Making the happiness of others our end

Kant says that a virtuous persons has the happiness of others as an end.

Note that this is not an end in the sense of a goal which we try to achieve. For the goal can’t be that all others are happy. If that were the goal, we might as well not even try: we’re not going to achieve it. Nor can the goal be that some others are happy. For that’s already so, and so nothing need be done. Could the goal be that many others are happy? I suppose that my actions could make a difference between not-many and many being happy. But it seems rather unlikely that they could. And if a careful examination of the world were to show that independently of my actions many others are happy, again such a goal would lead to my not having to do anything.

Maybe the Kantian end of happiness is distributive. For each person distinct from yourself, you aim at this person’s being happy. So you have a large number of goals, one for each person distinct from yourself. But that’s not right, either. For suppose that Alice is miserable, and you know you can’t make her happy. But you can make her happier. Surely that’s a part of what the virtuous person aims at. So is it, perhaps, that in the case of each person distinct from yourself, you aim to make them happier than they currently are? However, imagine that Alice is miserable, but you know that her condition will at least slightly improve over time, no matter what you do. Then you don’t need to do anything to make her happier, and so a goal of making others happier doesn’t make you do anything for Alice—even if you could make Alice much happier.

Perhaps, though, the end of happiness is doubly distributive: it distributes over persons and over what you might call “possible pieces of happiness”. For each person x and each possible piece H of happiness, you aim at x having H. But now the virtuous person’s aims are vast, since there are many, many possible pieces of happiness—maybe even infinitely many. Maybe this is right, but it seems implausible.

All this makes me think that when Kant talks of the happiness of others as our end, he is not talking of an end as a set of specific goals to be achieved. Maybe he is saying that in general a virtuous person has a tendency to perform actions with specific goals of the form: Make Alice happier with respect to her toothache. The “end” of happiness isn’t an end, or a multiplicity of ends even, but a kind of architectonic pattern in our goals.

Kantian antinatalism

Intuitively:

1. It is permissible to deliberately have children.

But there is a powerful Kantian antinatalist argument against (1). To decide rationally to have a child, one needs to have a purpose for the child’s existence. But to have a purpose for another person’s existence, no matter how good that purpose might be, is to treat that other person as a means rather than as an end. And that’s wrong.

Assuming the Kantian thesis that it is wrong to have an end for another person’s existence, the only way to block the argument against (1) is to find a way to rationally motivate having a child without having to have a purpose for the child’s existence. How can this be done?

So one needs a reason to have a child which is not grounded in having a purpose for the child. Such reasons can exist. For instance, if I promise you to make a scarf, my reason to make the scarf is grounded in my promise to make the scarf rather than in any purpose for the scarf itself.

This points to a way out of the Kantian antinatalist argument. A couple might have a duty, perfect or imperfect, to attempt to have a child. If so, they need not have a purpose for the child, but only a purpose to attempt having a child. Such a duty could come from a divine command or from some kind of natural law perspectives (both of which are compatible with the broadly Kantian opposition to treating others as mere means).

Few people, apart from Catholics, Orthodox Jews and optimistic utilitarians, think there is any duty to have children. But thinking that there is such a duty may be the best way to get out of Kantian antinatalism.

Loving our neighbor as ourselves

Suppose that, as some theories of motivation hold, that all our actions are done in pursuit of our flourishing. But the Scriptures tell us that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. Therefore, all our actions should also be done in pursuit of our neighbor’s flourishing. This seems an unreasonably high standard.

There are three ways out:

1. Deny that all our actions are done in pursuit of our flourishing.

2. Deny the love ethic of the Old and New Testaments.

3. Argue that the standard is not unreasonably high.

For me, (2) is not an option. I do think (1) is a serious option for independent reasons.

But I also think (3) is a very promising approach. Reasons to think that the requirement that we be pursuing our neighbor’s flourishing in all our actions is excessive are apt also to be reasons to think that Paul’s requirement that we “pray constantly” (1 Thes. 5:17) is excessive as well. But if all our actions are done in pursuit of our neighbor’s flourishing, and if we see our neighbor as in the image of God, then all our actions might be a kind of prayer, thereby fulfilling Paul’s difficult injunction. And, conversely, if we are praying always, aren’t we going to be always pursuing our neighbor’s flourishing?

We get something something similarly onerous to the requirement to pursue our neighbor’s flourishing in Kantian ethics: the requirement always to treat rational beings as ends.

