Darwin and Einstein against the shared-form interpretation of Aristotle

Assume an Aristotelian account of substantial form on which forms are found in the informed things. A classic question is whether substantial forms are shared between members of the same kind or whether each individual has their own numerically (but maybe not qualitatively) distinct form.

Here’s a fun argument against the shared-form view. For evolution to work with substantial forms, sometimes organisms of one metaphysical kind must produce organisms of another kind. For instance, supposing that wolves are a different metaphysical kind from dogs, and dogs evolved from wolves, it must have happened that two wolves reproduced and made a dog. (I suspect wolves and dogs are metaphysically the same kind, but let’s suppose they aren’t for the sake of the argument.) If we are to avoid occasionalism about this, we have to suppose that the two wolves had a causal power to produce a dog-form under those circumstances.

Plausibly dogs evolved from wolves in Siberia, but there was also a Pleistocene wolf population in Japan, and imagine that the causal power to produce a dog was found in both wolf populations. Suppose, counterfactually, that a short period of time after a pair of wolves produced a dog in Siberia, a pair of Japanese wolves also produced a dog. On a shared-form view, when the Siberian wolves produced a dog, they did two things: they produced a dog-form and they made a dog composed of the dog-form and matter. But when the Japanese wolves produced a dog, the dog-form already existed, so they only thing they could do is make a dog composed of matter and that dog-form.

The first oddity here is this. Our (perhaps imaginary) Japanese wolves didn’t know that there was already a dog in Siberia, so when they produced a dog, they exercised exactly the same causal powers that their Siberian cousins did. But their exercise of these causal powers had a different effect, because it did not produce a new form, since the form already existed, and instead it made the form get exemplified in some matter in Japan. It is odd that the exercise of the same causal power worked differently in the same local circumstances.

Second, there is an odd action-at-a-distance here. The dog-form was available in Siberia, and somehow the Japanese wolves in the story made matter get affected by it thousands of kilometers away.

In fact, to make things worse, we can suppose the Japanese wolves only lagged a two or three milliseconds after their Siberian cousins. In that case, the Siberian wolves caused the existence of the dog-form, which then affected the coming-into-existence of a dog in Japan in a faster-than-light way. Indeed, in some reference frames, the Japanese dog came into existence shortly before the dog-form came into existence in Siberia. In those reference frames we have backwards causation: the Siberian wolves make a dog-form and that dog form organizes matter in Japan earlier.

If, on the other hand, every dog has a numerically distinct form, there is no difficulty: the Japanese wolves’ activity can be entirely causally independent of the Siberian ones’.

The explanation of our reliability is not physical

1. All facts completely reducible to physics are first-order facts.

2. All facts completely explained by first-order facts are themselves completely reducible to first-order facts.

3. Facts about our epistemic reliability are facts about truth.

4. Facts about truth are not completely reducible to first-order facts.

5. Therefore, no complete explanation of our epistemic reliability is completely reducible to physics.

This is a variant on Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism.

Premise (4) follows from Tarski’s Indefinability of Truth Theorem.

The one premise in the argument that I am not confident of (2). But it sounds right.

Representation and truth

For a while, I’ve been thinking of a teleological/normative account of representation. The basic idea is that:

1. State S represents reality being such that r if and only if one’s teleology specifies that one should be in state S only if r.

But I’ve also been worried that this makes representation much too common in the world. If a bacterium’s nature says that some behavior that should only be triggered under some circumstances, then on this account, the bacterium’s behavior represents the occurrence of these circumstances.

I am kind of willing to bite that bullet. But perhaps I don’t need to.

For a long time I’ve been sensitive to the difference between a proposition p and the second-order proposition that p is true, but this sensitivity has largely been a matter of nitpicking. But today I realized that this distinction may help save the teleological account of normativity with a very small tweak:

2. State S represents a proposition p if and only if one’s teleology specifies that one should be in state S only if p is true.

It is plausible that only higher organisms have a teleology that makes reference to truth as such.

Remark 1: If we want, we can have both (1) and (2) by distinguishing between “simple representation” and “alethic representation”. Alethic representation is then related to simple representation as follows:

3. State S alethically represents reality being such that r if and only if S simply represents reality being such that it is true that r.

Remark 2: Given Leon Porter’s argument that truth is not a physical property, it is interesting to note that on the alethic version, representation requires a being that has normative properties that make reference to something nonphysical. In particular, this kind of normativity cannot be grounded in evolution.

Where does the evolutionary argument for naturalism work?

I’ve never been moved by Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism in general, but I’ve also always found it plausible that naturalism and evolution undercuts cognitive reliability in certain areas, such as metaphysics. It seems, on the other hand, really plausible that we would get cognitive reliability for empirical things (largely because of the fact that naturalism makes causal theories of content very likely).

