Saving infinitely many lives

Suppose there is an infinitely long line with equally-spaced positions numbered sequentially with the integers. At each position there is a person drowning. All the persons are on par in all relevant respects and equally related to you. Consider first a choice between two actions:

1. Save people at 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, ... (red circles).

2. Save people at 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, ... (blue circles).

It seems pretty intuitive that (1) and (2) are morally on par. The non-negative evens and odds are alike!

But now add a third option:

3. Save people at 2, 4, 6, 8, ... (yellow circles).

The relation between (2) and (3) is exactly the same as the relation between (1) and (2)—after all, there doesn’t seem to be anything special about the point labeled with the zero. So, if (1) and (2) are on par, so are (2) and (3).

But by transitivity of being on par, (1) and (3) are on par. But they’re not! It is better to perform action (1), since that saves all the people that action (3) saves, plus the person at the zero point.

So maybe (1) is after better than (2), and (2) is better than (3)? But this leads to the following strange thing. We know how much better (1) is than (2): it is better by one person. If (1) is better than (2) and (2) is better than (3), then since the relationships between (1) and (2) and between (2) and (3) are the same, it follows that (1) must be better than (2) by half a person and (2) must be better than (3) by that same amount.

But when you are choosing which people to save, and they’re all on par, and the saving is always certain, how can you get two options that are “half a person” apart?

Very strange.

In fact, it seems we can get options that are apart by even smaller intervals. Consider:

4. Save people at 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, ....

5. Save people at 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, ....

and so on up to:

14. Save people at 10, 20, 30, 40, ....

Each of options (4)–(14) is related the same way to the next. Option (4) is better than option (14) by exactly one person. So it seems that each of options (4)–(13) is better by a tenth of a person than the next!

I think there is one at all reasonable way out, and it is to say that in both the (1)–(3) series and the (4)–(14) series, each option is incomparable with the succeeding one, but we have comparability between the start and end of each series.

Maybe, but is the incomparability claim really correct? It still feels like (1) and (2) should be exactly on par. If you had a choice between (1) and (2), and one of the two actions involved a slight benefit to another person—say, a small probability of saving the life of the person at  − 17—then we should go for the action with that slight benefit. And this makes it implausible that the two are incomparable.

My own present preferred solution is that the various things here seem implausible to us because human morality is not meant for cases with infinitely many beneficiaries. I think this is another piece of evidence for the species-relativity of morality: our morality is grounded in human nature.

Harmonizing with nature

Living in harmony with nature can be understood in many ways. Here are two:

1. Living in a way that protects and repairs non-human aspects of nature.

2. Living in a way that harmonizes and accords with our own human nature.

The second mode of harmony with nature implies the first at least to some degree, because the nature of each organism—including humans—involves a degree of harmonization with the rest of the environment. But only to some degree. A species can do a great deal of damage to competing species by simply following out the dictates of its nature—its success can imply the failure of others. Still, our own nature probably calls on a fair amount of stewardship of surrounding nature, so the second mode implies quite a bit of the first mode.

The first mode of harmony with nature is more consequentialist than the second. While the second is focused on living a certain way that is not primarily defined in terms of consequences but in terms of accord with our own nature, the first is focused on consequences to non-human nature. Nonetheless, the first mode still implies a certain degree of the second, in that improving our natural surroundings often is an imperative of our nature.

At the same time, the second mode has implications the first does not. For instance, some forms of transhumanism fit very well with the first mode but none fit with the second mode. It might turn out that a version of the singularity—us all getting digitized and then run in a computer—is good for the non-human aspects of nature, because a computer simulation of our lives might turn out to have much lower energy costs than our meaty existence. Similarly, mass sterilization of humans might be good for non-human aspects of nature, but does not accord with our nature.

One might think of certain agrarian movements as instances of the second mode of harmony, though I do not think the second mode requires agrarianism.

The afterlife of humans and animals

I’ve been thinking a bit about the afterlife for non-human animals. The first thought is that there is a relevant difference between human and non-human animals in terms of flourishing. There is something deeply incomplete about the eighty or so years a human lives. The incompleteness of our earthly life is a qualitative incompleteness: it is not just that we have not had enough pieces of cake or run enough miles. Typically, whole areas of virtue are missing, and our understanding of the world is woefully incomplete, so that one of the most important things one learns is how little one knows. The story of the life is clearly unfinished, even if life has gone as well as it is reasonable to expect, and flourishing has not been achieved. Not so for non-human animals. When things have gone as well as it is reasonable to expect, the animal has lived, played and reproduced, and the story is complete.

If we think of the form of an entity as specifying the proper shape of its life, we have good reason to think that the human form specifies the proper shape of life as eternal, or at least much longer than earthly life. But there is little reason to think that form of an animal’s life specifies the length of life as significantly longer than the typical observed life-span of in its species.

If we accept the thesis which I call “Aristotelian optimism”, namely that things tend to fulfill their form or nature, we have good reason to think there is more to human life than our earthly life, but not so for non-human animals. In the case of humans, this line of argument should worry typical atheistic Aristotelian ethicists, because it would push them to reject Aristotelian optimism, which I think is central to ensuring knowledge of the forms in Aristotle’s system.

By the way, there may be an exception in the above argument for animals whose flourishing consists in relationships with humans. For there its flourishing might be incomplete if it cannot be a companion to the human over its infinite life-span. So there is some reason to think that species that are domesticated for human companionship, like dogs and to a lesser extent cats and horses (where companionship is less central to flourishing), might have an afterlife.

