Reflections for the Natural Moral Community

Suppose, a la Nozick, that we mix our labour with sources of resources and thereby acquire the products of our labour, which we can sell, give, or bequeath to someone else.  (Nozick also thinks that people can acquire sources of resources despite the fact that their labour is entirely in what they take out and not what they leave behind, but we can ignore that error at present.)

Now, suppose that two people work together.  Although it may be difficult, if not impossible, to determine the shares of the two in the product in practice, if people acquire property by mixing their labour with things, it must be the case that each owns a share proportional to the labour performed that actually went into the product.  Otherwise, one is appropriating the property of the other.

If one of the two is the employee of the other, the problem is that the share that the employee receives will be determined not by the amount of labour he contributes but by competition with other potential employees, assuming that there is freedom of contract.  Occasionally, he will receive proportionally more than he should but other times, he will receive proportionally less.  The latter outcome will occur far more frequently than the former.  Either way, the employee will almost never get what he deserves in light of the labour-mixing theory of property acquisition.  It will be a fortunate accident if he does.

Libertarians who endorse the employment relationship and freedom of contract cannot use the labour-mixing theory to justify them.  In fact, they need a justification that denies the labour-mixing theory.

When it comes to employment, freedom of contract is not a libertarian principle; freedom of contact for a just price is.  A just price is determined by the actual contribution of the worker to the product, not by the market price for his labour.

The consistency exhibited by most contemporary individuals who call themselves “libertarians” is not logical consistency but consistency in serving the interests of the people who happen to gain the most under the presently applied rules.

P.S.  I have turned off comments in order to avoid spam.  If you want to comment, e-mail me at the address on my main website.

According to David Velleman on p. 45 in his 2013 open source  publication Foundations for Moral Relativism,

The case for moral relativism is not an argument; it’s a pair of observations.  The first observation is that people live and have lived by mutually incompatible moral norms.  The second is that no one has ever shown any one set of norms to be universally valid.

There is a third observation that should be added to the list:  there is no human society that lacks a set of moral norms.  Of course, it is something everyone “knows” but we get a distorted picture if we develop theories on the basis of two relevant observations when there are three that should be taken into account – explicitly and in detail.

With all three noted, it is clear that we must describe either a case of divergence or an instance of convergence.   Divergence assumes that there is a shared basis for morality that includes moral content and explains why moral codes diverge from the basis, while convergence makes no such assumption and explains why every society converges on the property of having a moral code.

Divergence approaches can lessen the impact of the first observation and challenge relativism as the best explanation for the observable variation by pointing out that the differences in moral codes can be explained in terms of ignorance and error.  “Mutually incompatible norms” are evidence for relativism only if it is not possible to explain them in terms of ignorance and error.   It is not variation per se that supports relativism but variation despite people being equally knowledgeable and equally disinterested.  Being disinterested is important because interests can motivate conviction.

Additionally, Velleman’s second observation can be reasonably denied.  My theory, evolutionary intuitionism, posits a shared basis for morality that has content.  The norms it posits are universal, although their application can vary depending on the circumstances and the environment – minimizing loss of human life can mean homes for the elderly in some situations and putting them on ice floes in others.  Furthermore, it predicts that there will be variation.  According to evolutionary intuitionism, morality is the by-product of a set of adaptations that increase our ability to co-operate on longer range projects.  Maintaining the ability to co-operate depends more on consensus than on accuracy, so the ordinary accidents of life will cause different cultures to have different codes despite the shared basis – because more effort will be put into achieving agreement with potential co-operators than getting to the truth.  There is a lot of empirical evidence for the shared basis posited by evolutionary intuitionism and the observable variation confirms its existence rather than counting against it.

As for the third observation, divergence can obviously explain universality in terms of the shared basis.  In contrast, the convergence approach faces significant problems.  It must explain our capacity for morality.  It needs an explanation for the capacity that does not amount to a shared basis.  Furthermore, it needs to explain our predisposition to develop codes in a wide set of circumstances – having a capacity and utilizing it are two different things.  This must include demonstrating that developing a moral code is in the interests of individuals, that they are disposed to realize that it is, that they are not faced with a prisoner’s dilemma that keeps them from ever starting to develop a code, that they have the ability to do so, that they have the ability to maintain it once they have developed it, and that they can deal with defectors and free riders.   Finally, there is a good chance that it will have to explain the observable variation anyway.  Since part of the convergence story must be that moral codes benefit human beings, proponents of convergence must explain why the various codes are all beneficial despite their differences and why human societies do not converge on the same optimal code.

The upshot is that failing to notice the implications of the third observation and ignoring the fact that we need to explain it in detail makes relativism appear more plausible and probable than it actually is.

Evidentially, relativists tend to be free riders.

Kant’s categorical imperative is that we should always treat others as ends in themselves and never as means only.

The question here is:  Does treating others as ends reduce our fitness?