One might go on to conjecture that Plantinga’s argument works everywhere outside of empirical areas. I thought so until I realized that there is a significant area of normativity where the argument doesn’t work: prudential value judgments. This is because that life and reproduction is good for living things, and many other goods, noncoincidentally, contribute to life and reproduction. But at the same time, we are evolutionarily selected for successful promotion of life and reproduction. A being that believed that life is bad would be unlikely to promote its own survival, and hence unlikely to pass on its genes.

Plantinga’s standard answer to similar objections in the empirical arena is that behavior does not come just from beliefs, but from a combination of belief and desire. But this response is rather implausible in the prudential rationality case. It is extremely plausible that there is a conceptual link between a mental state representing something as good for one and having a desire for that thing. If there were no correlation between a mental state S respecting a thing and having a desire for that thing, that mental state just is not a belief that the thing is good for one.

Another problem with evolutionary accounts of teleology

The crucial thought behind evolutionary accounts of proper function or teleology is that organisms succeed in reproducing because they are fulfilling a function, and wouldn’t have reproduced otherwise. In a paper with Koons, I offer a Great Grazing Ground objection to all such accounts.

Here, I want to offer a perhaps neater objection. Imagine Twin Earth just like Earth, with a biological history just like ours. But there is an extremely powerful alien, akin to Frankfurt’s counterfactual intervener, who has a script for all the details of biological history on that planet. That script, completely by chance, matches all the events on both Twin Earth and Earth. But the counterfactual intervener has the following immovable policy: if there is any deviation from the script on Twin Earth, the alien restores conditions to the same ones that would have resulted according to the script. Moreover, the alien’s restoration would occur before there is any deviation in reproduction or survival. But, by good fortune, no intervention is ever needed: everything actually follows the script.

Imagine, for instance, that a bird is attacked by a predator. On Earth, it escapes on its wings and reproduces. The same happens on Twin Earth. But on Twin Earth, had the bird not flown, the alien would have intervened, moved the bird out of danger, and then restored everything to the post-flight situation in the script. Consequently, on Twin Earth, it is false that had the bird not flown, it wouldn’t have reproduced. Indeed, apart from trivial cases like “Had x not reproduced, it wouldn’t have reproduced”, on Twin Earth the counterfactuals allegedly defining proper function or teleology hold. Yet events on Twin Earth are just as on Earth, and the alien doesn’t do anything but watch. And it is deeply implausible that simply by watching the alien destroys proper function or teleology.

A constraint on metaethics

Suppose that we lived lives like ours in a world (possible or not) whose metaphysics included nothing like moral duties except that there was a loving God and he issued commands. If in that world we used the phrase “morally wrong”, that phrase would refer to the property of being forbidden by God.

Or suppose that we lived lives like ours in a world (possible or not) whose metaphysics included nothing like moral duties except that we had Aristotelian forms and they specified what the will should will, the phrase “morally wrong” would refer to the property of being contrary to what our form says the will should will.

But suppose now we lived in a world where there was nothing like moral duties, no God, no forms, but buried underground and unseen by humans there was a stone tablet that arose from a random volcanic process millions of years ago. On these tablets by chance there were markings that looked just like French sentences, and when interpreted as French sentences, they stated imperatives, like the Golden Rule, that that fit very well with our intuitions about what are the core moral duties. I doubt that the phrase “morally wrong” would refer to the property of being contrary to what the stone tablet would enjoin if it were interpreted as French. (I am careful in my wording, because strictly speaking the stone tablet, being the product of random processes, does not contain any sentences—it only contains markings that look like sentences of French.)

Suppose my intuition is right. What is the difference between the third case and the first two? Here is a hypothesis. In the divine command world, presumably our beliefs about what we call “morally wrong” have some sort of a connection to the commands of that God. In the Aristotelian world, our beliefs about the “morally wrong” presumably come in some way from the Aristotelian forms. But in the stone tablet world, the “morally wrong” beliefs have no connection to the stone tablets, except that the stone tablets happen to fit them.

This suggests an important constraint on metaethics: our beliefs about the morally wrong had better have a real connection—perhaps even a real causal connection—with their grounds. If this constraint is right, then evolutionary debunking arguments against morality cut more deeply than is recognized: if the arguments correctly show that our “moral concepts” lack a relevant connection with any grounds, then our “moral beliefs” not are not knowledge, but they are in fact just nonsense.

Of course, I want to turn this around: given that our moral beliefs are not mere nonsense, it follows that they have a real connection with grounds, and this undercuts the idea that we are mere products of completely unguided evolution.

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.

Approximatable laws

Some people, most notably Robin Collins, have run teleological arguments from the discoverability of the laws of nature.

But I doubt that we know that the laws of nature are discoverable. After all, it seems we haven’t discovered the laws of physics yet.

