William Gillis rejects natural rights theory as a basis for libertarianism, on the grounds that “as a theoretical physicist I find its assumptions (like the distinction between positive and negative action) about as reasonable as golden thrones in the clouds and holy trinities.”
I must gently point out that if an idea is inherently crazy when it shows up in the premises, it cannot suddenly become okay when it shows up in the conclusion (even if the conclusion is now derived from different premises). Or, equally, if it is okay in the conclusion, then it can’t be inherently crazy in the premises. In other words, when an idea (such as the distinction between positive and negative action) is all-pervasively presupposed in one’s policy proposals, one cannot coherently reject the distinction as part of the basis for those proposals.
Incidentally, I don’t know what the grounds for William’s skepticism of the positive/negative distinction are, but some critics of the distinction argue that if one’s decision (be it a decision to “kill” or a decision to “let die”) is part of the overall constellation of circumstances that is sufficient for someone’s death, then there is no interesting metaphysical (not just ethical) distinction between the two cases. I think this argument is confused; here’s a story from Fred Miller that’s useful therapy for such confusion:
A and B are hitchhikers who catch a ride with C. C drops A off in D-town and B off in E-town. In D-town, A sees F standing near the edge of a cliff; A pushes F off the cliff; F falls into the river and drowns. In E-town, B sees G standing near the edge of a cliff; G falls off the cliff on his/her own; B could save G, but instead stands and watches G drown.
Now in order to claim that there is no interesting metaphysical difference between A’s relation to F’s death and B’s relation to G’s death, one must in strict consistency also claim that there is no interesting metaphysical difference between C’s relation to F’s death and C’s relation to G’s death; C either makes a causal contribution (and we’re not talking about moral responsibility, just causal contribution) to both deaths or to neither. But no one (presumably) will seriously make such a claim. Obviously C makes an (inadvertent) causal contribution to F’s death but not to G’s. (To deny this, I maintain, is to fail to recollect the grammar of the concept of causation.) Hence there must also be a difference between A’s relation to F’s death and B’s relation to G’s death, QED.
How would you address the weaker claim that there is no *ethical* difference between the two cases?
I’d say a moral prohibition on letting-die couldn’t be in general as stringent as a moral prohibition on killing, because ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. Obligations not to let die can conflict with each other (given the number of people in need) in a way that obligations not to kill generally don’t.
That of course is perfectly compatible with saying that on specific occasions a case of letting-die may be just as bad as a case of killing (or worse, for that matter). But even in cases where killing and letting-die are equally wrong, they’re still not going to be morally equivalent, because one is presumably going to be a failure of justice and the other a failure of charity — different virtues.
Your example is, of course, a very limited situation and only tenuously related to some of the bigger issues we’re talking about. You’re drawing extremes and trying to assert that they’re logically at odds or in some distinction against one another, but all I would have to do to assert the weakness of positive/negative distinctions is expound on the massive expanse of fuzzy situations. If the conditions of your hypothetical are just fringe conditions, and the others can’t make an interesting or substantive distinction between the two, then you’re still wrong.
But, hey, I’ll go ahead and critique your extreme case.
You’re measuring the interaction of individuals as though they were billiard balls in order to track back whether A or B made a bump in the causal sequence leading to F and G. But that is unknowable to A and B in the situation they’re in just before F and G. B could very well have driven G over the cliff through some slightly more conceptually extended causal sequence. Your entire framing is dependent upon a legalistic interpretation of morality, in short: CAN A OR B BE OBJECTIVELY PROVEN A CAUSATION AFTER THE FACT? Are they directly to blame?
But this ignores that society is a complex system of interweaving causes that we are not entirely capable of extricating from one another. When A pushes F off, that’s in many ways a clear and overwhelming situation, but it’s also inextricably embedded in a broader context. (This is why I hate Kantian, Natural Rights, etc framings of ethics because they want to cut up the wider causal network into just the most apparent, most familiar macroscopic abstractions and then make proclamations on them. Even if they nuance it back and conditionalize, etc, such approaches inherently discard a huge amount of information compared to any reasonably Utilitarianism.)
For ethics to be coherent it must focus on individual agent’s DECISIONS, not simplified models of their actions. So while I agree that there’s causal distinctions between F’s falling and G’s falling, I fail to find that causal distinction substantively different from any other casual distinction. Since we’ve also stipulated that both A and B have the capacity (in a moment prior to either’s fall) to push their own neurons down one sequence or another and knowledge of what would happen either way, there’s no more fundamental separation than there would be between any other arbitrary set of actions set in motion by informed decisions leading — most probably — to the worst results.
