Axiological-ethical-political sketch #1 

from an e-mail: "Unanimous Hoedown IX"

Advocates a sort of open-minded utilitarianism

June 5

My provisional value system is similar to utilitarianism, but it's hardly drawn straight from the values of Mill or Bentham. It avoids most of the caricatures that people have made of utilitarianism over the years, e.g. "if an 80 year old man is tied to one train track, and a 70 year old man is tied to the train track that the train is currently speeding down, should you pull the switch?" Those kind of stupid-on-purpose questions miss the fact that utilitarianism, in essence, is the radical and satisfying response to the religious models of morality which held sway at the time, where some actions were simply considered right in themselves, others wrong, and that was the end of the discussion. The basic idea of utilitarianism is that an action is only as good or bad as it's result, which opens up a meaningful way to talk about good and bad actions without relying on the prescriptions of a traditional culture.
Quoting again from my existentialism paper (spring 2000), in the section on ethics:

"A sort of utilitarianism, but a utilitarianism which is originally and ultimately without marking posts and half-blind, in terms of the eternal uncertainty and incompletion of conceptual knowledge. As value is experiential before it is conceptual, it is not measurable or calculable or comparable, yet nevertheless it exists, before and beneath and beyond and through all of these. The value that a moral act has is not in its correspondence with a universal ethical code but rather its effect in experience (and cause in will) in lived existence."

So I embrace the idea that to behave compassionately / ethically is to be concerned with how your behavior will affect others. Will it have a beneficial or harmful effect? I'd say that this part of utilitarianism is very easy to accept.

The logical next question is the most difficult, since it brings us back to the core of axiology: How do you decide which outcomes are better than others?

Provisionally speaking, my value system is grounded in experience.
But let me first explain what I mean by 'provisionally.' I mean that I'm not certain as to what is really good and bad, since I don't think that we have been provided with a reliable measuring stick. Such is the human condition in my view. However, I do not stop there. I know that I can't stop there. As you said, we must choose value. And therefore, I think that we must decide what grounds we will use to provisionally measure the value of one possible outcome relative to another.

So, to quote Howard Beale in Network, "We're not talking about eternal Truth or absolute Truth or ultimate Truth! We're talking about impermanent, transient, human truth!"

And since I think that is the only kind of truth or value that we have access to, I think that is the most important thing in our lives. All value that we experience seems to fit into the category of impermanent, uncertain value. And yet, that's all we have, damn it! So I see no decent alternative to trying to play out that this impermanent life and make it as good as we can possibly make it. That is, we should try to find some good in it, something that seems worthwhile, because there is no point in not trying, and if we don't try and yet it is still possible, then we'll have missed our only chance to do it. Maybe there is no 'good', maybe it's all an illusion, but if it is, then there's nothing worth living for anyway, and we might as well die right away. So they're nothing to be lost in chasing after good even if it is a chimera. And when I say good, I don't necessarily mean something so Good that time stops forever in a state of eternal perfection (although that would be nice). It could just be any experience that, even for a moment, seems rewarding or enjoyable or beautiful.

So that's the caveat about provisional valuation, belief, etc. Nothing is certain, nothing is ultimate, but we have to live our whole lives within this uncertainty, within this temporality, so we should make the best of it.

That said, what is my provisional value system based on? First and foremost, it's based on experience. I prefer an outcome that leads to more pleasant experiences in the long run over one that leads to more painful experiences in the long run. That's still fairly faithful to basic utilitarianism so far, but perhaps I treat the remaining subtleties and unanswered ambiguities with more respect than the original utilitarians did.

Obviously the principle "the greatest good for the greatest number" is inadequate in itself because it doesn't tell you what to do when you're facing a choice between a greater good for a lesser number and a lesser good for a greater number.

Also, it is not at all easy to compare different experiences and to say definitively which are better than others and by how much. It is even hard for me to do this for myself, and it becomes harder yet when I make the judgment for another person. And yet, the obvious difficulty and possible-impossibility of the task does nothing to eliminate its importance, that is, the fact that this is my one opportunity to create something of value, and I may as well try my best.

