Reasons and permissions

The fact that a large animal is attacking me would give me both permission and reason to kill the animal. On the basis of cases like that, one might hypothesize that permissions to ϕ come from particularly strong reasons to ϕ.

But there are cases where things are quite different. There is an inexpensive watch on a shelf beside me that I am permitted to destroy. What gives me that permission? It is that I own it. But the very thing that gives me permission, my ownership, also gives me a reason not to smash it. So sometimes the same feature of reality that makes ϕing permissible is also a reason against ϕing.

This is a bit odd. For if it were impermissible to destroy the watch, that would be a conclusive reason against the smashing. So it seems that my ownership moves me from having a conclusive reason against smashing to not having a conclusive reason against smashing. Yet it does that while at the same time being a reason not to smash. Interesting.

I suspect there may be an argument against utilitarianism somewhere in the vicinity.

Epistemology and the presumption of (im)permissibility

Normally, our overt behavior has the presumption of moral permissibility: an action is morally permissible unless there is some specific reason why it would be morally impermissible.

Oddly, this is not so in epistemology. Our doxastic behavior seems to come along with a presumption of epistemic impermissibility. A belief or inference is only justified when there is a specific reason for that justification.

In ethics, there are two main ways of losing the presumption of moral permissibility in an area of activity.

The first is that actions falling in that area are prima facie bad, and hence a special justification is needed for them. Violence is an example: a violent action is by default impermissible, unless we have a special reason that makes it permissible. The second family of cases is areas of action that are dangerous. When we go into a nuclear power facility or a functioning temple, we are surrounded by danger—physical or religious—and we should refrain from actions unless we have special reason to think they are safe.

Belief isn’t prima facie bad. But maybe it is prima facie dangerous? But the presumption of impermissibility is not limited to some special areas. There indeed are dangerous areas of our doxastic lives: having the wrong religious beliefs can seriously damage us psychologically and spiritually while having the wrong beliefs about nutrition and medicine can kill us. But there seem to be safe areas of our doxastic lives: whatever I believe about the last digit in the number of hairs on my head or about the generalized continuum hypothesis seems quite safe. Yet, having the unevidenced belief that the last digit in the number of hairs on my head is three is just as impermissible as having the unevidenced belief that milk cures cancer.

Perhaps it is simply that moral and epistemic normativity are not as analogous as they have seemed to some.

But there is another option. Perhaps, despite what I said, our doxastic lives are always dangerous. Here is one way to suggest this. Perhaps truth is sacred, and so dealing with truth is dangerous just as it is dangerous to be in a temple. We need reason to think that the rituals we perform are right when we are in a temple—we should not proceed by whim or by trial and error in religion—and perhaps similarly we need reasons to think that our beliefs are true, precisely because our doxastic lives always, no matter how “secular” the content, concern the sacred. Our beliefs may be practically safe, but the category of the sacred always implicates a danger, and hence a presumption of impermissibility.

I can think of two ways our doxastic lives could always concern the sacred:

1. God is truth.

2. All truth is about God: every truth is contingent or necessary; contingent truths tell us about what God did or permitted; necessary truths are all grounded in the nature of God.

All this also fits with an area of our moral lives where there is a presumption of impermissibility: assertion. One should only make assertions when one has reason to think they are true. Otherwise, one is lying or engaging in BS. Yet assertion is not always dangerous in any practical sense of “dangerous”: making unwarranted assertions about the number of hairs one one’s head or the general continuum hypothesis is pretty safe practically speaking. But perhaps assertion also concerns the truth, which is something sacred, and where we are dealing with the sacred, there we have spiritual danger and a presumption of impermissibility.

Do promises sometimes make otherwise wrong actions permissible?

Consider a variant of my teenage Hitler case. You’re a hospital anesthetist and teenage Hitler is about to have an emergency appendectomy. The only anesthetic you have available is one that requires a neutralizer to take the patient out of anesthesia—without the neutralizer, the patient dies. You know (an oracle told you) that if teenage Hitler survives, he’ll kill millions. And you’re the only person who knows how to apply anesthesia or the neutralizer in this town.

You’re now asked to apply anesthesia. You have two options: apply or refuse. If you refuse, the surgeon will perform the appendectomy without anesthesia, causing excruciating pain to a (still) innocent teenager, who will still go on to kill millions. Nobody benefits from your refusal.

