Thoughts on Population

Fewer people use fewer resources — The means whereby we can preserve both our natural resources, and more generally our environment, have become increasingly popular points of conversation over the past couple of decades — and for a variety of very good reasons. Energy dependence is at least partly responsible for dragging the west into conflicts with other cultures and political groups. There is significant evidence that the burning of fossil fuels is degrading parts of the atmosphere responsible for keeping solar radiation off our tender heads, not to mention the your sundry icecaps. There are a lot fewer fish in the sea than there used to be, and a lot more trash — also markedly fewer right whales. It’s certainly worth noting that not only the extinction of individual species, but the consequent disruption of the ecosystems in which they previously thrived, at the hands of human hunters has historical precedent; for instance, the Maori hunting of New Zealand’s large flightless birds led to the extinction of both the moas and the Haast’s eagles that hunted moas as a primary food source. As a more general observation: many of the planet’s resources are finite; if we use them without regard for this simple fact, we will run out of them, resulting in a very difficult life on a very ugly world.

So, I’m certainly in favor of a more sustainable way of life for our peculiar species. What confounds me, and perhaps I’ve just been talking with and listening to the wrong people at the wrong time, is that I’ve never heard a single other person bring up population growth as an issue to be addressed in the development of sustainable living. In fact, just a few weeks ago President Obama reminded me via Hulu that being a good father is the most important job in a man’s life (bad luck if you’re sterile — I suppose you’ll have to find something trivial like practicing medicine or engineering highways to fill your day…but I digress). Certainly, it’s come up that there’s a whole lot of humanity out there, and they can’t all consume resources like we do in the United States, or we’d be in serious and relatively immediate danger of running out. It’s pretty rare for someone to suggest, though, that maybe we should try making fewer babies.

I’ll suggest it. Maybe we should try making fewer babies; it’s something to consider. Presumably if we had a much smaller population, it would not only result in a cheerier mother earth, but also allow us to retain a reasonably high standard of living in the doing. What I intend in the following text is to explicate and evaluate a few reasons why we might not take this as our primary route to sustainability.

Babies are nice — Humans are fairly well hard-wired to breed, as far as I can tell empirically. People like making babies and they like raising children, or at minimum they usually think that they are going to like raising children. Humans (and bacteria) who weren’t all that interested in extending their family trees just weren’t very successful at passing on that trait. The family structure is also a part of our culture: one marries and produces the most charming, best looking and smartest children, and puts bumper stickers about it on one’s car. If that’s not a big part of your life-plan, you tend to be looked at a little askance, just a little. Seeing as it’s difficult enough to cajole people into turning off lights when they’re not in the room, or driving cars that don’t burn as much fuel as a Learjet, or lifting up the toilette seat at the appropriate times, it’s probably going to be no easy task to get them not to go forth and multiply, even if they agree in principle that restraint would be a swell idea. Of course, by producing a few (or several) offspring, they’re deceasing the chances that any of their numerous descendents have of living in a particularly desirable world, which might be worth mentioning to them.

I look at it this way: in most circumstances in our society, it takes two individuals to make a baby, and these two persons are usually a couple (at least if their goal is to make the baby). I mean this purely descriptively, and there are significant exceptions, but I’m concerned with this most usual scenario since it presently describes the vast majority of instances that I am trying to address. Now, if each couple had one baby, the world’s human population would gradually decrease, each generation being half the size of the previous. If each couple produced two offspring, the population would remain stable. More than two babies, and population grows at an exponential rate — say if each couple has three children: each generation is 1.5x the size of the previous. So, no one’s saying you can’t have a child of your own in order to fulfill your evolutionarily induced desire to see the genetic combination of yourself and your mate grow into an adult person. Heck, if the global population seems to be at a good place, go ahead and have two. Perhaps the number of siblings one has effects one’s development? Well, if you think that children should come in packages of three for their own benefit, make one baby and adopt two. It might not be an ideal fulfillment of the desire for a full family, but it is probably more amenable to most than simply raising fewer children than they want, and certainly better than running out of key natural resources.

“Standard of living” is capitalist pig code talk — That is to say, there might be something, or any number of things, seriously wrong with the way we live our lives in contemporary society; if we “lowered” our standard of living to one less focused on buying things we don’t need and that don’t make us happy we would solve a lot of our problems that way. Any plan to save the environment while maintaining a lifestyle of consumerist “plenty” is corrupt to begin with.

I’m not unsympathetic to a softer version of this argument. Riding around on the Boston underground for the past few months, I’ve come to the (informal) conclusion that people don’t look very happy. Many, many of them don’t, anyway. Maybe they just don’t like riding in closed tin containers with lots of other people they don’t know. That could be part of it; however, I have come up with another partial explanation (with some help from Karl Marx): human beings don’t like working from 9-5 at jobs in which they aren’t at all interested; a lot of people do it, and it’s not really what we evolved to do. Life has been developing on earth for roughly 3.5 billion years; on a geological time scale, cubicles are a relative latecomer. So, when we’re not working, we buy things to distract ourselves from the fact that we dedicate most of our energy to doing something we don’t especially want to do. By buying things, we generate the need for people to do jobs that they don’t enjoy, and they in turn feel the need to buy things and keep us in our jobs (that we don’t enjoy). Perhaps, if we made a concerted effort to live more simply, our time would be spent doing things with which we feel more connected, and as a result of this we wouldn’t want to buy all of the things that constitute a “high standard of living” after all.

Obviously, that’s just a sketch of a much larger set of economic and philosophical theories, and at present I’m not interested in proving whether consumerism is or is not the bane of our civilization. What I am interested in is whether the equation of consumer society with a high living standard constitutes a sufficiently nuanced stance. It may be true that much of modern human “leisure” activity is a desperate attempt to escape undesirable lives, an attempt that only digs us deeper into them. Be that as it may, it does not follow that everything our natural resources are spent on does not, or under the right conditions could not, constitute some of the elements of true happiness. Medical technology occurs to me as something that we want to preserve. It would be nice if we could have flying vehicles that allow us to experience, from time to time, the exquisite beauties of nature and human civilization first hand. I’m also a fan of gas and electric ovens, indoor plumbing, electric lighting, wikipedia and JSTOR, to name just a few modern artifacts I think I genuinely enjoy and appreciate.

Let’s also remember that while population reduction might allow a continuation of our way of life, or one distinctly similar to it, it does not follow that we must keep that way of life if we reduce our population. We could both simplify and reduce. On the other hand, if population expands indefinitely, we will eventually run out of resources such as ground water and arable land, which are pretty important to any lifestyle, no matter how simple (assuming that medicine is retained to a degree that allows global population to expand).

Fewer scientific breakthroughs — It sounds odd, but bear with me a moment. Let us start from the premise that a certain percent of the population has the necessary talent and inclination to become great geneticists. Let’s say, very hypothetically, that this number is 2% and that there are a hundred human beings in the world. That means that there are limited number of persons, two persons, working away at a very large field, perhaps one that will never be exhausted. They can only do so much, and more of the potential discoveries would be made if there were four geneticists instead. If we assume, I think reasonably, that there is some conceptual synergy between the discoveries made by different scientists, then it is also true discoveries are made more slowly not only because there are fewer people to go through the material, but because they aren’t able to avail themselves of each others’ work, because that work doesn’t exist. I think this might be a legitimate issue with population reduction; what I am not convinced of is that the benefit of additional scientific researchers and research will outweigh the problems produced by a population of 30 billion.

Where will the labor come from? — If there are far fewer persons in the world, then there will be a much smaller labor pool. Who’s going to make things? Traditionally the presence of a class living in relative ease and comfort has required a much larger class of workers. If, as I am proposing, we retain a relatively high standard of living, who is going to make the things that are needed for it?