One family of difficult cases, both for the flourishing requirement and the Kantian one, lies in everyday businesslike interactions. To use an example of Parfit, you’re buying coffee. It seems that all that is relevant about the barista is that they are supplying coffee. How can you not treat them as a mere means? How can you be pursuing their flourishing? Well, a useful reflection is that we flourish in large part by promoting the wellbeing of others. The barista’s professional activity is a part of their flourishing as a social animal. In courteously buying coffee, one is doing one’s part in an interaction that constitutes a part of that flourishing. Of course, it would be very odd, and likely to lead to pride (“Look at how great I am: I am enabling his flourishing”), if one were to be explicitly thinking about this each time one buys coffee. But courteously making opportunities for others to exercise their professional skills can be a habitual background intention in one’s actions. Similarly, when I when I bite into a delicious sandwich, my intention to get some enjoyment is not something that I need to think about, but it structures the activity (e.g., it explains why I don’t at the same time pinch myself hard).

A different kind of difficult case is given by activity which adversely impacts the flourishing of others. Morality sometimes requires such actions. Less well qualified applicants need to be turned down and trolleys need to be redirected towards more sparsely occupied tracks. Here I think three things can be done to abide by the flourishing requirement. The first is that one not intend a bad effect on flourishing. One doesn’t turn down the less well qualified applicants in order to negatively impact their flourishing. The second is that while declining the applicants or redirecting the trolley, one should be taking their flourishing into account, by thinking about any creative ways to decrease the negative impact on flourishing. Even if no creative ways are found (but isn’t prayer always an option?), the action is chosen as part of a pursuit of the flourishing of those who are harmed by it—but not of course as part of the pursuit of only their flourishing. The third is that there is a kind of harm to one if one is benefited immorally. To a morally sensitive person, it feels bad to get a job that another applicant is was better qualified for, and it would surely feel awful to have five people die because the trolley operator refused to redirect the trolley away from them for one’s sake. These feelings reflect reality. No human is an island, and when our flourishing is at the expense of those who deserve flourishing more, that is bad for us—even if we don’t know about it. It may not be on balance bad for us, but still it is a bad thing. And so the person who turns down the less qualified candidate or redirects the trolley prevents this bad thing from happening, and this is a positive impact on flourishing.

Kant's 20 thalers objection to the Ontological Argument

I’ve been thinking of this way of putting one of Kant’s “20 thalers” objection to Anselm’s ontological argument:

1, When we say “x is greater than y”, what we mean is that what x would be like if it existed is greater than what y would be like if it existed.

Now, Anselm claims that a perfect being that exists in thought and reality is greater than a perfect being that exists only in thought. But this does not seem true. For what we need to compare is what (a) the perfect being that exists in thought and reality would be like if it existed to what (b) the perfect being that exists only in thought would be like if it existed. But the answer here is that the two perfect beings would be exactly the same under the hypothetical condition that they both existed in reality.

(A query: Wouldn’t the being in (b) be a self-contradictory being if it existed in reality, since it would be a being that exists only in thought and yet that exists in reality? This depends on how the counterfactual is resolved.)

Note that this objection does not apply to the necessary being versions of the argument (like, perhaps, Anselm’s “cannot be conceived not to exist” version). For a perfect being who is a necessary being would be greater, if it existed, than a perfect being who isn’t a necessary being, if that one existed.

Right and wrong choices

Here's a thought I had that might have theodical applications. Agents tend to be more responsible when they choose rightly than when whey choose wrongly. For when one chooses wrongly, one acts against reason. And that cannot but contribute to making one less responsible for the action than had one acted following reason.

Intra- and inter-choice comparisons of value

Start with this thought:

1. If I have on-balance stronger reasons to do A than to do B, and I am choosing between A and B, then it is better that I do A than that I do B.

But notice that the following is false:

2. If in decision X, I choose A over C, and in decision Y, I choose B over D, and I had on-balance stronger reasons to do A than I did to do B, then decision X was better.

To see that (2) is false, suppose that in decision X, you are choosing between your friend's life and your convenience, while in decision Y, you are choosing between your friend's life and my own life. Your reasons to choose your friend's life over your convenience are much stronger (indeed, they typically give rise to a duty) than your reasons to choose your friend's life over your own life. Nonetheless, to save your friend's life at the cost of your own life is a better thing than to save your friend's life at the cost of your own convenience.