So, I value positive, pleasurable, happy experience over negative, painful, unhappy experience. Beyond this, my ideas on the subject become more speculative and open-ended. The kinds of pleasure I value in particular are more lasting kinds of pleasure that are associated with good mental and physical health, and which are therefore less likely to have a nasty dark side.

For example, I don't place a high value on heroin, because even if it produces an extreme pleasure over a short period of time, it also has the potential to create a probably-greater amount of displeasure over a more extended period of time. I place a negative value on pollution etc. that causes widespread sickness, especially very drawn out sicknesses such as cancer.

I place a strong negative value on imprisonment (for people as well as for other animals, e.g. farm animals), because it deprives the body of its freedom of natural movement which brings pleasure and decreases pain. The flip side of this is that I place a positive value on freedom in the political sense, that is, civil rights and economic rights. If people don't have the freedom to express their political viewpoints, there are multiple drawbacks. One is that they are likely living in fear, fear of a dictator, his secret police, etc. I place a negative value on the kind of fear and anger that is causes by having a cruel and gloating person in a position of power where they will punish any dissent. This fear can also severely restrict people to make various adaptations to improve their own lives. Another drawback of dictatorship is that, in theory, a democracy is able to make more effective group decisions because the 'collective intelligence' of the group isn't hampered by such things as fear of expression, and a maximum of useful viewpoints are heard.

Granted, our nervous systems are geared to experience things as negative or positive depending on the probability of those things being associated with the health or disease of our organism / genetic strain. Whether the continuation of our genetic code is desirable in and of itself is no longer the point, however. The point for me is the actual experiences that we have. I prefer that humans and animals go through life feeling healthy, buoyant, stimulated, loved (at least, the group animals; the solitary ones don't care about that), capable, and comfortable. I prefer that they not have to experience unnecessary disease, injury, terror, confinement, or alienation.

I also place a positive value on humans ability to go on learning, to go on trying to improve our lives, both as a means to an end (the actual improvements), and an end in itself (the feeling of discovery, of freedom). Thus, a utopian human society for me wouldn't be static, it would always be in the process of developing and transcending itself.

Aside from the more readily identifiable pleasures, I also place positive value on a sense of beauty that may be a bit more difficult to pin down, to associate with a particular object. Sometimes this beauty comes of itself, sometimes as a part of a search for beauty, a search which could encompass art forms of all types, and yet which is by no means limited to appreciation of 'art objects' that have been created by other people solely to serve an artistic purpose; essentially it can be an appreciation of any and all objects, no matter how they fit into your life and your other systems of value.

Of course, even though I have established a semi-useable ground for determining provisional value, that hardly means that all decisions past this point are relatively straightforward. On the contrary, there's still a huge amount of complexity, ambiguity, and ambivalence. But at least it's a start. And it does provide a basis, or a basis for a basis, to say that democracy is preferable to dictatorship.

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Axiological-ethical-political sketch #2

from an e-mail: "Unanimous Hoedown XV"

Basically an elaboration on the above which takes special pains in arguing against nihilism... 

July 3

The question is basically one of axiology, that is, whether we can establish grounds for saying that something is more or less good or bad.

Now, we seem to agree that it is a necessary part of our nature to at least try to distinguish relative good from relative bad. So the question, I think, is whether we can, at all, and if we can, whether we can communicate about it, whether we can make any useful generalizations about it.

Is there any value in my life? If I die tonight, if I go blind, if I get thrown in a detention center for the rest of my life, if I unleash some sort of weird plague that devastates the bay area, does that decrease the amount of positive value or increase the amount of negative value in the world somehow? Ultimately, I guess I don't know. But although I don't know for sure that life has value, I also don't know for sure that life doesn't have value. So, since there's nothing to lose if life doesn't have value, and something to gain if it does, I might as well try my best to further the good in life and oppose the bad.

Next question: Can I tell between good and bad? Can I understand how things work to some degree, and act in such a way that I might be able to further the good and diminish the bad? The answer again is that if I can't, there's no harm in trying. And if I can, even if there's just a small chance that I can make a small change, accomplish one small good thing or prevent one small bad thing, there is no reason not to try, and there is every reason to try. That is, all the reason that we have, all the direction, is simply that, the chance of achieving something good or preventing something bad.

So, hopefully we can agree that we should try to do our best to identify good and bad, and then to pursue the good and combat the bad.