Well, presumably the number of persons demanding a large number of goods will decrease by roughly the same proportion as the producers of those goods, assuming there is a globaly uniform agreement to reduce or counteract population growth. Here we get back to the standard of living issue (what counts as a genuinely good standard?) and the question of whether or not it is O.K. to have a small percentage of the population benefiting from the labor the majority. I don’t see this as being an objection to my “fewer babies” suggestion, since it applies to pretty much any total population number. There’s also the technology factor — machines can do more and more things with great finesse; the need for a huge laboring class should be consequently reduced, lessening the need for a large industrially oriented population.

THEY will overwhelm us! — A couple of years ago Rick Santorum came to speak at my college, bringing with him any number of dubious premises, intriguing fallacies and misapplied obvious truths. One point he did speak on though that stuck with me qua my thoughts on population was his stern chastisement of the French for not having enough babies, thereby allowing North African (and more importantly Muslim) immigrants to slowly overtake their culture. I’m well aware of the strong undertones of bigotry in this proposition, and I’m certainly not suggesting that we have to help preserve “our culture” by making more babies than the other cultures. It remains, however, that our stage of human civilization (may there be a following one) retains much of the pack instinct of our distant Cenozoic ancestors and of the tribal structures that were the cradle of all cultural and political activity. That is to say, we have much more loyalty to people from our own little corner of the world than we do to others, and we’re generally willing to harm others if we think it will save, or provide great benefit to, us and ours.

We have wars, and larger countries tend to fare better in wars than smaller ones. Access to a larger population than your rival, assuming relative parity of technology, provides both a larger labor pool for the production of the tools of war and a larger pool of potential soldiers. It is also likely that a major reduction in population, or population growth, in any country would force some major restructuring, which would at least temporarily weaken it on the world stage. This all leads up to one big problem, perhaps the biggest — if we are going to try to counteract trends in population growth it has to be a worldwide project. Not only do we have to convince most individuals, or procreating couples, that it is in their (and their offspring’s) best interests to have fewer children; we also have to convince people that is in their best interests as regards their national affiliation, that we aren’t going to use their smaller population to our advantage to invade their country, kill them all, and take their resources. We would presumably have to convince the governing bodies of every major nation to do its own part to promote voluntary population control.

By and large, this is not a problem to which I can provide an adequate solution. I can, however, offer a partial one. Some wars are fought over ideals; some are fought under the command of egomaniacal tyrants; many wars are fought for control of resources which are not sufficiently plentiful in the territory of the aggressor nation to provide for the needs or desires of their citizens. With a vastly smaller national population, there would be vastly less stress on national resources. In light of this, it seems advisable under any population reduction plan to bring down each nation’s population to one that can be sustained, at least in terms of resources significantly available in that nation at all, by its own national product, or by non-coercive trade with a country possessing enormous natural resources (which would in turn have to determine its goal-population with reference to both its resources and the percentage of those resources traded to other countries). This strikes me as another very good reason to have fewer people.

Closing remarks? — I’m sure I’ve omitted a tremendous wealth of potential objections, interesting counter-objections and fascinating digressions. I have been, after all, attempting to treat a very broad subject (actually a number of broad subjects) in about 2500 words. I certainly don’t claim to have achieved anything like a flawless or conclusive account of the issue; this wasn’t my goal to begin with. My intention herein was, and is, simply to bring up in an acceptably cogent and reasonable manner a subject that I think gets much less attention than it deserves.

- J. Judd

Meet Paige

Paige M. Gutenborg is the name of Harvard Book Store’s new “book-making robot.”  The operator can draw on any public domain work available through googlebooks and have this wonderful machine print it for you as a bound paperback! I just got an out of print collection of posthumous essays by Schopenhauer…which excites me in a way that I sincerely hope no one else can empathize with. Really though, if there’s an obscure, out of print book that you’d like to see in print,  then take a look at the website:

http://www.harvard.com/bookmachine/

This is also a way of bringing up the book that I just bought and have begun reading. If you were half as fascinated as I was by the questions of argumentative method brought up in my earlier posting, I would suggest reading this book, titled The Art of Controversy and Other Posthumous Papers, selected and translated by T. Bailey Saunders. Its eponymous essay “The Art of Controversy” is a fairly detailed description of various rhetorical tactics.

- J. Judd

Marx: two Quandaries and a Clarification

You’re not really happy…You just feel happy. — As with most other social critics, Marx and his intellectual descendents are faced with the task of demonstrating to persons who profess to be happy that those persons are, in fact, not happy with the status quo. This is even more the case now, in developed capitalist societies of material plenty, than it was during the earlier industrial capitalist setting in which Marx wrote. It is rather easier to convince someone impoverished, despite working twelve hours a day in a factory or coal mine, that they are deeply unhappy with their lot than it is to convince someone working seven hours in a cubicle and suffering from no material deprivation at all. So, when an office worker points to their various possessions and various forms of diversion & entertainment and claims to be made happy by these things, do we not risk spouting simple gibberish in saying “No — you don’t really feel happy.” Of course, it may be that this person doesn’t really feel an emotion that they are inclined to call “happiness” and only purports to; however, it is equally possible that they really do  believe themselves happy, and we could never know whether that is the case, so we must proceed assuming that individual’s honesty.

What I suggest to make the idea of “false happiness” a sensible one is that what we (should) mean by it is not that the person whom we are attempting to convince does not actually feel the emotion that they feel, or claim to feel — rather, that there is some other emotion or state of being with which they are not at all familiar, but which they would be much more inclined to call “happiness” if they were aware of it. This is not a nonsensical claim; there may be no practical way to prove it, and less so to prove that a revolution of the proletariat would achieve it, but at least it is not a “meaningless” term.

And you don’t really desire that…You just feel like you do — The concept of a “false desire,” I think, is equally if not more difficult to make sense of. A false desire is something that we are made to believe that we want or need by advertising or socialization. So, for instance, I might not really have any interest in owning a blackberry until I see the U2 commercials for them and am subsequently filled with warm feelings toward the product — But the fact that I didn’t always desire a product doesn’t seem to make the desire that I now feel less real or “true.” In what way, then, could such a desire be false? How can we use the term “false desire” without spouting nonsense?

Before pursuing this specific question I would like to comment quickly on the argumentative tactic of deeming the proposition of another writer or orator “nonsense.” This was the favorite tactic of the logical positivists; indeed, they considered separating nonsensical from sensible claims to be the primary activity of philosophy. When a claim is “nonsense” it is such that it could be neither true nor false, because it has no genuine content or meaning to be proven or falsified. I concede to the positivists that this test may be of use when considering which questions are worthwhile to be pursued by the hard sciences. I also think, however, that to apply it too readily is to lose an opportunity to gain further understanding of the world and of other human beings. Simply put — we generally intend some meaning when we speak, particularly when we make a claim; to analyze the diction used in making that claim, and conclude that because of the way the words were used that the claim had no meaning at all, seems an overhasty and uncharitable form of argumentation…and one lacking in true understanding of the argument’s content. I believe it is therefore, at least sometimes, important to look past the diction of the claim and try to discern what might be intended by the persons who make it.

In this spirit, I will refrain from interpreting a “false desire” as one that the person feeling it does not genuinely feel…because that would actually be nonsense. I will instead make two suggestions, neither of which I am prepared to argue for conclusively at present, as to what might be meant.

We might think that the problem with desiring a Blackberry because of the U2 advertisements is not the absence of true desire, but a confusion about what we desire. If I am lead to believe that purchasing a Blackberry will make me a hip, spontaneous individual, surrounded by likeminded & excited persons…well, that’s unlikely. It is also a desire founded not in the definite uses and properties of the Blackberry, but something else all together. In this sense, I falsely desire a Blackberry; what I really desire is to be accepted by a group of trendy & enthusiastic concert-goers. “False desires” come about in capitalism because advertisers make us desire their products based on qualities which do not actually inhere in those products.