There is a whiff of paradoxicality here. But it's just a whiff. If you chose your convenience over your friend's life you'd be a terrible person. So in a case like that described in (2), choosing B (e.g., your friend's life over your life) is a better thing than choosing A (e.g., your friend's life over your convenience), choosing C (e.g., your convenience) is worse than choosing D.

In other words, when you choose A over B, the on-balance strength of reasons for A doesn't correlate--even typically--with the value of your deciding for A. Rather, the on-balance strength of reasons for A correlates (at least roughly and typically) with the value of your deciding for A minus the value of your deciding for B. This is quite clear.

This helps to resolve the paradox of why it is that doing the supererogatory is better than doing the obligatory, even though in a case where an option is obligatory the reasons are stronger than the reasons for supererogation. For omitting the supererogatory is much less bad than omitting the obligatory.

We may even be able to use some of the above to make some progress on the Kantian paradox that a good action by a person with a neutral character is better than a good action by a person with a good character, once we observe that it is worse for a good person to do something bad than for a neutral person to do the same thing, since the good person does two bad things: she does the bad thing in itself and she fights her good personality. Thus, even though the good person has more on-balance reason to do the good thing, because the strength of reasons doesn't correlate with the value of the action but with the value of the action minus the value of the alternative, this does not guarantee that her action has greater value than the good action of the neutral person.

The human as the end-setter

Perhaps the deepest question about human beings is about the source of our dignity. What feature of us is it that grounds our dignity, gives us a moral status beyond that of brute animals, provides us with a worth beyond market value, makes us into beings to be respected no matter the stakes?

I was thinking about the proposal (from the Kantian tradition, but rather simplified) that it is our ability to set ends of ourselves that is special about humans. But as far as I put it, the proposal is obviously inadequate. Suppose I take our Roomba and program it to choose a location in its vicinity at random and then try to find a path to that location using some path-finding algorithm. A natural way to describe the robot's functioning then is this: The robot set an end for itself and then searched for means appropriate to that end. So on the simple end-setting proposal, the robot should have dignity. But that's absurd: even if one day someone makes a robot with dignity, we're not nearly there yet, and yet what I've described is well within our current capabilities (granted, one might want to stick a Kinect on the Roomba to do it, since otherwise one would have to rely on dead-reckoning).

Perhaps, though, my end-setting Roomba wouldn't have enough of a variety of ends. After all, all its ends are of the same logical form: arrive at such and such a location. Maybe the end-setting theory needs the dignified beings to be able to choose between a wider variety of ends. Very well. There is a wide variety of states of the world that can be described with the Roomba's sensors, and we can add more sensors. We could program the Roomba to choose at random a state of the world that can be described in terms of actual and counterfactual sensor values and then try to achieve that end with the help of some simple or complex currently available algorithm. Now, maybe even the variety of ends that can be described using sensors isn't enough for dignity. But now the story is starting to get ad hoc, as we embark on the hopeless task of quantifying the variety of ends needed for dignity.

And surely that's not the issue. The problem is, rather, with whole idea that a being gets dignity just by being capable of choosing at random between goals. Surely dignity wouldn't just require choice of goals, but rational choice of goals. But what is this rationality in the choice of goals? Well, there could be something like an avoidance of conflicts between goals. However, that surely doesn't do much to dignify a being. If the Roomba chose a set of goals at random, discarding those sets that involved some sort of practical conflict (the Roomba--with some hardware upgrade, perhaps--could simulate pursuing the set of goals and see if the set is jointly achievable in practice), that would be cleverer, but wouldn't be dignified.

And I doubt that even more substantive constraints would make the random end-setting be a dignity-conferring property. For there is nothing dignified about choosing randomly between options. There might be dignity in a being that engaged in random end-setting subject to moral constraints, but the dignity wouldn't be grounded in the end-setting as such, but the being's subjection of its procedures to moral constraints.

The randomness is a part of the problem. But of course replacing randomness with determinism makes no difference. We could specify some deterministic procedure for the Roomba to make its choice--maybe it sorts the descriptions of possible ends alphabetically and always chooses the third one on the list--but that would be nothing special.