Risability

Aristotle says that a necessary accident of the human being is risability—the capability for laughter. As far as I can tell, necessary accidents are supposed to derive from the essence of a thing. So, how do we derive risability from the essence of the human being?

Here’s an idea. The essence is to be a rational animal. A rational being reflects on itself. But to have an animal that is simultaneously rational—that’s objectively funny. Thus, a rational being that is an animal is always in a position to discover something objectively funny, namely itself. And it just wouldn’t be rational not to laugh at that funny thing!

Naturalness and induction

David Lewis’s notion of the naturalness of predicates may seem at first sight like just the thing to solve Goodman’s new puzzle of induction: unlike green, grue is too unnatural for induction with respect to grue to be secure.

But this fails.

Roughly speaking, an object is green provided its emissivity or reflectivity as restricted to the visible range has a sufficiently pronounced peak around 540 nm. But in reality, it’s more complicated than that. An object’s emissivity and reflectivity might well have significantly different spectral profiles (think of a red LED that is reflectively white, as can be seen by turning it off), and one needs to define some sort of “normal conditions” combination of the two features. Describing these normal conditions will be quite complex, thereby making the concept of green be quite far from natural.

Now, it is much easier to define the concepts of emissively black (eblack) and emissively white (ewhite) than of green (or black or white, for that matter) in terms of the fundamental concepts of physics. And emeralds, we think, are eblack (since they don’t emit visible light). Then, just as Goodman defined grue as being observed before a certain date and being green and or being observed after that date and being blue, we can define eblite as existing wholly before 2100 and being eblack or existing wholly after 2100 and being ewhite. And here is the crucial thing: the concept of eblite is actually way more natural, in the Lewis sense of “natural”, than the concept of green. For the definition of eblite does not require the complexities of the normal conditions combination of emissivity and reflectivity.

Thus, if what makes induction with green work better than induction with grue is that greenness is more natural than grueness, then induction with eblite (over short-lived entities like snowflakes, say) should work even better than induction with green, since ebliteness is much more natural than grueness. But we know that we shouldn’t do induction with eblite: even though all the snowflakes we have observed are eblite, we shouldn’t assume that in the next century the snowflaskes will still be eblite (i.e., that they will start to have a white glow). Or, contrapositively, if eblite is insufficiently natural for induction, green is much too unnatural for induction.

Moreover, this points to a better story. Lewisian unnaturalness measures the complexity of a property relative to the properties that are in themselves perfectly natural. But this is unsatisfactory for epistemological purposes, since the perfectly natural properties are ones that we are far from having discovered as yet. Rather, for epistemological purposes, what we want to do is measure the complexity of a property relative to the properties that are for us perfectly natural. (This, of course, is meant to recall Aristotle’s distinction between what is more understandable in itself and what is more understandable for us.) The properties that are for us perfectly natural are the directly observable ones. And now the in itself messy property of greenness beats not only grue and eblite, but even the much more in itself natural property of eblack.

This can’t be the whole story. In more scientifically developed cases, we will have an interplay of induction with respect to for us natural properties (including ones involved in reading data off lab equipment) and in themselves natural properties.

And there is the deep puzzle of why we should trust induction with respect to what is merely for us natural. My short answer is it that it is our nature to do so, and our nature sets our epistemic norms.

The Need for Human Nature

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

Progress on Norms, Natures and God

In the fall, I opened a github repository for my in-progress Norms, Natures and God book manuscript, but all I had was a table of contents. I’ve finally started to regularly contribute text to the book. You can monitor my progress here, and you’re welcome to submit suggestions and bug reports via the Issues page.

Don’t count on the repository being available permanently: it will disappear when it’s time to submit to a publisher. (My preferred way to write books is to write them and then submit the whole draft to a publisher.)

Bizarre consequences in bizarre circumstances

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

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

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

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

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

Conciliationism and natural law epistemology

Suppose we have a group of perfect Bayesian agents with the same evidence who nonetheless disagree. By definition of “perfect Bayesian agent”, the disagreement must be rooted in differences in priors between these peers. Here is a natural-sounding recipe for conciliating their disagreement: the agents go back to their priors, they replace their priors by the arithmetic average of the priors within the group, and then they re-updated on all the evidence that they had previous got. (And in so doing, they lose their status as perfect Bayesian agents, since this procedure is not a Bayesian update.)

Since the average of consistent probability functions is a consistent probability function, we maintain consistency. Moreover, the recipe is a conciliation in the following sense: whenever the agents previously all agreed on some posterior, they still agree on it after the procedure, and with the same credence as before. Whenever the agents disagreed on something, they now agree, and their new credence is strictly between the lowest and highest posteriors that the group assigned prior to conciliation.

Here is a theory that can give a justification for this natural-sounding procedure. Start with natural law Bayesianism which is an Aristotelian theory that holds that human nature sets constraints on what priors count as natural to human beings. Thus, just as it is unnatural for a human being to be ten feet tall, it is unnatural for a human being to have a prior of 10⁻¹⁰⁰ for there being mathematically elegant laws of nature. And just as there is a range of heights that is natural for a mature human being, there is a range of priors that is natural for the proposition that there are mathematically elegant laws.