But if you apply anesthesia, you will put yourself in a very awkward moral position. Here is why. Once the surgery is over, standard practice will be to apply the neutralizer. But the Principle of Double Effect (PDE) will forbid you from applying the neutralizer. For applying the neutralizer is an action that has two effects: the good effect of saving teenage Hitler’s life and the evil effect of millions dying. PDE allows you to do actions that have a foreseen evil effect only when the evil effect is not disproportionate to the good effect. But here the evil effect is disproportionate. So, PDE forbids application of the neutralizer. Thus if you know yourself to be a morally upright person, you also know that if you apply the anesthesia, you will later refuse to apply the neutralizer. But surely it is wrong to apply the anesthesia to an innocent teenage while expecting not to apply the neutralizer. For instance, it would be clearly wrong to apply the anesthesia if one were out of neutralizer.

So, it seems you need to refuse to apply anesthesia. But your reasons for the refusal wiil be very odd: you must refuse to apply anesthesia, because it would be morally wrong for you to neutralize the anesthesia, even though everyone is no worse or better off in the scenario where you apply anesthesia and neutralize it than in the scenario where the operation happens without anesthesia. To make the puzzle even sharper, we can suppose that if teenage Hitler has the operation without anesthesia, he will blame you for the pain, and eventually add your ethnic group—which otherwise he would have no prejudice against—to his death lists. So your refusal to apply anesthesia not only causes pain to an innocent teenager but causes many deaths.

The logical structure here is this: If you do A, you will be forbidden from doing B. But you are not permitted to do A if you expect not do B. And some are much better off and no one is worse off if you do both A and B than if you do neither.

Here is a much more moderate case that seems to have a similar structure. Bob credibly threatens to break all of Carl’s house windows unless Alice breaks one of Carl’s windows. It seems that it would be right for Alice to break the window since any reasonable person would choose to have one window broken rather than all of them. But suppose instead Bob threatens to break all of Carl’s windows unless Alice promises to break one of Carl’s windows tomorrow. And Alice knows that by tomorrow Bob will be in jail. Alice knows that if she makes the promise, she would do wrong to keep it, for Carl’s presumed permission of one window being broken to save the other windows would not extend to the pointless window-breaking tomorrow. And one shouldn’t make a promise one is planning not to keep (bracketing extreme cases, which this is not one of). So Alice shouldn’t make the promise. But no one would be worse off if Alice made the promise and kept it.

I wonder if there isn’t a way out of both puzzles, namely to suppose that in some cases a promise makes permissible something that would not otherwise be permissible. Thus, it would normally be wrong to apply the neutralizer to teenage Hitler. But if you promised to do so (e.g., implicitly when you agree to perform your ordinary medical duties at the hospital, or explicitly when you reassured his mom that you’ll bring him out of anesthesia), then it becomes permissible, despite the fact that many would die if you kept the promise. Similarly, if Alice promised Bob to break the window, it could become permissible to do so. Of course, we better not say in general that promises make permissible things that would otherwise be impermissible.

The principle here could be roughly something like that:

1. If it would be permissible for you to now intentionally ensure that a state of affairs F occurs at a later time t, then it is permissible for you to promise to bring about F at t and then to do so if no relevant difference in the circumstances occurs.

Consider how (1) applies to the teenage Hitler and window-breaking cases.

It would be permissible for you to set up a machine that would automatically neutralize Hitler’s anesthesia at the end of the operation, and then to administer anesthesia. Thus, it is now—i.e., prior to your administering the anesthesia—permissible for you to ensure that Hitler’s anesthesia will be neutralized. Hence, by (1) it is permissible for you to promise to neutralize the anesthesia and then to keep the promise, barring some relevant change in the circumstances.

Similarly, it would be permissible for you to throw a rock at Carl’s window from very far away (out in space, say) so that it would only reach the window tomorrow. So, by (1) it is permissible for you to promise to break the window tomorrow and then to keep the promise.

On the other hand, take the case where an evildoer asks you to promise to kill an innocent tomorrow or else she’ll kill ten today, and suppose that tomorrow the evildoer will be in jail and unable to check up on what you did. It would be wrong for you to now intentionally ensure the innocent dies tomorrow, so (1) does not apply and does not give you permission to make and keep the promise. (Some people will think it’s OK to make and break this promise. But no one thinks it’s OK to make and keep this promise.)

Principle (1) seems really ad hoc. But perhaps this impression is reduced when we think of promises as a way of projecting our activity forward in time. Principle (1) basically says that if it would be permissible to project our activity forward in time by making a robot—or by self-hypnosis—then we should be able to accomplish something similar by a promise.

