A Stoic thesis

Combine these two rather Stoic theses:

1. No one can make the fully virtuous person worse off

2. Doing what is morally wrong always makes you worse off

and you get:

3. No one can make the fully virtuous person do what is morally wrong.

It is going to be crucial to this post that (3) includes cases of inculpably doing what is morally wrong. I myself think (1) is false, say for the that Aristotle cites, namely that severe pain makes even the virtous worse off. But nonetheless I want to defend (3).

It may be possible to first destroy a virtuous person’s virtue, and then get them to do what is morally wrong. Hitting someone on the head or brainwashing them can severely damage the psyche in a way that can remove the rational habits that constitute virtue. I do not count this a counterexample to (3), because in this case when the victim performs the wrong action, they have previously lost their virtue.

One might try to rule out the case of head injury and brainwashing by restricting (3) to culpable wrongs, but I don’t want to do that. I want to defend (3) in the case of inculpable wrongs, too.

A consequence of (3) is a fairly strong source incompatibilism about our action. Not only is it that neural manipulation cannot make you perform a free action, but it cannot make you perform an action. This fits well with dualism, but does not require it, because it might be that brain states that constitute acts of will have to have functional characteristics incompatible with outside control.

As a final clarification, I understand “making” as reliable, but not necessarily 100% reliable. Someone with significant free will cannot be 100% reliably made to do wrong, even if they are not virtuous. But at the same time, while a fully virtuous person cannot be reliably tempted away from right action, they might still have significant free will and be able to do wrong, so a temptation might unreliably get them to do wrong. Furthermore, I am thinking of “making” on something like a specific occasion. Thus, perhaps, if you tempt a virtuous person a million times, while restoring their brain to the pre-temptation state between temptations, by the law of large numbers you can expect them to fail at least once.

Let’s think about (3) some more.

Threats aren’t going to reliably get the fully virtuous person do the wrong thing. Sometimes, it is reasonable to bow to a threat. If someone holds a gun to your head and tells you to cover the side of your neighbor’s house with a giant smiley face graffiti, it’s reasonable to go along with it. But morality is reasonable, and where it is reasonable to bow to a threat, doing so is not only not culpable but simply not wrong. Indeed, it would typically be a failure of respect for human life to refuse to paint the graffiti when one’s life is threatened. In cases, however, where it is unreasonable to knuckle under, the fully virtuous person will reliably withstand the threat.

Physical control of another’s body or brain isn’t going to produce morally wrong action, because it doesn’t produce action at all. It is not wrong to kill someone by being pushed off a cliff on top of them, because it’s not an action to fall off a cliff. Similarly, if someone implants a remote control for one’s muscles, even if in the brain, then the resulting muscle spasms are not actions, and hence are not morally wrong actions.

Cases of omissions are interesting. It is easy to make someone fail to do what they promised, say by imprisoning them. If one thinks that such a failure counts as an inculpable wrongdoing, and if (3) is supposed to apply to omissions as well, then we have a counterexample. I do want (3) to apply to omissions. But I think that all that’s morally required by a promise is a reasonable amount of effort—where what counts as reasonable depends on the case. If you promise to come to a party but are in the hospital after a serious accident, it’s not morally required—indeed, it’s morally forbidden—that you rip the IV out of your arm and drag yourself on hands knees to the party. Indeed, (3) is a part of my reason for thinking that promises only require reasonable effort, so this is the first example where I have (3) giving us evidence for a substantive moral thesis. I think something similar is true in the case of commands, legislation and the like. You can’t ask for more than reasonable effort! Asking for more adds insult to injury. The parents whose children starve because the parents were unjustly imprisoned have not done wrong in failing to feed them.

Cases of ignorance are also interesting. If Alice is serving wine to her guests and Bob pours poison in the wine whe she isn’t looking, some might say that Alice has done wrong in poisoning her guests. Certainly, actual-result act utilitarianism implies this. But so much the worse for actual-result act utilitarianism. It is much better to say that Alice has done no wrong, as long as it was reasonable for her to have no suspicion of Bob. Cases of ignorance of through-and-through moral facts, on the other hand, are arguably incompatible with full virtue.

Where I think (3) becomes most interesting is in cases where we have a normative power over what is right or wrong for another to do. Using our normative powers, we can make someone who would otherwise have done wrong not be doing wrong. There is a story of a hasid whose house is being robbed, and when the thief is carrying his property away, the hasid yells: “I renounce my property rights.” In doing so, the hasid releases the thief from the duties of restitution, and makes it be the case that the thief is not sinning by continuing to carry the goods away.

Are there cases where we can use our normative powers to reliably make someone do wrong? Definitely. You can know that someone under your authority will very likely refuse to follow a certain command, and you can nonetheless issue the command. But this is obviously a case of someone who is lacking full virtue.

