An odd motive for love

Here is an odd reason for love. Someone is doing really well, and when we come to love them, their wellbeing becomes in part our wellbeing. So it’s especially good for us to love all the people who are doing well. The most extreme version of this is loving God. For God has infinite wellbeing. And so by loving God, that infinite wellbeing becomes ours in a way.

My first reaction to the above thoughts was that this is ridiculous. It’s too cheap a way of increasing one’s wellbeing and seems to be a reductio of the thesis that whenever you love anyone, their wellbeing is incorporated into yours.

But it’s not actually all that cheap. For consider one of the paradigm attitudes opposed to love: envy. In envy, the other’s wellbeing makes us suffer. It seems exactly right to say that in addition to the other-centered reasons to avoid envy, envy is just stupid, because it increases your suffering with no benefit to anyone. But if so, and if love is opposed to envy, then it is not surprising that there is a benefit to love. And because envy is hard to avoid, the opposed love is not cheap, since it requires one to renounce envy.

But what about the oddity? Well, that oddity, I think, comes from the fact that while the benefit to ourselves from loving is indeed a reason to love, it cannot be our only reason, since love is essentially an attitude focused on the other’s good. At most, the realization that loving someone is good for us will help overcome reasons against love (the costs of love, say), and motivate us to try to become the kind of person who is less envious and more loving. But we can’t just say: “It’s good for me to love, ergo I love.” It’s harder than that. And in particular it requires a certain degree of commitment to the other person for good and ill, so if an attitude is solely focused on the desire to share the other’s good, that attitude is not love.

Time and extended wellbeing

It is said that when your friend has bad things happen, the occurrence of these bad things constitutes a loss of wellbeing for you. Not just because you are saddened, but simply directly in virtue of your interest in your friend’s wellbeing. This is said to happen even if you don’t know about your friend’s misfortune.

But when do you lose wellbeing? On the story above, you lose wellbeing when you friend suffers. But if we say that your loss of wellbeing is simultaneous with your friend’s, what does that mean, given that simultaneity is relative? What is the relevant reference frame?

There are two obvious candidates:

1. Your reference frame.

2. Your friend’s reference frame.

These may be quite different if you and your friend are traveling at high speeds through space. And there doesn’t seem to be a compelling argument for choosing one over the other. Furthermore, there really isn’t such a thing as the reference frame of a squishy object like a human being. Different parts of a human being are always moving in different directions. My chest moves away from my backbone, and soon moves towards it. It is tempting to define my reference frame as the reference frame of my center of mass. I am not sure this makes complete sense in the framework of general relativity (a center of mass is a weighted average of the positions of my parts, but when the positions like in a curved spacetime, I don’t know if a weighted average is well-defined). But even in special relativity there are problems, since it is possible for an organism’s center of mass to move faster than light. (Imagine that a knife moving at nearly the speed of light cuts a stretched-out snake in half, and the snake briefly survives. During the time that the knife moved through the thickness of the snake, the center of mass of the snake moved by a quarter of the snake’s length.)

Here is another option. Perhaps your friend’s misfortunes are yours precisely when a ray of light from the misfortune could have illuminated you, i.e., precisely when you are at the surface of the future lightcone centered on some portion of the misfortune. There is something a bit wacky about this: misfortune propagates just as idealized light (not taking into account collisions with matter) would. In particular, this means that misfortune is subject to gravitational lensing. That seems really weird.

All of the above seems like it’s barking up the wrong tree. Here is a suggestion. While some aspects of wellbeing or illbeing can be temporally localized—pains, for instance—others cannot be. Having a rich and varied life is not temporally localized. Perhaps the contribution to your illbeing from the misfortune of your friends is similarly not temporally localized in your life. It’s just a negative in your life as a whole.

But I am not very happy with that, either. For it seems that if your friend is in pain, and then is no longer in pain, there is some change in the wellbeing of your life.

I don’t know.

Obedience to God out of gratitude

Some philosophers want to ground our duty to obey God’s commands in the need to show gratitude to God for all the goods God has done for us. I think there is something to that, but I want to point out a complication.

