From simplistic to nonsensical
Massimo Piglucci on Michael Shermer on moral philosophy:
You may have noticed that I don’t opine on quantum mechanics. Or jazz. The reason for this is that — although I’m very interested in both topics — I just don’t know enough about them. Not enough to be able to offer an informed opinion, at any rate. So I sit back, read what other, more knowledgeable people have to say about quantum mechanics and jazz, form my own second-hand opinion, and try to avoid embarrassing myself by pontificating in public.
Apparently, my friend Michael Shermer does not follow the same philosophy. At least, not when it comes to the field of moral philosophy. He has recently published a column in Scientific American entitled “Does the philosophy of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ have any merit?” which starts out simple (simplistic, really) enough, and ends in a crescendo of nonsense. Let’s take a look.
Shermer’s done more than that, he’s written a whole book on moral philosophy. I have no plans to read it.
Massimo picks apart the SciAm column; I’ll share a sample:
After a brief mention of Kantian deontology, the article really veers from simplistic to nonsensical: “Historically the application of a utilitarian calculus is what drove witch hunters to torch women they believed caused disease, plagues, crop failures and accidents — better to incinerate the few to protect the village. More recently, the 1:5 utilitarian ratio has too readily been ratcheted up to killing one million to save five million (Jews: “Aryan” Germans; Tutsi:Hutu), the justification of genocidal murderers.”
What?? No, absolutely not. Setting aside the obvious observation that utilitarianism (the philosophy) did not exist until way after the Middle Ages, no, witch hunts were the result of fear, ignorance and superstition, not of a Bentham- or Mill-style calculus. And this is the first time I heard that Hitler or the Hutu of Rwanda had articulated a utilitarian rationale for their ghastly actions. Again, they were driven by fear, ignorance, superstition, and — in the case of Nazi Germany — a cynical calculation that power could be achieved and maintained in a nation marred by economic chaos by means of the time-tested stratagem of scapegoating. (The latter is also what perpetrators of witch hunting and the Rwandan genocide did: prey on the weak, it’s easy to do and get away with it.)
I wonder where Shermer got the idea that Hitler or the Hutu did what they did for utilitarian reasons. I wonder if he thinks racism itself is utilitarian.
The true nonsense comes right at the end, when Shermer puts forth his preferred view, the one that, in his mind, has allowed for true moral progress throughout the ages: “both utilitarianism and Kantian ethics are trumped by natural-rights theory, which dictates that you are born with the right to life and liberty of both body and mind, rights that must not be violated, not even to serve the greater good or to fulfill a universal rule.”
Setting aside that you get precisely the same result from Mill’s rule utilitarianism, not to mention that natural rights theory has no argument against Kant, “natural rights” are what Jeremy Bentham famously, and correctly, referred to as “nonsense on stilts.” There is no such thing as a natural right, and we, therefore, are not born with them (contra the mindless libertarian mantra that Shermer is repeating). Michael is confusing human desires and instincts — some of which are actually culturally dependent (it is empirically not the case that everyone on earth desires liberty of mind, for instance) with rights. But rights are, obviously, a human creation. Which accounts for why, as Shermer himself notes, they have to be written down in things like the Bill of Rights, and protected by the force of state-enabled law. It’s also why people have come up with different lists of rights at different times. The United Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, provides a much more extensive list than the one arrived at by James Madison and co. back in 1789.
To argue that rights are “natural” is to commit the most elementary logical fallacy in ethics, that of the appeal to nature. And even if one were to overlook that little problem, there simply is no consistent empirical evidence for most of such alleged rights (i.e., desires, instincts) in Homo sapiens or its recent ancestors. Yeah, we all prefer to be alive rather than dead, other things being equal, but natural selection does not care about mere survival, it only favors survival that leads to reproduction. And it favors it, it doesn’t guarantee it. (So you can’t derive a natural right to sex. Too bad!)
This is the sort mess one gets when Michael talks about moral philosophy. Or when I talk about quantum mechanics. Or jazz. Please, let us all stick to what we know. It’s hard enough as it is.
Mind you…we all have more reason to take a stab at some kind of moral philosophy than we do quantum mechanics or jazz. We have more reason to do that if we want to do the right thing, refrain from doing harm, avoid hurting people, be more helpful or generous or kind, be less selfish or mean or a bully. We want to have some idea of why we should, and we may want to explain to other people why we and they should. We have some crude tools for doing that – instinct, training, emotions, experience, observation, rules – but they are crude, and they can compete with each other, and we can just get them all wrong.
It’s a problem. Amateurs bungle it (especially if they’re amateurs like Sam Harris and Michael Shermer, both of whom have pretty terrible moral compasses, frankly), but professionals don’t talk to us much.
Shermer’s dismissal of Kant is particularly risible, considering the degree to which Kant’s humanity-as-end thesis has been invoked to justify basic rights, by e.g. Rawls (conveniently, I happen to be writing a take-home exam on social contract theory, so I’ve been reading both those guys, as well as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau).
My take on Shermer’s conclusion is: My money is mine by Natural Right, but out of “impartial beneficence” I’ll make a libertarian decision to share some of it with the less fortunate. Aren’t I a Good Person! Which makes the lead-up an obvious hatchet job on moral theories which might be taken as mandating a more robust obligation, as a matter of justice, rather than charity.
