Category: Philosophy
Against Intuition
Larry Temkin, the noted philosopher, was trying to convince Robin Hanson and I that some moral values should not be traded. He posed the following question:
Suppose that you had a million children and you could give each of them a better life but only if one of them had a very, very terrible life. Would you do it?
"Of course," I answered. "You would be crazy not to," said Robin. I could tell by the look on Larry’s face that this was not the answer that he had expected. "But, but," he stammered, "almost all philosophers would tell you that that is wrong." "So much the worse for almost all philosophers," I replied.
My response to Tyler’s post on animal welfare is similar. Tyler wants to find a theory that both rationalizes and is consistent with our intuitions. But that is a fool’s game. Our intuitions are inconsistent. Our moral intuitions are heuristics produced by blind evolution operating in a world totally different than our own. Why would we expect them to be consistent? Our intuitions provide no more guidance to sound ethics than our tastes provide guidance to sound nutrition. (Which is to say, they are not without function but don’t expect to be healthy on a yummy diet of sugar and fat.)
The reason to think deeply about ethical matters is the same reason we should think deeply about nutrition – so that we can overcome our intuitions. Tyler argues that we don’t have a good approach to animal welfare only because he is not willing to give up on intuition.
Tyler asks (I paraphrase) ‘Would you kill your good friend for the lives of a million cats? What about a billion cats?’ He answers, No, but says "Yet I still wish to count cats for something positive."
My answer is not only Yes it is that we do this routinely today. The introduction of "your good friend" (or "children" in Larry’s example) engages our primitive intuitions and feelings and that is why Tyler’s answer goes awry. But consider, last year Americans spent more than 34 billion dollars on their pets. That money could have saved human lives had it gone to starving Africans.
Similarly, contra Larry, we do make tradeoffs concerning our children and more generally we accept that some people, such as coal miners, risk a much worse life, i.e. death, in order to benefit everyone else just a little bit.
The dilemmas that Larry and Tyler raise tell us that our intuitions,
taken as a package, are not rationally derivable from a handful of
premises. But that is no reason to abandon reason instead we should
happily accept that some of intuitions lead us astray.
A sound mind and a sound body both require that we abandon our gut instincts.
The public choice economics of Star Wars: A Straussian reading
The only spoilers in this post concern the non-current Star Wars movies. Stop reading now if you wish those to remain a surprise.
The core point is that the Jedi are not to be trusted:
1. The Jedi and Jedi-in-training sell out like crazy. Even the evil Count Dooku was once a Jedi knight.
2. What do the Jedi Council want anyway? The Anakin critique of the Jedi Council rings somewhat true (this is from the new movie, alas I cannot say more, but the argument could be strengthened by citing the relevant detail). Aren’t they a kind of out-of-control Supreme Court, not even requiring Senate approval (with or without filibuster), and heavily armed at that? As I understand it, they vote each other into the office, have license to kill, and seek to control galactic affairs. Talk about unaccountable power used toward secret and mysterious ends.
3. Obi-Wan told Luke scores of lies, including the big whopper that his dad was dead.
4. The Jedi can’t even keep us safe.
5. The bad guys have sex and do all the procreating. The Jedi are not supposed to marry, or presumably have children. Not ESS, if you ask me. Anakin gets Natalie Portman; Luke spends two episodes with a perverse and distant crush on his sister Leia, leading only to one chaste kiss.
6. The prophecy was that Anakin (Darth) will restore order and balance to the force. How true this turns out to be. But none of the Jedi can begin to understand what this means. Yes, you have to get rid of the bad guys. But you also have to get rid of the Jedi. The Jedi are, after all, the primary supply source and training ground for the bad guys. Anakin/Darth manages to get rid of both, so he really is the hero of the story. (It is also interesting which group of “Jedi” Darth kills first, but that would be telling.)
7. At the happy ending of “Return of the Jedi”, the Jedi no longer control the galaxy. The Jedi Council is not reestablished. Luke, the closest thing to a Jedi representative left, never becomes a formal Jedi. He shows no desire to train other Jedi, and probably expects to spend the rest of his life doing voices for children’s cartoons.
8. The core message is that power corrupts, but also that good guys have power too. Our possible safety lies in our humanity, not in our desires to transcend it or wield strange forces to our advantage.
What did Padme say?: “So this is how liberty dies, to thunderous applause.”
Addendum: By the way, did I mention that the Jedi are genetically superior supermen with “enhanced blood”? That the rebels’ victory party in Episode IV borrows liberally from Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”? And that the much-maligned ewoks make perfect sense as an antidote to Jedi fascism?