I think the best bet for using our normative powers to reliably make someone perfectly virtuous do wrong is when our exercise of normative powers creates a duty but does so in a way that the perfectly virtuous person does not know about. For instance, one might command the fully virtuous person in circumstances where they will likely not hear the command. Or one might pass legislation that they won’t know about. There are two ways to defend (3) in these cases. The first is to have a communication condition on commands and legislation—they are only morally binding when person subject to them either is informed about them or ought to be informed about them. The second is to say that all that’s morally required is that one make a reasonable effort to obey commands and laws in general, not that one make a reasonable effort to obey each specific command or law (since if one doesn’t know about a command or law, one doesn’t need to make a reasonable effort to obey it). I somewhat prefer the first option of a communication condition—the vicious lawbreaker does wrong in disobeying a specific law, and not just law in general (though according to James 2:10, they are also doing wrong in disobeying law in general).

In any case, I think (3) puts some significant constraints on the shape of moral obligation and the nature of action, but these constraints seem defensible. Though maybe I am failing to notice some better counterexample.

More on promulgation of laws

Laws need to be promulgated to be valid. Why? A Thomistic story is that valid laws create genuine reasons to act, and reasons are the sort of thing that’s available to a reasonable person. So, the laws need to be practically available to reasonable governed persons. In particular, if everyone has forgot about a law, and the books it was written in have burned down, the law is gone—promulgation is an ongoing affair. And the “practically” rules out such things as: “If you go to room 19235 in the Library of Congress, and enter a certain seven digit combination in the lock that only Congress knows, the doors will open and you will have books of all the laws in front of you.”

All this does not mean that the laws have to be made known to the reasonable persons. For it is encumbent on reasonable persons to educate themselves on laws that are relevant to them. However, since in a modern state the body of laws is too large for a typical reasonable person to study them all, availability also requires more than, say, that the laws be in public libraries, on the Internet, and to hired lawyers.

For it is not reasonable to expect that every reasonable person before they perform some ordinary action will go and search the laws. Rather, as participants in a society we rightly get a sense of what actions are ordinary, intrinsically moral, and done by people without any consciousness that some law might constrain them. And in the case of such actions, it’s not reasonable to be expect someone to look further. If there is a law prohibiting such an action, then I am inclined to think it is invalid—it is failing the promulgation condition, at least in this context.

An interesting thing about this view is that it gives some of the same results as the idea that unenforced laws are not valid. When a law has not been generally enforced, eventually ordinary people will forget (if they ever knew) that the law was there, and will go about their ordinary actions without any consciousness that they might be constrained by a law here. And then it’s not reasonable to expect people to know about the law, and the promulgation condition fails. However, not all cases of unenforced laws are like that. In some cases, people generally do know that there is a law, but they also know it is unenforced and generally ignored, and in such cases there is no promulgation failure.

Here is a somewhat hypothetical example. Ordinary people buy coffee filter cones without any worry that there might be some law requiring them to report the number of cones they purchased to the state and to keep track of destroyed cones in a log. If there is such a law, certainly no one enforces it. Thus, the ordinary reasonable person has no duty to look up whether there is such a law the first time they buy a coffee filter cone in any given state, and if it turns out that there is such a putative law, it has failed to be promulgated to them, and it’s not valid (i.e., it’s not a law) at least in the case of ordinary consumers. (I said this is somewhat hypothetical. Texas has a law governing “precursor chemical laboratory apparatus”. One of the controlled items on their report form is filter funnels, which is precisely what a coffee filter cone is. One assumes that that’s not what they mean, but I am not a lawyer. Transformers are also listed so maybe phone chargers would need to be reported to the state?)

On the other hand, there are non-ordinary actions where a reasonable participant in society knows that it’s not unlikely there are relevant laws, and it is reasonably expected that one find out what the laws are—hiring a lawyer if necessary. If I were to set up shop selling explosives, for instance, I would know that there are likely to be local, state and federal regulations I need to educate myself on.

I should note that my intuitions are driven by my conviction that valid laws are morally binding. So genuine laws aren’t like mere rules in a game or something like that. One could have a hybrid view on which we distinguish between laws and laws^*, where a law is morally binding on the governed while a law^* is something the state merely has moral permission to enforce in principle. If this distinction were to work, one could have a stronger promulgation condition for laws and a weaker one for laws^*.

Relativity theory, promises and promulgation of laws

In one earlier post, I suggested the principle the basic laws of morality, just like those of physics, should be reference frame invariant. In that post, I offered some examples of the application of this theory, albeit ones that were not of much interest. In a later post, I have offered an application of the principle to the abortion debate, but the principle did not really decide any issue, but simply deepened the discussion. But now I have what is to me a much more interesting pair of applications.