///I’d say a moral prohibition on letting-die couldn’t be in general as stringent as a moral prohibition on killing, because ‘ought’ implies ‘can’///
Oh come on! We can simply modify our discourse to only focus on situations where we have capacity one way or another. What does it even mean to have a moral prohibition on killing in a situation where you CAN’T kill that person? You ought not to do things you can not do? That’s a completely meaningless sentence. We could reverse it and say that you ought to do things you can not do, and it would make absolutely no difference whatsoever except to magically appear to lend oomph to one moral interpretation or another of completely realities.
////Obligations not to let die can conflict with each other (given the number of people in need) in a way that obligations not to kill generally don’t.////
This sentence pretty much perfectly encapsulates everything that’s sloppy about positive/negative distinctions. Obligations to not let die DON’T have to conflict with one another and obligations to kill CAN conflict with one another. You’re appealing to a very loose and entirely subjective read on the net percentages of ethical situations in reality.
///In other words, when an idea (such as the distinction between positive and negative action) is all-pervasively presupposed in one’s policy proposals, one cannot coherently reject the distinction as part of the basis for those proposals.///
I agree. But I’m not using the positive/negative distinction anywhere in my political, economic, moral, or ethical theory. At least not substantively — if the case may be that I might have lazily lapsed into such language passingly in some fast and loose internet debate. While I may be down with wider market dynamics, I’m still a part of the Social Anarchist tradition and Anarchists have been pretty uniformly consequentialist (utilitarian and egoist) across the board since forever. What will maximize freedom? What will maximize desires? The internal stumbling point for Anarchism (again minus some weird outliers who are almost all now claimed within Market Anarchist revisionist history) was how to get from the individual egoist ought (or rather simply an is) of “my desires” or “my freedom” to an ought of “net desires” and “net freedom”. (In my interpretation of history Kropotkin was the evil force that stuck a wrench in Anarchism by popularizing biological essentialism as the critical component, which has led inexorably to almost all the horrible things that have befallen Anarchism since.)
A friend of mine frames The Good in Anarchism as “Capacity for Choice.” And I really like her ethical derivations. They’re probably a purer statement of anarchism than any other yet. But I think there’s a more succinct or at least fundamental approach, and that’s what I intend to crank out. (But as I’ve been arguing in philosophy clubs and an endless stream of debates for strong Metaphysical Free Will for over a decade now, I can’t just touch on that passingly, I have to make sure my case implicitly addresses every single quibble along the way. )
all I would have to do to assert the weakness of positive/negative distinctions is expound on the massive expanse of fuzzy situations
I don’t see how the existence of borderline cases — even lots of borderline cases — poses a problem for this distinction (or indeed for most other distinctions). Most distinctions allow borderline cases.
Your entire framing is dependent upon a legalistic interpretation of morality, in short: CAN A OR B BE OBJECTIVELY PROVEN A CAUSATION AFTER THE FACT? Are they directly to blame?
You seem to be shifting from a metaphysical to an epistemological question — which to me seems like a change of topic, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
But this ignores that society is a complex system of interweaving causes that we are not entirely capable of extricating from one another.
Well, sure. But who denied it?
This is why I hate Kantian, Natural Rights, etc framings of ethics because they want to cut up the wider causal network into just the most apparent, most familiar macroscopic abstractions and then make proclamations on them.
I can’t see how that’s an objection. I mean, isn’t that how language and cognition work in general? We start with paradigm cases and then deal with other cases in terms of their degree of similarity of the paradigms. We couldn’t so much as walk across the room if we didn’t do that.
Even if they nuance it back and conditionalize, etc, such approaches inherently discard a huge amount of information compared to any reasonably Utilitarianism.
I’m not convinced of that. Any reasonable utilitarianism (actually I deny that there can be a reasonable utilitarianism, since I think utilitarianism is self-refuting, but never mind for now) has to abstract from all that huge glut of information in order to issue in manageable, graspable, predictable action-guiding advice. That’s why reasonable utilitarianism usually ends up looking so much like deontology. This point is made by Mill, Spencer, Hayek, and in his own way Axelrod.
Oh come on! We can simply modify our discourse to only focus on situations where we have capacity one way or another. What does it even mean to have a moral prohibition on killing in a situation where you CAN’T kill that person? You ought not to do things you can not do? That’s a completely meaningless sentence.
