So new project: I’m going to start doing reviews of the various books that have come out responding to Dawkins et al. Maybe doing so will give me a better idea of the kinds of things 21st century non-philosophers are saying about these issues. Maybe not. But it’s a project I expect to be able to really get into, and have be less of a chore.

So what is free will? I don’t know. You see, a lot of the philosophical debate over free will has been over not whether free will exists, but rather what free will would be, if it existed. There are two basic positions on this issue, and they split over the issue of determinism. If you want to know what determinism is, here you don’t have to worry, because I can define that. Determinism is the view that given the state of the world at any given time, and the laws of nature or whatever principles it is that govern the world, only one future is possible. The deterministic view of the world is the view contained in the Newtonian physics you likely studied in high school: in a common sort of high school physics problem you’re given some objects in some initial condition, and you have to figure out what will happen to them. It’s taken for granted that only one possible outcome is given.

Nowadays, you should be aware, many physicists are convinced that determinism isn’t true, that at the level of quantum mechanics there is some irreducibly random element in the world, such that a given situation could genuinely turn out multiple ways. It’s essential here, though, not to confuse determinism with mathematical chaos. Who here is familiar with fractal geometry, perhaps the Mandelbrot set? That’s mathematical chaos. Chaos, in this sense, isn’t opposed to determinism, but is a special type of deterministic system. In a chaotic system, any given starting point can only turn out one way, but an arbitrarily small change could cause things to turn out another way.

One of the most famous representations of chaos is the “butterfly effect”: the suggestion that a butterfly flapping its wings could cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. I don’t know if this is really possible, in terms of how the weather actually works, but if it were possible it would be consistent with determinism. Any given initial conditions will yield the same result every time. Add a butterfly, you get an entirely different result. However, if you add the exact same butterfly moving in exactly the same way many times, you’d get the same result every time in each butterfly trial, even if the result differed radically from the non-butterfly trials.

If you’re interested in learning more about this in depth, I recommend running some Google searches for chaos, fractal geometry, and the Mandebrot set. Here’s a short summary: the Mandebrot set is an instance of a fractal, an infinitely complex geometric figure. It ties in with chaos in that if you look at some area of the figure closely, and then move the area of focus just a little, you can get something entirely different. I can’t give you the full effect here, it really has to be seen live–or at least with the help of a Java web applet.

Now we get to understand the big divides among philosophers regarding free will: is free will compatible with determinism? Philosophers who say “yes” are compatiblists. Philosophers who say “no” are incompatiblists. Among the incompatiblists, there are those who think we have free will, “libertarians” (same word as the political position, different meaning) and those who don’t, the “hard determinists.” Finally, there are those who think the whole concept of free will doesn’t make any sense, who have been called “hard incompatiblists.” Incompatiblists are going to say “hey, of course if your actions are determined by the prior state of the world, you aren’t free.” Compatiblists, in contrast, argue that for an action to be freely chosen, it must be causally determined in the right way.

Which position should we hold? The logic of the situation is a little complicated. I think the starting point for most people is that we have free will. Starting from that point, we can ask three questions:
1) Do we have good reason to think determinism is true?
2) Do we have good reason to doubt that the compatiblist account of free will makes sense?
3) Do we have good reason to doubt that the libertarian account off free will makes sense?

If we can say “yes” to (1) or (3), but not (2), we’re forced into compatiblism. If we say “yes” to (2), but not (1) or (3), we’re forced into libertarianism. If we say “yes” to (2) plus (1) or (3), only then would we reluctantly give up our initial belief in free will. “Yes” to (1) plus (2) yields hard determinism; “yes” to (2) plus (3) yields hard incompatiblism.

Now let’s look at our questions. Do we have good reason to think determinism is true? The standard line you’re likely to hear from the physics department is that determinism is false. More specifically, you’re likely to be told that in quantum mechanics, a system can exhibit two states at once, but when an observation is made, you get a collapse of the state and one of the two possible states is selected randomly. Famously, physicist Erwin Schrödinger suggested that it should in theory be possible to build a box containing a cat that would be both alive and dead–the idea is that you get some small-scale system in two states at once, and then make whether the cat is given poison dependent on the small-scale system. Only when you look in the box would the cat be alive or dead.

I’ve just taken you into a world of absolutely crazy ideas which we, unfortunately, will not discuss in detail because I don’t understand physics as well as I’d like. But I want to throw you something to chew on: some have argued that the most reasonable interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn’t involve randomness. Rather than say that the cat is randomly selected to be alive or dead, why not say–since you’ve already accepted the crazy notion that the cat is both alive and dead–that the when the scientist opens the box, the cat is seen to be simultaneously alive and dead? Crazy, but no crazier than the initial idea now widely accepted by scientists.

Now, what about compatiblism? When I introduced the concept, I suggested some people will think it just obvious that if your actions are determined by things beyond your control, then you’re not free. This idea has been formalized by Peter van Inwagen as follows: If you have no choice about the fact that P, and you have no choice about the fact that P will result in Q, then you have no choice about Q. Call this “van Inwagen’s principle.” On determinism, you have no choice about the distant past, and no choice about the fact that the distant past can only give rise to a single unique future, therefore you have no choice about the future.

Van Inwagen, here, is relying on the notion that his principle has a good amount of intuitive attractiveness. But it’s not a logical axiom. Not everything works the way van Inwagen claims choice works. If I drop a pencil, the fact that it fell is due to gravity, but its initial position and the fact of gravity aren’t due to gravity. On compatiblism, choice would be something like this. An action can be chosen by you even if the things which contribute towards determining your choice–such as your initial psychological dispositions–aren’t your choice.

What about libertarianism? The basic worry here, I think, is that we don’t call random events acts of free will. If my hand suddenly flails out for literally no reason at all, we wouldn’t call that a free act. It seems like if an event isn’t determined, it must be random, so a non-determined event couldn’t be free. Free will would actually require that determinism be true, at least to a significant degree. Libertarians have responded to this argument by saying that the options aren’t limited to determinism and randomness. This raises the question of what the other option would be. The typical response, especially from van Inwagen, is to claim this as a great mystery, and say that they needn’t have a full-fledged account of free will to know that compatiblism is wrong.

It’s rather hard, then, to get a knock-down answer to any of the questions in my list of three. But still, many people are tempted to give a “yes” to at least one of them. It’s a very puzzling issue. We are tempted to say that when we know the neurological causes of a homicide, the killer is no longer morally culpable in the sense of being able to be sent to prison, so they are committed to a psychiatric institution instead. And there seems to me to be a very strong temptation to think of our own choices as happening outside the chain of causality. It’s a genuinely puzzling issue, and I’m curious to hear what you all have to say about it.

So now we’re going to take the mind from a different angle, or take the question of what humans are from a different angle. I state the problem both ways, because some philosophers would classify the things I’ll be talking about as not “philosophy of mind” but “metaphysics”–perhaps because some elements could be applied to things without minds.

Let’s begin: you would all agree it would be wrong for one of you to kill me because you didn’t like your grade on the first midterm–well, I hope you agree with that. But it’s OK to kill a cabbage to eat it. Why? A common sense answer is that I’m a person, and as a person I have a right not to be murdered, but a cabbage isn’t a person, so a cabbage has no such rights.

Similarly: A person is convicted of murder, and is sentenced to prison for life. Why are we putting him in prison, as opposed to someone else. Here’s an answer to common-sensical as to be trivial: we think he’s the guy who committed the crime, and no one else is the guy who committed the crime. Or, say you’ve got a company with a corrupt CEO, and he sets himself to make millions of the company’s bankruptcy, ruining the employees who’ve heavily invested in the company’s stock. It seems like they deserve some of the money the CEO is trying to make off with. Why? Because they’re the ones who earned it, and not him.

Now: how do we account for this? How do we account for the fact that humans are people and cabbages aren’t? And how do we account for you being the person you were yesterday, and not the person the guy sitting next to you was yesterday?

Surprise surprise, this takes us back to dualism. Some dualists claim that only by postulating a soul can we answer this question. Why? Well, it seems like if personhood and personal identity is dependent on some specific bits of matter, or maybe the way matter is arranged into brain structures, we’ll get ambiguous cases. When we look a these ambiguous cases, this problem feels very real, though it may begin to cast doubt on dualism. Consider first the cabbage/human distinction. The theory of evolution says that if you go far enough back in time, you will find a population of organisms that gave rise to both cabbages and humans, and change into cabbages and humans came through a slow progression, with each step in the progression only slightly different than its parent. Dualist solution: and some precise point, souls were thrown into the mix, and that what makes personhood. I know a lot of religious people don’t like the theory of evolution, but the Catholic Church, for example, accepts evolution, and seriously believes that at some point in the history of evolution, God said “this population of organisms over here, I’m going to give them souls,” and BAM! we got people. And even if you don’t think there was actually a human-ape intermediary, it’s very plausible that there could be one–humans and apes look quite a bit different, but we have almost all the same molecular biology, almost all the same cell types, tissues, organs, systems, even brain organization: same brain regions for sensation and motion, at least similar brain regions for higher-level thinking, maybe humans have specialized brain circuitry for learning language that apes don’t, but the vast majority of stuff in humans and apes is the same, so an intermediary is very plausible. So maybe dualism is needed to give us a real distinction.

Or, consider development. The development of a baby is a complicated, drawn-out process, it’s hard to point to any point in scientific terms where you become a person. Anti-abortion activists like to say that it’s a scientific fact that life begins at conception, that’s not true, what’s a scientific fact is that sperm and egg cells are already alive, as are the blood and tissue samples that doctors sometimes take without thinking twice about. Conception itself isn’t even a single instant, a single Planck time for you physics majors in the class–conception too is a process, involving changes in the cell membranes and migration of genetic material. And it can’t be genetic code that makes a person, because of identical twins. Again, the Catholic church seriously believes that there is an exact moment in conception where God puts a soul in the fertilized cell, though I don’t know the details of official Catholic doctrine, as to how much the cell membrane has to change, or what God does about identical twins.

Finally, instead of the end of life, consider damage to life, specifically the brain. There have been lots of cases of brain damage where people lose specific capacities–they lose one area, they lose one capacity, they lose another, they lose another capacity. When do you stop being a person? Maybe when your soul leaves your body.