Alternatively, using the way in which I defined “false happiness” above, we could think of false desires as those whose fulfillment leads only to false happiness, while genuine desires terminate in genuine happiness. As it stands, this is not mutually exclusive with my first account of false desires. It might be that those desires based on a false sense of what we are buying give us only a false sense of happiness when they are fulfilled, if any happiness at all; we might feel like we are part of a community because we bought a particular product — and so mistake this sensation for happiness– even thought the feeling of being part of a real community is quite a different sensation and one conducive to true happiness. Of course, I would be loath to suggest that the fulfillment of certain true desires is sufficient for happiness; there could be any number of other factors which make us unhappy — though perhaps those too could be described in terms of unfulfilled true desires.

Materialism v. Consumerism – I recently had a conversation with a friend who doesn’t have much background in philosophy during which we briefly discussed Marx; at some point while we talked, he mentioned that he agreed with Marx that our culture is too materialistic. I believe this is a misinterpretation of Marx, and I suspect that it is a fairly common one.

One could indeed criticize contemporary capitalism for placing too much emphasis on material goods while neglecting spiritual, or otherwise abstract, ones. Again, this may be a legitimate criticism, but it is not Marx’s central criticism. In fact, Marx called his theory of history “dialectical materialism.” His objection to capitalism was not its emphasis on material goods, but on the deeply unjust distribution of them and on the ways in which our use of currency in “free” trade prevents our appreciation, and the flourishing, of material life.

Really, this was just a brief note for any readers who might not be particularly familiar with Marx, but it seemed to me rather an important one.

Look here. You believe something other than what you believe. See?

The Problem at Hand — Beginning in the 19th century the position began to take shape that theories of universal ethics were logically problematic, if not entirely empty of content. Varieties of this position have continued through the 20th and into the 21st centuries. What I mean by the term “universal ethics” is the belief that “good and evil” or “good and bad” are real qualities of actions, just as weight and mass are real qualities of things, and that moral standpoints are true or false independent of human opinion. Many of those (Such as I) who are, more or less, persuaded by arguments against universal ethics are left with a conundrum: we still have moral ideas and intuitions, even if they cannot be validated as universally true, and we would like to be able argue for them, rather than depend on coercion — But how to do this?

One Anti-moral Argument — Before I make a couple of suggestions as to how this might be done, I will present one of an argument for why good and evil are not “real.” I start from the assumption that real things have properties (big, heavy, blue), and these properties endow the object in which they inhere with certain causal powers. So, my Webster’s is made up of a material that reflects red light (the property), which gives it the power of making me perceive it as red, as well as arousing pleasurable aesthetic sensations in me (I like the color red). A cinderblock has the property of being heavy, which give it the power of not being blown away in the wind. The meta-ethical question, then, is whether an action’s being good or bad endows it with any particular causal power.

Now, let us imagine a situation in which one person shoots & murders another; let us say, tentatively, that this is a morally wrong action. How does its being morally wrong change the situation at all? As far as I can tell, it doesn’t. The bullet flies just the same; the killer has just the same chance of getting away with it as if he was somehow morally right in shooting his victim. Of course, an action’s being immoral does appear to have one affect: its affect on someone who sees or hears about the action; they experience moral disgust, or something along those lines. This reaction is, however, incidental to the original moral action in question — it is the person’s belief that the action is immoral, rather than the action’s actual immorality, that causes the disgust. If the person reacting were misguided and looked on murder with admiration, irrespective or its “really” being right or wrong, his reaction would be different.

What about some sort of karma? Though I see no evidence for it, some might hold that person who commits murder will have it repaid to them in some way or another, and the good person will eventually be rewarded. While I believe that this is wishful thinking, it is not something I (or anyone else) can actually disprove, and I will grant it’s hypothetical truth for a moment. I wonder whether this outlook would collapse the terms “right” and “wrong” to sheer meaninglessness, if it all balances out anyway. If all evil comes back in the form of good, how can any action be wrong? It is only that we cannot see far enough to understand its good. There is only a series of fluctuations in a moral equilibrium.

By all means, these arguments are brief, and perhaps even incomplete, but my goal was not to prove definitively that moral positions have no universal truth, only to show how such a position is reasonably tenable.

But…Murder is wrong? — I think that for many, if not most, persons the idea that there are no universal morals is not a liberating but an alarming one. We have many cherished moral ideas, and admire various persons for their moral courage. In short, the fact that murder is not universally wrong does not prompt most us to go out and kill someone we happen to strongly dislike; nor does the knowledge that there is no prohibition against theft written in the stars inspire me to shoplift everything I desire (and not just because there are “some things that money just can’t buy”). Not only that, I would like to convince others who might do something I consider truly reprehensible that they shouldn’t do so. Equally I would like to convince others to perform morally positive actions as I see it.

Reevaluation of the Facts — A. J. Ayer suggests in his essay “Critique of Ethics and Theology,” after having argued for the unreality of moral principles, that debating issues involving ethics is still possible within a certain scope. He writes that, “We do not attempt by our argument to show that he has the ‘wrong’ ethical feeling toward a situation that he has apprehended correctly. What we attempt to show is that he has mistaken the facts about the case.” Ayer holds correctly that this is not only a possible method of arguing ethics, but one of which we regularly make use. Indeed, this is a sensible approach; we might consider some specific action, which we thought immoral, to be in fact excusable, because the motivation for the action in question turns out to be different from what we initially believed, thus making it a different sort of action with different moral implications. For this reason, we are willing to excuse someone who kills in self-defense, whereas if we thought he killed for pleasure we would condemn him both morally and legally. Likewise, we are more willing to partially forgive someone who has been provoked to a fight by “fighting words” than someone who just felting like punching another guy’s lights out.

I think this is a valuable observation by Ayer and that it does provide one method of persuasion in ethically charged situations, without debating the actual goodness or badness of sort of action. Ayer, however, takes this to be the one and only method, because there is no way of convincing persons to change their moral intuitions about some a specific action, or class of actions. Once the situation of an ethical question has been made clear and there is still disagreement, Ayer writes, then “we abandon the attempt to convince him by argument. We say it is impossible to argue with him because he has a distorted or undeveloped moral sense.” Of course, Ayer may mean here not that one cannot persuade another to change his ethical intuitions, but that it cannot be done through purely rational argumentation. This I will grant; I would not grant, however, that it is impossible to convince another to change his moral intuitions by any means other than physical coercion or massive propaganda. This may still be achieved through varieties of partially logical conversation & persuasion.

Self-Contradiction — We might also convince someone by pointing out that his ethical judgment or resolution conflicts with another that he holds. If he is to behave rationally, he must give up or alter one or the other. This may be applied particularly to cases of intended “just” retribution. If a friend is planning to cheat on their spouse in retaliation for being cheated on by the same in the past, we might point out to them that if they are doing it to punish their spouse for behaving immorally toward them then they cannot possibly be behaving morally by doing the very same thing. This might be a convincing argument; on the other hand, this tactic can be overcome by adding a nuance to the moral belief with which the intended behavior appears to conflict. For instance, the retaliatory adulterer may reply that it is only wrong to cheat on someone who is loyal; there is nothing wrong with cheating on a cheater. Therefore, while their spouse behaved immorally, there will be nothing reprehensible about the retaliation.

This “nuance response” may be avoided better by appealing to a more general and more strongly felt or worded principle for the intended behavior to contradict. For example, we could point out to our potentially unfaithful friend that they probably think cruelty is morally problematic, and what they plan to do would be cruel. They might prove more reluctant to nuance such a basic moral standpoint; however, it is entirely possible for them to do so. So we can try another (related) tactic:

Personal Virtue — There is a whole branch of ethics founded in Aristotle’s writings called “virtue ethics,” the focus of which is the sort of person one is, rather than the various specific actions one takes (though these both form and flow from one’s personal virtues & vices). Along these lines, we might challenge our aforementioned friend, asking them not whether their intentions fit with their other ethical principles, but rather with the sort of person they want to be. Would they like to be a vengeful individual, driven by anger?