If end-setting is to confer dignity, the being needs to set its ends not just subject to rational constraints, but actually for reasons. Thus there must be reasons prior to the ends, reasons-to-choose and not just constraints-on-choice. However, positive reasons embody ends. And so in a being whose end-setting makes it be dignified, this end-setting is governed by prior ends, the ends embodied in the reasons the being is responsive to in its end-setting. On pain of vicious regress, such a being must be responsive to ends that it did not choose. Moreover, for this to be dignity-producing, surely the responsiveness needs to to these ends as such. But "an end not chosen by us" is basically just the good. So these beings must be responsive to the good as such.

At this point, however, it becomes less and less clear that the choice of ends is doing all that much work in our story about dignity, once we have responsiveness to the good as such in view. For this responsiveness now seems a better story about what confers dignity. (Though perhaps still not an adequate one.)

Objection: No current robot would be capable of grasping ends as such and hence cannot adopt ends as such.

Response: Sure, but can a two-year-old? A two-year-old can adopt ends, but does it cognize the ends as ends?

Pursuit of perfect virtue

1. The pursuit of perfect virtue should be central to my life.
2. Necessarily, a virtue that does not completely guarantee acting rightly is not perfect.
3. If an afterlife is unavailable, virtue that completely guarantees acting rightly is also unavailable.
4. The pursuit of something unavailable should not be central to my life.
5. So, an afterlife is available.

Trust in the virtuous and the morality of lying

Helga is well known to be perfectly virtuous. Her best friend Kurt is accused of conspiring to peacefully overthrow a tyrannical government, and will be tortured to death and executed unless Helga can convince government agents that he did no such thing. As a matter of fact, Helga has conclusive first-person evidence that Kurt did no such thing, much as that government deserves to be overthrown.

Suppose that it is sometimes permissible to lie. Then surely lying to save a peaceful conspirator against a tyrannical government would be a paradigm case of permissible lying, and indeed of obligatory lying. Thus, if Helga testifies to government agents that Kurt is not a conspirator, she is doing precisely what a perfectly virtuous person would do if Kurt were a conspirator. Thus if she is known to be perfectly virtuous, her testimony to Kurt's not being a conspirator is unworthy of credence. In fact, her testimony would be more worthy of credence if she were somewhat less virtuous and rigidly opposed to lying in all cases. Thus the permissibility of lying would make the testimony of the virtuous be worthless in a number of high-stakes cases.

But the virtuous are precisely the people whose testimony should carry weight, they are precisely the trustworthy, at least in cases where they are in a position to know whereof they speak. So the conclusion that Helga's truthful testimony about Kurt is worthless is paradoxical. And this paradox gives one reason to reject the premise from which the paradox was derived, namely that it is sometimes permissible to lie.

Kant and Lewis on our freedom

Kant (on one reading) holds that the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of nature depend on us (noumenally speaking). This reconciles determinism with freedom: sure, our actions are determined by the laws and initial conditions, but the laws and initial conditions are up to us. Kant also thinks that a further merit of this view is that one can blame people whose misdeeds come from a bad upbringing, because noumenally speaking they were responsible for their own upbringing.

Lewis holds that freedom is compatible with determinism, and in a deterministic world had one acted otherwise, the laws would have been different.

Everybody agrees that the view I ascribe to Kant is crazy (though not everybody agrees that the ascription is correct). But Lewis's view is supposed to be much saner than Kant's.

How? The obvious suggestion is that Lewis only makes the laws depend counterfactually on our actions (assuming determinism) while Kant makes the laws depend explanatorily on our actions. But that suggestion doesn't work, since Lewis's best-systems account of laws makes the laws depend on the law-governed events, and so it makes the laws depend not just counterfactually on our actions but also explanatorily: the laws' being as they are is grounded in part in our actions. So both accounts make the laws explanatorily depend on us.

Admittedly, Kant also makes the past, not just the laws, depend on our actions. But that's also true for Lewis, albeit to a smaller degree, because of his doctrine of small miracles...

A (paradoxical?) argument that intentional reproduction is wrong

Consider:

1. We cannot permissibly intend to produce a person for reasons that do not include the specific person's own good.
2. We cannot intend to produce a person for reasons that include the specific person's own good.
3. We cannot permissibly intend to produce a person without reasons.
4. Necessarily, if we intend to produce a person, we do so for no reason, or for reasons that include the person's own good, or for reasons that do not include the person's own good.
5. We cannot permissibly intend to produce a person. (1-4)

Premise (1) is due to Kantian considerations: persons are ends not means. I will argue for premise (2) shortly. Perhaps the easiest way to argue for premise (3) is that we simply cannot intend—permissibly or not—without reasons. We intend things because they are good, either as means or as ends, and in either case we have reasons. But one might also argue that if it is wrong to produce persons for reasons that do not include the person's own good, it is a fortiori wrong to produce them wantonly, for no reason at all, as it were on a whim. Or one might think that being rational animals, it is wrong for us to intentionally act in a non-reasnable way, and to act intentionally but without reasons is to do that.