The dualist claim, made by people like Richard Swinburne, is that dualism lets us handle these problem cases in a nice and tidy way. But does it really work? To answer this question, let’s start with the Hollywood-and-Notre-Dame-undergraduate view of the soul. As I said two lectures ago, part of this view is that when your soul is disembodied, it will pretty much have your mental characteristics. That means if the brain is destroyed, your disembodied soul will pretty much have your mental characteristics. But why, then, when peoplpe’s brains are damaged can it change their mental characteristics so much? The Hollywood-and-Notre-Dame-undergraduate picture seems to fit poorly with our empirical facts.

There’s an analogy that is sometimes brought in here, the radio analogy. In the radio analogy, it’s argued that if you damage a radio, maybe the signal is less clear, and if you destroy it, the signal stops, but that doesn’t mean the signal is originating from the radio. The problem with this analogy is that with brain damage, something more specific is going on. Brain damage doesn’t just cause bad eyesight or loss of motor control. It can cause loss of memory, loss of specific capacities other than sense and movement, and even personality changes. Each change is pretty specific to the region of the brain damaged. It’s clear that the brain isn’t just receiving signals from the soul, the brain is doing most of the work.

Other dualists, you should realize, will tell you that they’re not Hollywood script writers. They can allow that the brain is important to memory and personality. But… and though I haven’t heard any sophisticated dualist like Richard Swinburne admit this explicitly… it seems like this reduces the soul to a sort of metaphysical barcode, used for keeping track of moral status but not anything else. This isn’t an especially attractive view.

What’s the alternative? Well, somehow we manage to talk about physical objects being of a certain kind, without their having souls. And somehow, we manage to talk about a machine being the same machine it was yesterday, before getting a part replaced, again without the machine having souls. And I think it’s obvious that we can accept ambiguous cases, that this metal wastebasket could be reshaped to the point where its status as a wastebasket is ambiguous, or that I could replace so many parts in my computer that its identity with the computer I used to own is ambiguous.

This analogy doesn’t prove that personhood is like that. But I think it shows there’s an alternative to dualism. Furthermore, given what we know about evolution and development and brain damage, it seems like the correct alternative.

This is the point in the lecture where I have to tell you that there’s a third option: some people want to reject dualism, and but also deny there’s any ambiguity in these questions of identity. There are several ways to approach this, and the whole problem is best explained with an example known as the Ship of Theseus. Imagine you’ve got a ship. At some point, the ship has to be moved over land, and for this purpose it is disassembled and reassembled. And over time, it has its planks replaced, so that eventually all the planks have been replaced. It seems like in both cases, it continues to be the same ship. But what if both happened at the same time? If planks were preemptively replaced, but then the old planks were reassembled into a ship?

Some philosophers insist that there’s a right answer to this question. Some side with the original-parts ship, and some side with the replacement-parts ship. And some think up more complicated views, according to which the “closest continuer” is the right ship–say the replacement-parts ship is the ship, but if the replacement-parts ship didn’t exist, then the original parts ship would be the ship.

These philosophers would then apply the same reasoning to people. In cases of brain transplants, or Star Trek style transporters, or duplicator machines, they try to formulate a theory that will always yield an exact answer as to questions of personal identity.

I find these views rather hard to swallow, and debates about them involve lots of subtle principles about logic and possibility and such. I don’t really want to inflict that on all of you, so let’s focus on one type of problem these views try to account for.

Consider the Star Trek transporters. In the show, it’s clear that these things are pretty powerful: they exactly analyze you, and beam your molecules across space, and then reassemble them according to their exact analysis of your molecular components. Maybe it’s assumed that they use the same molecular components, but they don’t really have to: in Star Trek, there are also replicators, which can make any food or whatever you want out of raw material, so probably the transporters could make a person out of raw material. Now, what if Scotty or whoever’s running the thing decides beaming the molecules themselves won’t work in some situation, so he’ll just disassemble you and reassemble a copy down on the planet. Is it really you? It seems like it can’t be, because then we’d also have to admit he could assemble two people who’d really be you, but they wouldn’t be identical to each other.

That is the sort of reasoning used in philosophical debates about personal identity. I have a rather hard time taking it seriously. The idea of being killed and replaced by a duplicate sounds horrifying, but so long as we remember it’s an exact duplicate, it’s hard to take seriously the idea it would make any difference in how we act. If someone you knew well was replaced by an exact duplicate, would you spurn your relationship with them because they weren’t really the same person.

Of course, this doesn’t do away with the pesky difficulty of having two duplicates around at once. But the reason that’s such a clear problem is that you can’t treat two people exactly as you treat one. There’s actually been at least on Star Trek episode where the duplicate problem arose, and the solution was just to put one duplicate on another ship to avoid the awkwardness–it was a practical problem. Now, Star Trek ignores the fact that once you’ve made one duplicate, people might figure out how to replicate the accident whenever it suits there purposes, and that’s a practical problem on a much grander scale. But it’s still a practical problem.

That’s my defense of a sort of inexact view of persons and identity. You should be aware, though, that this isn’t just a theoretical debate with no practical consequences. The nice, black and white metaphysical distinctions we thought we had were matched to nice, black and white moral distinctions. Give up one, and in some sense we must give up the other. We must accept something like moral gray areas on issues like abortion, animal welfare, and the treatment of people with severe brain damage. We also lose absolute principles about who deserves what, given their past actions.

There’s another side to the moral consequences of this view, though, that isn’t as depressing, though it is surprising. We have a tendency to worry an awful lot about our own welfare, to the exclusion of that of others, so much so that we’d really like to live forever. But given that personal identity is absolute, what does it matter if we live for ever? If I lived forever without some special guarantee of constancy in my personality, it’s likely that in a thousand years I would be just as different from my present self as a person born a thousand years in the future would be different from my present self. It’s a useful thought, when struggling with selfishness and fear of death.

I mentioned last lecture that Leibniz worried about Descartes’ dualism on the grounds that it violated conservation of momentum. Conservation of momentum is in just as good of shape today as it was back in Leibniz’s day, but it doesn’t get invoked often. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe, because we’re more used to talking about energy, which takes all kinds of forms, including gravitational potential energy and chemical potential energy and the energy stored within matter that is released in a nuclear blast, and maybe that makes too easy the rebuttal that there might possibly be soul potential energy or some such.

Of course, the idea of soul potential energy sounds kind of crazy once you spell it out, so maybe that’s not the reason we don’t hear conservation arguments against dualism much anymore. Maybe there’s some vague unease with relying too heavily on any one law of physics (before Newton, a lot of people thought action at a distance was impossible, but now we know gravity, the electric force, and the nuclear force all operate at a distance.) Or maybe the fall of conservation arguments is a historical fluke, with no good reason behind it.

Anyway, one starting point for arguing against dualism, based on modern science, is called “the completeness of physics.” According to David Papineau, this principle states that “all physical effects are fully determined by law by prior physical occurrences.”

On this basis, Papineau provides the following argument (this again is a quotation from Papineau):

1) (the completeness of physics): All physical effects are fully determined by law by prior physical occurrences
2) (causal influence): All mental occurrences have physical effects
3) (no universal overdetermination): The physical effects of mental causes are not all overdetermined
Conclusion: Mental occurrences must be identical with physical occurrences.

The first premise is supposed to be the result of scientific inquiry, so I’ll hold off on it and comment on the philosophical basis for the second two premises. The claim that all mental occurrences have physical effects is straightforward seems to be just common sense. I feel hungry, and lo and behold, I go get food, I think about what I want to tell you about the mind body problem in class today, and lo and behold I tell you those things, and so on and so forth. Probably you can think of lots of examples. Our thoughts can lead to actions, that’s just obvious.

But what the heck is “overdetermination”? Overdetermination is when an event have two different causes, and each would be sufficient to determine that the event happen. The example that always gets used is that Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick, Watson, both shoot Holmes’ archnemesis, Moriarty, and their bullets both hit him at the same time and kill him, and either bullet alone would have killed him. From this example, it should be obvious that overdetermination can happen sometimes, but it would be crazy to think its happening all the time. In the case of the mind body problem supposing that our actions are overdetermined by physical and mental events working together would be to suppose that when I’m hungry, my mental process cause me to go get food, and my physical processes also equally cause me to go get food, and if the physical processes failed my mental processes would still do the job, but somehow failures of that sort never, ever, happen, the system is always perfectly coordinated. That sounds just crazy.

These days, a lot of philosophers sort of take physicalism for granted, and even if they don’t say that, they may take the idea of the completeness of physics for granted, saying science has established that physics is complete and leaving it at that. The reason I’m using Papineau as my source for physicalism is that he does cover these things.

Papineau gives two main scientific reasons for accepting the completeness of physics. First is the “argument from fundamental forces,” the argument that scientists often describe various forces out there operating in the world, but then they succeed in explaining them in terms of a few fundamental physical forces: gravity, the electric force, the nuclear forces. Second, Papineau argues, scientists have spent a lot of time studying physiology, and they never seem to bump into non-physical causes in physiology. This is the “argument from physiology.” If scientists search and search and search without finding whatever non-physical causes of physical events that there are supposed to be, then where are these non-physical causes? Are they hiding from us?

If you go to the library to look up Papineau’s essay, you’ll get some very interesting history for the scientific advances that Papineau thinks supports physicalism. However, I think he may leave a couple things out, so just to give you one big idea quickly: it seems like we can arrange sciences from low-level to high level sciences, and scientists have had a lot of success explaining sciences in terms off the one below it on the hierarchy. And the bottom of the hierarchy is physics, then you have chemistry, biology, psychology, and the other social sciences, in that order.

Start with physics and chemistry. You may be used to hearing of quantum mechanics as this crazy thing that doesn’t have any relevance under normal circumstances, but scientists have actually worked out that you can explain a lot of chemistry with quantum mechanics, especially chemical bonds. You can’t explain chemical bonding with Newtonian physics. Now, for complicated systems we can’t do the calculations, but a lot of scientists are convinced that in principle, physics could explain all of chemistry.

Move to biology. In high school biology, you probably learned about how the body does its work with large molecules: DNA, RNA, enzymes, and so on. We’re actually coming to understand the functions of a mind-boggling number of biological molecules, more than anyone person could know about, that’s why its so important for science to have many scientists working at many universities to do the kinds of things modern science tries to do. It wouldn’t be surprising if everything in biology were explained by chemistry. Then you have neuroscience, explaining psychology in terms of biology. We can explain the most basic aspects of sensory experience in terms of fine neural circuitry, and for more complicated things we at least know there’s strong connections between what’s going on in the brain and the behavior we associate with psychology.

