Just some stuff I’ve been thinking about for my own records. It gets more inside baseball the further it goes, beware.
The integrity to be a nobody
One form of integrity we don’t talk about is the integrity to be a nobody. The kind of integrity you need to keep doing the right thing while aware that you’ll die unknown. The grit to go on when you know you’ll not touch your dreams. A necessary attribute given that if humans set their dreams in competitive terms -and they do- the vast majority of people cannot reach their wildest dreams. Not becoming bitter, not losing sight of the good that you can still do while honestly facing the reality that you’ve hit the limits of your success, there’s quiet integrity in that.
For many of us, this kind of integrity won’t be much of an issue because our desire to reach the mountaintops was only ever tepid. Yet in a world in which one-third of children say they want to be a YouTuber, and stardom seems, in some ways, closer to us ordinary people than ever, perhaps this form of integrity is becoming more important. However, it’s a kind of integrity we’re not taught because it doesn’t suit the omnipotence-through-self-esteem doctrine.
I suspect that a chunk of sins, small and big, interlace with failures of this sort of integrity. Especially from people who have hit a ceiling, but clearly wanted to go higher- C listers, wanna-be stand-up comedians with 4000 Twitter followers, academics slowly realizing that they’re not the next Kant- that sort of thing. These sorts of people cluster together in certain sorts of places, you can meet few of them in a life, or you can have the misfortune of running into a mass of them.
I wonder if a component of school shootings- particularly shootings where the shooter seems to be just doing the most horrific thing they can rather than taking revenge on specific students- is about a failure of this sort of integrity, a refusal to fade. The kind of person who wants to be the main character of a story, even if it means changing the genre to slasher.
Disclaimer: This should go without saying, but none of these speculations are intended to deny the primary role of other factors like gun access, pervasive social nihilism, etc. Any account of why there are so many shooting in America must explain why it is different from other countries, and nothing I said above does that- although I must admit I think the failure of this sort of integrity might be more common in America than other places because of the American emphasis on individualistic success. At most it is a proximal cause for some offenders, the broader social picture is more important from a policy perspective.
A few crazy legal takes of mine
1. If you're incarcerated for any length of time (whether imprisoned or jailed awaiting trial), and later found not guilty for any reason, the state should owe you a minimum of 100,000 per year pro-rata (a pretty standard cost of life year) plus lost earnings.
2. We need to make "beyond reasonable doubt" actually mean what it says- at least a minimum 99% certainty of guilt and not the sloppy 95 to 80% it often seems to mean at the moment. This means a lot of cases will be impossible to prosecute. We should resign ourselves to this.
3. If ordinary, not-crazy non-professionals can argue about whether someone is guilty with a straight face, they probably aren't guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, because (presumably) reasonable people are seriously doubting it.
Interlude: Okay, let me say something extra about 2 & 3. I’m genuinely not sure whether I believe them but I think that a fair-minded consideration of the ideas animating the legal system pushes us towards them. If we don’t buy these, we need to be honest and sell up certain other parts of our belief system.
4. If you're drafting a criminal law, stop and think "could a basically good-natured person fall afoul of this law"? Do some research to supplement your intuitions. If the answer is yes, a basically good-natured person could fall afoul, go back and redraft it so there's no way.
Combine all these and you get- all of the criminal law should be built around treating a more-or-less good person being imprisoned as a nightmare scenario should almost never happen. But this shouldn't be used as an excuse to mistreat those who are imprisoned either!
5. Victims are matter, but the criminal process isn't the right way to give them the support they need. For one thing, the guilty party might be found not guilty due to the high standard of proof. Support should be given elsewhere, outside the legal process. The legal process can't, and shouldn't be expected to, give victims "closure".
6. Victims should have no say in the degree of punishment someone is given because how badly you are punished shouldn't depend on how merciful your victim is. For one thing, that gives you an incentive to attack extra nice people, which seems perverse.
7. Often those of us who oppose prison abolition, at least in the short term, are more committed to mercy than those who support it. Many abolitionists write off violent offenders and don't even think about them in their utopias. Some even suggest killing rapists and murderers. While those of us who support reform have thought about these hard cases- of the serially violent- and come to grips with the reality that reintegrating these people will probably require a period of incapacitation.
8. The American system where there are very different defamation rules for celebrities and everyone else is roughly correct, but public figure needs to be made a much smaller class. Within this class (e.g. members of parliament) it should be almost impossible to sue for defamation. Basically- the fact that Dutton's case was even able to get as far as it did- Dutton, an Australian politician, suing for being called a rape apologist by an ordinary citizen on Twitter and only losing on appeal- was a disgrace.
9. One of the greatest indictments of our society is that we've made prison rape a joke. I'm not interested in having a go at individuals who crack jokes about it, but rather a culture that has basically decided it's acceptable for prisoners to be raped. If there is a God may he have mercy upon us for this gross abuse.