But the laws of nature are, surely, approximatable: it is within our power to come up with approximations that work pretty well in limited, but often useful, domains. This feature of the laws of nature is hard to deny. At the same time, it seems to be a very anthropocentric feature, since the both the ability to approximate and the usefulness are anthropocentric features. The approximatability of the laws of nature thus suggests a universe whose laws are designed by someone who cares about us.

Objection: Only given approximatable laws is intelligence an advantage, so intelligent beings will only evolve in universes with approximatable laws. Hence, the approximatable laws can be explained in a multiverse by an anthropic principle.

Response: Approximatability is not a zero-one feature. It comes in degrees. I grant that approximatable laws are needed for intelligence to be an advantage. But they only need to be approximatable to the degree that was discovered by our prehistoric ancestors. There is no need for the further approximatability that was central to the scientific revolution. Thus an anthropic principle explanation only explains a part of the extent of approximatability.

A third kind of moral argument

The most common kind of moral argument for theism is that theism better fits with there being moral truths (either moral truths in general, or some specific kind of moral truths, like that there are obligations) than alternative theories do. Often, though not always, this argument is coupled with a divine commmand theory.

A somewhat less common kind of argument is that theism better explains how we know moral truths. This argument is likely to be coupled with an evolutionary debunking argument to argue that if naturalism and evolution were true, our moral beliefs might be true, and might even be reliable, but wouldn’t be knowledge.

But there is a third kind of moral argument that one doesn’t meet much at all in philosophical circles—though I suspect it is not uncommon popularly—and it is that theism better explains why we have moral beliefs. The reason we don’t meet this argument much in philosophical circles is probably that there seems to be very plausible evolutionary explanations of moral beliefs in terms of kin selection and/or cultural selection. Social animals as clever as we are benefit as a group from moral beliefs to discourage secret anti-cooperative selfishness.

I want to try to rescue the third kind of moral argument in this post in two ways. First, note that moral beliefs are only one of several solutions to the problem of discouraging secret selfishness. Here are three others:

• belief in karmic laws of nature on which uncooperative individuals get very undesirable reincarnatory outcomes

• belief in an afterlife judgment by a deity on which uncooperative individuals get very unpleasant outcomes

• a credence around 1/2 to an afterlife judgment by a deity on which uncooperative individuals get an infinitely bad outcome (cf. Pascal’s Wager).

These three options make one think that cooperativeness is prudent, but not that it is morally required. Moreover, they are arguably more robust drivers of cooperative behavior than beliefs about moral requirement. Admittedly, though, the first two of the above might lead to moral beliefs as part of a theory about the operation of the karmic laws or the afterlife judgment.

Let’s assume that there are important moral truths. Still, P(moral beliefs | naturalism) is not going to exceed 1/2. On the other hand, P(moral beliefs | God) is going to be high, because moral truths are exactly the sort of thing we would expect God to ensure our belief in (through evolutionary means, perhaps). So, the fact of moral belief will be evidence for theism over naturalism.

The second approach to rescuing the moral argument is deeper and I think more interesting. Moreover, it generalizes beyond the moral case. This approach says that a necessary condition for moral beliefs is being able to have moral concepts. But to have moral concepts requires semantic access to moral properties. And it is difficult to explain on contemporary naturalistic grounds how we have semantic access to moral properties. Our best naturalistic theories of reference are causal, but moral properties on contemporary naturalism (as opposed to, say, the views of a Plato or an Aristotle) are causally inert. Theism, however, can nicely accommodate our semantic access to moral properties. The two main theistic approaches to morality ground morality in God or in an Aristotelian teleology. Aristotelian teleology allows us to have a causal connection to moral properties—but then Aristotelian teleology itself calls for an explanation of our teleological properties that theism is best suited to give. And approaches that ground morality in God give God direct semantic access to moral properties, which semantic access God can extend to us.

This generalizes to other kinds of normativity, such as epistemic and aesthetic: theism is better suited to providing an explanation of how we have semantic access to the properties in question.

Hope vs. despair

A well-known problem, noticed by Meirav, is that it is difficult to distinguish hope from despair. Both the hoper and the despairer are unsure about an outcome and they both have a positive attitude towards it. So what's the difference? Meirav has a story involving a special factor, but I want to try something else.

If I predict an outcome, and the outcome happens, there is the pleasure of correct prediction. When I despair and predict a negative outcome, that pleasure takes the distinctive more intense "I told you so" form of vindicated despair. And if the good outcome happens, despite my despair, then I should be glad about the outcome, but there is a perverse kind of sadness at the frustration of the despair.

The opposite happens when I hope. When the better outcome happens, then even though I may not have predicted the better outcome, and hence I may not have the pleasure of correct prediction, I do have the pleasure of hope's vindication. And when the bad outcome happens, I forego the small comfort of the vindication of despair.