Aristotelian natures, however, are connected with the actual propensities of the beings that have them. Thus, humans have a propensity to develop a natural height. Because of this propensity, an average height is likely to be a natural height. More generally, for any numerical attribute governed by a nature of kind K, the average value of that attribute amongst the Ks is likely to be within the natural range. Likely, but not certain. It is possible, for instance, to have a species whose average weight is too high or too low. But it’s unlikely.

Consequently, we would expect that if we average the values of the prior for a given proposition q over the human population, the average would be within the natural range for that prior. Moreover, as the size of a group increases, we expect the average value of an attribute over the group to approach the average value the attribute has in the full population. Then, if I am a member of the group of disagreeing evidence-sharing Bayesians, it is more likely that the average of the priors for q amongst the members of the group lies within the natural human range for that prior for q than it is that my own prior for q lies within the natural human range for q. It is more likely that I have an unnatural height or weight than that the average in a larger group is outside the natural range for height or weight.

Thus, the prior-averaging recipe is likely to replace priors that are defectively outside the normal human range with priors within the normal human range. And that’s to the good rationally speaking, because on a natural law epistemology, the rational way for humans to reason is the same as the normal way for humans to reason.

It’s an interesting question how this procedure compares to the procedure of simply averaging the posteriors. Philosophically, there does not seem to be a good justification of the latter. It turns out, however, that typically the two procedures give the same result. For instance, I had my computer randomly generate 100,000 pairs of four-point prior probability spaces, and compare the result of prior- to posterior-averaging. The average of the absolute value of the difference in the outputs was 0.028. So the intuitive, but philosophically unjustified, averaging of posteriors is close to what I think is the more principled averaging of priors.

The procedure also has an obvious generalization from the case where the agents share the same evidence to the case where they do not. What’s needed is for the agents to make a collective list of all their evidence, replace their priors by averaged priors, and then update on all the items in the collective list.

Evil, omniscience, and other matters

If God exists, there are many evils that God doesn’t prevent, even though it seems that we would have been obligated to prevent them if we could.

A sceptical theist move is that God knows something about the situations that we don’t. For instance, it may seem to us that the evil is pointless, but God sees it as interwoven with greater goods.

An interesting response to this is that even if we knew about the greater goods, we would be obligated to prevent the evil. Say, Carl sees Alice about to torture Bob, and Carl somehow knows (maybe God told him) that one day Alice will repent of the evil in response to a beautiful offer of forgiveness from Bob. Then I am inclined to think Carl should still prevent Alice from torturing Bob, even if repentance and forgiveness are goods so great that it would have been better for both Alice and Bob if the torture happened.

Here is an interesting sceptical theist response to this response. Normally, we don’t know the future well enough to know that great goods would arise from our permitting an evil. Because of this, our moral obligations to prevent grave evils have a bias in them towards what is causally closer to us. Moreover, this bias in the obligations, although it is explained by the fact that normally we don’t know the future very well, is present even in the exceptional cases where we do know the future sufficiently well, as in the Carl, Alice and Bob case.

This move requires an ethical system where a moral rule that applies in all circumstances can be explained by its usefulness in normal circumstances. Rule utilitarianism is of course such an ethical system. Divine command theory is as well: God can be motivated to issue an exceptionless rule because of the fact that normally the rule is a good one and it might not be good for us to be trying to figure out whether a case at hand is an exception to the rule (this is something I learned from Steve Evans). And St. Thomas Aquinas in his argument against nonmarital sex holds that natural law is also like that (he argues that typically nonmarital sex is bad for the offspring, and concludes that it is wrong even in the exceptional cases where it’s not bad for the offspring, because, as he says, laws are made with regard to the typical case).

Historically, this approach tends to be used to derive or explain deontic prohibitions (e.g., Aquinas’ prohibition on nonmarital sex). But the move from typical beneficiality of a rule to its holding always does not require that the rule be a deontic prohibition. A rule that weights nearer causal consequences more heavily could just as easily be justified in such a way, even if the rule did not amount to a deontic prohibition.

Similarly, one might use typical facts about our relationships with those closer to us—that we know what is good for them better than for strangers, that they are more likely to accept our help, that the material benefits of our help enhance the relationship—to explain why helping those closer to us should be more heavily weighted in our moral calculus than helping strangers, even in those cases where the the typical facts do not obtain. Once again, this isn’t a deontic case.

One might even have such typical-case-justified rules in prudential reasoning (perhaps a bias towards the nearer future is not irrational after all) and maybe even in theoretical reasoning (perhaps we shouldn’t be perfect Bayesian agents after all, because that’s not in our nature, given that normally Bayesian reasoning is too hard for us).

Death, dignity and eternal life

One way to look at the difference between the deaths of humans and brute animals is to say that the death of a human typically deprives the human of goods of rational life that the brute animal is not deprived of. While it is indeed an important part of the evil of typical cases of death in humans that they are deprived of such goods, however, focusing on this leads to a difficulty seeing what is distinctively bad about the death of humans who are not deprived of such goods by death, say elderly humans who have already lost the distinctive goods of rational life.

Sure, one can say that the death of a human is the death of a being that normally has the goods of rational life. But it is unclear why the death of a being that normally has the goods of rational life but actually lacks them is worse than the death of a being that actually and normally lacks the goods of rational life.