I don’t understand how your response connects to my point; in fact it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it, as far as I can see. When did I ever say anything about “a moral prohibition on killing in a situation where you CAN’T kill that person”? What??
This sentence pretty much perfectly encapsulates everything that’s sloppy about positive/negative distinctions. Obligations to not let die DON’T have to conflict with one another and obligations to kill CAN conflict with one another.
So? That’s why I said “ordinarily.”
You’re appealing to a very loose and entirely subjective read on the net percentages of ethical situations in reality.
I’m guessing that you’re saying one of the two following things, but I’m not sure which. Either a) you’re denying that what I describe as the ordinary case is the ordinary case, or b) you’re saying that even if it should indeed be the ordinary case, you deny the moral relevance of its ordinariness.
If you’re saying (a), then I’m simply astonished and await some evidence on your part.
If instead you’re saying (b), that’s a more interesting dispute. Maybe you think if a generalisation has exceptions then it’s just accidental and so nothing philosophically deep can hang on it. If so, I disagree. There are plenty of cases where a few exceptions don’t threaten the generalisation while those exceptions’ becoming the rule would be incoherent. Kant’s example of lying is a good one; Wittgenstein’s example of mistakes in chess is another. (There’s no problem with there being occasional mistakes made by chess players, but we couldn’t coherently claim that most chess moves in history have been in violation of the rules while continuing to claim that such people were still playing chess, because the existence of the relevant practice is constitutive of there being such a thing as playing chess.) I think this applies to many “ordinary features” of human life; their being the rule rather than the exception is constitutive of many of our most basic concepts of agency, such that while it makes sense to ask what the right thing would be to do in such-and-such an exceptional case, it makes no sense to ask what the right thing would be to do if such exceptions were to be the rule.
But I’m not using the positive/negative distinction anywhere in my political, economic, moral, or ethical theory.
But if your views about what people should and shouldn’t be allowed to do didn’t line up at least approximately with the positive/negative distinction, I doubt you would like the people/theories/movements you claim to like….
Uhh… yeah. I don’t think anything philosophically deep can hang on generalizations or abstractions. …Hence why I appealed to my physics background in my original trite dismissal of Rothbard.
I’m watching Veronica Mars with some friends right now and am incredibly distracted, but some quick things:
//I mean, isn’t that how language and cognition work in general?//
Yes, in general. And insofar as they do, I see that as a bad thing. (Or at least a disutility to it. I’m not as far as most of the hardcore primitivist theorists in my hostility to language/abstraction/symbolic logic/ etc, but I do feel that the underlying critique of postmodernity is a valid one.)
//We start with paradigm cases and then deal with other cases in terms of their degree of similarity of the paradigms.//
But you must agree that this is really, really awful methodology. We only use it because in most cases a purely deductive analysis from absolute root realities is still beyond us. Our ultimate goal should not be to build upon existing paradigms but to tear them down constantly to make them more reflective of the realities we’re dealing with.
//Most distinctions allow borderline cases.//
Serious root realities (as opposed to working abstractions) with borderline cases? I can’t think of a single one.
Look, you seem to be focusing on the individual’s body as an object either moved or left still in a very classical Newtonian/Cartesian conception. But I conceive of the ethical choice at hand as a neuron’s fork in the road. No matter what the neuron is going to move somewhere. The brain is always in motion, taking action. Thus you can only ever choose a positive action. Either you’re going to choose to think and thus act in one direction or another.
//I’m guessing that you’re saying one of the two following things, but I’m not sure which. Either a) you’re denying that what I describe as the ordinary case is the ordinary case, or b) you’re saying that even if it should indeed be the ordinary case, you deny the moral relevance of its ordinariness.//
I’m denying that whether or not it’s the ordinary case is either answerable or philosophically* meaningful. With regard to a) I’m not sure how it would be possible to prove in any substantive manner that it is or isn’t the ordinary case. That seems entirely a result of the arbitrary framing we bring to it.
*In any sense other than “philosophy” of language ruminations on how to clean, clarify and maintain the smoothest interactions of our meaningless abstractions (although it can also help with the few meaningful things we can say… or at least get close to).
//There’s no problem with there being occasional mistakes made by chess players, but we couldn’t coherently claim that most chess moves in history have been in violation of the rules while continuing to claim that such people were still playing chess, because the existence of the relevant practice is constitutive of there being such a thing as playing chess.//
Yeah, I am not playing philosophy of language, Kant or The Wigg. “Chess” is an abstraction with absolutely no relevance or substance. It is not in any way reflective of root realities.