The pleasures of correct prediction and the pains of incorrect prediction are doxastic in nature: they are pleasures and pains of right and wrong opinion. But hope and despair can, of course, exist without prediction. But when I hope for a good outcome, then I dispose myself for pleasures and pains of this doxastic sort much as if I were predicting the good outcome. When I despair of the good outcome, then I dispose myself for these pleasures and pains much as if I were predicting the bad outcome.

We can think of hoping and despairing as moves in a game. If you hope for p, then you win if and only if p is true. If you despair of p, then you win if and only if p is false. In this game of hoping and despairing, you are respectively banking on the good and the bad outcomes.

But this banking is restricted. It is in general false that when I hope for a good outcome, I act as if it were to come true. I can hope for the best while preparing for the worst. But nonetheless, by hoping I align myself with the best.

This gives us an interesting emotional utility story about hope and despair. When I hope for a good outcome, I stack a second good outcome--a victory in the hope and despair game, and the pleasure of that victory--on top of the hoped-for good outcome, and I stack a second bad outcome--a sad loss in the game--on top of the hoped-against bad outcome. And when I despair of the good outcome, I moderate my goods and bads: when the bad outcome happens, the badness is moderated by the joy of victory in the game, but when the good outcome happens, the goodness is tempered by the pain of loss. Despair, thus, functions very much like an insurance policy, spreading some utility from worlds where things go well into worlds where things go badly.

If the four goods and bads that the hope/despair game super-adds (goods: vindicated hope and vindicated despair; bads: frustrated hope and needless despair) are equal in magnitude, and if we have additive expected utilities with expected utility maximization, then as far this super-addition goes, you are better off hoping when the probability of the good outcome is greater than 1/2 and are better off despairing when the probability of the bad outcome is is less than 1/2. And I suspect (without doing the calculations) that realistic risk-averseness will shift the rationality cut-off higher up, so that with credences slightly above 1/2, despair will still be reasonable. Hope, on the other hand, intensifies risks: the person who hoped whose hope was in vain is worse off than the person who despaired and was right. A particularly risk-averse person, by the above considerations, may have reason to despair even when the probability is fairly high. These considerations might give us a nice evolutionary explanation of why we developed the mechanisms of hope and despair as part of our emotional repertoire.

However, these considerations are crude. For there can be something qualitatively bad about despair: it makes one not be as single-minded. It aligns one's will with the bad outcome in such a way that one rejoices in it, and one is saddened by the good outcome. To engage in despair on the above utility grounds is like taking out life-insurance on someone one loves in order to be comforted should the person die, rather than for the normal reasons of fiscal prudence.

This suggests a reason why the New Testament calls Christians to hope. Hope in Christ is part and parcel of a single-minded betting of everything on Christ, rather than the hedging of despair or holding back from wagering in neither hoping nor despairing. We should not take out insurance policies against Christianity's truth. But when the hope is vindicated, the fact that we hoped will intensify the joy.

I am making no claim that the above is all there is to hope and despair.

Moral failure and naturalism

Tripping while walking or acquiring an unjustified belief does not entail that we are in any way defective. It’s just not in human nature to walk steadily all the time—there is a tradeoff between perfect steadiness and the need to look for more distant dangers, or just the need to think about more important matters. Likewise, we sometimes need to acquire beliefs more quickly than checking the evidence carefully allows.

But a moral failure seems different. Acting immorally is always a defect. This tells us something interesting about nature: our nature has tradeoffs, but morality is never among the tradeoffs.

(A curiosity: If it is our nature never to act immorally, but it isn’t our nature never to trip, we would expect that tripping would be much more common than immoral activity. But it’s not like that.)

It is difficult, I think, to reconcile the special role that morality plays in us—the fact that moral failure is always a defect—with naturalism. On an evolutionary picture, we would expect tradeoffs to be everywhere in our nature. If we were meant by nature never to trip, we would expect to have an instinct that makes us always look down in front of us—but of course then we wouldn’t see distant danger, so instead we have a tradeoff where we scan the environment in all directions as well as looking down in front of us.

I have one worry about the above line of thought. Perhaps immoral activity is not always a defect. Maybe it is only a defect when isn’t innocently ignorant. Think of the extremely difficult cases that come up in medical or military ethics where one needs to act very quickly. In those cases, there just isn’t enough time to always figure out what the right solution is, and it does not seem to be necessarily a defect when the conscientious doctor or officer acts immorally, if she has given the matter as much thought and are as there was time for and innocently done what appeared right.

Maybe that’s right. It’s still surprising on a naturalistic picture of our nature and origins that it is always a defect to act knowingly immorally. We would expect our nature to exhibit tradeoffs even there.

And maybe the innocent ignorance cases aren’t a problem. Maybe in such cases, the action is to be described in terms that makes it right, like: “Performing an operation that after the due amount of investigation appeared most in keeping with the salient goods.”