(Of course, not everybody shares the normative view that there is something distinctively bad about the death of a human being even when the goods of rational life have already been lost. A significant number of people think that euthanasia in such cases is morally licit. But even among those who think that euthanasia in such cases is morally licit, I think many will still think that there is something particularly morally bad about killing such human beings against their clear prior wishes, and those may find something plausible about what I say below.)

How, then, do we explain the distinctive bad in the death of human beings, even ones that lack the distinctive goods of rational life? In the end, I think I would like to invoke human dignity here, but to a significant degree that’s just giving a name to the problem. Instead of invoking and trying to explain human dignity, I want to explore a different option, one that I think in the end will not succeed, but perhaps there is something in the vicinity that can.

Here is a hypothesis:

• It is the nature of human beings to live forever and never die, but the nature of brute animals is to have a finite life.

If this is true, then death always constitutes a mutilation of the human being. It is what directly deprives the human being of the normative diachronic shape of its life. And killing a human mutilates the human being.

Objection 1: If a murderer didn’t kill her victim, the victim would still have died at some later point.

Response: The murderer is still the proximate cause of the victim’s not living forever. And such proximate causation matters. Suppose that my brother murdered Sally’s brother, and to avenge her brother, in true Hammurabic fashion, Sally seeks to kill me. When she finally comes upon me, I am already falling off a cliff. A moment before I would have hit the ground, Sally shoots and kills me. Sally has murdered me, a grave evil. She is the proximate cause of my death. And that matters, even though it would make little difference to my life if Sally hadn’t killed me.

Objection 2: Even if it is the nature of brute animals to have a finite life, it is not the nature of brute animals to die young. But it is not wrong to kill a brute animal when it is young, even though doing so mutilates the brute animal in much the same way that killing a human mutilates the human by causing her life to be finite if the hypothesis is true.

Response: Agreed: it does mutilate the brute animal to kill it when it is young. But to foreshorten the life of a human being from infinity to a finite amount is much worse—in a sense, infinitely worse—than to foreshorten the life of a brute animal from a longer finite length to a shorter finite length.

Objection 3: Christian faith holds that humans will be resurrected. Thus, killing a human being does not succeed in causing the human being to lose infinite life.

Response: Yes, but according to the hypothesis it is not only the nature of human beings to have an infinite future life but it is also the nature of human beings to have a death-free infinite future life.

Objection 4: Imagine an otherwise unremarkable shrub which has a very special nature: it is supposed to live forever, undying. Destroying this shrub would feel distinctively bad as compared to destroying an ordinary shrub, but still not bad in the same way that killing a human being is. Hence, reference to the normativeness of an infinite future life is not enough to explain the distinctive badness of killing humans.

Response: I think that this objection is decisive. Mere invocation of the normativeness of an infinite deathless life is not enough to solve the problem of the distinctive badness of human death. One still needs something like a story about the special dignity of human beings. But it might be that the hypothesis still helps: it multiplies the synchronic dignity of the human being by something like infinity. So less needs to be accomplished by the dignity part of the account.

The problem of priors

Counterfactuals about scientific practice reveal some curious facts about our prior probabilities. Our handling of experimental suggests an approximate flatness in our prior distributions of various constants (cf. this). But the flatness is not perfect. Suppose we are measuring some constant k in a law of nature, a constant that is either dimensionless or expressed in a natural unit system, and we come back with 2.00000. Then we will assign a fairly high credence to the hypothesis that k is exactly 2. But any kind of continuous prior distribution will assign zero prior to k being exactly 2, and the posterior will still be zero, so our prior for 2 must have been non-zero and non-infinitesimal. But for most numbers, the prior for k being that number must be zero or infinitesimal, or else the probabilities won’t add up to 1.

More generally, our priors favor simpler theories. And they favor them in a way that is tuned (finely or not). If our prior for k being exactly 2 were high, then we wpould believe that k = 2 even after a measurement of 3.2 (experimental error!). If our prior were too low, then we wouldn’t ever conclude that k = 2, no matter how many digits after the “2.” we measured to be zero.

There are is now an interesting non-normative question about the priors:

• Why are human priors typically so tuned?

There is, of course, an evolutionary answer—our reasoning about the world wouldn’t work if we didn’t have a pattern of priors that was so tuned. But there is a second question that the evolutionary story does not answer. To get to the second question, observe that our priors ought to be so tuned. Someone whose epistemic practices involve the rejection of the confirmation of scientific theories on the basis of too strong a prejudice for simple theories (“There is only one thing, and it’s round—everything else is illusion”) or too weak a preference for simple theories (“There are just as many temperature trends where there is a rise for a hundred years and then a fall for a hundred years as where there is a rise for two hundred years, so we have no reason at all to think global warming will continue”) is not acting as she ought.

So now we have this normative question:

• Why is it that our priors ought to be so tuned?

These give us the first two desiderata on a theory of priors:

1. The theory should explain why our priors are tuned with respect to simplicity as they are.

2. The theory should explain why our priors should be so tuned.

Here is another desideratum:

3. The theory should exhibit a connection between priors and truth.

Next, observe that our priors are pretty vague. They certainly aren’t numerically precise, and they shouldn’t be, because beings with our capacity couldn’t reason with precise numerical credences in the kinds of situations where we need to.

4. The theory should not imply that our having those priors we should requires us to always have numerically precise priors.