10. A lot of the problem with the law is what Alexandra Erin calls the Shirley Exception- writing a law that could be used very harshly because “surely (don’t call me Shirley) the cops, prosecutors, and judges will apply it reasonably”. On the contrary, criminal law should be written on the assumption that it’s going to be enforced, prosecuted, and judged by malicious individuals trying to use it to harm essentially decent people or get up quotas because sometimes it will be.
A law is only as good as its worst use case.
An idea for a novel
Magic starts working. Specifically, all different kinds of magic start working, from practical Kabbalah to shamanic vision quests to crystal-healing-woo to stage magic (it now produces real mystical effects). An upshot of this is that the most powerful people in society are those who were once marginal- from schizophrenics to astrology mums. The fantasy premise is used to explore the social and personal implications of the sudden replacement of one set of elites with another.
Why ethical truth must be lo ba-shamayim hi
A while ago I scandalized a group I am a part of, made up of academic ethicists, but giving the following argument for moral anti-realism:
If moral realism were true, I could be wrong about fundamental ethical questions, even after having given the matter full consideration.
This would mean that I might be morally obliged to do something that I would find ethically revolting.
It’s absurd to imagine that I might be morally obliged to do something revolting.
Therefore moral realism must be false.
This scandalized these professional philosophers. The main objection they had was why in God’s name would anyone think that it’s absurd they might be morally obliged to do something they find revolting. The slaveowners might be revolted at the thought of giving up their slaves, can they, therefore, know that they’re not obliged to?
Well, let me try to motivate the general sentiment and then I’ll respond to the slaveowner case.
I no longer think that the argument proves the truth of anti-realism. Rather, I think it proves that ethics must be internal to us and who we are in a certain sense- that all (fundamental) ethical claims not involving empirical judgments need to be decided is already in the person. This is compatible with certain versions of realism, for example, Kantianism. It is not compatible with other views though, for example, the Moorean view that there is an external moral universe that we access through intuition. One might say that ethical truths must be lo ba-shamayim hi- not in heaven, but rather very near to us, so near to us as to not be separate from us.
Now I have decided that the earth revolves around the sun. Nonetheless, it is possible that I am wrong about this. I’ve also decided that we are not enclosed in a crystal sphere. I could be wrong about either of these, even if I thought about them really hard. Indeed, in a sense, almost any arbitrary empirical proposition could turn out to be true or false, even if it’s unlikely. The moon could be made of cheese. There’s a certain minimal sense in which the moon being made of cheese will always be on the table.
It seems to me that this kind of minimal possibility that I could be wrong doesn’t attach to a statement like “it is intrinsically noble to kill and eat all your second cousins”. Not only is this clearly false, but it’s also not on the table even in the very minimal sense that the moon being made of cheese is on the table. Even if I thought hard about the moon, I could be wrong, but if I thought hard about cousin eating- and considered every angle and every possible contradiction in my own views, and then came to the conclusion cousin eating was not mandated, if I considered it under ideal conditions, then I couldn’t be wrong.
Now I suppose we could explain this by appealing to the idea that I have a moral sense that is less fallible than my physical senses, but I don’t find that plausible. It seems to me that the best way to explain the fact that I can be so confident of this from the armchair is that stuff that is with me in the armchair is what is making it true. A view that makes ethics internal then is supported by this argument.
Slaveowner case
Doesn’t this view imply that the Slaveowner is right to think he can’t be obliged to give up his slaves? Not necessarily. We might think that if the slaveowner really thought about it, he’d see that his own views on other moral questions oblige him to give up his slaves. This is what the Kantian would say about the case for example. But that seems like a faint hope to me. I can imagine a fully consistent slaveowner. I must reluctantly agree then that my view implies the slaveowner can be certain in their slave-owning (although it is possible that most actual slaveowners couldn’t be so consistent).
So how can I possibly say that the slaveowner is right to think he can’t be obliged to give up his slaves? To explain this I need to spell out my metaethical view.
I’m an ideal conditions subjectivist about morality. Roughly, I think that to assert P is good is to assert that you would approve of P under ideal conditions (infinite time for consideration, omniscience etc). It is really a statement about the dispositions of your own will.
Now in the Slaveowner case, I’d say yes, it is impossible for this hypothetical slaveowner to be unknowingly obligated to give up their slaves. So long as they’ve thought about it thoroughly, achieved equilibrium with all the possible contradictions it creates with their other beliefs and so on, it seems to me absurd to think they might be secretly obliged to do this. Of course, when I’m looking at it from my perspective, they are obliged to give up their slaves. How? on my metaethical view ethical statements are basically statements about your own will, or what your own will would be under suitable conditions of reflection. For me to say “you’re morally obliged to give up your slaves” just means “I want you to give up your slaves, and would still want it even if I thought really hard about it”. For them to say “I’m not obliged to give up my slaves” just means “I do not want to give up my slaves and would not want to give up my slaves even if I thought really hard about it”.