Alternately, if someone were neglecting to do something which might be morally commendable, for example if they were a terrible miser, we could ask them whether they might not rather be a person of some largesse.

Of course, none of these schemes guarantee the desired result. In particular, if we try to convince someone not to take some action which they deem morally required of them on the basis of personal virtue, they have the option of replying that they do not necessarily want to be the sort of person who takes this action, that it is painful to them, but it is required nonetheless. The film Serenity, for instance, features an antagonist who says of himself that he is an evil man, one who has no place in the better world he is trying to create through terrible means; he has given up his personal virtue for the greater good.

Nonetheless, these styles of persuasion do have the advantage that they do not seek to change the other’s view as to whether some action is truly right, or some moral standpoint really correct, only that it does or does not fit with some principle they already take to be correct.

Implied Principle — I will suggest one more method of argumentation. Here we attempt to convince someone by showing that their specific moral belief implies or necessarily participates in some more general moral principle; we then try to show that this principle is untenable because of other specific moral stances it would compel them to endorse. For instance, some philosophers question whether an interest in art is ever morally justifiable in a world full of privation and suffering; should we not be focusing our resources on ending this suffering before we dedicate our effort to our own aesthetic pleasure? In response, we might hold that this position is based in utilitarian thinking and go on to show that utilitarianism has numerous implications with which the person we are attempting to convince would be uncomfortable.

Argumentation, Persuasion, Coercion — It concerns me that there is something deceptive, and perhaps even ignoble about these forms of persuasion. Indeed, perhaps they are not true argumentation, because they do not seek to arrive at or convince the other person of the actual truth of our moral claims. The goal, in essence, is to pressure them into seeing things our way by making them feel uncomfortable with their previous views, and this seems, at least to me, potentially a little underhanded.

I think that whether these tactics qualify as ignoble or emotionally coercive depends on the way in which they are pursued. It is one thing to point out to another that their moral views conflict, creating a situation in which they may be forced to choose between one or the other. It is another to heavily guilt trip them to one side or another of that internal debate. In the first case, it is wholly their own choice; in fact, we are helping them to refine their moral, and self, understanding. If, on the other hand, we pressure them, we end up foisting our own beliefs on them and outright forcibly changing their moral outlook. On the other hand, perhaps we sometimes must choose between some more outlook of our own and our desire to be honest & straightforward. Perhaps we will find some moral causes worth a little underhandedness?

The Problem at Hand — Beginning in the 19th century the position began to take shape that theories of universal ethics were logically problematic, if not entirely empty of content. Varieties of this position have continued through the 20th and into the 21st centuries. What I mean by the term “universal ethics” is the belief that “good and evil” or “good and bad” are real qualities of actions, just as weight and mass are real qualities of things, and that moral standpoints are true or false independent of human opinion. Many of those (Such as I) who are, more or less, persuaded by arguments against universal ethics are left with a conundrum: we still have moral ideas and intuitions, even if they cannot be validated as universally true, and we would like to be able argue for them, rather than depend on coercion — But how to do this?

One Anti-moral Argument — Before I make a couple of suggestions as to how this might be done, I will present one of various arguments for why good and evil are not “real.” I start from the assumption that real things have properties (big, heavy, blue), and these properties endow the object in which they inhere with certain causal powers. So, my Webster’s is made up of a material that reflects red light (the property), which gives it the power of making me perceive it as red, as well as arousing pleasurable aesthetic sensations in me (I like the color red). A cinderblock has the property of being heavy, which give it the power of not being blown away in the wind. The meta-ethical question, then, is whether an action’s being good or bad endows it with any particular causal power.

Now, let us imagine a situation in which one person shoots & murders another; let us say, tentatively, that this is a morally wrong action. How does its being morally wrong change the situation at all? As far as I can tell, it doesn’t. The bullet flies just the same; the killer has just the same chance of getting away with it as if he was somehow morally right in shooting his victim. Of course, an action’s being immoral does appear to have one affect: its affect on someone who sees or hears about the action; they experience moral disgust, or something along those lines. This reaction is, however, incidental to the original moral action in question — it is the person’s belief that the action is immoral, rather than the action’s actual immorality, that causes the disgust. If the person reacting were misguided and looked on murder with admiration, irrespective or its “really” being right or wrong, his reaction would be different.

What about some sort of karma? Though I see no evidence for it, some might hold that person who commits murder will have it repaid to them in some way or another, and the good person will eventually be rewarded. While I believe that this is wishful thinking, it is not something I (or anyone else) can actually disprove, and I will grant it’s hypothetical truth for a moment. I wonder whether this outlook would collapse the terms “right” and “wrong” to sheer meaninglessness, if it all balances out anyway. If all evil comes back in the form of good, how can any action be wrong? It is only that we cannot see far enough to understand its good. There is only a series of fluctuations in a moral equilibrium.

By all means, these arguments are brief, and perhaps even incomplete, but my goal was not to prove definitively that moral positions have no universal truth, only to show how such a position is reasonably tenable.

But…Murder is wrong? — I think that for many, if not most, persons the idea that there are no universal morals is not a liberating but an alarming one. We have many cherished moral ideas, and admire various persons for their moral courage. In short, the fact that murder is not universally wrong does not prompt most us to go out and kill someone we happen to strongly dislike; nor does the knowledge that there is no prohibition against theft written in the stars inspire me to shoplift everything I desire (and not just because there are “some things that money just can’t buy”). Not only that, I would like to convince others who might do something I consider truly reprehensible that they shouldn’t do so. Equally I would like to convince others to perform morally positive actions as I see it.

Reevaluation of the Facts — A. J. Ayer suggests in his essay “Critique of Ethics and Theology,” after having argued for the unreality of moral principles, that debating issues involving ethics is still possible within a certain scope. He writes that, “We do not attempt by our argument to show that he has the ‘wrong’ ethical feeling toward a situation that he has apprehended correctly. What we attempt to show is that he has mistaken the facts about the case.” Ayer holds correctly that this is not only a possible method of arguing ethics, but one of which we regularly make use. Indeed, this is a sensible approach; we might consider some specific action, which we thought immoral, to be in fact excusable, because the motivation for the action in question turns out to be different from what we initially believed, thus making it a different sort of action with different moral implications. For this reason, we are willing to excuse someone who kills in self-defense, whereas if we thought he killed for pleasure we would condemn him both morally and legally. Likewise, we are more willing to partially forgive someone who has been provoked to a fight by “fighting words” than someone who just felting like punching another guy’s lights out.

I think this is a valuable observation by Ayer and that it does provide one method of persuasion in ethically charged situations, without debating the actual goodness or badness of any sort of action. Ayer, however, takes this to be the one and only method, because there is no way of convincing persons to change their moral intuitions about some a specific action, or class of actions. Once the situation of an ethical question has been made clear and there is still disagreement, Ayer writes, then “we abandon the attempt to convince him by argument. We say it is impossible to argue with him because he has a distorted or undeveloped moral sense.” Of course, Ayer may mean here not that one cannot persuade another to change his ethical intuitions, but that it cannot be done through purely rational argumentation. This I will grant; I would not grant, however, that it is impossible to convince another to change his moral intuitions by any means other than physical coercion or massive propaganda. This may still be achieved through varieties of partially logical conversation & persuasion.

Self-Contradiction — We might also convince someone by pointing out that his ethical judgment or resolution conflicts with another that he holds. If he is to behave rationally, he must give up or alter one or the other. This may be applied particularly to cases of intended “just” retribution. If a friend is planning to cheat on their spouse in retaliation for being cheated on by the same in the past, we might point out to them that if they are doing it to punish their spouse for behaving immorally toward them then they cannot possibly be behaving morally by doing the very same thing. This might be a convincing argument; on the other hand, this tactic can be overcome by adding a nuance to the moral belief with which the intended behavior appears to conflict. For instance, the retaliatory adulterer may reply that it is only wrong to cheat on someone who is loyal; there is nothing wrong with cheating on a cheater. Therefore, while their spouse behaved immorally, there will be nothing reprehensible about the retaliation.