When someone has done something good for us, that generates moral reasons to do something good for them. But that is different from generating moral reasons to obey their commands. After all, being obeyed need not be good for the person issuing the commands. Imagine that you are on a ship along with someone who has already done many good things for you and your family. The ship is sinking. There is one last space left in a lifeboat. You start to push your benefactor into that space. Your benefactor interrupts: “Don’t! Get into it yourself!” In this case, it would be bad for your benefactor for you to obey their commmand, and obedience to this command would not, I think, be a right expression of gratitude. You might have other moral reasons to obey the command, such as that if someone is offering to make the ultimate sacrifice, you should not deprive them of that choice. But gratitude for past benefits is not a reason to obey your benefactor when your benefactor would not in fact benefit from your obedience.

So the mere fact that you are commanded something by your benefactor does not generate a gratitude-based reason for obedience. It is only when your benefactor would benefit from your obedience that such a reason is generated.

Now things get a little complicated in the case of God. It seems we cannot benefit God, as God has perfect beatitude. But as we learn from Aquinas’ discussion of love for God, it’s more complicated than that. There are internal and external benefits and harms a person might receive. Internal benefits and harms affect the person’s intrinsic properties in a positive way—think here of pleasure and pain, virtue and vice, etc. But there are external benefits and harms: when people speak badly about you behind your back, the loss of reputation is an external harm, even if you never find out about it and it never affects any intrinsic property of yours. Similarly, because friends are other selves, if x loves y, then benefits and harms to y are benefits and harms to x, albeit perhaps only external ones. Thus, we can benefit God by benefiting those that God loves, namely everyone.

So, when God commands us—as in fact he does—to love our neighbor, then our obedience to that command does benefit God, albeit externally. So it seems we do have a gratitude-based moral reason to do what God says. But notice that as far as the argument goes right now, that is not a reason to love our neighbor out of obedience to God. The reason to love our neighbor out of gratitude to God would remain even if God did not command us to love our neighbor.

But this isn’t the whole story. For, first, when we show gratitude to a benefactor by bestowing some internal or external benefits on them, gratitude seems to call on us to have a preference for bestowing those benefits that the benefactor asks us to bestow. Thus, the fact that some benefit to the benefactor is requested by the benefactor adds to the gratitude-based reasons for bestowing that benefit. And, second, it seems plausible that having one’s commands be obeyed is itself an external benefit—it is a way of being honored.

Thus, that God has commanded us to love our neighbor intensifies our reasons based on gratitude to God to love our neighbor. And even if God were to command something seemingly arbitrary and not in itself beneficial, like abstinence from pork, we externally benefit God insofar as we obey him. But in the latter case something stronger is needed than that: for the obedience to be a form of gratitude, it needs to be the case that on balance we benefit God through the obedience. That being obeyed is good as far as it goes does not show that being obeyed is on balance good. It is good as far as it goes for our benefactor to be obeyed when they say to go into the lifeboat, but it might actually on balance be better for them to be pushed into the lifeboat.

Thus there is a limit to how far this justification of divine authority goes. If we obey God out of gratitude, our reason for obedience cannot simply consist in the facts that God has commanded us and that God has bestowed great benefits on us. Our reason would also need to include the fact that on balance it bestows a benefit—an external one, to be sure—on God if we obey.

Is it the case that whenever God commands something, it always bestows a benefit on balance on God that we obey him? That initially sounds like a reasonable thesis, but we can easily imagine cases where it is not so. Consider cases where my disobedience to God would prevent massive disobedience by others. For instance, a malefactor offers me a strong temptation to disobey God, and tells me that if I refuse the temptation, then a thousand other people will be offered the same temptation, but if I give in, I will be the only one. Looking at how strong the temptation is, I conclude that if it’s offered to a thousand people, about 500 of them will succumb to it. Thus, if I obey God, there will be much less obedience of God in the world. Hence, my obedience to God actually leads to God being less honored and receiving less external benefit. But nonetheless I need to obey. Hence, the duty of obedience is not grounded in gratitude.

In summary: Normally, gratitude does give us moral reason to obey God. But if I am right, then the moral reason to obey God that comes from gratitude needs to include the assumption that it is good for God to be obeyed. And we can imagine cases where that assumption is false and yet obedience is still required.

Epicurus on death

There is the classic Epicurean argument that:

1. You aren’t harmed by death when dead, since then you don’t exist, and

2. You aren’t harmed by death when alive, since then you’re still alive,

so:

3. You aren’t ever harmed by death.

I just thought of a cute way to make the argument slightly more compelling. Take it, contrary to fact but in accord with what the Epicureans believed, that death is the permanent cessation of existence.