The above is reminiscent of cases where you promise to ignore someone’s releasing you from a promise. For instance, Alice, a staunch promoter of environmental causes, lends Bob a large sum of money, on the condition of Bob making the following promise: Bob will give the money back in ten years, unless Alice’s ideals shift away from environmentalism in which case he will give it to the Sierra Fund, notwithstanding any pleas to the contrary from Alice. The current context—Alice’s requirements at borrowing time—becomes normative at the time for the promise to be kept, notwithstanding some feared changes.

I am far from confident of (1). But it would let one escape the unhappy position of saying that in cases with the above structure one is required to let the worst happen. I expect there are counterexamples to (1), too. But perhaps (1) is true ceteris paribus.

Natural Law and the epistemology of permissions

It is hard to know that something is permissible, because an action is permissible provided that no moral consideration is decisive against it. Thus, it seems, to know that an action is permissible requires surveying the infinite set of all possible moral considerations and checking that none of them rules out the action.

But natural law ethics provides a handy shortcut:

1. Actions characteristic of a kind of being are permissible in relevantly normal circumstances.

Principle (1), for instance, makes it difficult to defend strong versions of antinatalism or of ethical vegetarianism by conferring a default permission status on reproduction and the eating of meat, since we are organisms (and hence characteristically reproduce in appropriate circumstances) and omnivores (and hence have a characteristic diet that includes meat).

The natural permission principle shifts the discussion from the question whether a given action type, characteristic of us humans, is generally permissible, to the question whether the circumstances at hand are relevantly normal. Thus, (1) still leaves open the possibility of an antinatalism that holds that things are so abnormally bad that it’s wrong to reproduce, or an ethical vegetarianism on which global conditions require us to forego meat.

Subscribing to principle (1) also explains the incredulous stare I see on students’ faces when I explain Andrea Dworkin’s view that heterosexual intercourse is always wrong.

Permissibility of the natural

The usual way to argue that an action is permissible is to argue that the arguments against the action’s permissibility fail. But it would be really nice to be able to give a more positive argument for an action’s permissibility. Sometimes one can do so by showing that the action is obligatory, but (a) that doesn’t help with the permissibility of non-obligatory actions, and (b) often an argument for the obligatoriness of a positive action presupposes the action’s permissibility (e.g., the obligation to kill a dog that is attacking one’s child when no other means of defense is available presupposes the general permissibility of killing dogs with good reason).

Here is a place where Natural Law (NL) can provide something quite useful, namely this principle:

1. If A is a natural action, then normally A is permissible.

This principle could, for instance, be used to generate intuitively compelling positive arguments for such controversial theses as:

2. It is normally permissible to eat animals.

3. It is normally permissible for us to reproduce.

4. It is normally permissible for us to prefer those more closely related to us.

In addition to Natural Lawyers, theists in general might have reason to endorse (1), on the grounds that our nature comes from God.

Of course, there is always going to be a difficulty in determining whether the antecedent of (1) is true.

Non-theistic non-NL theories are unlikely to endorse (1) except as a rule of thumb. And it will be an interesting explanatory question on those theories why then (1) is true even as a rule of thumb.

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.

Supererogation

Supererogation is a difficult concept for me. But there has to be such a thing. If Jones has suffered two hundred weeks of torture to save the lives of two hundred strangers, and then declines the 201st week of torture to save the life of the 201st stranger, Jones does not do wrong. And if he were to accept the torture, he would be acting superegatorily (barring special circumstances).

I doubt the following account is in the end right, but I think it is surprisingly defensible (modulo perhaps some minor tweaks):

• An action is supererogatory if and only if it is permissible and less convenient than some available alternative permissible action.

I don't have a good account of what "convenient" means, but "convenience" is meant to convey what one sacrifices when one makes "self-sacrifices". Thus, it is more convenient to endure less pain rather than more; it is more convenient to do the easier rather than the harder thing; it is more convenient to save than to lose one's life (this is an understatement in ordinary English, but I am using "convenience" in a sort of technical sense). But convenience probably won't count some higher goods to self, such as the exercise of virtue, which are gained rather than lost in self-sacrifice. Thus, a self-sacrifice can count as inconvenient even if overall one benefits from it because of the value of the exercise of virtue.

The account above seems to be subject to simple counterexamples. Let's say it's permissible for me to go to the kitchen, and suppose there are two paths—an easier and a harder one. Then surely both paths are permissible, and the harder one is less convenient, but that doesn't make the less convenient one supererogatory!