This “nuance response” may be avoided better by appealing to a more general and more strongly felt or worded principle for the intended behavior to contradict. For example, we could point out to our potentially unfaithful friend that they probably think cruelty is morally problematic, and what they plan to do would be cruel. They might prove more reluctant to nuance such a basic moral standpoint; however, it is entirely possible for them to do so. So we can try another (related) tactic:

Personal Virtue – There is a whole branch of ethics founded in Aristotle’s writings called “virtue ethics,” the focus of which is the sort of person one is, rather than the various specific actions one takes (though these both form and flow from one’s personal virtues & vices). Along these lines, we might challenge our aforementioned friend, asking them not whether their intentions fit with their other ethical principles, but rather with the sort of person they want to be. Would they like to be a vengeful individual, driven by anger?

Alternately, if someone were neglecting to do something which might be morally commendable, for example if they were a terrible miser, we could ask them whether they might not rather be a person of some largesse.

Of course, none of these schemes guarantee the desired result. In particular, if we try to convince someone on the basis of personal virtue to not take some action which they deem morally required of them, they have the option of replying that they do not necessarily want to be the sort of person who takes this action, that it is painful to them, but it is required nonetheless. The film Serenity, for instance, features an antagonist who says of himself that he is an evil man, one who has no place in the better world he is trying to create through terrible means; he has given up his personal virtue for the greater good.

Nonetheless, these styles of persuasion do have the advantage that they do not seek to change the other’s view as to whether some action is truly right, or some moral standpoint really correct, only that it does or does not fit with some principle they already take to be correct.

Implied Principle — I will suggest one more method of argumentation. Here we attempt to convince someone by showing that their specific moral belief implies or necessarily participates in some more general moral principle; we then try to show that this principle is untenable because of other specific moral stances it would compel them to endorse. For instance, some philosophers question whether an interest in art is ever morally justifiable in a world full of privation and suffering; should we not be focusing our resources on ending this suffering before we dedicate our effort to our own aesthetic pleasure? In response, we might hold that this position is based in utilitarian thinking and go on to show that utilitarianism has numerous implications with which the person we are attempting to convince would be uncomfortable.

Argumentation, Persuasion, Coercion — It concerns me that there is something deceptive, and perhaps even ignoble about these forms of persuasion. Indeed, perhaps they are not true argumentation, because they do not seek to arrive at or convince the other person of the actual truth of our moral claims. The goal, in essence, is to pressure them into seeing things our way by making them feel uncomfortable with their previous views, and this seems, at least to me, potentially a little underhanded.

I think that whether these tactics qualify as ignoble or emotionally coercive depends on the way in which they are pursued. It is one thing to point out to another that their moral views conflict, creating a situation in which they may be forced to choose between one or the other. It is another to heavily guilt trip them to one side or another of that internal debate. In the first case, it is wholly their own choice; in fact, we are helping them to refine their moral, and self, understanding. If, on the other hand, we pressure them, we end up foisting our own beliefs on them and outright forcibly changing their moral outlook. On the other hand, perhaps we sometimes must choose between some moraloutlook of our own and our desire to be honest & straightforward. Perhaps we will find some moral causes worth a little underhandedness?

- J. Judd

Utilitarianism: I Couldn’t Think of a More Snappy Title

Utilitarian Moral Theory — Utilitarianism is the position that the most moral action in any given situation is that which results in the greatest happiness or pleasure (for oneself and others). What follows is a series of critiques of this theory, as well as evaluations of how problematic those critiques, in fact, are for the theory. Some of these are fairly standard issues, while others– though I am sure someone has made the same observations at one point or another– I arrived at on my own (while others still I thought of on my own and then came across in the work or comments of others). So without further ado, the utilitarian Smörgåsbord (wherein the effort needed to create the dishes does not exceed the pleasure experienced by those who consume them):

For Oracles Only — One fairly common objection is that it is impossible to foresee all the consequences of our actions, including all the pleasure or suffering caused by them tangentially in the distant future, and so the advice to “perform the most beneficial action” can never be followed with certainty. This has always struck me as a strange objection, because we can still perfectly well follow the utilitarian dictum to the best of our knowledge. The fact that our intentions sometimes fail shouldn’t invalidate the value of those intentions. Should we not endeavor, to the best of our limited abilities, to be causes of happiness as opposed to suffering, just because we might cause suffering?

One version of this problem is the hypothetical situation wherein somebody saves Hitler from drowning as a child. It seems as though utilitarianism requires us to condemn the individual who, to the best of his knowledge, was saving a drowning child and could never have known that he was securing years of war and genocide. I think this dilemma may be solved by distinguishing the value of an action from the value of the person performing it. Utilitarianism evaluates, first and foremost, specific actions. As a theory, it really has nothing at all to say about the value of the individuals performing it. A utilitarian takes from this thought experiment, therefore, neither the belief that the person who saves Hitler was a bad human being, nor that one should refrain from saving drowning children because they might grow up to by evil dictators. In general, by saving a child we ensure the presence of another receiver and producer of pleasure; while there is a small chance that the child we save might grow up to inflict terrible suffering far outweighing any pleasure he generates, there is an equal chance that the child will grow up to prevent the next tyrant from coming to power.

Reductio Ad Absurdum — This is an argumentative technique which takes a proposed principal and shows that its implications force us to abandon it as a universal principal. This is a tactic frequently employed against utilitarian theory, usually with the intent of showing that it is inhumane. For example, John Rawls describes a hypothetical practice he calls “telishment,” which consists of charging & punishing random, probably innocent, persons for of a variety of crimes in order to make the public believe that the government effectively keeps law and order, thereby deterring any actual crime, which would cause more suffering than whatever is done to those chosen to be “telished.”

There are a number of other thought-experiment along these lines, for instance the suggestion that utilitarianism would require us to keep a child in a dark, dank room to be beaten daily and then locked up again if it somehow ensured the happiness of everyone else in the community. Even more troubling, it would also suggest that the job of the beating should be given to sadists, since at least they would take pleasure in it, rather than adding the suffering of a guilt-ridden beater to that of the child.

While most of these hypothetical situations revolve around the sacrifice of the individual for a larger number of persons, I think it need not be so. We might imagine, for instance, some irresponsible parent deriving more pleasure spending their money on cocaine than their child would gain from a birthday present bought with the same money. Utilitarianism invites us to be selfish when we can get more pleasure for ourselves than we can give to another by the same effort.

Many of us would be inclined by this sort of argument to decide that Utilitarian theory has gotten something not quite right. Perhaps, as thinkers from Nietzsche to Bernard Williams have suggested, it just doesn’t capture the full range of human experience or moral intuition. It fails to take into account, among a great many other potentially competing values, honor, kindness, friendship, the aesthetic sublime, or maybe even beauty. None of this is to say that it isn’t good general advice to maximize pleasure while avoiding pain, just that it is no more than good general advice, and surely not a universal moral dictum.

The style of argument contra utilitarian thought described above is a persuasive one, however it is flawed in that its persuasive power is essentially emotional; rather than bringing to light a logical flaw within the utilitarian framework, it forces us to doubt the moral intuition underlying utilitarianism. It would be ineffectual against someone who held strongly to their utilitarian intuition in spite of the feelings aroused in them by the various thought-experiments — The reductio style of argument would be unable to prove them wrong.

I’ll provide one more example in this vein, drawing on Schopenhauer. He believed that existence is so full of suffering that all its misery would never be out-weighed by its pleasure. Therefore, he concludes along implicitly utilitarian lines, it would be better never to have been born at all, better still if no human had ever existed. The premise here may or may not be chalked up to Schopenhauer himself being a particularly unhappy person. In either case, it is true that if the primacy of suffering is inevitable, then utilitarianism must recommend the end of the world. This strikes me as the most forceful reductio against utilitarianism, but I will now move on to another problem.

