Socrates and thinking for yourself

There is a popular picture of Socrates as someone inviting us to think for ourselves. I was just re-reading the Euthyphro, and realizing that the popular picture is severely incomplete.

Recall the setting. Euthyphro is prosecuting a murder case against his father. The case is fraught with complexity and which a typical Greek would think should not be brought for multiple reasons, the main one being that the accused is the prosecutor’s father and we have very strong duties towards parents, and a secondary one being that the killing was unintentional and by neglect. Socrates then says:

most men would not know how they could do this and be right. It is not the part of anyone to do this, but of one who is far advanced in wisdom. (4b)

We learn in the rest of the dialogue that Euthyphro is pompous, full of himself, needs simple distinctions to be explained, and, to understate the point, is far from “advanced in wisdom”. And he thinks for himself, doing that which the ordinary Greek thinks to be a quite bad idea.

The message we get seems to be that you should abide by cultural norms, unless you are “far advanced in wisdom”. And when we add the critiques of cultural elites and ordinary competent craftsmen from the Apology, we see that almost no one is “advanced in wisdom”. The consequence is that we should not depart significantly from cultural norms.

This reading fits well with the general message we get about the poets: they don’t know how to live well, but they have some kind of a connection with the gods, so presumably we should live by their message. Perhaps there is an exception for those sufficiently wise to figure things out for themselves, but those are extremely rare, while those who think themselves wise are extremely common. There is a great risk in significantly departing from the cultural norms enshrined in the poets—for one is much more likely to be one of those who think themselves wise than one of those who are genuinely wise.

I am not endorsing this kind of complacency. For one, those of us who are religious have two rich sets of cultural norms to draw on, a secular set and a religious one, and in our present Western setting the two tend to have sufficient disagreement that complacency is not possible—one must make a choice in many cases. And then there is grace.

Marriage as a natural kind

Thesis: Marriage as a natural kind of relationships is a better theory than marriage as an institution defined by socially instituted rights and responsibilities.

Argument 1: On the institution view, we have to say that people in most other cultures aren't married since they don't have the same socially instituted rights and responsibilities. That's bad, since they say they're married when they learn English. The natural kind view holds, instead, that people in different cultures are referring to the same kind of relationship, but may get wrong what is and is not a part of the relationship.

We do not automatically accept educational credentials from other cultures. Thus, being medically educated in France does not automatically make one count as medically educated in the U.S. And being medically educated in 5th century France would make one not one whit medically educated in 21st century France (imagine a 5th century doctor who travels in time). In other words, being medically educated is always indexed to a set of standards. But we don't think of marriage in this way, with a few notable exceptions, such as polygamy or same-sex marriage. Getting married in India is sufficient for being married in France. Why? If one thinks of getting married as assenting to a set of rights and responsibilities, then getting married in India shouldn't be sufficient for being married in France, or vice versa.

Argument 2: The natural kind view explains how we can individually and as a society discover new rights and responsibilities involved in marriage. The institution view leads either to constant abolishment of the old institution and replacement with a new one, or to a stale conservatism. We learn about the rights and responsibilities of marriage experientially and not just a priori or by poring over legal tomes. That is how it is with a natural kind like water.

Argument 3: Suppose we see someone from a patriarchal culture who is failing to care for his sick wife (or at least someone he calls a wife). We might well say: "It's your duty as a husband to take care of her." On the institution view, he can respond: "No, it isn't. It would be my duty to take care of her if I were her husband-per-American-rules, but I am her husband-per-Patriland-rules, and in Patriland wives take care of their husbands and husbands do not need to take care of their wives." But on the natural kind view, we can say: "You tried to marry her, and marriage does require taking care of a sick spouse, regardless of who is of what sex. So either you succeeded at marrying, in which case you have this responsibility, or you failed at marrying, in which case you don't have the rights you thought you gained." On the institution view all we can say is: "You're in a corrupt and sexist institution, and you should divorce to stop supporting it. By the way, you're right that you have no role duty to take care of her."

Argument 4a (for conservatives): If you take the institution view, you play into Wedgwood's argument for same-sex "marriage".

Argument 4b (for liberals): If you take the institution view, you cannot advocate same-sex marriage, but only same-sex "marriage". You have to adopt the very revisionery position that marriage should be abolished, albeit replaced with something very much like it, namely marriage*, since marriage is defined by the social understanding, and that has included opposition of sexes. Moreover, such a view leads to unhappy consequences. Once we have replaced marriage with marriage*, we can't say that our grandparents are married*, only that they are married, and since marriage* is the only relationship available after the revision, you can't do what your grandparents did. Moreover, even allowing our grandparents to stay married is problematic if marriage is an unjust institution. So probably the state needs to dissolve their marriage, leaving it up to them whether to marry*. This is a politically untenable and unhappy view. A much better view is that marriage is a natural kind, and we were simply wrong in thinking marriage is only for people of the opposite sex. This (and Argument 3, too) is a species of the general point that relativistic theses run the danger of leading to stale conservatism.

Sexual ethics and moral epistemology

Let A be the set of all the sexual activities that our society takes to be wrong. For instance, A will include rape, voyeurism, adultery, bestiality, incest, polygamy, sex involving animals, sex betweeen adults and youth, etc. Let B be the set of all the sexual activities that our society takes to be permissible. For instance, B will include marital sex, contracepted marital sex, premarital sex, etc.

Now there is no plausible philosophical comprehensive unified explanatory theory of sexuality that rules all the actions in A wrong and all the actions in B permissible. There are comprehensive unified explanatory theories of sexuality that rule all the actions in A wrong but that also rule some of the actions in B wrong—the various Catholic theories do this—as well as ruling same-sex sexual activity wrong (which isn't in B at this point). There are also comprehensive unified explanatory theories of sexuality that rule all the actions in B permissible but that also rule a number of the actions in A permissible—for instance, theories that treat sex in a basically consequentialist way do this.