Further, there seems to be something to subjective Bayesianism, even if we should not go all the way with the subjective Bayesians. Which we should not, because then we cannot rationally criticize the person who has too strong or too weak an epistemic preference for simple theories.

5. The theory should not imply a unique set of priors that everyone should have.

Next, different kinds of agents should have different priors. For instance, agents like us typically shouldn’t be numerically precise. But angelic intellects that are capable of instantaneous mathematical computation might do better with numerically precise priors. Moreover, and more controversially, beings that lived in a world with simpler or less simple laws shouldn’t be held hostage to the priors that work so well for us.

6. The theory should allow for the possibility that priors vary between kinds of agents.

And then, of course, we have standard desiderata on all theories, such as that they be unified.

Finally, observe the actual methodology of philosophy of science: We observe how working scientists make inferences, and while we are willing at times to offer corrections, we use the actual inferential practices as evidence for how the inferential practices ought to go. In particular, we extract the kinds of priors that people have from their epistemic behavior when it is at its best:

7. The theory should allow for the methodology of inferring what kinds of priors we ought to have from looking at actual epistemic behavior.

Subjective Bayesianism fails with respect to desiderata 2 and 3, and if it satisfies 1, it is only by being conjoined with some further story, which decreases the unity of the story. Objective Bayesianism fails with respect to desiderata 5 and 6, and some versions of it have trouble with 4. Moreover, to satisfy 1, it needs to be conjoined with a further story. And it’s not clear that objective Bayesianism is entitled to the methodology advocated in 7.

What we need is something in between subjective and objective Bayesianism. Here is such a theory: Aristotelian Bayesianism. On general Aristotelian principles, we have natures which dictate a range of normal features with an objective teleology. For instance, the nature of a sheep specifies that they should have four legs in support of quadrapedal locomotion. Moreover, in Aristotelian metaphysics, the natures also explain the characteristic structure of beings with that nature. Thus, the nature of a sheep is not only that in virtue of which a sheep ought to have four legs, but also has guided the embryonic development of typical sheep towards a four-legged state. Finally, in an Aristotelian picture, when things act normally, they tend to achieve the goals that their nature assigns to that activity.

Now, in my Aristotelian Bayesianism, our human nature leads to characteristic patterns of epistemic behavior for the telos of truth. From the patterns of behavior that are compatible with our nature, one can derive constraints on priors—namely, that they be such as to underwrite such behavior. These priors are implicit in the patterns of behavior.

We can now take the desiderata one by one:

1. Our priors are tuned as they are since our development is guided by a nature that leads to epistemic behavior that determines priors to be so tuned.

2. Our priors ought to be so tuned, because all things ought to act in the way that their nature makes natural.

3. Natural behavior is teleological, and our epistemic behavior is truth-directed.

4. The the priors we ought to have are back-calculated from the epistemic behaviors we ought to have, and our behaviors cannot have precise numbers attached to them in such a way as to yield precise numerical priors.

5. Nothing in the theory requires that unique priors be derivable from what epistemic behavior is characteristic. Typically, in Aristotelian theories, there is a range of normalcy—a ratio of length of legs to length of arms between x and y, etc.

6. Different kinds of beings have different natures. Sheep ought to have four legs and we ought to have two. We are led to expect that different kinds of agents would have different appropriate priors. Moreover, animals tend to be adapted to their environment, so we would expect that in worlds that are sufficiently different, different priors would be appropriate.

7. Since beings have a tendency towards acting naturally, the actual behavior of beings—especially when they appear to be at their best—provides evidence of the kind of behavior that they ought to exhibit. And from the kind of epistemic behavior we ought to exhibit, we can back-calculate the kinds of priors that are implicit in that behavior.

This post is inspired by Barry Loewer saying in discussion that I was Kantian because I think there are objective constraints on priors. I am not Kantian. I am Aristotelian.

Are we all seriously impaired?

When I taught calculus, the average grade on the final exam was around 55%. One could make the case that this means that our grading system is off: that everybody’s grades should be way higher. But I suspect that’s mistaken. The average grasp of calculus in my students probably really wasn’t good enough for one to be able to say with a straight face that they “knew calculus”. Now, I think I was a pretty rotten calculus teacher. But such grades are not at all unusual in calculus classes. And if one didn’t have the pre-selection that colleges have, but simply taught calculus to everybody, the grades would be even lower. Yet much of calculus is pretty straightforward. Differential calculus is just a matter of ploughing through and following simple rules. Integral calculus is definitely harder, and exceling at it requires real creativity, but one can presumably do decently just by internalizing a number of heuristics and using trial and error.

I find myself with the feeling that a normal adult human being should be able to do calculus, understand basic Newtonian physics, write a well-argued essay, deal well with emotions, avoid basic formal and informal fallacies, sing decently, have a good marriage, etc. But I doubt that the average adult human being can learn all these things even with excellent teachers. Certainly the time investment would be prohibitive.

There are two things one can say about this feeling. The first is that the feeling is simply mistaken. We’re all apes. A 55% grade in calculus from an ape is incredible. The kind of logical reasoning that an average person can demonstrate in an essay is super-impressive for an ape. There is little wrong with average people intellectually. Maybe the average human can’t practically learn calculus, but if so that’s no more problematic than the facts that the average human can’t practically learn to climb a 5.14 or run a four-minute mile. These things are benchmarks of human excellence rather than of human normalcy.