Only Human — Something that came up very frequently in class discussions of utilitarianism is that it is simply too demanding, an observation made especially in reaction to Peter Singer’s utilitarian writings which make it clear just what a true adherent to utilitarianism must sacrifice. In this scheme, one ought to sacrifice one’s own pleasure just up to the point that one’s misery in doing so does not outweigh the happiness of those who benefit from one’s sacrifice. Consider how far an American dollar can go in poorer countries. According to utilitarianism, I am obligated to give away any money (to those whom it will help the most) which does not go toward keeping me alive to produce more money for those for whom it can buy the most. Does utilitarianism class me as an evil individual, my every self-oriented action cementing this? Do we make monsters of ourselves for every pleasure in which we indulge? Is almost every human being that has ever lived deeply morally corrupt?

I would like to restate, at this point, that utilitarianism is a system oriented toward the judgment of actions rather than individuals. We might also consider that feeling guilt, under utilitarianism, is a moral affront, since it is a form of suffering. Still, we might say that our personal value is a reflection of our actions, and so judged, albeit indirectly, by utilitarianism. I think, though, that we are being a tad dramatic if we call ourselves “evil” or “monsters” for failing to maximize our utility; after all, there is quite a bit of moral space between Satan and saint. If we fail to be morally perfect, that is not the same as being monstrous — It is moral imperfection, which I (for my own part) have no problem attributing to humanity in general. If utilitarianism classes human beings as not morally perfect that isn’t a very strong basis for objection.

Now I make an argument with which I agree — We may argue about whether utilitarianism is too strict (in terms of self-sacrifice), or whether it is practically impossible (because of limited knowledge of the future), but I think there is a good case to be made for its logical impossibility as well. Quite simply, I am extremely skeptical of the notion that we can weigh pleasure against pain, like gold against pyrite on some intellectual scale. Let’s say, hypothetically, that we could quantify levels of pleasure as compared to other levels of pleasure based on the number of certain neurotransmitters released and the duration before their re-uptake, and that we could similarly quantify pain. We can’t measure pain against pleasure in the same way, because the comparison depends upon a shared, quantifiable cause. In terms of how the phenomena of pain and pleasure appear to us, what I mean is that they are such different sensations that we can’t really compare them objectively. It is largely a subjective and individual (perhaps even personality-defining) decision how much  pain we will put up with to achieve a certain desired (pleasurable) aim; it is not something we can calculate disinterestedly.

To come back to an example I used earlier, the one involving a child being imprisoned and abused to “magically” secure the fortunes of the rest of the community (a staple thought-experiment for philosophy classes): The issue is not whether the child suffers more than the community gains pleasure; it is that the good fortunes of the community are utterly incomparable.

As I have noted above, none of this is to deny that it is usually better to be a cause of happiness than of suffering; however, I think it is a mistake to believe that this moral intuition is indicative of a moral rule that we can follow to the letter. Perhaps part of the appeal of utilitarian thought is that it frees us from moral anxiety; if we follow through the “hedonistic calculus” (the determination of expected pain versus pleasure resultant from some action) we will know definitely whether our proposed action is right or wrong. I suspect that any system intended to eliminate moral anxiety will prove untenable; uncertainty about or ethical decisions may be as much a part of being human as moral imperfection.

- J. Judd

Utilitarian Moral Theory — Utilitarianism is the position that the most moral action in any given situation is that which results in the greatest happiness or pleasure (for oneself and others). What follows is a series of critiques of this theory, as well as evaluations of how problematic those critiques, in fact, are for the theory. Some of these are fairly standard issues, while others– though I am sure someone has made the same observations at one point or another– I arrived at on my own (while others still I thought of on my own and then came across in the work or comments of others). So without further ado, the utilitarian Smörgåsbord (wherein the effort needed to create the dishes does not exceed the pleasure experienced by those who consume them):

For Oracles Only — One fairly common objection is that it is impossible to foresee all the consequences of our actions, including all the pleasure or suffering caused by them tangentially in the distant future, and so the advice to “perform the most beneficial action” can never be followed with certainty. This has always struck me as a strange objection, because we can still perfectly well follow the utilitarian dictum to the best of our knowledge. The fact that our intentions sometimes fail shouldn’t invalidate the value of those intentions. Should we not endeavor, to the best of our limited abilities, to be causes of happiness as opposed to suffering, just because we might cause suffering?

One version of this problem is the hypothetical situation wherein somebody saves Hitler from drowning as a child. It seems as though utilitarianism requires us to condemn the individual who, to the best of his knowledge, was saving a drowning child and could never have known that he was securing years of war and genocide. I think this dilemma may be solved by distinguishing the value of an action from the value of the person performing it. Utilitarianism evaluates, first and foremost, specific actions. As a theory, it really has nothing at all to say about the value of the individuals performing it. A utilitarian takes from this thought experiment, therefore, neither the belief that the person who saves Hitler was a bad human being, nor that one should refrain from saving drowning children because they might grow up to by evil dictators. In general, by saving a child we ensure the presence of another receiver and producer of pleasure; while there is a small chance that the child we save might grow up to inflict terrible suffering far outweighing any pleasure he generates, there is an equal chance that the child will grow up to prevent the next tyrant from coming to power.

Reductio Ad Absurdum — This is an argumentative technique which takes a proposed principal and shows that its implications force us to abandon it as a universal principal. This is a tactic frequently employed against utilitarian theory, usually with the intent of showing that it is in some way inhumane. For example, John Rawls describes a hypothetical practice he calls “telishment,” which consists of charging & punishing random, probably innocent, persons for of a variety of crimes in order to make the public believe that the government effectively keeps law and order, thereby deterring any actual crime, which would cause more suffering than whatever is done to those chosen to be “telished.”

There are a number of other thought-experiment along these lines, for instance the suggestion that utilitarianism would require us to keep a child in a dark, dank room to be beaten daily and then locked up again if thiese actions somehow ensured the happiness of everyone else in the community. Even more troubling, it would also suggest that the job of the beating should be given to sadists, since at least they would take pleasure in it, rather than adding the suffering of a guilt-ridden beater to that of the child.

While most of these hypothetical situations revolve around the sacrifice of the individual for a larger number of persons, I think it need not be so. We might imagine, for instance, some irresponsible parent deriving more pleasure spending their money on cocaine than their child would gain from a birthday present bought with the same money. Utilitarianism invites us to be selfish when we can get more pleasure for ourselves than we can give to another by the same effort.

Many of us would be inclined by this sort of argument to decide that Utilitarian theory has gotten something not quite right. Perhaps, as thinkers from Nietzsche to Bernard Williams have suggested, it just doesn’t capture the full range of human experience or moral intuition. It fails to take into account, among a great many other potentially competing values, honor, kindness, friendship, the aesthetic sublime, or maybe even beauty. None of this is to say that it isn’t good general advice to maximize pleasure while avoiding pain, just that it is no more than good general advice, and surely not a universal moral dictum.

The style of argument contra utilitarian thought described above is a persuasive one, however it is flawed in that its persuasive power is essentially emotional; rather than bringing to light a logical flaw within the utilitarian framework, it forces us to doubt the moral intuition underlying utilitarianism. It would be ineffectual against someone who held strongly to their utilitarian intuition in spite of the feelings aroused in them by the various thought-experiments — The reductio style of argument would be unable to prove them wrong.

I’ll provide one more example in this vein, drawing on Schopenhauer. He believed that existence is so full of suffering that all its misery would never be out-weighed by its pleasure. Therefore, he concludes along implicitly utilitarian lines, it would be better never to have been born at all, better still if no human had ever existed. The premise here may or may not be chalked up to Schopenhauer himself being a particularly unhappy person. In either case, it is true that if the primacy of suffering is inevitable, then utilitarianism must recommend the end of the world. This strikes me as the most forceful reductio against utilitarianism, but I will now move on to another problem.