Of course, some naturalists simply deny that there is any coherent concept of “defect” to be applied to us. The above line of thought may be grist for their mill. Another view might be to bite the bullet and say that we are riddled with tradeoffs through and through, and it is no defect when we occasionally act immorally. On the contrary, sometimes (say, when it causes great harm to one’s genes getting passed on) acting morally is a defect—but we should be guided by what is right or wrong, not by what is or isn’t a defect in our nature. This latter view is not, I think, very popular, but one finds it in Andrea Dworkin’s idea that “the God who doesn’t exist” (nature? evolution?) has designed us so that until recent times we could only reproduce by means that, according to Dworkin, are innately oppressive to women.

Evolutionary knowledge formation

Suppose a very large group of people who form their scientific beliefs at random. And then aliens kill everybody whose scientific beliefs aren't largely true. Surely the survivors don't know their scientific beliefs to be true, assuming they don't know about the aliens killing off those who were wrong. After all, they didn't know their beliefs prior to the massacre, and the massacre of the erring didn't give them knowledge. (This case may be a problem for certain kinds of reliabilism.)

Suppose now that we came to believe certain truths--whether mathematical or empirical or moral--"for evolutionary reasons". In other words, those who had these beliefs survived and reproduced, and those who didn't didn't. Let's even suppose that there is a tight connection between the truth of the beliefs and their fitness value. Nonetheless I am not sure that this story is sufficiently different from the story about aliens to make the beliefs into knowledge. The crucial difference, I guess, is that the story about the aliens is a single-generation story, while the evolutionary story is a multi-generation story. But I am not sure that matters at all. Suppose, for instance, that we modify the alien story to add a new generation who takes their scientific beliefs from the survivors of the first generation. Surely if you get your scientific beliefs from people who don't know, and no additional evidence is injected, you don't know either.

Intuitive moral knowledge

People intuitively know that stealing is wrong. Maybe stealing is wrong because it violates the social institution of property which is reasonably and appropriately instituted by each community. Maybe stealing is a violation of the natural relation that an agent has to an object upon mixing her labor with it. Maybe stealing violates a divine command. But people's intuitive knowledge that stealing is wrong does not come from their knowledge of such reasons for the wrongness of stealing. So how is it knowledge?

It's not like when the child knows Pythagoras' Theorem to be true but can't prove it. For she knows the theorem to be true because she gets her belief from the testimony of other people who can prove it. But that's not how the knowledge that stealing is wrong works. People can intuitively know that stealing is wrong without their belief having come directly or indirectly from some brilliant philosopher who came up with a good argument for its wrongness.

Perhaps there is some evolutionary story. Communities where there was a widespread belief that stealing is wrong survived and reproduced while those without the belief perished, and there was no knowledge at all the back of the belief formation. However, perhaps, it came to be knowledge, because this evolutionary process was sensitive to moral truth. However, it is dubious that this evolutionary process was sensitive to moral truth as such. It was sensitive to the non-moral needs of the community, and sometimes this led to moral truth and sometimes to moral falsehood (as, for instance, when it led to the conviction that it is right to enslave members of other communities). So if this is the story where the belief came from, it's not a story about knowledge. At best, the intuitive conviction that stealing is wrong, on this story, is a justified true belief, but it's Gettiered.

This, I think, is an interesting puzzle. There is, presumably, a very good reason why stealing is wrong, but the intuitions that we have do not seem to have the right connection to that reason.

Unless, of course, we did ultimately get the knowledge from someone who has a very good argument for the wrongness of stealing. As I noted, it is very implausible that we got it from a human being who had such an argument. But maybe we got it from a Creator who did.

If birds aren't reptiles, maybe people aren't animals?

Some biological taxa are clades: a clade is a taxon that contains a descendant of every included organism. For instance Mammalia is a clade, while Reptilia is not, since birds aren't reptiles but are descendants of reptiles. There are biologists that wish that we used a phylogenetic classification scheme, one where all taxa are clades. But that's not what is traditionally done. Let's consider the hypothesis that the traditional approach is right in the sense that it cuts nature at joints. Then a taxon can change from being a clade to being a non-clade. I assume that Reptilia changed in this way when birds evolved. And whether such a change has occurred is a substantive question.

In principle, then, it is possible for the kingdom Animalia, which I understand is normally taken to be a clade, to change into a non-clade. And it is a substantive question, then, whether such a change occurred when humans evolved. It could be the case that sapience marks such a departure that we are a new kingdom, and Animalia is no longer a clade. I think a close relative of this thought--albeit without evolutionary connections--is behind the ordinary person's (as opposed to a philosopher's) resistance to the idea that we are animals: personhood is such a transformative feature that it marks a completely new kind of organism.