That may in fact be the right thing to say. But I want to explore another possibility: the possibility that the feeling is right. If it is right, then all of us fall seriously short of what normal human beings should be able to do. We are all seriously impaired.

How could that be? We are, after all, descendants of apes, and the average human being is, as far as we can tell, an order of magnitude intellectually ahead of the best non-human apes we know. Should the standards be another order of magnitude ahead of that?

I don’t think there is a plausible naturalistic story that would do justice to the feeling that the average human falls that far short of where humans should be at. But the Christian doctrine of the Fall allows for a story to be told here. Perhaps God miraculously intervened just before the first humans were conceived, and ensured that these creatures would be significantly genetically different from their non-human parents: they would have capacities enabling them to do calculus, understand Newtonian physics, write a well-argued essay, deal well with emotions, avoid fallacies, sing decently, have a good marriage, etc. (At least once calculus, physics and writing are invented.) But then the first humans misused their new genetic gifts, and many of them were taken away, so that now only statistically exceptional humans have many of these capacities, and none have them all. And so we have more geneticaly in common with our ape forebears than would have been the case if the first humans acted better. However, in addition to genetics, on this story, there is the human nature, which is a metaphysical component of human beings defining what is and what is not normal for humans. And this human nature specifies that the capacities in question are in fact a part of human normalcy, so that we are all objectively seriously impaired.

Of course, this isn’t the only way to read the Fall. Another way—which one can connect in the text of Genesis with the Tree of Life—is that the first humans had special gifts, but these gifts were due to miracles beyond human nature. This may in fact be the better reading of the story of the Fall, but I want to continue exploring the first reading.

If this is right, then we have an interesting choice-point for philosophy of disability. One option will be to hold that everyone is disabled. If we take this option then for policy reasons (e.g., disability accommodation) we will need a more gerrymandered concept than disability, say disability^*, such that only a minority (or at least not an overwhelming majority) is disabled^*. This concept will no doubt have a lot of social construction going into it, and objective impairment will be at best a necessary condition for disability^*. The second option is to say only a minority (or not an overwhelming majority) is disabled, which requires disability to differ significantly from impairment. Again, I suspect that the concept will have a lot of social construction in it. So, either way, if we accept the story that we are all seriously impaired, for policy reasons we will need a disability-related concept with a lot more social construction in it.

Should we accept the story that we are all seriously impaired? I think there really is an intuition that we should do many things that we can’t, and that intuition is evidence for the story. But far from conclusive. Still, maybe we are all seriously impaired, in multiple intellectual dimensions. We may even be all physically impaired.

Dignity, humanity and Aristotelianism

1. All humans have dignity because they are humans.
2. Humans do not have dignity because of an extrinsic property.
3. So, being human isn't an extrinsic property.
4. If to be human is to be a member of a particular biological taxon, then being human is extrinsic. (Biological taxa are defined by gene interchange in a population and are thus extrinsic characterizations of individuals.)
5. So, to be human is not the same as to be a member of a biological taxon.
6. Our best alternative to the biological taxonomic account of what it is to be human is the Aristotelian account that it is to have a human form, so the Aristotelian account is probably true.

Value of species membership

We generally think that humans have a dignity that non-human animals like dogs lack, even when the humans are so disabled that their functioning is on the level of a dog. While Kant rightly insists that dignity does not reduce to value, nonetheless dignity seems to imply a value. Perhaps the point generalizes so that it is better to be a member of a spiffier species even if one personally lacks those features that make the species spiffier.

This isn’t clear, however. I wish I had the amazing mathematical abilities of a Vulcan like Spock. I don’t really wish to be a mathematically disabled Vulcan, whose mathematical abilities are no greater than mine. And if the choice were between being a deficient Vulcan with mathematical abilities slightly weaker than mine and being what I am, I would prefer to be what I am, at least bracketing non-mathematical features of the two species. Thus whatever value there is in being a member of a species with much greater normal mathematical abilities seems easily outweighed by the value of actual mathematical abilities.

But now consider a somewhat different choice: that between being a human like me and a highly deficient Vulcan whose mathematical skills are nonetheless somewhat better than mine. Suppose, too, that in my chosen way of life only the mathematical skills would matter: nobody would make fun of me for having pointy ears, I wouldn’t feel sad at being a deficient Vulcan, etc. It seems quite reasonable to want to be such a deficient Vulcan. This suggests that either the small improvement in actual mathematical skills is ample compensation for being highly disabled, or being a Vulcan counts for a lot.

Being a Vulcan doesn’t seem to me to count for a lot. When I reflect why I’d rather be the deficient Vulcan with mathematical skills somewhat better than mine, neither the deficiency as such nor the Vulcanness as such count for much.

It seems of much greater value to be a deficient human than to be a normal dog, keeping actual abilities the same. But it doesn’t seem to be of much greater value to be a deficient Vulcan than a human, even if normal Vulcans were equal or superior to humans in all respects. Maybe this is because only a dignity-relevant difference between species makes a value difference between species, and Vulcans, even if they are superior, do not have greater dignity.

Or it could even be that the dignity difference doesn’t imply a value difference.

Human nature

Human flourishing includes a number of central goods such as friendship with God, friendship with neighbor, understanding of the world, appropriate autonomy, etc. Take any two goods, G and H, other than friendship with God. We could imagine an alien race of intelligent beings that are approximately as capable of humans in terms of goods other than G and H, but that normally are much, much more capable than we in respect of G and much, much less capable than we in respect of H. Maybe these are a race of individualistic scientists and philosophers who are barely capable of friendship with their fellows. Or maybe these are a race of very friendly and socially intertwined beings who are much less good at understanding the world. Call these aliens "xens".