Only Human — Something that came up very frequently in class discussions of utilitarianism is that it is simply too demanding, an observation made especially in reaction to Peter Singer’s utilitarian writings which make it clear just what a true adherent to utilitarianism must sacrifice. In this scheme, one ought to sacrifice one’s own pleasure just up to the point that one’s misery in doing so does not outweigh the happiness of those who benefit from one’s sacrifice. Consider how far an American dollar can go in poorer countries. According to utilitarianism, I am obligated to give away any money (to those whom it will help the most) which does not go toward keeping me alive to produce more money for those for whom it can buy the most. Does utilitarianism class me as an evil individual, my every self-oriented action cementing this? Do we make monsters of ourselves for every pleasure in which we indulge? Is almost every human being that has ever lived deeply morally corrupt?

I would like to restate, at this point, that utilitarianism is a system oriented toward the judgment of actions rather than individuals. We might also consider that feeling guilt, under utilitarianism, is a moral affront, since it is a form of suffering. Still, we might say that our personal value is a reflection of our actions, and so judged, albeit indirectly, by utilitarianism. I think, though, that we are being a tad dramatic if we call ourselves “evil” or “monsters” for failing to maximize our utility; after all, there is quite a bit of moral space between Satan and saint. If we fail to be morally perfect, that is not the same as being monstrous — It is moral imperfection, which I (for my own part) have no problem attributing to humanity in general. If utilitarianism classes human beings as not morally perfect that isn’t a very strong basis for objection.

Now I make an argument with which I agree — We may argue about whether utilitarianism is too strict (in terms of self-sacrifice), or whether it is practically impossible (because of limited knowledge of the future), but I think there is a good case to be made for its logical impossibility as well. Quite simply, I am extremely skeptical of the notion that we can weigh pleasure against pain, like gold against pyrite on some intellectual scale. Let’s say, hypothetically, that we could quantify levels of pleasure as compared to other levels of pleasure based on the number of certain neurotransmitters released and the duration before their re-uptake, and that we could similarly quantify pain. We can’t measure pain against pleasure in the same way, because the comparison depends upon a shared, quantifiable cause. In terms of how the phenomena of pain and pleasure appear to us, what I mean is that they are such different sensations that we can’t really compare them objectively. It is largely a subjective and individual (perhaps even personality-defining) decision how much  pain we will put up with to achieve a certain desired (pleasurable) aim; it is not something we can calculate disinterestedly.

To come back to an example I used earlier, the one involving a child being imprisoned and abused to “magically” secure the fortunes of the rest of the community (a staple thought-experiment for philosophy classes): The issue is not whether the child suffers more than the community gains pleasure; it is that the good fortunes of the community are utterly incomparable.

As I have noted above, none of this is to deny that it is usually better to be a cause of happiness than of suffering; however, I think it is a mistake to believe that this moral intuition is indicative of a moral rule that we can follow to the letter. Perhaps part of the appeal of utilitarian thought is that it frees us from moral anxiety; if we follow through the “hedonistic calculus” (the determination of expected pain versus pleasure resultant from some action) we will know definitely whether our proposed action is right or wrong. I suspect that any system intended to eliminate moral anxiety will prove untenable; uncertainty about or ethical decisions may be as much a part of being human as moral imperfection.

- J. Judd

Cyborgs Taste Better

Cyborgs Taste Better

The Cult of Efficiency — It seems to me that there is a spirit of industrious “commonsense” in our (American) culture, partially residual from our puritan origins, which prizes usefulness, while eschewing the “unnecessary.” It is in this spirit that we particularly desire to be efficient in attaining whatever goal we have in mind. No doubt, this is a helpful mindset when undertaking some key task; however, what I wish to suggest is that the significance of the measures designed to increase efficiency in some task should be proportional to the importance of that task, because all gains in efficiency attained by simplifying or streamlining a process also involve as loss of some kind.

Now, not all loss is bad; there are things one is quite happy to be without. For instance, I am glad not to have a broken leg or chicken pox. My point, then, is not some odd brand of Nietzscheanism wherein we make our life as difficult as possible in order to overcome it, though I am equally reticent to accept the proposition from the opposite pole that eliminating all difficulty will make us happier.

So, what I am making a case for is that there are some cases where efficiency is not worth what is lost to achieve it. I will use a couple of personal examples: I recently cleaned out and reorganized my living quarters and came across a number of very nice wooden boxes, a sort of item with which I had a peculiar fascination  as a child. While I no longer feel compelled to buy every small decorative box I can get my hands on, I still find them very aesthetically pleasing and hoped to find a use for them. Eventually, I resolved to use a couple of them to store my wallet and other similar items, and kept them on a shelf in my closet. Now every time I want my wallet, which is fairly often, I have to open up my closet and handle these boxes in order to get it. From a point of view wherein my goal is simply to get my wallet, this is painfully inefficient; I must take the smaller box off of the larger one and put it out of the way on my desk, come back to the closet, finagle the larger box out of its position on my shelf, remove my wallet, and then replace both boxes. Nevertheless, I am happy to do this, because I get to handle and look at these boxes on an almost daily basis.

I’ve also recently taken up baking bread as a hobby. From the point of view where the only goal is to have a fresh loaf of bread to eat, I could more easily do this by buying a bread-kneading machine, or even by driving over to a local bakery 10 minutes away to buy fresh bread there. I enjoy, however, the textures involved in kneading the bread myself, and the progression of tastes and smells from putting the yeast in the water to baking it. While I could easily make more time for myself to do other productive or fun things by using a machine or buying bread, I don’t do so, because the process involved is as much my interest as the final goal of eating a nice whole wheat loaf.

I don’t think that anything I’ve said is particularly radical, but what I’m driving at through it may be novel on some level, if only because most people haven’t thought of it so explicitly: All efficiency is efficiency toward some particular end, while many of our activities do, or could, involve a number of smaller goals and pleasures. Whenever we increase efficiency, we privilege one goal of an activity above the others. If you will permit me a moment of armchair linguistics — even the word “streamline” implies a fluidity or sleekness and therefore a lack of texture. We might say, metaphorically, that efficiency tends to decrease the texture of our lives. As I admitted earlier, some textures are unpleasant and are rightly eschewed; others, however, are not. For example, I would prefer the cotton or wool textures of a sweater for warmth in the winter to the texture of synthetic fibers, even if those synthetics would do a slightly better job of keeping me warm. Being a little cold is worth the texture of a sweater to me. To restate my general observation in another way — If we raise efficiency up as something desirable in itself, we end up being forced to chose only one element of an activity to enjoy and stand to lose quite a bit of variety and pleasure in our lives.

I had a conversation a few years ago with a roommate and friend of mine about efficiency in music. It would be better, he thought, if we could (eventually) program robots to play all of our live music, so that it would be without error, perfectly executed, and all without having to pay the expensive costs of an orchestra or band. At the time, my primary objection was that the technology involved in producing an emotive performance would require so much skilled engineering for each individual instrument, and for each individual piece of music, that the labor and costs involved would be at least as great as the labor saved in getting rid of human musicians, at least until we developed extremely delicate thinking & feeling machines. I think this is a fair response, though I cannot vouch for it entirely, as I am far from an expert in robotics. I have since come up with what I think is, philosophically speaking, a better response along the lines of what I discussed above. Something is lost when we replace our artists with machines; even if the execution of the musical score if without flaw, a great many human beings will have lost the possibility of making a living through the production of beauty. The audience will have lost the pleasure of admiring and even congratulating other human beings for their skill.

There is also a connection to be drawn here with the issue of small business. Very large companies are able to put more leverage on distributors than small, independent shops, and can consequently (if they wish) offer products at lower prices. The shopper, therefore, can save money by buying from larger businesses, and may also save some time if they can get everything from a single store. While this efficiency is gained, entrepreneurialism is at the same time quashed (fewer people will be able to take pride in creating a business), all services rendered are likely to become more impersonal, and those employed are more likely to feel that they are just there for their hourly wage, since they  know neither the persons whom they serve nor their employer. For those who are lucky enough to afford to shop locally, a more genuinely personal experience may be the result, a more textured one perhaps; at the same time, the people working in a local store are kept in business and able to work in what is probably a nicer and more personally rewarding environment.