If it does, even if only occasionally, there will be selection for not treating others as ends in themselves.  If it were obligatory to treat others as ends in themselves and if we fulfilled our obligations, it would, ironically, tend to cease to be obligatory.  If the process continued long enough, it would become biologically impossible for anyone to treat anyone else as an end.  Thus, if “ought” implies “can,” evolution would transform an obligation into something that was not an obligation.

If it does, it may take more than a few seconds, but this morality will self-destruct.

Ethical intuitionism holds that human beings are morality detectors – in the same sense as a Geiger counter is a radioactivity detector.  Once we have a description of an act in a set of circumstances, we have the ability to “see” that the act is right or wrong, good or bad, as the case may be.  Ignorance and error impairs our functioning as morality detectors – in the same way as the presence of lead, say, may impair the functioning of a Geiger counter.  Whenever an intuitionist does normative ethics, it will appear that there is an illicit move from descriptions to prescriptions of the sort about which Hume complained in A Treatise of Human Nature.

For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.

Hume’s comment presupposes that the philosophers whom he was criticizing were dealing with an intellectual rather than an instinctual matter.   After Hume, it appears as though we need a moral principle to function as the major premise in our ethical syllogisms (that have descriptions of acts as their minor premises).

In fact, what we need is either a moral principle or an explanation of how it is that we could be morality detectors.  To infer that we need a principle without eliminating the alternative is to beg the question.

But, the orthodox retort will no doubt be, there is no explanation, nor any prospect of an explanation, for our ability to detect morality.  But I have developed just such an explanation in my book Evolutionary Intuitionism, pp. 108-117.

I suppose that there had been no progress towards an explanation of our ability to detect morality at the time Hume wrote and that positing a principle was the only apparent way forward.  But we have now reached a stage in which it is obvious that there is no moral principle that can serve as the major premise.  What clinches the contention is that principle-seekers now advocate “reflective equilibrium,” which amounts to accepting a principle that subsumes some of their intuitions and ignoring falsifying intuitive data.

Hume’s law has resulted in Humean lawlessness.

There are many elementary textbooks that present virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism as exhaustive of the possibilities.  The first has to do with nature of the antecedents of actions, the second with the properties of actions themselves, and the third with the results.  But it is false that there are no alternatives.  Evolutionary intuitionism maintains that what matters is the relationship of actions to a proposition that people hold.

An impoverished view of the possibilities is no basis for progress in understanding the nature of ethics.

For a long time, moral philosophers sought a single moral principle that could serve as the major premise in a syllogism that had a description of a state of affairs as its minor premise and whose conclusion was a true moral judgment as to what moral agents ought to do in the situation described.  The search has not been successful.  No one has discovered a principle that enables us to derive all and only acceptable moral judgments.

The method of reflective equilibrium involves accepting a principle anyway and discounting the moral judgments it cannot accommodate.   In other words, the method consists of accepting a generalization and dismissing the counter-examples that falsify it.

The method of reflective equilibrium could only seem plausible to someone who cannot conceive of ethics as something other than the search for a principle.

What started out as a hypothesis has ended up as a dogma.

Utilitarians object to reflective equilibrium but only because they prefer to be dogmatic from the get-go.

Dumb and dumber.

Typical arguments for animal rights presuppose that moral properties supervene on non-moral ones.  If you believe that you are of worthy of moral consideration in your own right, if you believe that you are worthy of moral consideration in your own right because you possess certain non-moral properties, and if you believe that animals share those non-moral properties, then you are logically committed to believing that animals are worthy of moral consideration in their own right as well.  The argument from marginal cases shows that, for any non-moral property that could reasonably be the foundation for value, there are liable to be animals with that property or human beings that lack it.  So, trying to find a property that is shared by all and only human beings is a fool’s errand – at least in a world in which being human or being made in the image of God don’t count.

Let us suppose that you are worthy of moral consideration in your own right and that you are because you possess certain non-moral properties.  It does not follow that you are logically committed to believe either proposition.  But you must believe both before you are logically committed to believing that others are worthy of moral consideration and before you are committed to treating them accordingly.

It is probably easy to get people to acknowledge that they are worthy of moral consideration in their own right.  But, when it comes to supervenience and the relevant non-moral properties, there’s nothing but hypotheses.  None of the hypotheses is self-evident or observable.  None is empirically demonstrable.  None is logically or conceptually true.  At most, accepting a hypothesis concerning the properties on which value supposedly supervenes enables us to use the resulting theory to generate moral judgments that accord with our pre-theoretical moral intuitions.

But if there’s one thing that does not accord with our pre-theoretical moral intuitions, it is that animals are worthy of moral consideration in their own right in the same way that other human beings are.

As a matter of rationality, then, the prevailing arguments for animal rights are non-starters.  And, since it is what leads to the profoundly counter-intuitive result that animals are worthy of moral consideration in their own right, the supervenience hypothesis is also a non-starter.  One dogmatic opinion begets another.

I disagree with Paul Krugman:

Start with the proposition that there is a legitimate left-right divide in U.S. politics, built around a real issue: how extensive should be make our social safety net, and (hence) how much do we need to raise in taxes? This is ultimately a values issue, with no right answer.