There is nothing morally repugnant about xens, in the way that it would be repugnant to imagine a race of beings whose flourishing consists in causing misery to others (if such flourishing is possible). If we ever meet such a race of alien beings, the reaction we should have is "Vive la différence!" We ought not think ourselves superior to them and they ought not think themselves superior to us.

But now imagine that there were a form of neurosurgery that greatly increases one's capabilities in respect of G at the cost of one's capabilities in respect of H. It would be clearly wrong to perform this surgery on one's child, and it would be dubious if it were appropriate to have it be performed it on oneself. Why? If the life of the xens is no worse than ours, but merely different, what's wrong with such surgery? I think the obvious answer is: The life of the xens is great--if you're a xen. But we are not xens, and their life isn't for us. For the xens, less of H is normal. For us, less of H is abnormal.

So, thinking about xens and neurosurgery suggests we need a notion of normalcy. And this notion had better be morally significant. Merely statistical notions of normalcy lack moral significance. Why be like everyone else? (One might worry that being different from others leads to misery. But I deny this. My childhood was a very happy one, but I was very different from others.) This suggests a natural law intuition: a life with the particular pattern of emphases among pursuits that is characteristic of normal humans is something that has a moral call on us, unlike the pattern of goods embodied in the life of xens.

Rational and irrational desires

Odysseus is told by Athena that he is very unlikely to reach Ithaca, unless he suppresses his desire to reach Ithaca. If he does suppress it, he will quickly by accident find his way to Ithaca, and as soon as he is within ten stadia of it, his desire will return. Athena points to a pear from a tree on the banks of Lethe, and tells him that this pear will suppress his desire to reach Ithaca. But Odysseus longs for Ithaca too much to be willing to let go of his desire to return there. He tosses the pear by the wayside and wanders the world for many years.

Odysseus was irrational to hold on to his desire to return to Ithaca. It was thereafter irrational for him to have the desire. Yet the desire to return to his home was a perfectly rational one.

Irene never desired to experience friendship. Finally, one day, Matthew gave her a fallacious argument whose conclusion was that friendship is worth having. Irene didn't see the fallacy, and concluded that friendship is worth having. She then hired Dr. Mesmer to hypnotize her into desiring friendship. A couple of months later, while having an intense desire for friendship, she found the fallacy in Matthew's argument. But while she believes that friendship is not worth having or desiring, she irrationally refuses to hire Dr. Memser to hypnotize the desire for friendship away.

Irene acquired her desire for friendship irrationally and is irrational in holding on to the desire. But the desire for friendship is perfect rational.

Patrick comes to be convinced by Irene, whom he has excellent reason to think to be an epistemic authority even whe she says things that seem absurd (she has said many seemingly absurd things to him, and turned out to be right), that he ought to desire to be the heaviest man on earth. By constantly dwelling on the excellent reasons he has for trusting Irene, and on Irene's advice, he comes to desire to be the heaviest man on earth, and starts to eat.

Patrick acquired his desire to be the heaviest man on earth quite rationally, and is rational in holding on to the desire. But the desire is irrational.

Collectively, the cases force a distinction between (ir)rationally having or acquiring a desire, and a desire being itself (ir)rational.

But now what does the irrationality or rationality of a desire in itself consist in if it does not consist in the irrationality or rationality of the agent who has it in respect of the having of the desire? I suspect that a good answer will have to advert to the human good, to human flourishing, but even so, I don't know how to answer.

Football excellence

I sent the following in an email to a former student. He knows a lot more about the subject—both first-order and second-order—than I do, and for some reason he found it hilarious, and perhaps true, so I'm posting it (with some typos fixed):

Jon K and Mike B were talking football. And I was finding their discourse very interesting. It was a mix of descriptive and evaluative language, with the two inseparable, in the way natural law theorists like. Understanding almost none of the first order content of their conversation, I wondered what sorts of claims they were making. My first thought was that the evaluative language could be reduced without remainder to means-end stuff: a criticism might be a claim that such and such an action did not contribute to winning, or was not likely to contribute to winning, etc.

But on reflection, no such reduction is possible. Suppose player x does not take an action A such that x's taking A would have increased the chance of victory. This is only a criticism if we add some further claims. For instance, it is not a criticism of a player that he did not run at 90% of the speed of light, though had he done so, it might have increased the chance of victory. Maybe we want to say: we criticize x for not doing A only when x could have done A. But while that may be the case for moral evaluation, it's not the case for sports evaluation. For instance, if I was due to some freak in a football game, it would be appropriate to criticize me for not doing all sorts of things that I am incapable of doing. For while I'm incapable of doing them, they're expected of a football player. The criticism might be phrased: "That Pruss guy shouldn't have been put on the team." But it could just be phrased: "He didn't run fast enough."
 