To respond I note that it is wrong to pointlessly impose burdens on any person—including oneself. (Argument 1: We are to love all of the people that God loves, and love prohibits pointless imposition of burdens. But I am one of the people God loves. So I am not permitted to impose pointless burdens on myself. Argument 2: What is vicious is impermissible. But pointless imposition of burdens on myself is contrary to the virtues of prudence and hence vicious.) Thus if there is no benefit to anybody from taking the harder path, the harder path is not permissible, and hence is not supererogatory. But suppose that there is a benefit to someone from the harder path: maybe I become physically or morally stronger, or maybe someone else benefits in some way. Then as long as the harder path is permissible (if the benefit is too trivial as compared to the burden, it might not be), it does seem to be supererogatory.

I do suspect that this account of supererogation only stands a chance if we have duties to self, but that's not a weakness of it.

Some people doubt that there are any supererogatory actions. On the above account, it is quite plausible that there are. First, we need to note that surely there are cases where we choose between multiple permissible actions. And second we note that it is very likely that among such choices there are going to be cases where the permissible options are not all equally convenient. And then the less convenient ones will be supererogatory.

Note that if convenience is what is given up in self-sacrifice, then every supererogatory action involves self-sacrifice. Now, self-sacrifice is relative to some alternative that does not involve such a sacrifice. We might then rephrase our definition of supererogation as:

• An action is supererogatory if and only if it is permissible and it is a self-sacrifice relative to some permissible alternative.

Go back to my initial case of Jones. If Jones did undergo the 201st week of torture, he would be doing something permissible, but it would also be permissible for him not to undergo that torture. However, undergoing the torture is less convenient. Again, this sounds like an absurd understatement, but in our technical sense of "convenient", it's not. It sounds a lot better in the language of self-sacrifice: Jones' undergoing the torture is permissible and is a self-sacrifice relative to the alternative of not undergoing it.

I think the weakness of the account is it does not make clear why supererogation is particularly praiseworthy. Moreover, even if the account happens to be extensionally correct, I don't think it captures what it is that grounds supererogation.

Double effect reasoning without a Principle of Double Effect

Consider a fairly normal formulation of the Principle of Double Effect (PDE). An action that is foreseen to result in an evil is permissible if:

1. the action is not intrinsically wrong
2. at least one good is intended
3. no evil is intended, either as a means or as an end
4. the foreseen evils are not disproportionate to the intended good or goods.

In the previous post I argued that if this (or something like it) is true, it isn't just a peripheral principle, but all of normative ethics—a necessary and sufficient condition for permissibility. Unfortunately, I do not think this is true, not because of any difficult issues about intentions, but for the simple reason that there are many ways for an action to go wrong, and (1)-(4) do not exclude all of them. Suppose, for instance, I drop bombs on the enemy headquarters, even though I know that some civilians in the vicinity will die. It may well be that (1)-(4) are satisfied. But that is not enough for permissibility if, for instance, my commanding officer has forbidden the bombing or I am under a valid vow of non-violence. Yet that the bombing was forbidden or that I am under a vow of non-violence does not affect (1)-(3).

Granted, the proportionality question is going to be affected by the command or vow, but proportionality does not do justice to the reasons that come from commands or vows. Proportionality weighs goods, while commands and vows give rise to exclusionary reasons, which make some goods no longer count. Of course, one could redefine proportionality to take into account all the reasons available, including the exclusionary ones, but if we do that, then (4) will presumably by itself be sufficient for permissibility. Moreover, the sort of "proportionality" that will let one adequately account for reasons arising from commands and vows will likely just be another word for permissibility, and then the account is trivial. Moreover, intuitively, even when one considers the evil of disobeying one's commander's prohibition, the bombing of the enemy headquarters could be proportionate. But when one's commander prohibits it, the bombing is no longer an act of war, but a private lethal act which one has no right to perform.

Now, one could add conditions like that the action is not forbidden by vow, promise or command. But the resulting PDE would look ad hoc, and I don't think we could be sure we listed everything needed.

So what is to be done about PDE? Here is a short and dogmatic suggestion. One of the basic deontic moral intuitions is that one should produce no evil. However, as soon as we start reflecting on the world around us, we realize that many of our actions have bad consequences for some people. A letter of recommendation that I write for my student is likely to either hurt my student or hurt my student's competitor. When I cross the road, I incur the harm of an increased risk of being run over. And so on, in various day-to-day things. Moreover, there are less day-to-day cases, such as the polio vaccine manufacturer who knows that the vaccine will kill some patients, but also knows it will save more lives. The consequentialist solution is to refine "Produce no evil" into "Do nothing that produces less utility than you could produce." I think it's easy to see that this doesn't do justice to the deontic "Produce no evil" insight.