It’s those kinds of scientific discoveries that make a lot of scientists and philosophers want to be physicalists. In a sense, you could even bypass Papineau’s three-premise argument and just say that science supports physicalism directly. It wouldn’t be a deductive argument, but on Papineau’s statement of the argument, you still end up having to say that science supports the completeness of physics in some non-deductive way.

However, Papineau’s three assumptions gives us a way of classifying ways of rejecting physicalism. (Also, being able to say “the principle of the completeness of physics” is a good way to sound like you know what you’re talking about, but here we’re concerned with alternatives to physicalism.) You can get a different version of dualism for each of the three assumptions you might reject. Descartes would have rejected the completeness of physics premise. The best-known defenders of dualism today, in contrast, people like Jaegwon Kim and especially David Chalmers, reject the causal influence premise: they don’t think all mental occurrences have physical effects. They think some mental occurrences are physical occurrences, and those have physical effects, but some mental occurrences are produced by physical things without causing anything physical. This view is known as epiphenomenalism, a term coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, a.k.a. Darwin’s bull-dog for his defense of evolution, though by the way while Thomas Huxley is a good name to know, I don’t know how similar his views are to those of the contemporary guys we’ll be talking about, and you’ll only be tested on the modern guys.

Modern epiphenomenalists tend to be specifically epiphenomenalists about subjective consious experience. The paradigm case of conscious experience is often given as the redness of red. These subjective conscious experiences are called “quale,” plural “qualia,” another good word for showing off your philosophy knowledge. If you don’t know what that means, I’m not going to try to explain it precisely, but instead hope that it’ll become more clear as I give examples. As an initial illustration of the modern epiphenomenalist view of consciousness: it seems that hunger causes us to eat. Someone like David Chalmers, though, would say this is what’s really happening: your brains gets information about your needing food from your body, and that sets into motion a series of brain events that will hopefully result in you eating, eventually, and will cause you to eat through purely physical means. In a sense, that’s hunger. But the subjective feeling you get of hunger isn’t what causes you to eat. Rather, its a non-physical event that doesn’t cause anything, but it may seem to cause something, because its caused by the very same brain events that cause you to eat.

So, why would you believe something like this? This is pretty clearly a view for people who really like the scientific view of the world, and want to stick to it as much as they possibly can, but for some reason think that consciousness can’t be covered by physicalism. The arguments are similar to Descartes’ arguments, but philosophers today are more careful about what they apply to. Back in Descartes day, it would have been very easy to Descartes, “maybe there in some sense is a mind distinct from the body, but that doesn’t mean all the things you assign to the mind instead of the body really belong to the mind.” As a historical note, Descartes initially claimed his arguments for dualism proved that the soul was immortal, but he backed off this claim, seeing he hadn’t really proved that. Contemporary philosophers tend to be much more careful. I’m going to describe two arguments, maybe not the best ones, I won’t take a position on what the best arguments are, but I’ll give you two argments that are well-known and very memorable, as they involve zombies and super scientists and all that.

Okay, where do zombies come in: in the context of this particular debate, zombie doesn’t mean a slow-moving creature that comes in large numbers at the apocalypse and tries to eat your brain. Zombie just means a being like an ordinary human in every physical respect, but lack consciousness. So they don’t rot, they don’t move slower than normal, they don’t go around moaning “braaaiiins…” They’re even indistinguishable when you test them with electrodes in their brain or under fMRI. It’s just that they don’t ever experience color, or sound, or hunger, or anything like that. If this idea doesn’t make any sense to you, well, not all philosophers agree that it makes sense, but it might be easier to understand if you consider this question: some philosophers have worried about whether other people really have minds. This can’t be a worry about whether people have the ability to behave in the way we associate with minds, because we can see people’s behavior. This must be a worry about something like whether other people really experience colors and sounds and feelings, or whether they’re like robots, managing to respond appropriately without really experiencing the world.

An alternative version of the zombie argument that you may find more attractive is the inverted spectrum argument. This comes from the worry “what if other people see red the way I see green? What my green is other people’s red? What if other people see the world as a photonegative of how I do?” How many people think they understand this worry? I once heard a professor who had been teaching for a long time say about two-thirds of his students tend to get this idea. Okay.

The zombie argument, or inverted spectra argument, starts with the claim just that zombies are possible, or that an inverted spectra is possible without any physical differences. It has to be a real, deep sense of possibility, not just apparent possibility, but nothing more than possibility either.

Then you get this argument:
1) If zombie are possible, consciousness is not physical
2) Zombies are possible
3) Therefore, consciousness is not physical

If you remember the masked man example from last time, you might think contemporary physicalists would reject premise (1). However, most of them don’t think this is analogous to the masked man case. It’s more analogous to this case: since life is physical, you can’t have something that’s exactly physically identical to a living thing, down to the molecular biology, and yet not alive.

Then, the question is whether zombies are possible. Debates over whether zombies are possible tend to get very quick into technical philosophical ideas about what’s really possible, we can talk about that, but I’m not going to burden you with it right now, just a quick check, what do people think? How many people say, “yes, zombies are possible”? How many nos? I myself tend to be kind of skeptical about these off-the-wall possibility claims.

The other argument is the knowledge argument. Based on what I’ve been told about freshmen philosophy students by one of my former professors, I think you may find this argument more attractive. The knowledge argument asks us to imagine a super-scientist named Mary who spent her entire life of getting super-scientist training in an entirely black and white environment, where she never sees the color red (it’s never really addressed why she doesnt’ become acquainted with red through her own body, maybe she’s a black and white mutant, or bleeds green, or just never bleeds, or something.) But she’s a super-scientist, and her specialty is color vision. She knows everything there is to know about what happens in the visual systems of the brain when people see color. But she never becomes acquainted with color directly. Now, imagine one day she is let out into the world and sees a red rose. Does she learn what it’s like to experience red? Does she go from not knowing what it’s like to experience red to knowing what it’s like to experience red?

The argument is that if we accept that she does gain new knowledge, physicalism has to be false, because she knows everything physical about seeing red but doesn’t know what it’s like. This, admittedly, is an argument that sounds more like the masked man case. It involves knowledge, to recall a technical term we learned last time, it involves “intentionality.” But this isn’t just a case about knowing one thing about the physical nature of red but not another thing about the physical nature of red. This is about knowing absolutely everything there is to know about red, in terms of physical perception, but not knowing what it’s like. Its a question of whether physical knowledge and knowing what it’s like overlap.

How do we respond to this argument? I think there are two big ways. One, you could question the thought experiment. Maybe you think a true super-scientist would learn what its like to see red through text book learning alone. Or maybe you just feel unsure, you think without any actual super-scientists, we can’t know whether a superscientist would know what it’s like. The other option, is to conceed Mary would learn something that isn’t knowledge of the physical world, but it isn’t learning something non-physical, but learning in a different way. Maybe she’s gaining acquaintance, or gaining the ability to recognize red, or coming into contact with a previously known fact through new means. Those are the kinds of things physicalists say when they want to resist the knowledge argument.

Final comment: maybe you aren’t totally confident about the zombie argument or the knowledge argument. Maybe you’re confused by all the subtleties. You should be aware that even philosophers who don’t see these as knock-down arguments often begin to suspect that they are getting at something, that philosophers who promote them have picked out a feature of our minds that isn’t readily explained by current scientists. Not saying what that means, ultimately, but it’s worth knowing.

That concludes what I have prepared today–we covered a lot of ground. Questions?

References:
David Papineau, “The Rise of Physicalism,” from /Physicalism and its Discontents/, ed. C. Gillett and B. Loewer. Cambridge, 2001.

But note there’s another way I’m organizing the class: I tried to start out with issues most likely to come up in the popular press and casual conversation. Religion, ethics, and politics aren’t things you talk about if you’re worried about offending someone, but they’re common choices if you’re looking to start an argument. Today, we begin the move to less familiar topics, though this one is only a little less familiar: the nature of the human mind, including questions about the soul and free will.

Okay, where do we begin? There’s a philosopher who teaches at the University of Notre Dame, Peter van Inwagen, who’s done a number of things I really like. One is coin the phrase “Hollywood-and-Notre-Dame-undergraduate picture,” referring to a sort of common sense view of the mind and body. The view is this: you have a body and a soul. Normally, your soul is in the same place as the body. When you die, though, the soul rises up out of the body. Normally, the soul is invisible, but if you manage to see a soul somehow it will look exactly like the body of the person it belongs to. Not only is a disembodied soul invisible, but under ordinary conditions it doesn’t interact with things in any other way. Physical objects pass right through it. However, an especially angry ghost might be able to make a vase go crashing to the floor. The mental characteristics of a disembodied soul will be similar if not identical to the embodied version. In a living person, the soul controls the body, and is central to providing the body’s mental characteristics.

As a simple matter of historical fact, I don’t think any major philosopher has accepted the Hollywood-and-Notre-Dame-undergraduate theory of the mind. However, there is one very important philosopher who believed something at least a bit similar: Rene Descartes. For those who care, Descartes lived from 1596 to 1650, and invented coordinate geometry–you know, the whole x-axis, y-axis deal. Descartes agreed with Hollywood that you have a body and soul, and the soul is what is your mind, and controls the body. He disagreed with Hollywood in that he didn’t think souls were extended in space, and the soul isn’t even located in space. So, your soul isn’t exactly as tall as you are, says Descartes, because it doesn’t have a height, and when you die it won’t leave the hospital through the roof.

Be warned that while Descartes aligned himself with the Catholic Church (even though they didn’t like everything he said), and while Descartes views have become popular among sophisticated religious thinkers who want to give an account of the afterlife, they aren’t the only religious option out there. Thomas Aquinas, as I understand him, didn’t have Descartes’ view of the mind. I’m not sure I understand Aquinas’ view, but it was a modified view of Aristotle, who thought that the soul was the form of the body. This was supposed to be analogous to the relationship between the form of a statue and the marble composing it. I’m not sure I understand Aristotle’s view, either, but be aware that non-Cartesian religious views are out there. Incidentally, Peter van Inwagen is a Christian example. Van Inwagen denies that there are souls, and thinks the afterlife is all about being risen miraculously from the dead. You can find this diversity of views far back in time. Read Josephus, who was the main Jewish historian who wrote about roughly the time of Jesus, and you’ll get an account of three different views of the afterlife held by the different Jewish sects at the time: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essences. Now, you won’t be tested in-depth on Aristotle or Aquinas or van Inwagen or Roman-era Palestine, but you should be aware that non-Cartesian but religious views are out there.