Now let’s imagine a scenario where everything, including time itself, comes to an end at the last moment of your life. And for simplicity (this doesn’t affect anything) let’s suppose you came into existence at the beginning of time. Then you are never dead. When we think about this scenario, the analogue of claim 1 is trivially true, for you’re never dead. Thus on this scenario, all that needs to be thought about is an analogue of of claim 2 (with “death” being understood not as an event but as the fact that one’s life has an end) plus the additional highly plausible claim:

4. The scenario where everything, including time, comes to an end at the last moment of your life is no better for you than the scenario where you alone come to an end then.

I don’t think this makes the argument much more compelling, because I don’t think claim 1 was ever the real problem with the Epicurean argument. But in the scenario where time comes to an end, I think we avoid some irrelevant objections to the argument.

The real problem with the Epicurean argument is, I think, two-fold. First, I think 2 is dubious: your well-being at one time can depend on what happens or does not happen at other times.

Second, one can accept 3 and still think you’re harmed by death. For one can hold that one isn’t ever harmed by death, i.e., that there is no time at which one is harmed by death, but nonetheless as a four-dimensional whole one is worse off for death. Here’s one way to make the point. Suppose that by choosing a medical regimen for you, I can choose whether:

• You are unconscious for ten years, and then you live ten years while experiencing two units of wholesome pleasure each day, without anything negative, and then you cease to exist.
• You live ten years while experiencing one unit of wholesome pleasure each day, without anything negative, and then you cease to exist.

If I choose the regimen that gives you the second life, I harm you overall but you aren’t ever harmed—there is no time at which you’re worse off for that option.

Humean views of rationality and the pursuit of money

Consider a Humean package view of rationality where:

1. Then end of practical rationality is desire satisfaction.

2. All the rational motivational drive in our decisions comes from our desires.

3. There are no rational imperatives to have desires.

Now suppose that you learn that some costless action will further one or more of your desires, but you have no idea which desire or desires will be furthered by that action. (If we want to have some ideality constraints on which desires make action rational—say, only desires that would survive idealized psychotherapy—then we can suppose that you also know that the desire or desires furthered by the action will satisfy those constraints. I will ignore this wrinkle.)

Any theory of rationality that holds it to be rational to pursue one’s desires should hold it both rational and possible to take that costless action. In the abstract, a case where you know that some desire will be furthered but have no idea which one seems a strange edge case. But actually there is nothing all that strange about this. When money is offered to us, sometimes we have a clear picture of what the money would allow us to do. But sometimes we don’t: we just know that the money will help further some end or other. (Of course, in some people, the pursuit of money may have a non-instrumental dimension, but that’s vicious and surely unnecessary.)

So now let’s go back to the costless action that furthers one or more of your desires and the desire theory of rational motivation. How can this theory accommodate this action?

Option 1: Particular desires. You pick some desire of yours—let’s say, a desire to read a good book—and you think to yourself: “There is a non-zero probability that the action furthers my desire to read a good book.” Then the desire to read a good book, in the usual end-to-means ways, motivates you to do the costless action.

That, of course, could work. And in fact, in the case of money we do sometimes proceed by imagining something that we could buy. However, thinking that what motivates one is just the non-zero probability of furthering a particular desire gets things wrong for two reasons. The first is that we could imagine the case being enriched by your learning that the desire that will be furthered by the action is none of the desires that would come to mind if you were to spend less than a minute thinking about the case but that you need to make your decision within a minute. The inability to think of a particular desire that even might be furthered by the action does not affect the ratioanl possibility of taking the costless action.

The second is that this approach gets the strength of motivation wrong. You have many desires, and the desire to read a good book is only one among many. The probability that that desire to read a good book would be furthered by the costless action might well be tiny, especially if you received the further information that it is only one of your desires that is furthered by the action. Such a small probability of a benefit could still motivate you to take a costless action, but it may not work for similar cases where there is a modest cost. For instance, we can suppose you learn that:

4. The benefit is roughly equal to reading a good book as measured by desire-satisfaction.

5. The cost is roughly equal to a tenth of the benefit of reading a good book as measured by desire-satisfaction.

6. You have a hundred desires and the one furthered is but one of them.

Well, then, the action is clearly worth it by (4) and (5). But it’s not worth doing the action simply on a one percent chance that it will lead to reading a good book, since the cost is ten percent of the benefit of reading a good book.