But while the question is substantive, it's not tenable to say we aren't animals. If we are not animals, it seems we aren't mammals. (Maybe more can be said, though?) But if we aren't mammals, then various natural kind-based explanations fail: we can't say, for instance, that we have complex bones in the inner ear because we have mammals.

Note, too, that the question raised in this post is orthogonal to the question that animalists are concerned with. For all that we animalists need for our positive theory is that we are organisms--whether the particular kind of organism we are is an animal, a plant, a fungus or something else is not very important for the theory.

The needs of the human community

Andrea Dworkin argued that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is always wrong because it involves a violation of the woman's bodily integrity. She concluded that until recent advances in medical technology, it was impossible for humans to permissibly reproduce. The antinatalists, on the other hand, continue to hold that it is impossible for humans to permissible reproduce. Such views lead to an incredulous stare. It is very tempting to levy against them an argument like this:

1. Coital reproduction is necessary for the minimal flourishing of the human community under normal conditions.
2. Whatever is necessary for the minimal flourishing of the human community under normal conditions is sometimes permissible.
3. Coital reproduction is sometimes permissible.

The condition "under normal conditions" is needed for (2) to be plausible. We can, after all, easily imagine science-fictional scenarios where something immoral would need to be done to ensure the minimal flourishing of the human community.

Reproduction is not the only case where issues like this come up. For instance, the destruction of non-human organisms, say plants, seems necessary for our flourishing. And I suspect that under normal conditions the killing of non-human animals is necessary, too (if only as a side-effect of plowing fields, say). Taxation may be another interesting example.

I have heard it argued that (2) is in itself a basic moral principle, so that killing non-human animals as a side-effect of vegan farming is permissible because it is permissible to ensure minimal human flourishing. But that seems mistaken. Rather, while (2) is true, it is not a moral principle, but a consequence of a correlation between (a) fundamental facts about what moral duties there are actually are and (b) facts about what is actually needed for minimal human flourishing under normal conditions.

This leads to an interesting and I think somewhat underexplored question: Why are the moral facts and the facts about actual human needs so correlated as to make (2) true?

Theists have an elegant answer to this question: God had very strong moral reason to make humans in such a way that, at least normally, minimal flourishing of the community doesn't require wrong action. Non-theists have other stories to tell. These stories, however, are likely to be piecemeal. For instance, one will give one evolutionary story about why we and our ecosystem evolved in such a way that eating persons wasn't needed for our species' survival, and another about why we evolved in such a way that morally non-degrading sex sufficed for reproduction. But a unified answer is to be preferred over piecemeal answers, especially when the unified answer is compatible with the piecemeal ones and capable of integrating them into a single story. We do, thus, get some evidence for theism here.

Why do we need consciousness?

A perfect Bayesian agent is really quite simple. It has a database of probability assignments, a utility function, an input system and an output system. Inputs change the probability assignments according to simple rules. It computes which outputs maximize expected utility (either causally or evidentially--it won't matter for this post). And it does that (in cases of ties, it can take the lexicographically first option).

In particular, there is no need for consciousness, freedom, reflection, moral constraints, etc. Moreover, apart perhaps from gerrymandered cases (Newcomb?), for maximizing expected utility of a fixed utility function, the perfect Bayesian agent is as good as one can hope to get.

So, if we are the product of entirely unguided evolution, why did we get consciousness and these other things that the perfect Bayesian agent doesn't need, rather than just a database of probability assignments, a utility function that maximizes reproductive potential, and finely-honed input and output systems? Perhaps it is as some sort of compensation for us not being perfect Bayesian agents. There is an interesting research program available here: find out how these things we have compensate for the shortfalls, say, by allowing lossy compression of the database of probability assignments or providing heuristics in lieu of full optimizations. I think that some of the things the perfect Bayesian agent doesn't need can fit into these categories (some reflection and some moral constraints). But I doubt consciousness is on that list.

Consciousness, I think, points towards a very different utility function than one we would expect in an unguidedly evolutionarily produced system. Say, a utility function where contemplation is a highest good, and our everyday consciousness (and even that of animals) is a mirror of that contemplation.

Edge cases, the moral sense and evolutionary debunking

It has been argued that if we are the product of unguided evolution, we would not expect our moral sense to get the moral facts right. I think there is a lot to those arguments, but let's suppose that they fail, so that there really is a good evolutionary story about how we would get a reliable moral sense.

There is, nonetheless, still a serious problem for the common method of cases as used in analytic moral philosophy. Even when a reliable process is properly functioning, its reliability and proper function only yield the expectation of correct results in normal cases. A process can be reliable and properly functioning and still quite unreliable in edge cases. Consider, for instance, the myriad of illusions that our visual system is prone to even when properly functioning. And yet our visual system is reliable.