Now that I’ve given you these basics, I want to give you a sort of standard philosophy-class story about why anyone would be a Cartesian, and why they’re wrong. It seems like everyone gets this story in introduction to philosophy, so I’m giving it to you, too, but I’m also going to give you some cautions about it.

First, why did Descartes believe the mind was distinct from the body? The argument attributed to Descartes goes like this:

(1) I can doubt the existence of my body
(2) I can’t doubt the existence of my mind
(3) If two things have distinct properties, they are distinct things
Therefore, my mind and body are distinct.

Three assumptions go into this argument. Where do they come from? The first two are some ideas Descartes had that I don’t want to say too much about until later, but here’s the basics. I look at my hands, and I have to admit maybe, they could be a hallucination. There are actually people who, in a sense, have hallucinated limbs, though they’re not visual hallucinations but feeling hallucinations. It’s called phantom limbs: they loose a limb but it still feels like they have it. On the other hand, Descartes says, we can’t doubt the existence of our minds, because if we try to doubt that, there has to be an us to do the doubting, a mind to do the doubting.

There are some important ideas about the nature of reason and knowledge in there, but let’s try to side step them. One approach is just to say that there’s a gap between our ability to imagine not having a body, and our ability to imagine not having a mind. Or, perhaps, the argument is we can imagine ourselves as disembodied minds.

What about the third assumption? The idea is we have to account for inferences like this:
(1) John is a philosophy teacher
(2) Jones is not a philosophy teacher
(3) Link???
Therefore, John is not Jones.

Standard reply to Descartes: this sort of principle works, but only with cases not involving intensionality. What is intensionality, you ask? Simple definition: it’s “aboutness”: things like doubting, believing, knowing, liking, wanting. Some standard examples of where an argument doesn’t work, because of intentionality:

(1) I know that the masked man is in the room
(2) I don’t know that my father is in the room
It DOES NOT follow from this that I know the masked man is not my father

(1) Lois Lane wants to kiss Superman
(2) Lois Lane doesn’t want to kiss Clark Kent
It DOES NOT follow from this that Superman is not Clark Kent (though you have to wonder why there’s any confusion, given that Supes doesn’t wear a mask).

This is the standard story about why Descartes didn’t have a good argument for his dualism. Is the criticism correct? Well, what quite a few philosophers would say today that maybe Descartes stated the argument badly, but suspect there’s something like Descartes’ argument that works. Since that takes us away from Descartes into the contemporary era, I’m going to leave it aside for next lecture. Something to work forward to.

Next question: suppose we accept that Descartes couldn’t show he was right about the mind, can we show he was wrong? Here’s one story about why Descartes’ views have been rejected: on his account, the mind and body are so wildly different that there’s no way for them to interact. I want to give you an exact quote propounding this view, originally from Antony Kenny, though I myself got it from one of Jaegwon Kim’s books:

On Descartes’ principles it is difficult to see how an unextended thinking substance can cause motion in an extended unthinking substance and how the extended unthinking substance can cause sensations in the unexteneded thinking substance. The properties of the two kinds of substance seem to place them in such diverse categories that it is impossible for them to interact.

This looks like a clear bit of prose, and if you find it confusing I’m sorry to say I can’t help you, because I don’t understand it either.

Realize that in the 20th century, it was popular to claim that this was the actual historical reason for the historical downfall of Cartesianism. Also realize that historically, that may not be right. Here, for example, is the objection to Cartesianism lodged by Leibniz, inventor of calculus:

Descartes recognized that souls cannot impart any force to bodies, because there is always the same quantity of force in matter. Nevertheless he was of opinion that the soul could change the direction of bodies. But that is because in his time it was not known that there is a law of nature which affirms also the conservation of the same total direction in matter.

You may or may not know from high school physics the principles Leibniz is talking about. If not, it’s OK, the main idea is that Leibniz claimed Cartesianism was consistent with the physics of Descartes’ day, but not the physics of Leibniz’ day, half a century after Descartes. And Descartes himself worried about questions like what part of the body’s anatomy was the site of interaction with the soul. He once proposed this happened at the pineal gland, though later realized perhaps this wasn’t his brightest idea. The historical reasons for Descartes’ fall were to an important degree scientific, again something I’ll say more about next time.

Back to the standard philosophy class story. One suggestion as to what the real problem is, is that we don’t the faintest idea what the mechanism might be, by which the mind affects the body. For example, we know the molecular biology and physiology of digestion. The thought is we should have something like that for mind-body interaction, if such a thing is real.

But wait a minute. Do we always have a mechanism? We can break digestion down into steps, but can we give a mechanism for every step? If we have one for every step, do we have one for every sub-step? Is there a mechanism by which the electrons and nuclei of one molecule affect those of another molecule? If we say the mechanism is one of electric fields, do we have a mechanism for electric fields? At some point, explanation has to stop, and we just accept that interaction happens, without having a mechanism.

Jaegwon Kim, I said, is the philosopher I got the Antony Kenny quote from, and Kim is suspicious of Kenny’s argument. However, Kim isn’t a friend of Cartesianism, so Kim tries to give another critique of Cartesianism in place of Kenny’s. Kim’s idea is this: consider a case where two people are shot and killed at the same time by two bullets of two different guns (maybe they were both convicted of being part of the same plot). What makes it true that shot A killed victim A and shot B killed victim B, rather than the other way round? For Kim, he key is that you can trace a causal path from each gun to the assigned victim. If not for that, there would be no basis for associating one gun with one dead man and the other with the other. Kim generalizes from this to say that all causation requires spatial relation. Since Descartes’ souls aren’t located in space, they can’t participate in causal relations.
I’m not sure this is much of an improvement over Kenny’s argument. Imagine a universe where maybe there is nothing not located in space, but occasionally particles become somehow connected with each other, so that whenever you spin one, the other spins, and this connection stays fixed no matter how far you separate the particles. Do we want to say that such a world is impossible? That we can prove such a world is impossible by metaphysical argument? I can’t endorse that view, but it would have to be impossible for Kim’s spatial account of causation to work. Therefore, I can’t endorse Kim’s conclusion.

Next time, we’ll try to move away from this and towards arguments inspired by modern science.

Now I want to consider a much more extreme critique of Rawls, from Robert Nozick, who is philosophy’s great libertarian, in the political sense. You should be aware that there’s another sense of “libertarian” used in philosophy, about free will. We’ll get to free will maybe a few lectures from now, for now we’re talking about politics. If you’ve heard of Ayn Rand, that’s roughly what we’re talking about in this context.

Before I say too much about Nozick’s views, a little of the history here: Rawls and Nozick were both professors at Harvard in the 70′s. Rawls came out with his most famous book, /A Theory of Justice/ in 1971, and in 1974 Nozick came out with his most famous book, /Anarchy, State, and Utopia/. /Anarchy, State, and Utopia/ covers a lot of ground, but a lot of it was taken up with responding to Rawls. That means it’s sometimes unclear how Nozick would respond to other views, but I’ll do my best on that count.

Perhaps the best-known example that Nozick has used to illustrate his ideas is the Wilt Chamberlain example. Wilt Chamberlin, for those who don’t know, was this basketball player who was big in the 60s, early 70s, had a rivalry with Bill Russell, who my undergraduate prof Keith Yandell always told us was the greatest basketball player ever, and Chamberlin was also notorious for claiming, late in life, that he had slept with like 20,000 women over the course of his life… that’s Wilt Chamberlain.

Nozick asks what we are to make of a celebrity like Wilt Chamberlain who makes a lot of money being a celebrity, and to make the case more favorable to him, asks us to imagine that Wilt Chamberlain has a special contract where the audience to some extent is interacting directly with Chamberlain, because at games where he plays the audience has to drop an extra quarter in a separate box and he gets everything in it. Probably, it would have been better if Nozick had imagined a music star where the one guy is the absolute star of the show, rather than basketball, and you can imagine that the star is the first one to get all the ticket money, and then out of that he pays his back up band and all other expenses as an agreed upon rate. That makes the scenario a little more plausible. Anyway, the key thing is you’ve got a celebrity who gets rich by dealing directly with his or her fans.

Now you’ve got this guy who’s gotten rich through a perfectly fair, transparent exchange. Then you’ve got Rawls, or someone with similar, maybe not exactly the same, views, saying that the resources of a society need to be distributed in a fair way, and this seemingly fair, transparent exchange may create a situation that conflicts with whatever principles of justice you’re inclined to accept as fair. Therefore, if we take seriously these principles of justice, the government would have to constantly interfere with these seemingly transparent, free exchanges, and that doesn’t really seem credible.

Nozick takes this a step further. He thinks that as a basic moral principle, property acquired in a fair way can’t be taken away by the government. For Nozick, a fair way is when you acquire property through your labor (following Locke) or exchange it freely. Once you’ve acquired something justly, the government has no more right to take it away from you than a highwayman does. That is what people are saying when they say taxation is theft, like in science fiction author Robert Heinlein’s novel /The Moon is a Harsh Mistress/, which is about a group of revolutionaries who, among other things, finance their revolution by stealing the money they need, and the revolutionary who makes this decision is a spokesperson for libertarianism, to an extent anarchism, who says that in stealing the money to finance their revolution, they’re not behaving differently than how governments behave, and they’re just being more honest about it.

Before we get into the extreme “taxation is theft” view, what does a Rawlsian say about the Wilt Chamberlain problem? The first step, I think, is to concede that constant government interference is bad, but not necessarily because it’s wrong in principle, but just because economically, it can be inefficient. It’s very plausible that from an economic point of view, general laws, percentile taxes and such, may better fulfill the principles of justice than constant interference. Remember, inequality is OK according to Rawls as long as it helps the least well-off. If the people going to see Wilt Chamberlain are the poorest in society, but the society is so well-off in general that nobody has any lacks much greater than not being able to see a great basketball player play–in that case letting people see Wilt Chamberlain play helps the least well off.

Admittedly, Rawls doesn’t have a very good response to the case where the people benefiting from watching Wilt Chamberlain play aren’t among the worst-off in society, where they’re say middle class. That’s a point where the position that cares for the middle class is more plausible than Rawls. In any case, the Wilt Chamberlain example isn’t a very powerful challenge to the view that income should be taxed to pay for social services like health care and education for the poor. Nozick might call that a form of constant interference, but it’s a much more defensible form of “constant interference” than trying to micro-manage economic interactions to fit some principles of distributive justice.