I disagree because “values issues” do have right answers.

The ownership of sources of resources is a creation of the law, not a naturally occurring state of affairs.  The mixing of a person’s labour with resources justifies ownership of the product only, not the sources of resources for the product.  Likewise, the corporation is a creation of the law, not a naturally occurring state of affairs.  Etc., etc.

The justification for such creations of the law is that they make everyone enmeshed in the economy better off.  It is morally wrong to discard any individual.  Hence, it is morally necessary to provide for everyone either through the provision of employment or the provision of a state income in the absence of employment.   Of course, there are free rider problems but they can probably be solved by mandating an inverse correlation between the availability of employment and the level of the state income for individuals between 18 and 65 who are capable of working.

The conviction of the Republican rich that they are being robbed by being taxed is just false.  Billionaires are functionaries – they are merely individuals who have responded to the information and incentives in the price and tax systems and who have made the right kind of responses, often through luck.   Moreover, if billionaires cease to be of benefit to the system as a whole, the rules can be changed.  Indeed, there is no absolute bar to expropriation if it turns out that excessive wealth has a negative effect on the functioning of the system qua system for making everyone enmeshed better off.  If billionaires think otherwise, they are confusing the legal with the moral justification for property.

There is a right answer.  The social safety net should be as extensive as is compatible with the free market system working well enough to provide for everyone enmeshed in the system.  The Republicans whom Krugman excoriates are as objectively wrong about this as they are wrong about climate change.  Conceding that reasonable opinions differ is conceding too much.

Religious freedom is a liberty right and not a claim right.  Therefore, the freedom to pursue religion does not give anyone a claim right to be subsidized, either directly or indirectly.   Indeed, subsidizing religion directly or indirectly prima facie violates the religious freedom of people who have no interest in religion.  It violates it because they have to pay higher taxes than they would otherwise have to pay.   So, tax deductions for donations to religious organizations, tax exemptions for religious organizations, and grants to them violate the principle that everyone should be free to pursue or not to pursue religion – at least on the face of it.

Now, collectively, we spend money in ways that presuppose that some religious doctrines are false.  The question is whether doing so violates the religious freedom of people who hold the doctrines whose falsity the policies presuppose.  So, for example, should Christian Scientists have to pay that portion of their taxes that go towards medical research?

Of course, it is seldom true that governments spend money in ways that completely satisfy anyone.  Freedom of belief and conscience do not provide grounds for refusing to pay taxes.  Nor do they provide a reason for the state not to fund research that might show some opinions to be false.  If freedom of religion is merely a species of freedom of belief and conscience, then the religious have no grounds to refuse to pay any portion of their taxes.

But if freedom of conscience and religion do not provide grounds for refusing to pay taxes, there can be no complaint about subsidies to religion on that basis either.  In other words, the non-religious cannot complain about subsidies to religion on the ground that they subsidies to religion.  (If the religious start to complain about having to pay taxes that support things that they disapprove of, however, then the non-religious can make the same complaint.  American Catholic bishops have complained about having to pay for health insurance that covers birth control.  They are hypocrites until they stop taking subsidies themselves.)

If it is not a matter of principle that there should or should not be subsidies to religion, it must be determined whether the subsidies are beneficial to society as a whole.  If subsidies to religion are beneficial to society, the benefit must be that religion promotes morality.  But what it typically promotes are particular views of morality based on theories that beg the question (the divine command theory) or that involve equivocation (natural law).   Consequently, what religion uniquely promotes in the way of morality is liable to be false.  The promotion of false moral views is not beneficial to society as a whole.   On the contrary, it is liable to promote conflict and disagreement, and to prevent the development of a shared view of morality.   Therefore, unless religion reforms itself by adopting and promoting better moral theories, there is good reason not to subsidize it.  Of course, eliminating what should constitute a bar to subsidies is not enough to show that there should be any.

One fact that seems to support relativism is that people do disagree about moral issues and that some of the disagreements correlate with cultural backgrounds.

It supports it provided there are no alternative explanations.

I have an alternative explanation.

First, what we believe about ethics depends not only on the foundation of morality, which I believe all moral agents share, but also on the rest of their beliefs.  People can believe relevant falsehoods and lack relevant truths.  In fact, since ignorance and error are common  and since people are going to ignorant of and in error about different things, disagreement about morality is also going to be common.

Second, evolutionary intuitionism explains morality as the by-product of a combination of adaptations that have been selected for because they improve our ability to complete medium to long range projects that are in our interest and because they enable us to co-operate with others on such projects.  When it comes to cooperation on the projects, it is more important that people agree than that they get things objectively right.   So, groups of cooperators will tend to agree internally.  There will not be the same motivation to agree with outsiders.    Consequently, insiders will tend to agree with each other and to disagree with outsiders.  What they agree about and disagree about will often be a matter of chance, depending on what their forebears believed falsely and failed to believe at all.  Since cultural groups are groups of cooperators, it will appear as though cultural relativism is true.

It follows that the observable variation is not necessarily evidence for relativism.