This wouldn't matter much if ethical inquiry restricted itself to considering normal cases. But often ethical inquiry proceeds by thinking through hypothetical cases. These cases are carefully crafted to separate one relevant feature from others, and this crafting makes the cases abnormal. For instance, when arguing against utilitarianism, one considers such cases as that of the transplant doctor who is able to murder a patient and use her organs to save three others, and we carefully craft the case to rule out the normal utilitarian arguments against this action: nobody can find out about the murder, the doctor's moral sensibilities are not damaged by this, etc. But we know from how visual illusions work that often a reliable cognitive system concludes by heuristics rather than algorithms designed to function robustly in edge cases as well.

Now one traditional guiding principle in ethical inquiry, at least since Aristotle, has been to put a special weight on the opinions of the virtuous. However, while an agent's being virtuous may guarantee that her moral sense is properly functioning--that there is no malfunction--typical cognitive systems will give wrong answers in edge cases even when properly functioning. The heuristics embodied in the visual system that give rise to visual illusions are a part of the system's proper functioning: they enable the system to use fewer resources and respond faster in the more typical cases.

We now see that there is a serious problem for the method of cases in ethics, even if the moral sense is reliable and properly functioning. Even if we have good reason to think that the moral sense evolved to get moral facts right, we should not expect it to get edge case facts right. In fact, we would expect systematic error in edge cases, even among the truly virtuous. At most, we would expect evolution to impose a safety feature which ensures that failure in edge cases isn't too catastrophic (e.g., so that someone who is presented with a very weird case doesn't conclude that the right solution is to burn down her village).

Yet it may not be possible to do ethics successfully without the method of cases, including far-out cases, especially now that medical science is on the verge of making some of these cases no longer be hypothetical.

I think there are two solutions that let one keep the method of cases. The first is to say that we are not the product of unguided evolution, but that we are designed to have consciences that, when properly functioning (as they are in the truly virtuous), are good guides not just in typical cases but in all the vicissitudes of life, including those arising from future technological progress. This might still place limits on the method of cases, but the limits will be more modest. The second is to say that our moral judgments are at least partly grounded in facts about what our moral judgment would say were it properly functioning--this is a kind of natural law approach. (Of course, if one drops the "properly functioning" qualifier, we get relativism.)

Reverse engineering conscience

I was thinking about the method of cases in ethics, and it made me think of what we do when we apply the method as a reverse engineering of conscience. Reverse engineering of software has been one of the most fun things in my life. When I reverse engineer software, in order to figure out what the software does (e.g., how it stores data in an undocumented file format), I typically employ anywhere between one and three of the following methods:

1. Observe the outputs in the ordinary course of operation.
2. Observe the outputs given carefully crafted inputs.
3. Look under the hood: disassemble the software, trace through the execution, do experiments with modifying the software, etc.

In ethics, there are obvious analogues to (1) and (2): looking at what our conscience says about actual cases that come up in our lives and looking at what our conscience says when fed carefully crafted imaginary cases. Reverse engineering of conscience suffers from two difficulties. The first is that method (3) is largely unavailable. The second is that conscience malfunctions more often than production software typically does, and does so in systematic ways. We can control for the second by reverse engineering the conscience of virtuous people (assuming we have--as I think we do--some independent access to who is virtuous).

But now suppose that this all works, that we really do succeed in reverse engineering conscience, and find out by what principles a properly functioning conscience decides whether an action is right or wrong. Why think this gives us anything of ethical interest? If we have a divine command theory, we have a nice answer: The same being whose commands constitute rightness and wrongness made that conscience, and it is plausible to think that he made it in order to communicate his commands to us. Perhaps more generally theistic theories other than divine command can give us a good answer, in that the faculty of conscience is designed by a being who cares immensely about right behavior. Likewise, if we have a natural law theory, we also have a nice answer: The faculty of conscience is part of our nature, and our nature defines what is right and wrong for us.

But what if conscience is simply the product of unguided evolution? Then by reverse engineering conscience we would not expect to find out anything other than facts about what kinds of behavior-guiding algorithms help us to pass on our genes.

So if all we do in the method of cases is this kind of reverse engineering, then outside of a theistic or natural law context we really should eschew use of the method in ethics.

A Thomistic creationism of sorts

Suppose that God made physical stuff (say, particles) be arranged just like in a butterfly, but he did not give (either directly or by some general policy) a butterfly form. Then we would have something that looks just like a butterfly. And to the extent that butterfly behavior is ultimately predictable just from physics, that bunch of physical stuff would behave like a butterfly. There wouldn't be a butterfly there. In fact, there wouldn't be one thing there: just a bunch of physical stuff.

Now, we are not yet in a position to know how much of the physical behavior of organisms—especially non-human ones—is predicted by the physics. Let us suppose, however, that it turns out that all the physical behavior of non-human animals is predicted by the physics. (Humans have free will, and that's a different business.)

