like causation going on here. Similarly, it could be that sometimes a normative status is not caused but merely quasi-caused by an utterance.

Catholics, in fact, are liable to think that the quasi-causal theory is at least true of one aspect of one case: sacramental marriage. In sacramental marriage, there is an intrinsic change in the parties entering the marriage as a result of the exchange of the marriage vows. But because the change happens due to God’s gracious activity, it probably cannot be said to be caused by the marriage vows. Rather, the change is quasi-caused by the marriage vows. However, it is not clear whether the relevant intrinsic change is a change with respect to a normative property.

All in all, there are many open questions here.