If this is right, then unless a completely new kind of theory can be found, it looks like we need to choose between three broad options:

1. Take all the actions in A to be forbidden, and revise social opinion on a number of the actions in B.
2. Take all the actions in B to be permissible, and revise social opinion on a number of the actions in A.
3. Revise social opinion on some but not all of the actions in A and on some but not all of the actions in B.

Moreover, the best theories we have fall into (1) or (2) rather than (3). So given our current philosophical theories, our choice is probably between (1) and (2).

It is an interesting question how one would choose between (1) and (2) if one had to. I would, and do, choose (1) on the grounds that typically we can be more confident of prohibitions than of permissibles, moral progress being more a matter of discovery of new prohibitions (e.g., against slavery, against duelling, against most cases of the death penalty) than of discovery of new permissions.

It is somewhat easier to overlook a prohibition that is there than to imagine a prohibition that isn't there. An action is permissible if and only if there are no decisive moral reasons against the action. Generally speaking, we are more likely to err by not noticing something that is there than by "noticing" something that isn't there: overlooking is more common than hallucination. If this is true in the moral sphere, then we are more likely to overlook a decisive moral reason against an action than to "notice" a decisive moral reason that isn't there. After all, some kinds of moral reason require significant training in virtue for us to come to be cognizant of them.

If this is right, then prima facie we should prefer (1) to (2): we should be more confident of the prohibition of the actions in A than of the permission of the actions in B.

It would be interesting to study empirically how people's opinions fall on the question whether to trust intuitions of impermissibility or to trust intuitions of permissibility. It may be domain-specific. Thus a stereotypical conservative might take intuitions of impermissibility to be more reliable than intuitions of permissibility when it comes to matters of sex, but when it comes to matters of private property may take intuitions of permissibility to be more reliable, and a liberal might have the opposite view. But I think one should in general tend to go with intuitions of impermissibility.

A certain kind of conservative

There is—and if there isn't, we can imagine her—a certain kind of conservative who both likes to have laws prohibiting various kinds of behavior that she takes to be immoral and in the name of freedom believes in a small government and is opposed to much government regulation in business (e.g., minimum wage laws) and other areas of life. The position seems inconsistent or at least ad hoc: she opposes certain kinds of regulation but not others. (It is sometimes said that people like want to have the freedom to do the things they like, but not to give others the freedom to do the things they like, but that is an unkind jibe, for instance because such a person might well want, for the good of her own soul, that the state prohibit immoral behaviors that she herself is tempted towards.)

I will argue that, whatever the substantive merits of positions like that, the position can be quite consistent, and indeed the restriction of immoral activity is quite consistent with setting a high value on civil freedom.

For it may well be that the activities that our conservative wishes to prohibit are ones that she takes to be absolutely wrong in all cases. Now it is possible to value civil freedom, without valuing the civil freedom to do what is wrong. Rather, one might value the civil freedom to choose between multiple morally permissible options. One might hold that no civil freedom worth having is lost to one through a prohibition on what would anyway be wrong to do.

However, the regulations that this conservative opposes on the grounds of the value of liberty are ones that prohibit, or at least penalize, activities some instances of which would be morally permissible but for the law. Consider, for instance, a minimum wage law. While there is a moral duty to pay a just wage, it is false that absent such a law it is always wrong to pay less than $5.85 per hour to an American worker in our day. It is not wrong, for instance, to pay $4 per hour to a kid who has no need for the money, who wants to work to get some experience, and whose productivity is significantly below that of an older worker. It is not wrong to pay workers $4 per hour if the owner is only making $4 per hour herself and the only available alternative for the business is to go broke and leave the workers destitute. The latter case is pretty rare but physically possible, but the former is less rare. In any case, it is clear that the minimum wage law prohibits some activities that are reasonably taken by our conservative not to be independently immoral, and indeed I suspect that even the proponents of such a law (I have no principled problem with minimum wage laws) are going to agree.

Our conservative takes the regulations she opposes to make illegal, or at least penalize, some actions that otherwise would have been morally unexceptionable. Moreover the proponents of the legislation are going to agree about this fact. They will, however, insist either that in most cases the activities prohibited or penalized would be wrong, or that some of the evils prohibited or prevented by the legislation are so great that it is worth prohibiting some otherwise permissible activities to prohibit these evils, or that great social goods are promoted by the legislation. The conservative lover of civil freedom will not be impressed, but may insist that we should leave unprohibited ten wrong actions rather than prohibit one permissible action just as we should leave unpunished ten guilty people rather than punish one innocent one.

Observe, too, the following. Legislation that prohibits something that is already immoral (e.g., fornication or unjustified breach of contract) does not decrease the number of actions that are morally open to one. But legislation that prohibits some actions that are not already immoral does decrease the number of actions that are morally open to one—for while the action wasn't immoral before the legislation was put in place, it becomes immoral afterwards to do it, since we are morally bound to obey the state (within certain limits). So it is quite consistent to believe in civil freedom, and to attack all kinds of otherwise reasonable laws on the grounds that they limit civil freedom, while yet wanting to prohibit fornication, unjustified breach of contract, suicide, medically unnecessary amputations, etc., as long as one believes the latter actions to be always wrong.

I am not saying that the position I described is above criticism. I think in any well-run state, we will need a lot of legislation that prohibits antecedently morally permissible activities (such as driving on the left side of the road). But at least it should be clear that one can consistently call for legal prohibitions on some activities one takes to be immoral while setting a very high value (perhaps too high a value) on civil freedom.