Now let me tell a story. I don't think the story is actually true, though it seems basically[note 1] logically possible:

God created a physical world and had some chemical stuff come together in a way that "reproduced". And then evolution took over, and bundles of physical stuff that were better at survival and reproduction reproduced more, until we had bundles of physical stuff shaped like algae, trilobites, trees, dinosaurs, birds, horses and apes. But there never were any algae, trilobites, trees, dinosaurs, birds, horses or apes. Finally, not too long ago on a cosmic scale, there came to be two bundles of physical stuff that were physically rather like humans. By this point, there was no physical stuff shaped like trilobites or dinosaurs, but there was physical stuff shaped like algae, trees, birds, horses and apes. And God then said: "Let there be algae, trees, birds, horses, apes and many other organisms", and he created forms which informed the algaelike, treelike, birdlike, horselike and apelike bundles of physical stuff, and all sorts of other bundles. Thereupon, there were birds, horses and apes, though things didn't look any different. Finally God said: "Let there be humans", and he created forms which informed the human-like bundles of physical stuff. And there were humans.

This story is fully compatible with naturalistic evolution. Indeed, the only bar to the possibility of this story would be a vitalism on which physical stuff does not behave like living organisms. On this story, there literally never have been any dinosaurs. But there will have been bundles of physical stuff arranged dinosaurwise, and that's all many a biologist thinks a dinosaur is anyway.

But since bunches of physical stuff can't be conscious—they need soul, i.e., form, for that—then on this story there was no consciousness before human beings came on the scene. This is theologically attractive in that it enables us to hold that suffering came into the world through human sin. For we can continue the logically possible story thus:

When God created the forms of all the organisms, he miraculously arranged things so that no organism would suffer, miraculously making a harmonious state. And he put humans in charge of this delicately balanced system. Humans, however, quickly came to freely reject God's sovereignty in the system that he put them in charge of, and he reluctantly removed his miraculous protection from the system in deference to the authority he granted humans. And so humans and other animals came to suffer.

This story is also interesting in that it is yet another way to reconcile naturalistic evolution with the not dogmatically required but still somewhat attractive theological idea that all the organisms there are were directly created by God. For the story makes clear in a Thomistic setting how naturalistic evolution only explains how we got to have the physical stuff shaped and behaving like algae, trees, birds, horses and apes. God's creation is needed to make this stuff into actual algae, trees, birds, horses and apes: forms need to be put in. (Compare how in Genesis we are told that God made Adam from the "dust of the earth", i.e., physical stuff.)

The main reason I don't like this story has to be with my being an eternalist. I think past (and future) objects are real. And I think reality will be more wonderful if it really contains trilobites and dinosaurs, not just physical stuff arranged trilobitewise or dinosaurwise. So while the above story is basically logically possible, I don't think it's actually true, because it seems likely that a God whose goodness spreads itself out creatively would be likely to create forms for physical stuff arranged trilobitewise and dinosaurwise.

But there might, nonetheless, be aspects of the story that we can adopt. In the story, creation was safeguarded by God's taking bundles of physical stuff and giving them form. We can posit this in a more commonsensical evolutionary story. Maybe the gametes of two dinosaur parents involve some mutation that makes the offspring be particularly birdlike. Then God can simply prevent the offspring from being informed by a dinosaur form and then instead make the offspring be informed by a bird form. This is still direct creation of birds from previously existing physical matter. And while higher animals prior to the first human sin were conscious, we can suppose that God in his love miraculously prevented any instance of conscious suffering that wouldn't be on balance good for the animals, say by miraculously preventing pain qualia or in some other way. But this divine miraculous intervention perhaps ended (though perhaps not!) when Adam and Eve rejected God's rule over the earth they were put in charge of.

Evolution and the Principle of Sufficient Reason

This is an oldish argument, inspired by a student comment, but I kind of like my present formulation of it. Start with this fine inductive argument:

1. All the known explanations of present species are evolutionary.
2. So, all the explanations of present species are evolutionary.

But (2) isn't all that the evolutionary biologist claims about present species. She claims more strongly:

3. All the present species have evolutionary explanations.

Claim (3) is stronger than claim (2). Let's suppose that half of the present species have evolutionary explanations and the other half have no explanations at all. Then (2) is true, but (3) is not.

We could derive (3) from (2) if we had the further thesis:

4. All the present species have explanations.

Indeed, (3) is equivalent to the conjunction of (2) with (4). But the evidence in (1) does not do anything to support (4). It only supports (2).

We could get scientific support for (4) as follows. Randomly samples species, and make sure that we can find an explanation for each randomly sampled species. But we haven't done this.

Yet, I say, we know (3) to be true, and hence we know (4) to be true as well, since (3) obviously entails (4) and this doesn't look like one of the exceptional cases that are counterexamples to closure.

But how do we know (4) to be true? I think a priori. And the best non-ad hoc story about that is that we derive it from the Principle of Sufficient Reason.