What about the claim that taxation is theft, or, as Nozick puts it, that taxation is on par with forced labor? The way Nozick puts it, taxation is like forced labor, because you have to work extra to get the things that you want. The problem with both the theft and forced labor comparisons, is first, that everything is like everything else to some small degree. A podium and a boot are both solid objects. A boot and air are both made of atoms. Little obviously follows from this, because there are also many potentially relevant differences. Theft is done by one person or a small gang, taxation is something governments, some democratically elected, do. With forced labor, you get beaten if you don’t work at all. With taxation, you can not work at all, and if you don’t work extra to make up the loss from taxation, you loose only a fraction of the goods earned from work.

In the section of his book immediately after the general claim that taxation is on par with forced labor, Nozick also suggests taxation is unfair to the person whose preferred enjoyments don’t come cheap–the person who doesn’t much enjoy sunsets, and can only really enjoy movies and such. I mention this because it’s a fairly famous passage, but I’m not sure what it has of value. Of course people who have difficulty enjoying life will be at a disadvantage, but what follows from that in terms of political philosophy? Why does this make taxation especially unfair? All I can figure is that Nozick was joking, making fun of Rawls’ suggestion that it is unfair for the talented to be the only ones to benefit from their talents, and that the state should redistribute wealth even when the only reason for inequality in wealth is inequality in talent. Nozick’s suggestion about sunsets and movie tickets reads a bit like a parody of that. But I worry he may have been serious on that point.

Aside from the weak justification Nozick gives for his anti-tax views, they seem to conflict with things almost everyone, including Nozick, believes about legitimate functions of the state. Nozick agrees that a “minimum state,” one which only concerns itself with safety from violence, theft, and the like, is legitimate. Like Rawls, he approaches this conclusion from the point of view of a hypothetical contract. However, instead of asking what we’d do behind a “veil of ignorance,” he asks what would happen in a situation where we have normal knowledge, but there was no government. In this case, Nozick argues that to protect themselves from violence and theft people would form voluntary protective associations, and with time these would evolve into state-like entities. Each area would have its own dominant organization, and labor would be divided so a few people are paid by everyone else to be the police while everyone else gets on with their lives.

However, to be like real governments, these organizations would have to use coercion to make people pay for their protective services. The only alternative, it seems, is that people who don’t pay their police fees would be declared “fair game” for others to attack with impunity. That seems worse than merely being prosecuted for tax evasion. This problem of prosecuting someone vs. making them “fair game” illustrates the difficulty in having a really non-coercive world. If you want people to not have to worry about being shot for not doing as others wish, you have to be willing to do something unpleasant to those who have or are trying to shoot people for not doing as the shooters want.

For these reasons, I don’t think Nozick’s arguments for libertarianism are all that good. However, there’s one angle I’ve bypassed. In all four of these lectures, I’ve side-stepped the issue of capitalism, using wealth to get more wealth, which is really distinct from the free market, that is to say being able to exchange goods other people value more for goods you value more. You might think that what should happen is the government controls all the forms of wealth that can be used to produce more wealth, factories and such, what Marx called the “means of production.” People could then gain access to it on some democratic or egalitarian basis, and only then set free to operate under free-market conditions.

Nozick has some Wilt Chamberlain-style concerns about such an arrangement, and the level of interference required to establish it. In a free market system, it would be very easy for people to seek out tools needed to create basement mini-factories. Would you have to have a division of law enforcement to prosecute these people? This problem is especially big in the 21st century, where PC clusters have replaced supercomputers, so if you saved up for several PCs you could get a small computer company running out of your home. The government of such a society would also have to worry about people with private dental equipment, private artist’s or jeweler’s tools, private tools for fixing technology. Given reasonably liberal contract-making powers, you could also get powerful companies that deal in intellectual property.

Nozick also asks, on this question, if lack of capital is the cause of worker’s sorrows, then why don’t rich modern unions start buying factories for their members? A plausible explanation is that managing capital requires some skill, including skill at managing risk, and can’t be done by just anyone. Even someone like Paris Hilton, just coasting on inherited wealth, has to get her trust fund into competent hands. When the government tries to collectivize capital, it might not end up in competent hands. Finally, accumulated capital is a much stronger incentive than a short-term windfall for doing good work, and may help motivate people to work for society’s benefit.

The moral of all this is that even when we throw out Nozick’s anti-tax claims, and accept social services funded by an income tax and inheritance tax, there are still good reasons for the government not to micromanage the economy, either in terms ensuring fair distribution of goods or fair distribution of capital. Nozick is right that guaranteeing a “fair” pattern in these things could easily require more interference in our lives than we want.

At the end of the lecture series on smaller-scale ethical questions, I mentioned that it’s important to look at how various ideas work out in practice, not just the theoretical arguments. In practice, the sort of welfare-state capitalism I’ve been outlining works out pretty well. Overall material prosperity, as I said in a previous lecture, has increased greatly over the decades, and this has been mainly though individual enterprise. The rich are in a position to get richer, but the poor aren’t trapped. My mom’s dad came from a poor background, but he went to college on the GI bill and worked his way up from being an accountant to being a corporate president. My dad’s parents weren’t well-off, but they saved money for their kids to go to college. My dad went to dental school and made a good living as a dentist, while one of his brothers worked for the government designing missiles, and then got rich by founding his own company that did similar work only with car manufacturing. In college one of my good friends was from a working class background, enough that he was late paying tuition one semester, but still was on his way to having a good job in scientific research. American capitalism really does work for making people’s lives better, I hope these last four lectures have helped you see why.

How many people in this room are aware that sweatshops are evil? Sweatshops, as in overseas factories where big evil clothing corporations like Nike pay workers hardly anything and force them to work in conditions where… they get really sweaty, I guess. Sweatshops also steal jobs from hardworking American workers. Liberal student groups like holding protests to make their universities stop having university gear–stuff with the sports team mascot or whatever on it–made in sweatshops. Then their members grow up to be adults who try to get the entire country to boycott stuff from sweatshops, and of course they don’t succeed in that, though they may create a market for companies to sell more expensive clothing to them by announcing that they don’t make their clothing in sweatshops.

Okay, so that was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but is that roughly the image most people still have of sweatshops? Has the basic image of them among students changed much since my college days? Thought I’d ask.

Anyway, many people may naturally sympathize with the sort of picture of sweatshops I painted, but they don’t have a worked out argument for why it’s wrong to pay workers low wages, and especially why they would like to get governments involved to stop that, which is the end goal for a lot of organizing against sweatshops. Some do have detailed arguments, though. I’m going to focus on an argument that comes down from Karl Marx, which you can still hear people making today, or at least you could when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, where there was a reasonably strong International Socialist Organization presence. Maybe you can find people making that argument here in, say… the literature department. Anyway, here it goes:

Marx proposed what’s called the Labor Theory of Value, which says that all value in a product, such as a team hoodie that comes out of a sweatshop, comes from the labor used to make it. Of course, this doesn’t mean that all the value of a product comes out of the labor that takes place in the factory where it’s made, since you also need the labor to extract the raw materials and such. But all value comes from labor.

This theory naturally strikes many people as very intuitive. In fact, it hasn’t just been used by Marx, but was used before him by people like John Locke back in the 17th century to justify property rights. You read in the Declaration of Independence about “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and that comes from Locke, with the exception of “Pursuit of Happiness,” which was a substitution for “Property.” Locke thought property was a fundamental right up there with life and liberty, and he justified that with the claim that if you labor for something, you have a right to it.

So, given this Labor Theory of Value, Marx asked: how do we explain the fact that capitalist businessmen make such fantastic amounts of money? It has to be due to a difference between the wages being paid workers and the amount of income the capitalist can get from their labor. Marx defined this difference as exploitation. Here’s how Marxist writer Alex Callinicos illustrates the principle:

For example, let us assume that in a working day of eight hours, four hours labour replaces the value of labour power advanced by the capitalist in the form of wages. The other four hours is pocketed by the capitalist. Surplus value, or profit, is merely the form of existence of surplus labour peculiar to the capitalist mode of production.

The significance of this analysis of the purchase and sale of labour power is that it enables Marx to trace the origins of surplus value to the exploitation of the worker by capital.

As you may have suspected, I think there’s something fishy about this. Talk about the labor theory of value makes it sound as if this it what’s happening under capitalism: the worker comes over to the factory and works for eight hours, and then the factory own comes over to the workers house and works in his garden for four hours. Obviously, that isn’t what’s happening.

The problem, I think, is that the labor theory of value is wrong. Commodities, from food to clothing to automobiles, are what they are. They aren’t imbued with some inherent amount of value by the labor put into them. There isn’t the sort of inherent value that Marx believed in.

Now, later in the course we’ll talk about the question of various kinds of truths, including whether there are any absolute moral, or perhaps artistic, value. That, however, isn’t what I’m talking about when I deny the existence of the sort of inherent value Marx believed in. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that having fun playing basketball is an absolute, objective good. Now imagine you have a basketball. In spite of having a basketball, though, your ability to have fun playing basketball is limited in other ways: maybe you don’t have access to a basketball court, or maybe you aren’t very good at basketball. Your basketball, then, will be more valuable to someone who is more able to have fun playing basketball. We’ve shown that by assuming one thing, having fun playing basketball, has absolutely objective value, we know that another thing won’t have value, only value to different people.

Now imagine you meet someone who is more able to have fun playing basketball than you. That person, say, has a chess set. And he isn’t very well able to have fun playing chess, but you like chess. In that situation, if you give him your basketball for his chess set, you’ll both be better off. That is the core idea of free markets. When you own property and have the choice to trade it or keep it to yourself, you can trade when it will benefit you and not when it won’t. Free markets almost automatically make everyone better off. Though the reasons for this are easy to understand, it can seem magical at times, which is why the 18th century economist Adam Smith talked about the “invisible hand of the market.”

You might say, “well, couldn’t somebody still get ripped off?” In a sense. Obviously, it’s possible to lie about the nature of the goods you’re selling, to defraud someone, and we need laws against that. That’s not the only thing people talk about, though, when they talk about getting ripped off. Part of the reason it makes sense to talk of getting ripped off is that free markets never just involved two people. You might have twelve people wanting to trade you for your basketball, and you want to trade with whoever will give you the most. That’s how prices get negotiated on the free market, not just by interaction between two people, but based on what everyone does and is willing to do. The law of supply and demand is thus generated, because the more people you have that want something, the more likely it is that someone will be willing to pay a lot for it.