//You seem to be shifting from a metaphysical to an epistemological question — which to me seems like a change of topic, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at.//
I was alluding to the statist nature of any ethical system that extends past helping a single individual make ethical decisions at a single moment. (Without, of course, making a detailed argument. Because the issues at hand are just so goddamn expansive and our approaches so radically different.)
//But if your views about what people should and shouldn’t be allowed to do didn’t line up at least approximately with the positive/negative distinction, I doubt you would like the people/theories/movements you claim to like…//
Heh heh… I know I’m baiting unfairly, but I’d like to see what you think those are.
(as a semi side note, yesterday I dug up a delightfully surprising essay by Karl Hess attacking the entire idea of rights as 1. arbitrary and 2. anti-anarchist.)
I don’t think anything philosophically deep can hang on generalizations or abstractions
I don’t think anything philosophically deep can hang on anthing but abstractions (of which generalisations are a subclass).
But you must agree that this is really, really awful methodology.
No, I don’t agree.
Our ultimate goal should not be to build upon existing paradigms but to tear them down constantly to make them more reflective of the realities we’re dealing with.
I suspect this right here is a — perhaps the — really deep disagreement between us. You think of ordinary human experience as something that needs to be cleared away or dug beneath to get at the underlying reality. I see it as an indispensable framework within which all getting at reality has to happen.
Look, you seem to be focusing on the individual’s body as an object either moved or left still in a very classical Newtonian/Cartesian conception.
I don’t think I’m doing that.
The brain is always in motion, taking action. Thus you can only ever choose a positive action. Either you’re going to choose to think and thus act in one direction or another.
I don’t disagree with that at all. But I can’t see what that has to do with the issue between us; you seem to be sliding to a different sense of negative-versus-positive action from the one that’s at issue. Nobody ever said letting-die was a matter of remaining immobile. I can let someone die by jumping up and down on a trampoline.
That seems entirely a result of the arbitrary framing we bring to it.
I don’t think the framing is arbitrary — but that goes back to what I thought was our major disagreement above.
Yeah, I am not playing philosophy of language, Kant or The Wigg. “Chess” is an abstraction with absolutely no relevance or substance. It is not in any way reflective of root realities.
Again, this is the big disagreement. What you’re dismissing as nonbasic is for me the utmost basic, the presupposition of anything else’s making sense at all.
I’ve always found it hard to tell when someone doesn’t know anything about what they’re talking about. There are a few cases though where I’m pretty confident in my BS-detector, and this guy has it flagging into the red zone.
I wonder what makes so many physicists think their physics training qualifies them to be philosophers. In my experience, it’s generally been an impediment to them.
I wonder if William sees a difference between the elimination of taxes on the one hand and government subsidies on the other?
i don’t see anything absurd i claiming, that c caused both deaths. one weak argument against is that we know that he didn’t.
//You think of ordinary human experience as something that needs to be cleared away or dug beneath to get at the underlying reality. I see it as an indispensable framework within which all getting at reality has to happen.//
‘Ordinary human experience’ is an extended system of structures that develop through our engagement with our environment. Our brains form images and programs that we then use to interact with the world around us. We agree on that much, right?
There are two broad methods of going about improving these structure to better fit / handle / engage with the world around us.
1. We add nuances and caveats to them.
2. We tear them down to the root and start anew all the way back up.
I’ve been declaring that as far as approaches goes 1 = (Largely) Bad, 2 = Good. (1 gets you the undying self-recurring text-upon-text of postmodernism and most language-based philosophy, 2 gets you science.)
Original ordinary human experience has very little grasp of real existing material nature, in order to comprehend it it has had to roll back a lot of its assumptions and consequently completely transform our language over the last few thousand years. Ordinary human experience CHANGES, and has changed, based on something external. We may not be able to directly speak of ‘all that really matters,’ but we can get closer and closer by refusing to hold to our existing macroscopic abstractions.
//Nobody ever said letting-die was a matter of remaining immobile. I can let someone die by jumping up and down on a trampoline.//
I was going there because I threw out the concept of direct line-of-causation that you were arguing and I wanted to cover the next base in case you moved there. The difference between jumping on the trampoline and directly pushing the guy off the cliff is a hazy matter of degree. Tracking billiard ball interactions all the way, much less somehow measuring and comparing them, seems a little ridiculous. I could very well have manipulated his mind or conditions around him to force him jump. But those might have less of a physical direct causality than your jumping up and down on the trampoline. Distinguishing between these in causal force is seems an entirely subjective (arbitrary according to cultural, etc macroscopic constructs with no direct root in reality) evaluation, with no objective or cardinal base.