Which brings us up to where we were: how do we identify good and bad?

So, again, I think that this is the fundamental axiological question. So it's not necessarily something that can be answered conclusively or simply.

One of the issues we discussed in relation to this was whether we could find grounds for saying that one political system was preferable to another. Now, this is a very real and immediate question, and we don't have the luxury to wait for axiological certainty before we attempt to answer it. My opinion is that certainty is not possible, and therefore we have to do our best with the best uncertain, provisional knowledge that we can muster.

This doesn't only apply to macro-level political systems. Discussion of value, of the weight of pros and cons, is essential to collective decision making. Since we need to make collective decisions, we need to discuss our provisional valuations.
Also, we don't have to get our axiology absolutely perfect and universal down to the finest detail; rather there are some questions which we have to answer as a collective, and then we can leave many of the finer details for individuals to answer on their own. Some of the most urgent axiological/ethical questions are thankfully relatively easy to answer, for example the acceptability of dictatorship or slavery.

So, I was talking about pain and pleasure. I think that this is a good basic place to start in constructing an axiology. I think that to a large extent, pain and pleasure are pre-rational. That is, they don't require rational justification. Often we experience something as pleasurable or painful before we mentally classify it as pleasurable or painful. Indeed, the experience itself informs our subsequent mental classification. So, there is arguably a pre-conceptual referent for pain and pleasure.

Are the pain and pleasure we experience controlled by our expectations, our will to experience them as one or the other? To a degree, yes of course, but not entirely.

True, not everyone will experience exactly the same set of things as being pleasurable and painful. Some people enjoy being whipped, or are irritated by the light of the sun, etc. However, you can notice quite a few patterns in what humans experience as painful versus pleasurable. And better knowledge of these patterns enables you to better care for humans. For example, most humans experience it as painful when the bones of their hand are smashed by a hammer. Most humans experience is as painful to be locked in a hard and airless prison for a long period of time. So by this you know that in general you should avoid situations where people have their hands smashed by a hammer or get locked in dank prisons.

The above is just to take extreme examples to make the point that such patterns may exist, and that we should seek knowledge of those patterns. Of course, working them out to any great detail is very difficult, and it's easy to go wrong, but that is just a matter of degree; the basic point remains that patterns can and should be sought. So, in trying to get more specific, I move towards difficult ground, but I am not risking the loss of my earlier point.

There are lots of basic examples of things that people often find painful or pleasurable. Painful: getting injured, being sick, being poorly-nourished, being cold, and so on. Pleasurable: eating good food, physical closeness with other people, being warm, healthy, etc.

To return to the terms of the axiological question, I think that it is relatively sensible to base your actions around the principle of trying to minimize the extent to which people (including yourself) experience pain, and maximize the extent to which they experience pleasure. Of course, you are likely to mess it up often enough, to do something such that you intended it to result in pleasure but it actually resulted in pain, but anyway, that is in general a very sensible direction in which to apply one's effort.

Intersubjectivity. Yes, intersubjectivity is possible with regard to pain and pleasure. For example, if you hit me in the hand with a hammer, shattering my bones, I can tell you that it hurt. Then you will be able to infer that if you do it to someone else, it may hurt them as well. This is the kind of stuff that we probably start figuring out when we're about one or two years old. So yes, you can communicate to someone that you find something to be a source of positive or negative value, and they can infer that it might be a source of the same for others. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that it always will be. If I find brussels sprouts to be disgusting, that doesn't mean that someone else might not find them to be delicious. We are not trying to establish universals here; rather we are constructing an understanding which appropriately takes variation into account.

Intersubjectivity. Imagine a kid whose parents are trying to get him to eat a pear. The kid (never having tried a pear), says that he expects the pear to taste bad. His parents insist that it will taste good. The kid decides to try it, and he takes a bite. What happens? There is some information that is subsequently transferred to his brain via his mouth and tongue... maybe, despite his negative expectation, he finds the pear to be delicious. This is indeed possible. So, the parents have communicated a value judgment to their kid: "we like pears, and you should try one". It is then up to the boy to consider that proposition, and to try to evaluate it using his senses. Maybe he will keep a "closed mind", such that his expectations are too overbearing to admit that the pear is tasty. Maybe, expectations aside, he still finds the pear to taste bad. The parents cannot force him to perceive the taste as being good, but they can at least make the suggestion and enable him to confirm or deny it for himself.