Now on its face, premise (2) is false. Surely people do procreate for the child's own good. But I don't think so. They may be acting for the good of whatever child results from the reproduction, but there is no specific child for whose good they are acting. And when they act for the good of whatever child results, the specific child's good ends up being a constitutive means to the good they are seeking, so they do not escape from the Kantian criticism. The good of a person is an incommunicable good: it is that specific person's good. But the existence and identity of the child depends on the couple's decision in a way that the couple is unable to figure out beforehand. Thus the couple cannot be deciding in light of the identity of the child, and hence cannot be acting for the good of that specific person.

Note that God does not suffer from the cognitive limitations that give rise to (2): he can know our identity before he decides to create us, and can decide to create us for our own good.

Now, when a couple engages in the marital act, they have a reason to engage in that act apart from reproduction: the act is good in itself, being an embodiment of marital union. Thus they can act so as to unite, and accept the child as a gift from God that goes beyond their intention. Note that even given my argument they can permissibly rationally consider the reproduction in their decision whether to make love, for instance as a defeater to various defeaters (being tired, etc.) to the marital reasons for lovemaking. On the other hand, in non-coital methods of reproduction like IVF the couple is specifically intending reproduction, and that is wrong if the argument succeeds.

I am not myself entirely convinced of (1), because I am not entirely convinced of the Kantian autonomy framework. We aren't ends in ourselves: we exist as constitutive glorifications of God. Thus it does not seem contrary to the dignity of a person to be produced for the greater glory of God. Kantianism is what you get when you remove God from the story. If that's right, then we get the surprising result that only theists can permissibly intend to produce a child. Atheists, to be consistent, will need to have the Kantian attitude, and while they can permissibly reproduce, they cannot do so with the intention of reproducing, if everything else in the argument works.

Laurie Paul on deciding whether to have children

A colleague alerted me that Laurie Paul has a piece on deciding whether to have children (in a position where one does not have any yet). Paul addresses the model on which you rationally decide whether to have a child by reflecting on "what it will be like for you to have a child of your very own" and argues that this model cannot be used. The neat idea is that having a child is a transformative experience, and just as the person who has never seen color cannot have any idea what it's like to see red, so too cannot have any idea what it will be like to live after this transformative experience until one has undergone it. Therefore, she concludes, standard decision theory cannot be used to decide whether to have a child.

Now, I agree that one shouldn't decide on whether to have a child by reflecting on what that would be like for you. To decide to have a child on the basis of what it will be like for one is to treat the child's very existence as a means to one's ends. This is morally objectionable in the same way that it is morally objectionable to decide to rescue a drowning person on the basis of what it will be like for one to be a rescuer (though of course that certainly beats deciding not to rescue her).

But Paul's transformative-experience argument seems to me to fail in at least two places. First, it is false that one cannot make rational decisions on the basis of what it will be like for one after one has had a transformative experience. Paul herself gives the example of posttraumatic stress as a transformative experience. I have no idea what it would be like to have undergone that, but I certainly can know that it would be terrible to live with posttraumatic stress. I can decide to avoid situations generating posttraumatic stress in a perfectly rational way on the basis of what it would be like to live with posttraumatic stress--namely, on the basis of the fact that it will be nasty. I don't have to know in what way it would be nasty to know that it would be nasty. There are many very nasty things that are transformative, and one can rationally avoid them simply on the basis of common-sense knowledge (typically based on testimony) of their nastiness.

I think Paul will resist this line of thought on the following grounds. The decision whether to avoid posttraumatic stress or not is a no-brainer given what we know about it. Just about everybody who undergoes it agrees it's very nasty, I assume (I haven't checked opinion polls here). But parenthood is much more complex. Typically, it has both nasty and nice components. And one doesn't know how the nasty and the nice will balance out until one has undergone the transformative experience. But I think that once we've agreed that there is no in-principle difficulty in making decisions on the basis of how things will be after a transformative experience, then it can just be a matter of gathering the best information we have on the balance between the nasty and the nice for people of different sorts, and seeing what sort of a person we are.