When, through lack of information, you end up not getting the best deal you could get on something, in a sense you’re getting ripped off. However, information about the market you’re working in isn’t something we can expect to magically come to everyone for free. Information takes work to acquire. If I notice that you have a basketball and want a chess set, and that someone else has a chess set and wants a basketball, I can act as the middle man, asking for a little extra on each side as long as the deals aren’t overall unfavorable to either of you. I’m doing both of you a favor, arranging a good deal that might not otherwise happen. Why shouldn’t I get payed for that work?

The situation of the factory worker is like the situation of the person who has a basketball and wants a chess set. If the wage weren’t more valuable to him than the time spent laboring for it, he wouldn’t work in the factory. He’d maybe go work for himself. So if he’s working in the factory, it means he wouldn’t be better off working for himself, so if the factory just disappeared with nothing to replace it, he’d be worse off!

This is something that rarely comes up in discussions of sweatshops. Working in sweatshops might be a step down from working even at a U.S. McDonalds, but it might be step up from being a poor Thai agricultural laborer. This is in fact what you are likely to hear if you were to talk to sweat shop workers. In one of his books, journalist Nicholas Kristof tells of how he and his wife met the father of a girl who was working making clothing for $2 a day under bad conditions–she got a needle through her hand twice. The westerners’ response was “how terrible,” but the father’s response was: what are you talking about? It’s good pay. I don’t know what she’d do if the factory closed.

There’s a temptation to say that workers working in sweatshops don’t have a choice. But I emphasize again: this is only because the choice between starving and working for low pay is so obvious. Simply removing the sweatshop doesn’t do any good, then there’s really no choice, all you might be able to do is starve, or get an even worse job.

Is there any way free markets can hurt? Well, it’s not fun being out-competed by someone else. This is the essence of a lot of fighting over “shipping jobs overseas,” and immigration. People don’t want to have to compete with much poorer people overseas for jobs, and they don’t want much poorer people from Mexico coming here to compete for their jobs. That would mean the supply of labor going up, so wages go down. But wages don’t go down for everybody–they go up for the very poor people from other counties. Opposing “shipping jobs overseas” is essentially saying you’re willing to let poor people in Thailand starve so Yankee factory workers can make much more than the free market price.

Another example: say you’re a skilled craftsman at the dawn of the industrial revolution, who can make an entire product in your little shop with the help of some apprentices and maybe a partner you’re working with. Then the factory owner comes along with his equipment that anyone can operate, and suddenly poor farm hands are coming to the city from the country, competing for your job–with the difference that the capitalist will cut prices below what you can sell at. You can’t keep up your old business model, and if you try to get a job at the factory you’ll work for less because some other people are willing to take the job for less. That hurts, obviously. If you’ve heard the term “Luddite,” you may know it as people who have a vague dislike of technology, but it was originally a term for textile workers who were rioting and destroying the machinery that was putting them out of work.

Know what, though? The industrial revolution was an overwhelmingly good thing, in the long run. Do you really want to think what it would cost to buy a pencil, pen, notebook, or desk from a skilled craftsmen? Once upon a time books cost a literal fortune, they were only for the rich. And the computers some of you are taking notes on aren’t even possible to make without factories. On top of all that, putting people out of their jobs means they can go take other jobs. Once upon a time, nearly everyone was a peasant farmer. In a sense, all you sitting in this class are unemployed farmers, forced to get a university degree so you can work in a non-farm job. But all these non-farm jobs mean we can get a lot more done, mean we can have a lot more in our lives than food. Putting farmers out of work has been the foundation of modern prosperity.

Of course, it’s possible to have a general free market while having limited restrictions, such as minimum wage laws or child labor laws. These can be beneficial, but they interfere with the market, and that carries a price. Minimum wage laws, for example, can act as mandatory price-fixing among workers, allowing workers who’d be willing to work for a very low wage work for a somewhat better one. But there will also be people who would only be able to find a job at below the minimum wage, and who will simply be put out of work by minimum wage laws. Or: child labor laws might, by reducing the supply of labor, raise wages for the parents and give children time to go to school. However, if the parents’ wages don’t rise high enough, and the family still needs money, the children might end up doing things much more dangerous than legal factory work to get money–including prostitution. Yes, there’s a real possibility that enacting child labor laws in a third world country could lead to a rise in child prostitution.

So that is what Marx was wrong and free markets are an almost entirely a good thing. Next time, we’ll talk about some even stronger defenses of property rights given by libertarians, represented in recent times by Robert Nozick.

References:
*Two Cheers for Sweatshops by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn.
*The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx by Alex Callinicos. The relevant quote was from page 68 of the PDF.

The idea of having to make a decision from known probabilities comes from two main places: gambling, and insurance. Start with gambling. The idea of a fair coin, fair die, fair roulette wheel, is that in the long run each of the possibilities will come up an equal number of times, or at least in some known proportion of times. (Write “heads” on one side of a die, and “tails” on the other five sides, and you’ve got something equivalent to a coin weighted exactly so that it comes up tails five of six times, with this fact being known.) So since the whole idea of the probabilities involved is about what happens in the long run, you can use that to make decisions about how your choices will turn out in the long run. For example, if you have a bet that says you may $5 on “heads” and lose $4 on “tails,” and you take that bet a hundred times, you should make about $50 bucks: 50 heads times $5 is $250, 50 tails times negative $4 is negative $200 dollars, add the two and you get $50 dollars. There’s some chance a fluke would throw this off, but the chances of a major fluke go down the more times you bet. And the “average result” rule tells you the right thing here: $5 times one-half chance of heads minus $4 times one-half chance of tails is 50 cents, which is positive, telling you you should take the bet. Same result as looking to the long run.

The situation with insurance is similar, though it tends to be more all at once than over the long run. The idea is the insurance agent has statistics that give him a pretty good idea of how many of his clients will collect so much money in a financial period, and then he knows how much to charge each of his clients to make a profit–and he can charge the higher risk ones more. He has to charge them more, because if the low-risk ones leave, but they take away as much money away as the high risk ones would, that would throw off the balance sheets. Really, the math is the same as with coin flips, but you divide people into more groups, and want to make money off all groups. Think of it as like juggling bets with coins, dice, cards, and a roulette wheel, all at the same time, with different payoffs for different bets. But the math is the same. Does that make sense?

Smart people will be asking a question now: how do you account for the customers of insurance companies? Are they just dumb, like people who play the lottery? Remember, it wouldn’t be theoretically impossible to steal the stats used by insurance companies and use them to make the decision.

You might just say here that the averaging rule only applies when you have a lot of different opportunities, so that things are likely to really average out. But that’s not what most philosophers who’ve written on decision making have actually said.

The first step to understanding why requires dealing with the insurance problem, which involves the idea of diminishing returns, and the distinction between money and real utility. The idea is that not every dollar you make is worth the same amount in terms of your well being. This is actually very easy to see in the insurance case: the money that goes towards the heart surgery you need counts more towards your real well-being than the money that goes towards the boat you don’t need, or any similar frivolous luxury. So you don’t have to be especially risk adverse to forgo frivolous luxuries in order to afford health insurance. That’s the distinction between money and real happiness. The standard idea is you have a vague sort of quantification of how much happiness something, and that’s what you should plug into the average utility function. Also, in general any given dollar will be less useful to you when you have more money. $10,000 a year would be a lot to most of you college students sitting here in class, but it would be barely worth keeping track of for someone like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.

Why accept this approach to the problem of risk? Why not just accept some risk-minimizing principle, like the maximin principle for total uncertainty? Perhaps most obviously, because we think the size of a risk matters. The size of a risk matters even when we are dealing with our own lives. A 50% chance of death, except in the most extreme of circumstances, is completely unacceptable, whereas a 0.1% chance of death might be acceptable. I won’t give up driving, or walking and biking where I occasionally have to cross the street, or flying places in planes, because of the risk of dying in an accident. Notice that with chances of our own deaths, there is no way to make back our money in the long run, as with gambling examples. Also notice that this shows rhetoric about the absolute importance of life is misleading. There is a certain reduction in my quality of life that I would not accept to avoid a 0.1% chance of death. I imagine the same is true for all of you. Some economists have actually taken to calculating the value people place on their own lives, calculating the dollar value on a life, based on what kind of risks people are willing to take with their lives for economic gain. Finally, notice how impossible it is to totally eliminate risk. Even when you’re averaging your betting over 10,000 die rolls, there’s still a possibility that you could loose every bet.

All this means that we need a way of weighing risk, even when we might not be able to earn back what we lose over the long run. The average expected utility principle seems like a pretty good principle for doing this.

Now: what about when you don’t have statistics, or exact probabilities? It seems plausible to a lot of people here that you should try to minimize what you’d lose. If one possible outcome is death, and you have no idea how large the risk of that is, it makes more sense to go way out of your way to avoid that. It’s plausible in a way that it’s not plausible to go way out of your way to avoid a small known risk of death.

In his writings on justice, Rawls goes a little further in arguing that the maximin principle is appropriate to the original condition. He doesn’t insist that it’s appropriate to all decision making under uncertainty, but argues it’s appropriate to the scenario he envisions for two additional reasons: we’re in the position to give everyone in society a decent basic standard of living, and stuff above this basic standard isn’t actually worth all that much.

There’s an important challenge to the maximin principle here. Some philosophers claim that really, we don’t need any special principles for decision under total uncertainty. They argue that when you’re given possibilities without probabilities attached, you should treat all possibilities as equally likely.

Two objections: one, if you have no idea what the probabilities are, where do you get off making assumptions about the probabilities? More concretely, we can see a lot of situations where it’s clearly fallacious to try to estimate the probability of something by counting the ways it could happen, but that seems like what the principle of indifference would do.

I confess I’m not really sure what to make of that debate. But I actually don’t think it’s that important: to worry to much about what to do in situations of absolute uncertainty misses the point. We never find ourselves in a case of absolute uncertainty. We may rarely know exact probabilities, but we can get an idea of where they lie. Most people don’t have memorized statistics on airline safety, and some are terrified of flying. But even the ones who are terrified of flying, who greatly overestimate the odds of dying in an airline crash (airplanes are actually safer than cars, by the way)… even those who greatly overestimate the risk of flight can still guess that it’s safer than playing Russian Roulette. On the other hand, even when you have what look like sure statistics, the statistician could actually be incompetent, or the dealer could be cheating. There’s no way to get an exact number on the probability of your statistics being reliable.

What about mistakes people make in estimating probability? What about the argument that you shouldn’t estimate probabilities by counting possibilities? Well, this may not be as good a method as getting the statistics, but you wouldn’t expect an estimate to be perfect. Estimates are for when you can’t get a perfect measurement.