A consequence of this view is that, despite grammatical and semantic appearances, when I say “the slaveowner is obliged to give up his slaves” and the slaveowner says “I am not obliged to give up my slaves” we are not actually contradicting each other in a formal sense- although we are stating the clash of our wills. This is counterintuitive, and a blow against the ideal conditions subjectivist. However, I think the merits of the theory mean it’s worth biting this bullet, for reasons I won’t get into here.
I should also briefly say something about metametaethics- or the theory of what makes a metaethical theory a good theory. For me, ideal conditions subjectivism is a way of trying to make sense of ethical language and thought. It preserves some of our uses for ethical language and fails to preserve others. Other theories might have their own suite of advantages and disadvantages- for example, error theory. For me, there is no fact of the matter as to which view is right it’s just a question of how you, personally, choose to construe ethical language, in light of the sad truth that no metaethical theory can give us everything we want.
The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, a case study from my own life
I once heard an account of a philosopher -whom I will not name because I could not find the original and I do not want to falsely attribute anything to her- who, if memory serves, considered this case:
Suppose that you are a physician. You only have one vial of medicine and a patient who will die if they do not take it. You are about to prescribe the medicine to that patient when a colleague knocks on the door with a nervous cough. Your colleague explains that approaching the hospital in an ambulance are two people with the same condition. They will need a lower dose than the patient you are currently seeing, but they will also die without the medicine. Thus, you have a choice, reserve the medicine for these two patients, saving two lives and not saving one, or finish prescribing the medicine to your current patient, saving one life and not saving two.
She argued, that you have no obligation to stop prescribing the medicine to your current patient. He is your patient. You have special duties to him. The two in the ambulance might soon also be your patients, but they are not yet your patients. Thus you do not have special responsibilities to them.
A lot of clinicians think like this. Once someone is your patient, they’re your problem. You have to feel guilty about not being able to do your absolute best for them. Before they are your patient though, you have no such obligations thus, you can get out of tricky ethical situations where you wouldn’t be able to do your best for someone by not taking them on as a patient or by delaying when they become your patient.
To my mind this is poppycock.
It seems rather like, in spirit, what is sometimes called the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics.:
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it
And, as an extension, when you don’t observe or interact with it, you cannot be blamed for it.
I want to give a first-hand account of what this type of thinking, in practice leads to, particularly in a medical context. Someone else, probably less well paid than the physician or clinician, getting their hands dirty on your behalf.
Some details have been changed to protect the innocent and mostly innocent. Several years ago, I worked for an orthotics clinic. The first person someone saw as a result of being referred to the clinic was the orthotist. Some patients, perhaps about 65% of them, also saw a specialist doctor in the clinic. Nominally the specialist doctor was the head of the clinic, in practice, the senior orthotist ran it.
Now the law where I live is that a specialist doctor can refer someone to allied health, but not to another specialist doctor. The patient needs to go back to their GP for a referral to another specialist. We would often get specialist referrals to our program because it was largely an allied health program, but we would have to contact these patients and tell them “thank you for your referral, but we need you to go get a GP referral if you want to see us”. Now a lot of prospective patients reacted very badly to this because they were desperate to see us, in many cases had already waited a long time, and I was the hapless receptionist tasked with being the bearer of bad news.
After a while, I suggested to my boss, the senior orthotist, the following plan. Due to a loophole in the rules, we could let the patient see an orthotist off the bat with a specialist referral. The only thing we couldn’t do was send them to the clinic specialist, but we could tell them to get a GP referral for that. Let them at least see the orthotist while they wait for a GP referral to the clinic specialist.
My boss said no. Here was his reasoning- while it was safe for him to see a patient without them also seeing a specialist, some of his patients badly needed to see a specialist. He couldn’t be in a position of “gatekeeping” them from that, just because they didn't have the right type of referral. He needed to be able to make decisions about his patients and whether they saw the specialist right away purely on a clinical basis, not on the basis of billing considerations.
In effect, best not to see those patients at all, because if I see them, I’ll feel guilty about not being able to send them to the specialist right away.
The thought that not seeing them at all left him morally liable for them not seeing either the specialist or the orthotist on his hands didn’t seem to occur. So long as they weren’t (yet) his patients they were off his hands.