Second, even if one could not make a decision on the basis of what-it-would-be-like considerations, decision theory could still be used. One could use non-egocentric decision theory, like utilitarian decision theory. But even within egocentric decision theory, one could make a decision on the basis of non-experiential values, like the objective value of being the intentional cause of the great goods of life and upbringing.

My own take on the reasons for having children is rather different however. There is some discussion here.

Kantian reflections on making tools less useful

It has often struck me as perverse to be putting effort into making products one sells be less flexible and useful. There is a good Kantian reason against such efforts when the goals one is hampering are not immoral: by making products be less useful, one is hampering the autonomous pursuit of goals by customers and thus putting effort into treating the customers less as ends.

This is not, I think, an area for an exceptionless principle. But there is, I think, a strong moral presumption against putting effort into making products be less flexible and less useful to customers. The principle is grounded in the need to avoid of unnecessary restrictions on pursuits of permissible ends. Here are some examples of practices that violate this presumption:

• Locking down operating systems on tools such as phones, tablets and cameras in such a way as makes it more difficult, and in some cases illegal, for users to add new functionality.
• Including legal terms in end-user license agreements that have a blanket prohibition on modification of the software.
• Removing customization options available in earlier versions of software.

Conversely, there is a moral presumption in favor of making products be more flexible and more useful to customers, especially when this can easily be done. For instance, if a software developer can with little effort add an option that allows a piece of software to be customized by the user in some respect, to add that option is a way of displaying respect for the user's autonomy to choose ways of using the software that do not fit with the developer's own ideas on how the software is best used.

Of course, these are all only presumptive moral principles and can be overridden. Nonetheless, the reasons to override these principles need to have significant moral weight. And the reasons need to be particularly weighty when the reasons themselves are in tension with respect for the customer, as for instance if one locks down the firmware of a device in order to protect customers from themselves. Such locking down is much easier to justify in a device like a car or a pacemaker where human lives are stake, than in a device like a camera, where the worst that might happen to a customer is destruction of the device. Phones are somewhere in between: life can depend on it (and not just in really rare freak cases), but typically do not.

And of course there need be nothing wrong with a pricing structure on which less locked-down devices are more expensive, as long as all the prices are fair (I am inclined to accept something like the medieval fair-price doctrine, but I have no idea how to formulate it).

Kant's argument from gratitude

Kant famously argued that we had a duty to believe in God, as this was necessary for us to fulfill the duty to give thanks for the universe. My understanding is that Kant thought that this was not an argument for the existence of God, but only an argument for the duty to believe in God. But surely it becomes an argument for the existence of God (or at least an agent who caused the universe) when one adds the very plausible premise:

• One only has the duty to give thanks for a product of agency.

Perhaps, though, Kant would want to subjectivize this premise into:

• One only has the duty to give thanks for what one believes to be a product of agency.

But if one says this, then the atheist doesn't have a duty to give thanks for the existence of the universe, and Kant's argument fails. So it seems that either Kant's argument fails (at least in the case of atheists--maybe you could argue that if you believe in God then you have a duty to believe in God, which is an interesting result, but I don't think it's what Kant was trying to argue for) or Kant is wrong that we can't argue for the existence of God or both.

But I am no Kant scholar.

Reasons of trust

Suppose you promise me to do something and suppose I should trust you. Then I have a moral reason not to check whether you did what your promised. Of course, if I have a special responsibility for it, I may also have a moral reason to check. But generally speaking, I think we have an imperfect duty not to check up on people when we should trust them. Moreover, we should trust people unless we have good reason to the contrary. I would be wronging a colleague if, out of the blue, I were to start running his papers through TurnItIn.com to look for plagiarism. Such an action would be a failure to show required trust. It would thus be contrary to collegial love.

Natural love, thus, requires natural faith of us. But our supernatural love for Christ requires supernatural faith of us.

Spinoza and Kant on reason and universalizability

Spinoza writes (Ethics, Scholium to 4P72):

The question may be asked: "What if a man could by deception free himself from imminent danger of death?  Would not consideration for the preservation of his own being be decisive in persuading him to deceive?"  I reply in the same way, that if reason urges this, it does so for all men;  and thus reason urges men in general to join forces and to have common laws only with deceitful intention;  that is, in effect, to have no laws in common at all, which is absurd.