One might try to remedy the second problem by mentally going through a larger number of desires so as to increase the probability that some one of the desires will be fulfilled. But we still have the first objection—there may not be enough time to do this—and surely it is implausible that one would have to go through such mental lists of desires in order to get the motivation.

Option 2: A higher-order desire to have satisfied desires. Suppose you have a higher-order desire H to satisfy lower-order desires. Then while you don’t know which lower-order desire is furthered by the action, you do know that this higher-order desire is furthered by them.

This approach seems to lead to an unfortunate double-counting. When you sit down to read a good book, do you really get two benefits, one of reading the book and the other of furthering the higher-order desire to have satisfied lower-order desires? If not, the approach is problematic. But if so, then it gets the rational strength of motivation wrong. For suppose that you are choosing between two actions. Action A will lead to your reading a good book. Action B will lead to the fulfillment of an unknown desire other than reading a good book, a desire you nonetheless know to have the same weight. On the higher-order solution, it seems you have a double motivation for action A, namely H and the desire to read a good book, but only a single motivation for action B, namely H, and hence you should have a twice as strong rational motivation for A. But that’s surely not rational!

Maybe, though, you can get out of the double-counting in some way, by having some story about desire-overlap, so that H and the desire to read a good book don’t add up to a double desire. I suspect that this may undercut the force of the story, by making H not be a real desire.

But there is a second and more serious problem with the story. Suppose that Jim has all the usual lower-order order desires but lacks H. If rational motivation comes from desires, then Jim will not be rationally motivated to the action. (Maybe he will have some accidental non-rational motivation for the action.) But surely not going for a costless action that he knows will fulfill some desire of his will be a rational failing, assuming that it’s rational to fulfill one’s desires. Hence there will have to be a rational imperative to have H among one’s desires, contrary to the third part of the Humean package we are exploring.

Now I suppose we could drop the third part of the Humean picture, and hold that rationality requires some desires like H. But I think this makes the rest of the picture less plausible. If rationality requires one to have certain desires, it could just as well require one directly to fulfill certain ends, thereby undercutting the second part of the Humean picture.

Finally, I should note that not all non-Humeans should rejoice at this argument. For similar considerations may apply against some other views. For instance, some Natural Law views that tie motivation very tightly to basic goods may have this problem.

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.

Fictional characters, heaven and the multiverse

One of the minor sadnesses of life is when you finish a work of fiction and then you miss a character from there, wishing for more interaction with that character (some examples in my own case: Gandalf, Twoflower, Lucy Pevensie, Sherlock Holmes, Pan Wolodyjowski, Elizabeth Bennet, JC Denton, Inspector Gently, and the Moomins). It's not so much that you want to meet that character in real life (my first thought was that I wanted to meet the character, but then I realized that I just wouldn't click with all of them). But you want something like eternal fictional life for the character (to be distinguished from fictional eternal life, which at least the characters created by authors who believe in eternal life are presumed to have even if this is not mentioned, just as they are presumed to have spleens even if this is not mentioned).

In heaven all tears are wiped away, and presumably this includes the minor ones. So how is the minor sadness of missing a fictional character met? One possibility is that all that is engaging about any person, real or fictional, is his or her way of participating in God. Thus the beatific vision of God will supply the reality that the character is a shadow of.

But although the beatific vision we hope to receive after death even before the resurrection of the body will give us a bliss fulfilling our deepest desires, there is something fitting to our nature to also receive back our bodies. Likewise, then, there is something fitting to our nature to also receive back contact with fictional characters.

Let's speculate. Does this mean that further episodes in their lives will continue to be fictionally created—either by their author or by oneself—ad infinitum? Maybe: these episodes might be set in an infinite afterlife, or they might would-have-been episodes in parallel universes. But there may be a way in which such extension could betray the finitude and integrity of the author's creation, even when in-story the character has eternal life (as Lucy Pevensie clearly does). Though this is definitely one option. Another option is that even the finite earthly life of any real person has infinite thickness, infinite depth of participation in God. If so, then one might enjoy interaction with the character by coming to a deeper and deeper appreciation of the character. Another option is that we might stick to the canonical works created on earth, but have the ability to re-enjoy these works even more deeply than the first time (say, by reaching back in memory to them).

An even more daring option is that we might be living in a very large multiverse and we might meet the real people of whom the characters were shadows. But I am not sure that this is what we really want--I think in at least some of the cases (JC Denton?) we want more of the fictional interaction, rather than a meeting with a real-life person like the character.