And now I really, really need to quit screwing the pooch and write that damned exam….
It is your duty I mean Duty.
A really good read from Massimo, though I think his conclusion needs some work. The problem is not that Shermer doesn’t “stick to what he knows”, it’s that he doesn’t make the effort to actually become an expert in something before pontificating about it. It’s all the more ironic because that’s exactly the kind of process as a “skeptic” that Shermer is supposed to be against. It reminds me of Michio Kaku’s arrogant willingness to talk as an expert about evolution despite obviously having never truly studied it.
“(So you can’t derive a natural right to sex. Too bad!)”
Ouch! I don’t think Shermer’s worked this one out yet. Then there’s this:
” …both utilitarianism and Kantian ethics are trumped by natural-rights theory, which dictates that you are born with the right to life and liberty of both body and mind, rights that must not be violated, not even to serve the greater good or to fulfill a universal rule”(unless you happen to be drunk).
There, fixed that for him.
“I wonder where Shermer got the idea that Hitler or the Hutu did what they did for utilitarian reasons. I wonder if he thinks racism itself is utilitarian.”
I think it’s his libertarianism. It requires things be reducible to some form of very simple (and of course, simplistic) calculation.
You can’t imagine how much grief I get from people for taking this position! No, rights are real! They come from (God – Nature – Vishnu – Thor – the eternal consciousness). Yeah, right. So the eternal consciousness guarantees not only your right to smoke, but to smoke in my house? Nope, sorry. (Yes, I heard that one – from a brother who was never invited to my house again, because that is my “right”).
“I wonder where Shermer got the idea that Hitler or the Hutu did what they did for utilitarian reasons. I wonder if he thinks racism itself is utilitarian.”
It could be as simple as “I don’t agree with utilitarianism. Therefore it’s bad. Hitler and the Hutu did bad things. They used utilitarianism because what they did was bad so they must have used a means of thinking and justification that I think is bad. Utilitarianism is bad (see above); therefore they probably used it.This makes utilitarianism look even worse.”
Maybe he’s reflexiively deploying “utilitarian” in the same way that those on the right reflexively brand things they don’t like “communist” or “liberal”.
Shermer:
This is a lousy attack on utilitarianism. The witch hunters had the wrong factual premises — the women weren’t causing disease, plagues, crop failures and accidents — so it should hardly be surprising that the conclusion was wrong. It says little about the validity of the moral framework itself, because any argument is only as good as its premises. Garbage in, garbage out. (There is, perhaps, a subtler point to be made, that a moral framework about something as potentially vague as “the greater good” is more prone to biases or manipulation by which people talk themselves into whatever premises are needed to justify the preferred outcome. But that doesn’t seem to be Shermer’s point here.)
I also have my doubts that Shermer’s preferred “natural rights” theory would lead to a different result in that hypothetical. Is Shermer really claiming that, if an actual bona fide witch is inflicting disease and crop failure on your village, you can’t take defensive action up to and including killing them if necessary? It’s been a long time since I read John Locke, but I seem to recall that he acknowledged that natural rights can be in conflict, and that the highwayman’s natural right to his life ends when he starts trying to take my purse.
My knowledge of philosophy is basic at best, but I was thinking along Screechy Monkey’s lines. Is killing in self (or other) defense in the face of imminent harm “utilitarianism”? Honest question. It seems to me that it’s not. It’s… something else.
If anyone cares to enlighten me on this, the attempt would be greatly appreciated.
Lady Mondegreen: I do think Mills’ “rule utilitarianism” would allow for killing in self-defense or defense of another’s life, as allowing for it means that people will be less likely to try to kill one another in the first place. However, it would also restrict it to cases of literal life-and-death (none of this ‘stand your ground’ bullshit, for instance), and probably not even in cases of violence where life itself is not at stake. (It would allow for equivalent force, but not escalation, since once escalation is allowed for one side, it becomes permissible for the other.)
Freemage, I’m sure it can be philosophically justified, but is it a “utilitarian calculus” in Shermer’s phrase? Say you shot an intruder in defense of yourself and your family. There’s an ethic at work there, but is it “the greatest good for the greatest number”?
I’m probably out of my depth here, sorry.
No; the fact that “the greatest good for the greatest number” treats people as integers is one of the objections to it, I think. That’s why Peter Singer is often so controversial.
Well tell them they should!
;-)
If Nazis or witch hunters or racists were driven by utilitarianism, they would neither want nor need to try to de-humanize their victims. The fact that they did (and do) shows very clearly that utilitarianism was/is not on their minds – to them, some lives are inherently worth more than others. (That’s why Nazis had words like “lebensunwertes Leben” – roughly translated “life unworthy of life” – for handicapped people.)
I refrain from pontificating on physics. I DO know plenty around jazz. The murky depths of libertarianism are beyond my sympathy, but I can smell the cigarette butts and amphetamines from here.
Furious denunciations of Kant (and Dewey for that matter) seem to have made up a lot of Rand’s table talk…
@14: To the extent that any moral calculus is on the minds of fanatical bigots, their victims possess *negative* utility, which means they don’t really have a dilemma when deciding which way to steer the metaphorical trolley.