I promise you never to sit on your late wife's favorite bench which happens to be on my front lawn. I thus create an obligation for myself (an amazing power, isn't it, the power to create obligations?). A while later you release me from the promise. Your release destroys the obligation (so a part of my power of promising was a power to give you the power to make the obligation cease to obtain).

But when did these things happen? When did the obligation not to sit on the chair come into existence? When I promised I wouldn't, or only when the promise reached you? And when did the obligation cease? When you said you release me, or only when the release reached me? Of course, if we're speaking face to face, the question is only of theoretical interest—but, still, it is a genuine interest, I think. But what if you live four light-years away, and we speak by radio? Then, did I become bound when I made the promise, or only four years later, when you heard the promise? And did I become released when you uttered the words releasing me from the promise, or only four years later? In such a case, the question is not just of theoretical interest.

It turns out that there is a very natural way to decide this question when we apply invariance, assuming that making promises and releasing from them is a matter of basic laws of morality. Suppose that we said that the obligation comes to exist when you hear my promise. But then the law would not be invariant. For five minutes after I have sent my words to you over the radio, it will be true in some but not all reference frames that you have already received the message. So, it will depend on reference frame whether I may sit on the bench then or not. Invariance will be violated. (Note that it will not help much to say that what is relevant is my reference frame. For extended substances do not in general define a unique reference frame. Besides, if my reference frame matters so much then, absurd, I'll be able to affect when the obligation applies simply by running really fast in some direction or other.)

If, on the other hand, I say that the promise is binding on me as soon as I have made it, then this rule is invariant. For the rule, basically, says that the obligation obtains when I am in the forward light-cone of the promise-making, and this is a reference-frame invariant relationship.

One might think that just as I am bound as soon as I sent the promise, so too am I released as soon as you sent the release. But here things are quite the opposite. For if I were released as soon as you sent the release, invariance would be violated—for, we would have to ask, in which reference frame is the "as soon as" measured. But invariance will obtain if I specify that my obligation ceases as soon as the release gets to me.

So we have a pretty good argument, based on invariance, for when promises come to bind and when we are released from them. The obligations, as it were, exist at the site of the promiser, and hence come to exist when the promiser speaks, and cease to exist when the promisee's release arrives at the promiser. Of course, further questions can be asked—when is the exact moment of sending, for instance. But those questions, I think, do not concern the basic practice of promise making/keeping itself—maybe answers to those questions can be left to custom or the prudent legislator.

Here is a different application. When a legislature passes a law, when does the law become morally binding on me? (I don't care about the question when it becomes legally binding, since only moral normativity matters in the end.) When the law is passed? Or when the law is promulgated? Or when the promulgation arrives? Intuitively, it would seem unfair if I were bound as soon as the law were passed, since I would have no way of knowing about the law as soon as it were passed, and surely the law is to be a guide to my rational deliberation. I think Aquinas makes something like this argument. But it would be nice to have an argument without so much that is controversial. Well, that's easy. The rule that the law is binding morally on me when promulgated violates invariance (imagine that the law is one of the Galactic Empire, and there is no faster than light travel, so it can take years and years to reach me), since we would have to ask: "In which reference frame?" The same problem obtains for the question: "When the law is promulgated?" (e.g., when the legislature radios it out to the subjects). But "When the promulgation arrives to me" is invariant, since it is a question of my being bound.

Now there is a problem with this answer. Generally, it is taken that ignorance of the law is no excuse. So, it seems, I can be bound by laws that were never communicated to me. Three answers are available. The first is that the "ignorance" saying only applies to legal binding—morally, ignorance of positive law is a perfectly fine excuse. The second is to modify my initial formulation: I am bound at the first time at which it was reasonably possible for me to have found out about the legislation had I set my mind to it. This, too, is invariant. The third is to combine the first two answers. Certain basic laws, such as laws proclaiming the constitution of a new nation, only become morally binding when the subjects hear of them. As part of the proclamations of these laws, the subjects hear how and where they can find out about additional laws. But then further laws becoming binding when one can reasonably find out about them. This, too, is invariant.

In any case, the answer "When the legislator makes the law" is not a good one. So we have an argument for Aquinas' thesis that promulgation is essential to the bindingness of a law. Secret treaties do not bind those ignorant of them, at least not morally.

I think it's pretty cool that one can get such fairly specific answers to difficult normative questions simply out of relativity theory. I think one could probably also get similar answers if one had a causal theory of time (whether it was relativistic or not). And that is not a coincidence because I think the relativistic theory of time is, basically, a causal theory of time.