There are interesting parallels between this set of issues and the issue of losing a pet.

I suppose the one thing we can with confidence about questions like is that way in which our tears--minor in this case, major in other cases--will be wiped away will be surprising...

Reasons of marriage

Suppose we take seriously the idea that when a couple marries, an entity with moral standing—the married couple—comes into existence. Then there might be cases where an action is good for the spouses but bad for the married couple, and the fact that it is bad for the married couple could provide a strong moral reason to refrain from an action even if the action is good for the spouses.

That said, I don't accept an ontology on which a new entity comes into existence when a couple marries. But something similar to the above could still be the case. There are two kinds of wellbeing: one may call them narrow and extended wellbeing. Extended wellbeing is flourishing you have in virtue things outside of you going right for you. For instance, when someone you love has a success, your extended wellbeing increases even before you find out about it. Likewise, our reputation is a matter of our extended wellbeing, though it also tends to instrumentally affect our narrow wellbeing.

It can be quite rational to engage in some actions that sacrifice narrow wellbeing for extended wellbeing (just as sometimes the opposite makes sense). Now, even if a new entity doesn't come into existence when a couple marries, the members of the couple acquire a new mode of extended wellbeing, a mode where they are well insofar as the marriage goes well and poorly insofar as the marriage goes poorly.

But this means that it could happen that it would be rational for the spouses to sacrifice the narrow wellbeing of both persons for the sake of the external wellbeing they have in virtue of their marriage. It could well be that destroying the marriage is on balance a harm to the spouses even if they no longer care about the marriage and its destruction makes them feel better, just as an action that destroys one's reputation may be a harm to one even if one no longer cares about one's reputation and enjoys ruining it.

An argument from physical disability against naturalism

1. On average, severely disabled people report not being dissatisfied with life.
2. Thus, probably, on average severely disabled people are rightly not dissatisfied with life.

The defeasible inference is due to the presumption in favor of the correctness of people's judgments about their wellbeing.

But (2) is very surprising on naturalism. Given naturalism, one would expect that human wellbeing be extremely tenuous, and that any significant downward push, such as from disability, should push people into the illbeing range. The theist, on the other hand, has a rather better explanation of (2).

Of course the naturalist can talk about evolutionary and social mechanisms that make severely disabled people report satisfaction even though their lives are on balance unsatisfactory. But that isn't a naturalistic explanaton of (2). It is an explanation of (1) coupled with a patronizing denial of (2).

The theist, like the naturalist, might question people's self-reports. But she could also accept (2). Of course, the theist will then have a serious problem of evil in the case of the large numbers of severely disabled people whose life satisfaction self-report is negative. But since the theist has very good reason to think that life continues infinitely beyond death, a dissatisfaction—even a rightful one—over a finite initial period is not perhaps quite that surprising.

Well-being

Consider these statements:

1. Polluted air is bad for a tree.
2. Polluted air is bad for a ladybug.
3. Polluted air is bad for a mouse.
4. Polluted air is bad for a dog.
5. Polluted air is bad for a human.

As far as I know, these are all true. Moreover, it does not appear to me that "bad for" is used equivocally in all the cases.

Furthermore, the reasons for the truth of the items higher on the list remain in the case of the items lower on the list, but new reasons are added. Thus, pollution harms the growth and survival of a mouse just as it does a tree. But the mouse can get sick and feel pain, while the tree cannot. Thus, there is an additional reason for why pollution is bad for a mouse that does not apply in the case of the tree. And a human being can have various higher level goals be frustrated by pollution. However, the reasons for why polluted air is bad for a tree, a ladybug, a mouse or a dog are all reasons for why it is bad for a human as well.

This has obvious implications for a theory of human well-being. Since the reasons for why (1) is true have nothing to do with actual or counterfactual desires of trees, likewise, at least one of the reasons for why (5) is true obtains least in part independently of any actual or counterfactual desires of humans. And this shows that desire-fulfillment theories of human well-being are false: some things, such as health, are valuable for humans regardless of how humans feel about them, for the very same reasons for which they are valuable for trees.

The opponent will, I expect, either deny (1) and (2) (and maybe even (3)), saying that nothing is good or bad for trees or ladybugs, or else claim that I am equivocating on "bad for". Neither, though, seems that plausible.