The basic insight of double effect reasoning is that "Produce no evil" should be refined into as "Intend no evil", with a supplement of "Do nothing disproportionate." Discomfort over trolley cases then shows that we are sometimes unsure whether "Intend no evil" (together with the proportionality condition) really does capture all of the force of "Produce no evil", but I think "Intend no evil" does in fact come close to capturing the force. (I prefer: "Accomplish no evil.")

What is the PDE, then? It is simply an observation of the conditions under which the refinement of "Produce no evil" is satisfied. Seen in this way, it does not provide a sufficient condition for permissibility. It does provide a necessary condition for permissibility, and satisfaction of the conditions does show that the action is permissible insofar as the deontic question of the production of evil is concerned. But there may be other deontic questions. Seen in this way, the PDE can be simplified greatly. It simply says that "Produce no evil" is not violated when one intends no evil and does not act disproportionately.

Is the Principle of Double Effect the sum total of normative ethics?

The Principle of Double Effect (PDE) is often stated in something like this form: An action that is foreseen to have an evil effect (maybe better: an effect that is a basic evil—I shall not worry about this) E is permissible if:

1. the action is not intrinsically wrong
2. a good is intended
3. E is not intended, either as a means or as an end
4. E is not disproportionate to the intended good.

This sort of formulation is obviously incorrect. After all, conditions (1)-(4) which are supposed to be sufficient for permissibility are compatible with the action also being intended to have another evil effect E*. That particular problem is easily fixed. We just say that an action that is foreseen to have at least one evil effect is permissible if:

5. the action is not intrinsically wrong
6. at least one good is intended
7. no evil is intended, either as a means or as an end
8. the foreseen evils are not disproportionate to the intended good or goods.

This is better.

Now, observe two interesting facts. First, if an action that is foreseen to have at least one evil effect and that satisfies (5)-(8) is permissible, then a fortiori an action that is not foreseen to have any evil effects and that satisfies (5)-(8) should also be permissible. (It would be really, really weird if an action would become permissible as soon as one noticed some tiny evil side-effect.) So, in fact, the PDE gives a set of sufficient conditions for permissibility. Second, it is clear that (5) and (8) are necessary conditions for permissibility. Moreover, if (7) weren't a necessary condition for permissibility, there would be little need for a PDE. Finally, it is plausible that an action that aims at no good is a perversion of will, and hence on Natural Law grounds (6) will be necessary. Moreover, it may even be the case that every action has to intend at least one good in order to be an action, and hence (6) may be trivial.

If so, then if (5)-(8) are the right conditions to put in the PDE, they are a complete account of permissibility. This makes the PDE not just something peripheral to a deontic ethics, an epicycle for handling some wartime and medical cases, but in fact it makes the PDE be all of normative ethics.

However, as tomorrow's post will show, a PDE like (5)-(8) is not the right way to think of the insights embodied in double effect reasoning (to use Cavanaugh's phrase).

Knowing permissibility

Some moral permissibility facts are logically trivial: it permissible to eat a morally appropriate breakfast. And maybe some moral permissibility facts permit something negative where the permissibility derives from the impermissibility of the opposed positive action: it is permissible to refrain from murder.

But a non-gerrymandered, logically non-trivial permission of a positive action is always something contingent fact (assuming it is a fact), and depends on empirical knowledge of the world or revelation. It is never a priori. The reason is simple. For any non-gerrymandered, logically non-trivially permission claim about a positive action A, we can find a logically possible situation in which A has some horrible consequences down the road, consequences so horrible as to make A impermissible (I am not here assuming consequentialism—even the anti-consequentialist has to allow that an action can become impermissible due to its having disproportionately bad non-intended consequences) such that we only know empirically or by revelation that these consequences do not obtain.

Therefore, while one can perhaps engage in purely armchair discernment of obligations, one cannot engage in purely armchair discernment of permissions (except in gerrymandered, logically trivial or negative cases). Data about the world around us is always needed, either obtained empirically or by revelation.

In particular, unless one's knowledge of a non-gerrymandered, non-trivial permission of a positive action comes from divine revelation, such knowledge suffers from the kind of defeasibility that all empirical knowledge suffers from. We're not going to be dealing in the self-evident when we make these permissibility claims.

This should lead to a certain epistemic modesty when making claims such as that eating meat or engaging in homosexual acts or lending at interest is permissible, unless one has apposite divine revelation (I think in the eating meat case, we do in fact have divine revelation that sometimes the eating of meat is permissible; but it does not follow that in our day, affluent Westerners who can get nutrition from other sources are permitted to eat meat).