I want to be clear, also, that this wasn’t a medico-legal thing. It would have been perfectly legal for the patients to see an orthotist without that orthotist having the option to immediately send them to a specialist. Nor was any of this required by our institution’s policies. I also did admin for another hospital orthotics clinic that didn’t have a specialist doctor at all but was identical in the patients it saw, and otherwise identical in structure. Nor was this a concern about patient rapport- the patients weren’t gagging to see the specialist, they were coming to the clinic for the othortist. He wouldn’t have to argue with many, if any, of them about it. The policy I suggested would create few awkward conversations for the senior orthotist, certainly far, far fewer than the status quo entailed for me. He just didn’t want to ever be in a position where someone was in front of him, he could do something for them, except he couldn’t really do it for billing reasons.
Now the worst thing about this ruling is that it made patients suffer. But that’s just the standard objection to Copenhagen ethics thinking, and more generally to deontological approaches in ethics, which focus on keeping “clean hands” rather than trying to do as much good for the world as possible. I want to say something about what I find particularly frustrating and hypocritical about this.
It would be a mistake to say that this was a strategy to keep clean hands generally. This was a strategy to keep his hands clean. The gatekeeping didn’t go away, he just pushed it onto someone else, someone else with less pay and authority than himself. I had to have the difficult conversations about how, yes, of course, it was silly that the patient had to go and get a GP referral, and yes, I knew they were in pain, and yes, for the 60,000th time I am quite certain that this is the policy, and no, there was nothing I could do about it.
I don’t think my situation is unique. I think it’s common for strategies for keeping ethically “clean hands” to amount to pushing the muck out onto someone else. If you try to set things up so that you always get to feel like the good guy, not only are you failing to do all the good you could, but often, vampire-like, you’re draining someone else’s self-conception of virtue.
(Another example of the pushing the dirt onto someone else strategy: Think of the parent who never says no to their child, but gets away with it by always sending them to "ask their mother" or ask their father" who is then forced to be the bad guy. A lot of people who have arranged things so they never need to be an ogre have done so by forcing someone else to be the ogre.)
Grizzly-Salmon conjecture
I ran into this while I was working on my thesis and promptly banged my head on it. I’m going to put this in a really butchered and disjointed way because I don’t have the maths chops. Still, at least I find it interesting.
Consider a series of hidden states S1, S2, S3… SN where each is a real, unknown number.
For each of these hidden states, we have an indicator I1, I2, I3… IN which is a real, known number.
We know that, in expectation, the larger I1, the larger S1.
We know that, in expectation, if something increases the value of I1, it increases the value of S1.
We have no evidence whatsoever about the value of S1 except the value of I1. As far as we know, it’s impossible for us to get any such evidence.
We want to choose the right policy to maximize the average value of some subset of hidden states, say S1, S2 and S3. I conjecture that we should select the policy that maximizes the average value of the corresponding subset of indicator states (I1, I2 and I3).
I also (kind of by analogy with Lerner’s theorem) make the strong Grizzily-Salmon conjecture. If we want to maximize some additively separable, function on S1, S2, and S3 which is weakly concave in each component, we should choose the policy which maximizes the same function, but for I1, I2, and I3.
I’d suggest that if this is true, it’s presumably also true that your best guess about the value of S1/S2 is I1/I2. In other words, our guesses as to the magnitude of the hidden variables relative to each other should be the values of the known variables relative to each other.
I think we always wrestle with the need to convict the guilty and punish the innocent, but I don't think "beyond reasonable doubt" really means 99% certainty, no reasonable person could disagree. That's certainly not how it's been interpreted in the past, and reasonable people can have some very wild opinions so that doesn't seem particularly practical.
Perhaps I'm too pessimistic, but I think the law will always be constrained by the fact that it needs to be a more appealing option than just settling the matter through private violence. When the state is weak or unwilling to intervene, you don't just get people reconciling peacefully, you get blood feuds, honor killings and lynch mobs. If the criticism of the justice system is that it's institutionalised revenge, then the counterpoint is that privatised revenge cares even less for due process and a fair trial.
I am a fan of restorative justice, like most people I love a good "former criminal turns his life around" storyline (in fiction or in real life) and it's depressing whenever justice systems don't have that as their primary aim. We just don't really know how to make a process of internal change and transformation scale, and I'd be far more interested if prison abolitionists took that question seriously rather than just dismissing it. Generally the assumption just seems to be that crime won't happen if we just raise quality of life enough, which is definitely not how people work.
I'll stand by moral realism, at the very least I think it's a useful to treat moral values as something that must be discovered rather than just invented. At the very least, I'm sure I could present an argument that would seem compelling to a slaveholder that slavery is wrong by appealing to existing moral intuitions, although that doesn't mean the slaveholder will necessarily agree. It just seems more productive to treat this as something we can disagree on while still pursuing a shared goal.
The penultimate point is probably why I like Utilitarian ethics so - it often gets described as cold and uncaring, but I think that putting the focus on the actual outcome rather than on the person doing/not doing the action is the best antidote for our naturally self-centered view of things.