This not only agrees exactly with Kant's position that lying is always wrong, but the form of reasoning is rather Kantian.  So the first form of the Categorical Imperative precedes Kant not just in doctrine but also in rationale: if reason tells me to do something, it tells everyone this.

And, while I agree the conclusion that lying is always wrong is correct, Spinoza's version of the reasoning just doesn't work.  For defender of lying to save innocent life does not say that reason says that one ought always deceive or even that one ought deceive whenever it is to one's advantage, but the claim is more narrow, say that one should lie to unjust aggressors in order to protect their victims.  And the universalization of this narrow claim does not lead to the sort of absurd social situation Spinoza points out, though it leads to the kind of contradiction that Kant is worried about: if everyone lied to unjust aggressors when this would save lives, unjust aggressors wouldn't believe the claims of those who speak to them, and there would be no point to the lie.

That said, I am in general kind of dubious of universalization arguments.  There is, after all, the classic example of playing tennis Saturday night because the courts are free.

48 arguments against naturalism

Consider this argument:

1. A desire to be morally perfect is morally required for humans.
2. If naturalism is correct, a desire to be morally perfect cannot be fulfilled for humans.
3. If a desire cannot be fulfilled for humans, it is not morally required for humans.
4. Therefore, naturalism is not correct.

This argument provides a schema for a family of arguments. One obtains different members of the family by replacing or disambiguating the underlined terms in different ways.

If one disambiguates "naturalism" as physicalism (reductive or not), one gets an argument against physicalism (reductive or not). If one disambiguates "naturalism" in the Plantinga way as the claim that there is no God or anybody like God, one gets an argument for theism or something like it. Below I will assume the first disambiguation, though I think some versions of the schema will have significant plausibility on the Plantingan disambiguation.

One can replace "morally required" by such terms as "normal", "non-abnormal" or "required for moral perfection".

One can replace "to be morally perfect" by "for a perfect friendship", "to be perfectly happy" or "to know with certainty the basic truths about the nature of reality" or "to know with certainty the basic truths about ethics" or "to have virtue that cannot be lost". While (1) as it stands is quite plausible, with some of these replacements the requiredness versions of (1) become less plausible, but the "non-abnormal" version is still plausible.

Probably the hardest decision is how to understand the "cannot". The weaker the sense of "cannot", the easier it is for (2) to hold but the harder it is for (3) to hold. Thus, if we take "cannot" to indicate logical impossibility, (2) becomes fairly implausible, but (3) is very plausible as above.

I would recommend two options. The first is that the "cannot" indicate causal impossibility. In this case, (3) is very plausible. And (2) has some plausibility for "moral perfection" and all its replacements. For instance, it is plausible that if naturalism is true, certain knowledge of the basic truths about the nature of reality or about ethics is just not causally available. If, further, moral perfection requires certainty about the basic truths of ethics (we might read these as at the normative level for this argument), then moral perfection is something we cannot have. And if we cannot have moral perfection, plausibly we cannot have perfect friendship either. Likewise, if naturalism is true, virtue can always be lost due to some quantum blip in the brain, and if moral perfection requires virtue that cannot be lost, then moral perfection is also unattainable. And perfect happiness requires certain knowledge of its not being such as can be lost. Maybe, though, one could try to argue that moral perfection is compatible with the possibility of losing virtue as long as the loss itself is not originated from within one's character. But in fact if naturalism is true, it is always causally possible to have the loss of virtue originate from within one's character, say because misleading evidence could come up that convinces one that torture is beneficial to people, which then leads to one conscientiously striving to become cruel.

The second option is that the "cannot" is a loosey-goosey "not really possible", weaker than causal impossibility by not counting as possible things that are so extraordinarily unlikely that we wouldn't expect them to happen over the history of humankind. Thus, in this sense, I "cannot" sprout wings, though it seems to be causally possible for my wavefunction to collapse into a state that contains wings. Premise (2) is now even more plausible, including for all the substituents, while premise (3) still has some plausibility, especially where we stick to the "morally required" or "required for moral perfection", and make the desire be a desire for moral perfection.

If I am counting correctly, if we keep "naturalism" of the non-Plantingan sort, but allow all the other variations in the argument, we get 48 arguments against naturalism, though not all independent. Or we can disjoin the conjunctions of the premises, and get an argument with one premise that is a disjunction of 48 conjunctions of three premises. :-)

Siblings and moral theory

1. We have special duties, independent of communal enactments, to take care of our siblings, precisely because they are siblings.