Finally, getting back to Rawls. He asks us to imagine designing a society without knowing where in society we will be. He says that we should act as if we have no idea what the odds are of our being any particular member of society–but why not treat it as if there’s an equal chance you being each person? Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” looks like the ideal situation to apply the principle of indifference, no matter what you think of other situations.

What does accepting average utility in this case mean for social policy? I think the results are very intuitive. It means that it’s OK to enact an economic plan that will benefit most people greatly, even if a few people lose their jobs. It’s OK to enact welfare reform that will benefit most people greatly, even if a few people lose their welfare benefits. Do you see why? If you’re sitting under the veil of ignorance, a policy that hurts a few people and benefits a lot is a pretty good bet, because you’re more likely to be one of the lot than one of the few–though of course, as with insurance, you might also accept a guaranteed small cost to avoid a risk of something horrible.

Rawls on the other hand, would say you should apply the maximin principle, and worry a lot about what would happen if, once the veil of ignorance were lifted, you turned out to be one of the least-advantaged members of society. Therefore, you can’t enact a policy that will benefit most people no inequalities that don’t benefit the worst-off. That prohibits both of those sorts of policies to benefit most people. There’s a sense in which following Rawls’ difference principle could actually increase overall inequality, if you screw your middle class for the sake of a few very poor people–Rawls could be forced to recommend that, under the right circumstances. That seems like an extreme, counter-intuitive view.

The result of applying the average expected utility principle to the “veil of ignorance” is a basically consequentialist political philosophy. It allows for generally beneficial policies that make some people worse off. But it also allows for redistribution of wealth. Remember what I said about diminishing returns? The money a rich person spends on a yacht could do more good spent on education or health care for the poor. The ultimate policy outcome, from the consequentialist spin on Rawls, is something most people accept at least partially: no one in the United States wants to stop taxing rich people to pay for poor people’s high schools. This doesn’t mean we should completely redistribute the wealth, you have to leave people with an incentive to work. But it means it’s okay to tax the rich at 15, 20, 30 percent, whatever tax rate gives the best results, in order to pay for things like education and health care. Again, from the veil of ignorance: better to be guaranteed $10,000 for your education, than have a 1 in 100 chance at $1.1 million (if you were just maximizing money, you’d take the $1.1 million, but maximizing non-monetary utility it can make sense to get the money for education.) You don’t want redistribution to put too much of a damper on the workings of the economy, but a little bit of economic inefficiency becomes OK if it means most people are getting a decent standard of living as opposed to a few people getting yachts.

Next time, we’ll talk about the idea of a free market, something I probably actually should have hit before Rawls. Then we’ll talk about the stricter forms of libertarianism that have come out of Robert Nozick, who is often cited as the number 2 political philosopher of the 20th century, after Rawls.

Today, we’re going to move from moral philosophy, which is generally concerned with individual actions, to political philosophy, which is concerned with the structure of society. However, there are important similarities, too–the sort of political philosophy we’ll be talking about tries to say how society should be, rather than merely describing or explaining it. Most philosophers, I think, see there’s an important relationship between moral and political philosophy, though it’s controversial what that relationship is.

This lecture and the next will focus on the philosophy of John Rawls, who’s known for thoroughly overshadowing everyone else in political philosophy. My philosophy 101 teacher said he’s one of the philosophers of the 20th century who people will still be reading in a few centuries. I don’t know if that’s really true, but he still is kind of a big deal.

Rawls’ first big idea is the idea of the “original position,” or somewhat more informatively the “veil of ignorance.” This is the idea that a just society would be one that people could agree to live in if they had to design society without knowing what position in society they’d have–you don’t know what race or social class or whatever you’d be born into. You have to design a society ignorant of whether you’ll be rich or poor, black or white, male or female, you’re ignorant of those things, that’s why it’s called the veil of ignorance.

You should understand that the veil of ignorance it completely imaginary–Rawls doesn’t imagine we’ve ever been in, or ever will be in, or even could be in, such a situation. It’s just a device for thinking about justice. This is a contrast to, say the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who believed that once upon a time there was no government and therefore a war of all against all and therefore life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, and then people sat down and made a social contract which said there would be a government which would end the free for all war and life wouldn’t be so nasty, brutish, or short. And Hobbes said if you don’t believe me that we used to live that way, look at the way the savages live over in America–Hobbes lived in the 17th century, when it was OK to call Native Americans savages–where there is no government beyond the family unit. As an anthropological aside, Hobbes was wrong about the savages in this respect, even though Rousseau was also wrong about his horribly patronizing image of the noble savage. Aboriginal societies do have governments, even though they also tend to have what we would consider very high murder rates.

So the veil of ignorance is an imaginary situation. But though it’s often lumped with the sort of imaginary situations we discussed in the ethics unit under the heading “thought experiments,” it serves a different purpose than those situations. Those situations say “Here’s an ethical principle. Here’s a situation that might, in principle, come up. Is the principle plausible in that case?” Rawls’ claim about his “veil of ignorance” scenario is that if you contemplate it and ask what would be right to do in that case, you’ll get a general answer to the question of what is just. This is because it would be wrong to take into account the things you’re prevented from knowing in the veil of ignorance scenario–the question of your own personal place in society. Justice is supposed to be universal, a rich man’s principles of justice shouldn’t be any different from a poor man’s.

There’s a final, subtler point about how you’re supposed to use the veil of ignorance: imagining yourself as someone who actually has to live in the society, though you don’t know in what role, introduces a selfish element. Suddenly, it’s not just that you have to reason about principles of justice in an abstract way, just avoiding class biases. You can look out for number one, even though you don’t know what number one’s social status will be. You can try to make out good, even though the rules of the game make this tricky. This will become very important, very fast.

Before I move on to what conclusions Rawls draws from the “veil of ignorance” approach, what do people think of it? I’m just pausing on this point, because I’m going to mainly focus on what conclusions Rawls draws from this, without questioning his basic approach. I’m assuming most people find it has some appeal, so we can move straight to the implications, but I admit I may be wrong about that.

Now for Rawls’ big conclusions, derived from the liberty principle. Rawls claimed that people put under the original position would choose to organize society based on two principles, both important, though the first trumps the second. The first is the “Liberty Principle,” which states that everyone ought to get the maximum amount of “basic liberties” possible–things like freedom of speech, freedom from arbitrary arrest, voting rights, and so on. The second is the “Difference Principle” which says that you can’t have inequalities, differences, in access to goods (basically economic inequalities) except ones justified by concern for the interests of the least well-off.

The difference principle, I should point out, only makes sense in the context of the assumption that the resources of society aren’t fixed. If the resources of society were fixed, it would be impossible to improve the lot of the worst-off by allowing inequalities. You would just give everyone equal amounts of everything, and then you couldn’t do any better. Making anyone better off would require making someone worse off, and then those people would be the worst-off, because everyone was initially equal.

That’s the broad theory–in principle, but why exactly would allowing inequalities make even the poorest better-off? Well, one reason is that allowing people to get rich as an incentive for being productive might–indeed probably is–the best way to get people to be productive. People are selfish. This might sound like a surprising claim, but it shouldn’t. Remember in the lecture on famine relief, we looked at how caring for people in the third world as much as we care for ourselves would require radically altering our lifestyles. The idea of being fully selfless, once you realize what it really means, sounds crazy. I understand that even Mother Teresa, when she got old and sick, helped herself to medical care too expensive to provide to everyone her charities were helping.

This doesn’t mean that everyone will rape and pillage and murder if it gets them ahead. But even if there wasn’t a single person in the world willing to rape and pillage and murder to get ahead, it could still be true that self-interest is by far the best way to get people to be productive. We have pretty good evidence that that’s true. Also, it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. One, given what we know about evolution, it’s likely that selfishness is a very deeply wired instinct. Second, utopian societies based on the assumption that everyone will automatically work for the good of the community have a history of failing. It’s greedy Yankee capitalism that gave us all the prosperity we take for granted (I’ll say more on why that’s true once we get done with Rawls).

To bring this back to the real world a little, the idea of selfish motivations getting people to do socially beneficial things has played a fairly big role over taxation. The idea of “supply side economics” is that the more you tax people, the less incentive they have to work, so lowering taxes will get people to work harder and stimulate the economy. Potentially, cutting taxes could increase tax revenue, if the economy is stimulated enough. That argument is, by the way, an excellent example of how hard these theoretical arguments are to apply to the real world. One low-tax advocate illustrated the argument by saying “if the tax rate were 100 percent, no one would work.” To which the comedian (and now Senate candidate) Al Franken responded: “Yes, I agree. The marginal tax rate should be somewhere between 0 and 100 percent.” The argument doesn’t prove as much as “supply siders” sometimes imply.

Back to Rawls: his difference principle accounts for these issues. He says it’s OK to have some inequalities, if that’s what it takes to get people to be productive. It’s just that the productivity you’re encouraging has to be for the sake of the worst-off in society. And that’s supposed to follow from the idea of designing society under a veil of ignorance, with the designers having to take up some role in society, but they don’t know what.

The big question now: how is the difference principle supposed to come out of the veil of ignorance? (You could ask the same thing about the liberty principle, but it’s the difference principle where the debate is really interesting.)

Two foundational concepts: decision under uncertainty, and decision under risk. Like a lot of words, starting with “logic,” these things have a special meaning in a philosophical only partly based on their ordinary meanings. In this case, it will be especially confusing, because commonsense–not to mention a thesaurus–would suggest they mean basically the same thing, but in philosophy they mean something very different.

In both cases, you’re supposed to imagine yourself with a list of possible things that might happen beyond your control, and a list of possible actions, and know what will happen for each combination of an action on your part. The thing is, in decision under uncertainty you have absolutely no idea which of the things that might happen, beyond your control, will actually happen.

How little of an idea are you supposed to have? The best way to understand this aspect of decision under uncertainty is to compare decision under risk. In decision under risk, you know the odds of each possible outcome. Gambling games with fair, known mechanisms and known rules are the classic example of this. They’re also a really good example of the idea of different possible outcomes. For example, playing the lottery:

. . . . . . . Would Win. .Wouldn’t Win
Play lottery: Prize!. . . Lose Ticket Price
Don’t play:. .Nothing. . .Nothing

For this to be a case of decision under risk, you would have to know the odds, for example by knowing that a million tickets will be sold, that exactly one ticket will win, and all tickets have an equal chance. Then you would know you’d have a one in a million chance of winning if you bought a ticket.