Intersubjectivity. Can we organize these observations of pain and pleasure as we communicate them, structure our communication such that we can work together to establish patterns from the observations we have of what people find pleasurable and painful? I think, yes, we can. When we do so, we are not infallible, but nevertheless it's not hard to acknowledge that we can do this, at least to a limited degree, and that there is probably a value in doing so.

For example, we humans have long been wise to the notion that people do not like having various kinds of bodily harm inflicted on them (e.g. getting your hand bones broken by a hammer, having your ear cut off, being anally raped by the insertion of a toilet plunger, etc.)... this is painful and we suppose that it has negative value. So, we have communicated about this, and not only that, we've constructed various plans to do something about it. For example, we make laws, rules which state that you are not allowed to inflict such harm. Then, if people are demonstrated to have broken such rules, we inflict some sort of harm upon them... this is supposed to deter it from happening in the first place, and in general I bet that it does have this effect. Thus, you largely avoid the unpleasantness of having people injuring each other. All this comes from (provisional) intersubjective agreement about values. If we throw up our hands completely and say that such intersubjective agreement is impossible, then I think that our society would descend into a very unpleasant kind of chaos. However, by the same token we have recognized that punishments are undesirable as well as crimes. Hence, you probably want to aim for a society that has both a minimum of violence committed by the state as well as one that has a minimum of violence committed in general.

To move towards the more uncertain (but still valuable-to-explore) territory, I suspect that it is possible to generalize pain and pleasure to include some more "emotional", "psychological", "mental" experiences rather than the sheerly "tactile". It is well known that two people could both be sitting in identical chairs opposite to one another, neither of them having recently incurred a significant bodily injury, and yet one of them might be quite at ease while the other is in intense distress. I believe that we should aim to reduce psychological distress as well as physical distress, and to encourage psychological pleasure as well as physical pleasure.

What are some examples? Well, the grief at having lost a child, friend, husband, etc. We should probably do our best to avoid situations where people experience that sort of grief. Intense stress due to busy-ness or other kinds of mental pressure, that's another one. If you heap a large amount of responsibilities, time constraints, pressures, etc., on people, many of them are likely to experience it as being highly unpleasant. Hence we should think about ways to give people the option of avoiding that sort of lifestyle. Loneliness is another. A person could be in fine physical health, and yet could be quite miserable, because this person desires the friendly company of others but is unable to find it. Similarly, being verbally or symbolically degraded by others is often psychologically unpleasant... for example, being surrounded by people who frequently insult you, make fun of you, etc. Another is fear... a lot of fear is unavoidable, of course, but some are potentially avoidable. Specific fears, that is, can be reduced by reducing the probability that the feared event will occur. For example, if there is less risk of a secret police coming in the middle of the night and taking you to an interrogation center for an indefinite amount of time, you are likely to experience less psychological distress.

Most of these have a converse. That is, many people will often experience pleasure in having time for relaxation, or in loving and being loved by others, or in feeling safe, or in anticipating that something you enjoy will happen soon. I think that people often enjoy learning as well, that is, making discoveries about the world, making inferences, developing their understanding. (And conversely, people might experience displeasure in being denied access to learning opportunities.)

Anyway, this isn't to say that the favorable/unfavorable psychological reactions of humans to various situations can be predicted in all circumstances. Some people may enjoy being very busy, or being alone, or feeling the thrill of fear, etc. But again, you can establish general patterns such that very many humans experience an excess of these things as severely unpleasant... and thus we should work to avoid them.

So... these ideas give us the very beginning of a basis upon which to evaluate certain conditions as being preferable to others, and thus, to make decisions. Whether these are decisions that only affect a small group of people, or whether they are decisions as to the political structure or government policy of an entire nation, this is primarily just a matter of scale. Most group decisions require some kind of collective evaluation of different options, and even though complete agreement among group members about these evaluations is rarely possible (and not always desirable), discussion of these value judgments is often beneficial, in that it leads to clarification and a sharing of information / observation / experience.