This is true.

Notice that (1) creates problems for a number of moral theories. Utilitarians will deny (1). The mere fact that someone is our brother or sister only makes it easier for us to know how to help him or her, which does not make a for a special duty to take care of him or her precisely because he or she is our brother or sister. It is difficult to see how Kantians could justify (1) without relying on something like a dollop of Natural Law (which Kant himself, but not so much contemporary Kantians, is happy with).

Contractarians can accept (1) minus the "independent of communal enactments" proviso. For perhaps it would be irrational for us to reject a communal tradition of a network of duties of special care that is below a certain level of onerousness, and our community's network includes siblinghood. But the contractarian probably could not object if the community instead had a network of duties of special care that put similar emphasis on, say, first-cousins-of-the-same-eye-color instead of siblings: what one gets from the contractarian structure is at most the irrationality of rejecting whatever one's community network of duties of special care is.

Divine command theorists can perhaps accept (1), though one might worry if the "precisely" in (1) is correct if this happens also because of divine command.

Natural law, of the well-developed moral theories, is probably the theory that best passes the test of fitting with (1). So, (1) provides a kind of argument for natural law theory (and to a lesser degree for divine command theory).

Does (1) matter? I think so. It is an important moral insight that somehow all human beings are brothers and sisters, but this moral insight is unhelpful, and maybe harmful, apart from (1).

Wild and domesticated animal pain

It seems to me that our attitudes to the pain of animals are three-fold:

1. It is important for humans not to cause severe pain to non-human animals.
2. It is not important for humans to prevent severe pain to animals not under human care.
3. It is important for humans to prevent severe pain to animals under human care.

The importance of not causing severe pain to animals, whether these animals are wild or pets or farm animals is manifested, for instance, in our laws against cruelty to animals and in our moral outcry against cruel hunting methods.

On the other hand, scientists routinely observe wild animals causing severe pain to other animals in the wild, and do not intervene in the process, and I have never heard anyone criticize them for this failure to intervene. Likewise, nobody makes it their life-work to legalize a special kind of safari where marksmen who have passed accuracy tests relatively painlessly shoot lions' prey in the head just before the lions reach the prey, as well as seeking out and killing animals that look like they are suffering from painful diseases. Yet such safaris would prevent instances of severe pain to wild animals.

Finally, the importance of preventing severe pain to animals under our care is exhibited by a whole host of practices such as the use of anesthesia in veterinary care or the euthanizing of elderly pets.

I think the best way to make sense of the data is to postulate us accepting a view on which (a) severe pain to animals is not a great evil in and of itself, but (b) to cause severe pain to animals is to behave in a particularly vicious and censure-worthy fashion, and (c) we have special duties of care towards some animals often in exchange for goods we receive from the animals (labor, milk, meat, entertainment, companionship, etc.)

Points (a)-(c) fit with the Kantian idea that what makes cruelty to animals wrong is not primarily the harm to the animals, but the dehumanization of the cruelly behaving person, though I don't want to endorse the Kantian idea.

Vices

The virtues support each other in two ways: (i) having one helps gain another; (ii) each helps to achieve the ends of the others. In regard to (ii), note that it is easier to achieve the goals of prudence if one is chaste, sober and eats in moderation, to achieve the goals of generosity if one is prudent and brave, to achieve the self-knowledge that humility aims at if one is wise and sober, and so on. This is partly distinct from (i).

The vices, on the other hand, support each other in sense (i), but hamper each other in sense (ii). Thus, laziness may lead to gluttony (having nothing better to do, one may just eat) and lust may lead to greed (in order to impress potential sexual partners): having a vice helps one gain another. But, in fact, the goals of the vices hamper one another. Lust is expensive, and hence hampers the goals of greed. Wrath makes it harder to make money and keep sexual partners. All the vices, including vanity itself, hamper the goals of vanity by making one appear ridiculous. Conversely, sloth and cowardice hamper the goals of all the other vices.

So, while type (i) support among the virtues is a delightful thing, because the virtues also help to achieve one another's goals, type (i) support among the vices is a baneful thing, because the vices hamper the achievement of one another's goals, but nonetheless the vices lead to one another.

This is a fine, and very broadly both Kantian and Aristotelian, answer to the question of why be virtuous.