Of course I’m willing to grant consciousness metaphysical significance. In which case we can only say that the RESULTS of an act upon consciousness (the individual’s death) is significant. Since both actions result in death. They’re indistinguishable (when extracted from context that may have an effect on other results).
//There are a few cases though where I’m pretty confident in my BS-detector, and this guy has it flagging into the red zone.//
Yay! I’m rarely truly surprised by insults, but this one is particularly refreshing.
//I wonder what makes so many physicists think their physics training qualifies them to be philosophers. In my experience, it’s generally been an impediment to them.//
I wonder what makes so many philosophers think their non-physics training qualifies them to be philosophers. In my experience it’s generally been an impediment to them. :p
I once pulled the physics card in a personal debate with David Friedman when I was winning just to be an ass. Of course I was absolutely right and he was being an stuffy idiot, but it turns our he did get his doctorate in physics. So that was a humorous foot-in-mouth situation.
//I wonder if William sees a difference between the elimination of taxes on the one hand and government subsidies on the other?//
Contextually different. Essentially and effectively the same (net increase in freedom). Again, I’m pro-market dynamics, but I’m from the Social Anarchist tradition, which is at least decended from Utilitarianism.
Short answer: physics is (largely) an empirical enterprise, philosophy is (largely) a conceptual enterprise, so physics has very little relevance to philosophy. Philosophy deals with whether a claim makes sense or not, which is independent of changes in culture or scientific knowledge. Moreover, the scientific method has philosophical presuppositions which the scientific method itself is not competent to address.
Our brains form images and programs that we then use to interact with the world around us. We agree on that much, right?
That sentence is ambiguous between so many different possible propositions that I have no idea whether I agree with it.
One addendum: some of the structures you think science should tear down, or at least be prepared to tear down, are structures I think provide the essential framework that science presupposes, so that science couldn’t tear them down without annihilating itself.
William:
Are you claiming that something like, say, the loaf of cornbread that I stuffed into my mouth earlier today is a “macroscopic abstraction,” whereas stuff like, say, up and down quarks are not abstractions, but rather concretes?
Really?
Sorry, I had a conference in Tacoma. + traveller punk stuff
//”Philosophy deals with whether a claim makes sense or not,”//
When I said that Physicists were more qualified as Philosophy than Philosophers I was implicitly using two different definitions. Sure, Philosophy [1] is essentially Mathematics. (And I agree with you there regarding better than physics) But I was using Philosophy [2] which is to say the real existing field, largely focusing on claims and systems of logic that are not pre-existing ontological realities, but random social constructs. Physics (in any sense) is closer to Phil [1] than Phil [2] is.
//Moreover, the scientific method has philosophical presuppositions which the scientific method itself is not competent to address.//
I want to make clear that I’m not, nor have I ever argued that Science = a Methodology. (By the way, there’s an interesting tendency where physicists are most likely to be hostile to the Scientific Method as the definition of Science, whereas “Social Scientists” cling to it.) I’m making an ontological claim (or posit): there exists nothing but a single consistent reality, and everything that is — qualia/etc — follows that consistency.
//One addendum: some of the structures you think science should tear down, or at least be prepared to tear down, are structures I think provide the essential framework that science presupposes, so that science couldn’t tear them down without annihilating itself. //
Empiricism is Our Marxist State. So what? The end goal of both physics and philosophy is consistency. Where all our logic becomes deductive rather than inductive. (“Science” thanks to the very, very wide net it casts these days, is pretty much stuck on inductive, but it was started and physics continues the tradition to muck around doing pretty much anything to get to a pure deductive all the way back.)
//Are you claiming that something like, say, the loaf of cornbread that I stuffed into my mouth earlier today is a “macroscopic abstraction,” whereas stuff like, say, up and down quarks are not abstractions, but rather concretes?//
Sure. Obviously “cornbread” is an abstraction we make over completely different aggregate structures. But there are more useful concretes, like say the arrow of time, that are relevant and useful to the sort of philosophical questions we’re interested in here. While the case for Free Will as an ontological reality is perhaps a different conversation, it ties into the idea of the presence of consciousness in matter as a concrete (briefly: I see consciousness as a vector of increasing a-causality — quantum dual-time vectors writ large). And, being a concrete, we explore deductive math/logic relations with it and other concretes. That’s called Ethics.