Moreover, some of the criticism is probably rather mild. The person isn't being criticized for falling short of what it takes to be a competent football player. The criticism is for falling short of excellence. Maybe that's not entirely fair, but maybe it is. So we need a concept of football excellence. Football excellence is a concept that goes beyond the empirical. [I]f all the players in the world were as incompetent as I'd be, we should say that even the best players fall short of excellence. There may be games like that, say newly invented games that no one is excellent [as] yet. So what measures excellence here? I can't help but think it's some kind of a notion of human nature. Football excellence is a kind of human excellence. Thus, it is not a part of football excellence to run at 90% of the speed of light or to throw a ball with millimeter accuracy at 100 meters. For that's asking for more than human nature can be expected to yield even in the truly excellent. That would be asking for the superhuman, and we don't ask for that (though in a way God does—but he also gives the grace for it). This means that the notion of football excellence depends on a notion of human nature. Moreover, this notion of human nature does not appear to be merely empirical: there is an irreducible normative component. 

This means that a naturalist can't consistently talk football. 

How's that sound? I may be fudging too much, since I didn't really understand many, or maybe any, of their first order claims.

Why do we need bodies?

The following scenario is adapted from Keith Laumer's story "The Body Builders": Technology reaches the point that our brains, while still in our natural bodies, can be remotely connected to a synthetic body, which would be as manipulable and would provide as much and as good sensory input as our real bodies. The natural bodies, with brains in their skulls, can be kept in municipal storage, where they will be carefully maintained, exercised and kept trim and healthy, without us being aware of it, because the sensory connections between the brain and the rest of the natural body are severed. It seems the synthetic body could do all the tasks that the natural body could, but would provide two advantages: (a) it could technologically improve on the capabilities of the natural body, say, by providing more strength, agility or sensory data, and (b) one will avoid danger, since one's brain and natural body are safe in municipal storage while the synthetic body goes out into the world of whizzing cars, disease, and all that. Very quickly, one starts to feel about the synthetic body as if one were there, in it—as if it were one's own body.

Question: In a scenario like this, what would we lose? What couldn't we do in this scenario if we did everything through the synthetic body?

One class of activities that we would lose out on are various hobby and sport activities where the contingent limitations of our bodies are important. If various drugs are contrary to good sportsmanship (though, on the other hand, consider the case of Oscar Pistorius), obviously this will be. There can be sports that are played with synthetic bodies. They would in some way akin to remote control car racing. But they would, indisputably, be essentially different sports from the ones we have. (That's part of the point of the Laumer story.)

A second class of acitvities that we would lose out on are ones where physical danger appears to be central to meaning of the activity. Climbing Mt. Everest is a paradigm example. I am inclined to think activities where danger is courted are contrary to the virtue of prudence, since danger is a bad thing. If one could climb Mt. Everest while ensuring safety (e.g., by having a button which, if pressed, would teleport one to a medical facility), one should.

But both of the above classes of activities are pretty much optional to human life. We could get along pretty much fine without bodily sports or mountain climbing: we could still have video games, and cases where non-physical courage is exercised. We would lose out, but we would not lose out on all that much.

In thinking about this, the only cases of activities crucial to the good of humanity that I can think of which could not be done through the synthetic bodies would be:

1. Basic survival functions. (Those would need to be done in municipal storage.)
2. (a) Sexual union and (b) reproduction.
3. The sacraments of baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, ordination and annointing of the sick.

One might think (2a) could be done remotely, and (2b) could be done technologically in municipal storage (extracting sperm and egg, combining them, etc.) But this is mistaken. Sexual union is essentially embodied: the remote "union" would only illusorily be a physical union. And doing (2b) apart from (2a) is immoral—human beings should be the fruit of marital union.

It's interesting that apart from basic survival functions, all of the activities that are both crucial to the good of humanity and that require the natural body are sacraments or closely tied to sacraments ((2) is obviously closely tied to the sacrament of matrimony, as its consummation). It's also interesting that two sacraments are left off the list in (3): reconciliation and matrimony. While currently reconciliation is normally done through in-person confession, I do not think this is essential to the sacrament—I think the Church could change this (I am not saying it would be wise to change it) to confession, say, by telephone. (If general absolution is valid, remote absolution would probably be valid, too, if the Church allowed it.) And while matrimony essentially requires the exchange of consent, this consent need not be given in spoken words (Canon 1104.2), and it is permissible for the two parties to be present only by proxy (Canons 1104.1 and 1105). Still, the consummation must be happen in person for the marriage to be indissoluble.

That, apart from basic survival, all the most important non-survival functions for which a natural body is essential are religious ones or closely tied to religious ones neatly refutes the popular idea that the Christian Church thinks poorly of the human body.

Templates for relationships

I wonder if human nature might not come along with a finite number of more or less flexible normative templates for love-relationships. These templates would define the basic forms of love that are appropriate to us. An attempt to create new basic relationships, or to transcend the boundaries between these, would then be failures insofar as a relationship is defined normatively. Thus, two siblings might attempt to enter into a romantic relationship, and they might behave romantically together. But, nonetheless, they would not be having a romantic relationship, because the normative features of a romantic relationship would be objectively absent: thus, there would in fact be no obligation—but only a false belief in the obligation—to nurture the kind of intimacy that a romantic relationship calls for. We would say that the siblings are not in a valid romantic relationship, where we use "valid" in the technical sense in which we say that only an "invalid promise" (i.e., no promise at all, but only the appearance of one) results from coercion.

One way to make plausible such a story would be through a scepticism about the possibility of our creating new normative facts, other than by simply by making the antecedents of pre-existing conditional ones true.

Of course the difficulties then are epistemological: how do we know what all the templates are?