A very standard thought about decision under risk: multiply the odds of each outcome with the benefits or cost of that outcome, and add up that number for all the possibilities to get an “expected utility.” Then take the option with the greatest expected utility. For example, consider the one-in-a-million lottery. Say the prize is three million dollars. Now if the ticket costs $5, then the expected utility is three million, divided by one million, minus five, or negative $2. However, if the cost is only $1, then the expected utility is positive $2. The very standard thought about risk says you should be willing to buy the $1 lottery ticket, but not the $5 one. Note that for a lottery to be profitable, there has to be a negative expected utility, that’s why hoping to get rich off the lottery is generally considered a bad idea.

However, Rawls claims that designing a society under the veil of ignorance isn’t a decision under risk, it’s a decision under uncertainty. Therefore, we don’t get a nice, tidy rule, like maximizing expected utility, to tell us what to do. However, Rawls says that there is a rule for decision under uncertainty that works at least for the veil of ignorance. It’s called the Maximin rule: maximize how well you’ll do in the worst possible (minimum) scenario. That’s why, according to Rawls, you should maximize the welfare of the worst off in society.

To know what to make of this argument, we’ll have to say a fair amount more about decision under uncertainty and risk, more than I want to cram into this lecture. Therefore, I’ll just take questions now and put off the resolution for next time.

The most commonly cited alternative to consequentialism is “deontological ethics,” which you can just remember as being “what Kant said.” However, Kant said several different things about ethics, and its not clear they’re all in harmony with each other. Kant’s moral ideas are called “categorial imperatives.” The most often cited one is probably “Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will” (That’s the Wikipedia translation).

Now, when I studied Kant back as an undergrad, the teacher was a philosopher named Keith Yandell. He really liked Kant. But what was his position on that particular “categorical imperative”? He insisted that Kant didn’t really mean it, the reason being that if you were really devious, you could come up with “maxims” that sanctioned all sorts of immoral behavior. Let me see if I can explain this problem.

First, what is a “maxim”? For Kant, it’s a sort of second-order moral principle, below the categorical imperative. Beyond that, not so clear. On the subject of lying, it seems Kant thought there were two possible maxims: “never lie,” and “it’s okay to lie when you feel like it,” or maybe even just “lie.” Kant claimed that the second option leads to contradiction, because it would destroy the institution of communication on which lying depends. But you could think up other maxims–maxims that let you lie in your particular case, but don’t lead to problems overall. Some of these tricks might be a bit cheesy–referencing you yourself, or anyone who happens to have your particular combination of first and last name, or someone dressed as you are. But if you thought carefully, you might be able to come up with much more subtle sanctions for your own lying. And this problem is the core of Keith Yandell’s objection to this part of Kant’s ethics.

Another trouble comes from the fact that Kant seems to have thought that the only way to identify bad rules is that they lead to actual contradictions when universalized according to the categorical imperative. John Stuart Mill, in his famous book /Utilitarianism/, stated the problem with this point better than I could:

This remarkable man [Kant], whose system of thought will long remain one of the landmarks in the history of philosophical speculation, does, in the treatise in question, lay down an universal first principle as the origin and ground of moral obligation; it is this:–’So act, that the rule on which thou actest would admit of being adopted as a law by all rational beings.’ But when he begins to deduce from this precept any of the actual duties of morality, he fails, almost grotesquely, to show that there would be any contradiction, any logical (not to say physical) impossibility, in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct. All he shows is that the consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would choose to incur.

The other major moral principle Kant put forth is that you always have to act with respect for persons–also, never treat another persons as a mere means, rather than an end. It’s not clear that the first part, about respecting persons, has any anti-consequentialist implications at all. It could be argued that to let five people die just because you don’t want to kill one person isn’t respectful to the five people. The part about not using people as a mere means does point vaguely towards an anti-consequentialist conclusion, though it runs into the problems that we saw with similar ideas in my first lecture on consequentialism. It also may or may not rule out cases of getting one person to benefit another that we would normally think harmless–again, the principle is a bit unclear.

So Kant’s views have some problems. There is, however, a theory which tries to incorporate the best parts of Kant and consequentialism, called “rule consequentialism.” The idea is, first, that traditional consequentialists have carelessly assumed we should focus on actions, rather than rules. Rule consequentialists will talk about traditional consequentialists as “act consequentialists.” In some ways, rule consequentialism is surprisingly similar to Kant’s deontological ethics, except that rule consequentialism explicitly says that the consequences matter, with everyone treated equally. That’s a barrier to gaming the rules for your own benefit, and addresses Mill’s criticism that Kant claimed not to care about consequences, but couldn’t derive any actual moral rules without reference to consequences.

J.J.C. Smart, in a defense of consequentialism written around the middle of the 20th century, argued that rule consequentialism amounted to rule-worship. Why follow a rule that doesn’t have the best consequences in your case, just because it would have good consequences in other cases? Rule consequentialists have a response to the criticism: a rule might have good consequences only when followed by a solid majority of people, but at the margins breaking the rule isn’t likely to have bad consequences.

Perhaps the most plausible instance of this claim is voting: it’s good to have a solid majority of the population voting, but one person’s vote is unlikely to change anything, no matter what the political slogans and chain e-mails tell you. The clearest example of this was in the 2000 Bush vs. Gore election, when I was 13. Presidential elections, as you’re all hopefully aware by this point in your academic careers, aren’t directly decided by your votes, but rather are directly decided by the electoral college and only indirectly decided by your votes for electors. The situation outside of Florida was such that whoever got Florida’s electors would win in the electoral college. And Florida’s system is that whoever got the most votes there, even by one vote, got all the electors. Thus, it became very important to know exactly how many votes each side had. *Exactly how many.* Tensions ran high, but when you cut through all the partisan rhetoric, what we learned was that our vote counting systems just aren’t that accurate. The margin of error was in the hundreds of votes.

In other words, we learned that a single vote doesn’t count.

Looking at this situation from the point of view of an act consequentialist, you’d see that you shouldn’t vote. Since a single vote doesn’t count, and not voting saves you time, and doesn’t really affect anyone in any other way, not voting will have the best consequences overall. Therefore, act consequentialists shouldn’t vote. Rule consequentialism, however, accounts for why we should vote, because it would be good if everyone voted.

Act consequentialists, though, have a response to this argument: it commits the mistake of thinking that by acting in accordance with a rule, we can magically get everyone else to follow it as well. To the rule consequentialist’s question of “what if everyone did this?” the act consequentialist can reply “they won’t.” Voting won’t cause everyone else to vote; not voting won’t cause everyone else to not vote.

This becomes even starker when you consider the problem of resisting tyrants. If everyone always resisted tyrants, without regard for their own safety, tyranny would quickly become impossible. That doesn’t mean you, individually should run out and get yourself killed whenever you find yourself living under a tyrant. That won’t do anyone any good. Randomly resisting won’t magically cause everyone else to do the same, if you want to be really effective you have to be willing to plot with greater discretion than you’d have to if a random act of resistance could automatically spark a general rebellion.

Actually, the problem is worse than that, because if we try to ask what would happen if everyone followed a proposed rule, the rule need say nothing about how to respond to rule breakers, including tyrants, because we’re asking what would happen if such people didn’t exist. So in its strictest application, rule consequentialism fails to tell us what to do in situations we regularly find ourselves in. As a historical aside, it should be noted that people who’ve tried to follow through rule-based reasoning have gotten some bizarre results. Kant, for example, claimed that you must absolutely never lie, even to someone who’s trying to kill someone else and wants to know where their intended victim is hiding. So according to Kant, if you were hiding Jews from the Nazis during WWII, you would actually have to confess this to them readily.

At the end of the day, I think it’s sensible to treat act consequentialism as the most coherent form of consequentialism, because our acts are ultimately what we have control over. Trying to avoid this leads to the problems I’ve discussed: rule-worship, imagining we can set the principles by which everyone acts, and so on. Further, I think a lot of what theories like rule consequentialism are supposed to accomplish.

For example, Brad Hooker has suggested we include a clause in the formulation of rule consequentialism saying that you should take into account the cost of establishing a rule in society. The problem here is that trying to get a rule generally accepted is a type of action, and is therefore something that traditional, or act consequentialism will recommend in some circumstances. This may seem odd, but it’s a confusion to think that there’s some logical necessity requiring us to always inculcate people with correct moral principles, write them into law, etc. Claiming sound morality requires that is a substantial moral claim, as open to challenge as any other moral claim.

There are some cases where it’s very plausible that we shouldn’t try to inculcate a perfect moral code, as given human fallibility people are likely to misapply it. Rather, we should promote whatever moral principles will do the most good. Remember the case of torture and the ticking time bomb? It’s plausible to think there are hypothetical situations where torture would be the right thing to do, but as a matter of fact, we can’t actually trust the government with the power to torture people. This kind of reasoning can be applied even to our own mental habits.

And as for voting: it can make sense to encourage others to vote, to provide them with incentives to do so and give them grief for not voting, even though without any such incentives there would be no good reason to vote.

I’m going to try to summarize what I think are the strengths and weaknesses of consequentialism, as they’ve played out over these last four lectures. First, it seems that the consequences of our actions matter. Second, it seems that what we have the most immediate control over is our actions, not the rules that all people must operate on. Third, some of the distinctions that anti-consequentialists want to make run into difficulty on close examination. Fourth, some of the things that non-consequentialist theories are supposed to provide can be provided by consequentialism, once you recognize the range of things that can be considered actions–such as promoting rules.

None of this, though, changes the fact that consequentialism has some highly counter-intuitive implications. Normally, we don’t think we are required to kill one person to save five, or to be as concerned for the welfare of strangers as we are for our own. It’s not clear exactly how we should deal with these situations in philosophy–where an otherwise attractive theory tells us our commonsense beliefs are wrong. We want to be able to find errors in our moral thinking, but we don’t want to deny obvious moral truths.

One response philosophers have made to this debate is to give up the search for all-encompasing moral principles, like consequentialism and Kant’s deontology, and do ethics piecemeal. This is sometimes turned into a theory onto itself, and called “moral particularism” or some such. My own thought, though, which I hold for reasons I can’t fully explain here, is that we should be skeptical of grand philosophical theorizing, and just try to get judgments on down-to-earth questions–like whether we should legalize torture of terror suspects, given the actual circumstances we find ourselves in, as opposed to hypothetical ones–get those questions right. We may not be in a position to get the grand theorizing right.