There are, certainly, some situations in which absolute commitment to a single goal is of crucial importance; however, in day to day life, it seems well worth losing a bit of efficiency to lead a fuller and more varied existence. Most of us already acknowledge this in some of our actions: we may take a longer route to work because it’s a nicer drive; we probably all eat dessert now and then (terribly inefficient healthwise, not to mention the extra exercise we may require of ourselves for it); what about the money we spend on music, or decoration and in general on our aesthetic lives? If we take the high valuation of efficiency to a hypothetical & absurd extreme, we end up with a situation wherein we’d all be producing things, without “wasting” any time enjoying what we or others produce; I don’t mean to imply some slippery slope that actually results in this, only the silliness of taking efficiency as something to be valued in itself. In short — the admiration of austerity and hyperfocus as virtues may lead us to rather less fulfilling existences. Next time someone tells you that you are being “inefficient” as if it’s some terrible crime against reason (unless, perhaps, it’s your boss), this might be something to consider.

Another question — Aren’t humans terribly inefficient in their appreciation of music? At some point in the distant future, couldn’t we replace them with a much more attentive and musicologically knowledgeable group of robots?

The Cult of Efficiency — It seems to me that there is a spirit of industrious “commonsense” in our (American) culture, partially residual from our puritan origins, which prizes usefulness, while eschewing the “unnecessary.” It is in this spirit that we particularly desire to be efficient in attaining whatever goal we have in mind. No doubt, this is a helpful mindset when undertaking some key task; however, what I wish to suggest is that the significance of the measures designed to increase efficiency in some task should be proportional to the importance of that task, because all gains in efficiency attained by simplifying or streamlining a process also involve a loss of some kind.

Now, not all loss is bad; there are things one is quite happy to be without. For instance, I am glad not to have a broken leg or chicken pox. My point, then, is not some odd brand of Nietzscheanism wherein we make our life as difficult as possible in order to overcome it, though I am equally reticent to accept the proposition from the opposite pole that eliminating all difficulty will make us happier.

So, what I am making a case for is that there are some situations where efficiency is not worth what is lost to achieve it. I will use a couple of personal examples: I recently cleaned out and reorganized my living quarters and came across a number of very nice wooden boxes, a sort of item with which I had a peculiar fascination  as a child. While I no longer feel compelled to buy every small decorative box I can get my hands on, I still find them very aesthetically pleasing and hoped to find a use for them. Eventually, I resolved to use a couple of them to store my wallet and other similar items, and kept them on a shelf in my closet. Now every time I want my wallet, which is fairly often, I have to open up my closet and handle these boxes in order to get it. From a point of view wherein my goal is simply to get my wallet, this is painfully inefficient; I must take the smaller box off of the larger one and put it out of the way on my desk, come back to the closet, finagle the larger box out of its position on my shelf, remove my wallet, and then replace both boxes. Nevertheless, I am happy to do this, because I get to handle and look at these boxes on an almost daily basis.

I’ve also recently taken up baking bread as a hobby. From the point of view where the only goal is to have a fresh loaf of bread to eat, I could more easily do this by buying a bread-kneading machine, or even by driving over to a local bakery 10 minutes away to buy fresh bread there. I enjoy, however, the textures involved in kneading the bread myself, and the progression of tastes and smells from putting the yeast in the water to baking it. While I could easily make more time for myself to do other productive or fun things by using a machine or buying bread, I don’t do so, because the process involved is as much my interest as the final goal of eating a nice whole wheat loaf.

I don’t think that anything I’ve said is particularly radical, but what I’m driving at through it may be novel on some level, if only because most people haven’t thought of it so explicitly: All efficiency is efficiency toward some particular end, while many of our activities do, or could, involve a number of smaller goals and pleasures. Whenever we increase efficiency, we privilege one goal of an activity above the others. If you will permit me a moment of armchair linguistics — even the word “streamline” implies a fluidity or sleekness and therefore a lack of texture. We might say, metaphorically, that efficiency tends to decrease the texture of our lives. As I admitted earlier, some textures are unpleasant and are rightly eschewed; others, however, are not. For example, I would prefer the cotton or wool textures of a sweater for warmth in the winter to the texture of synthetic fibers, even if those synthetics would do a slightly better job of keeping me warm. Being a little cold is worth the texture of a sweater to me. To restate my general observation in another way — If we raise efficiency up as something desirable in itself, we end up being forced to chose only one element of an activity to enjoy and stand to lose quite a bit of variety and pleasure in our lives.

I had a conversation a few years ago with a roommate and friend of mine about efficiency in music. It would be better, he thought, if we could (eventually) program robots to play all of our live music, so that it would be without error, perfectly executed, and all without having to pay the expensive costs of an orchestra or band. At the time, my primary objection was that the technology involved in producing an emotive performance would require so much skilled engineering for each individual instrument, and for each individual piece of music, that the labor and costs involved would be at least as great as the labor saved in getting rid of human musicians, at least until we developed extremely delicate thinking & feeling machines. I think this is a fair response, though I cannot vouch for it entirely, as I am far from an expert in robotics. I have since come up with what I think is, philosophically speaking, a better response along the lines of what I discussed above. Something is lost when we replace our artists with machines; even if the execution of the musical score if without flaw, a great many human beings will have lost the possibility of making a living through the production of beauty. The audience will have lost the pleasure of admiring and even congratulating other human beings for their skill.

There is also a connection to be drawn here with the issue of small business. Very large companies are able to put more leverage on distributors than small, independent shops, and can consequently (if they wish) offer products at lower prices. The shopper, therefore, can save money by buying from larger businesses, and may also save some time if they can get everything from a single store. While this efficiency is gained, entrepreneurialism is at the same time quashed (fewer people will be able to take pride in creating a business), all services rendered are likely to become more impersonal, and those employed are more likely to feel that they are just there for their hourly wage, since they  know neither the persons whom they serve nor their employer. For those who are lucky enough to afford to shop locally, a more genuinely personal experience may be the result, a more textured one perhaps; at the same time, the people working in a local store are kept in business and able to work in what is probably a nicer and more personally rewarding environment.

There are, certainly, some situations in which absolute commitment to a single goal is of crucial importance; however, in day-to-day life, it seems well worth losing a bit of efficiency to lead a fuller and more varied existence. Most of us already acknowledge this in some of our actions: we may take a longer route to work because it’s a nicer drive; we probably all eat dessert now and then (terribly inefficient healthwise, not to mention the extra exercise we may require of ourselves for it); what about the money we spend on music, or decoration and in general on our aesthetic lives? If we take the high valuation of efficiency to a hypothetical & absurd extreme, we end up with a situation wherein we’d all be producing things, without “wasting” any time enjoying what we or others produce; I don’t mean to imply some slippery slope that actually results in this, only the silliness of taking efficiency as something to be valued in itself. In short — the admiration of austerity and hyperfocus as virtues may lead us to rather less fulfilling existences. Next time someone tells you that you are being “inefficient” as if it’s some terrible crime against reason (unless, perhaps, it’s your boss), this might be something to consider.

Another Question — Aren’t humans terribly inefficient in their appreciation of music? At some point in the distant future, couldn’t we replace them with a much more attentive and musicologically knowledgeable group of robots?

-J. Judd

If you noticed and were wondering…

I changed my blog’s subtitle from “An Online Philosopher’s Journal” to “A Philosopher’s Online Notebook,” because I discovered there was already a website called “The Examined Life: An Online Philosophical Journal,” from which I wanted to distinguish myself. It also occured to me that “journal” has a variety of meanings, particularly in the academy, and I just thought “notebook” would be clearer.

-J. Judd