Negligence

Negligence is thought to be a problem for motive-based (desire-based) moral theories.

The reason is because negligence does not spring from any bad motive or desire. A farmer wants to get his hay to a neighboring farm. He does not want to make two trips - a perfectly common motive - so he stacks all of the hay on the trailer. Along the way, a few bails of hay at the top of the poorly secured stack fall off. They bounce into oncoming traffic where they cause a wreck.

The farmer is considered negligent and condemned for his actions. Yet, they spring from no bad motive - a desire to get the hay to a neighboring farm without taking two trips.

One task for somebody seeking to defend a motive (desire) based theory is to explain the moral category of negligence.

Henry Sidgwick, a philosopher at the start of the 20th century, used the problem of negligence to challenge the motive-based theory of James Martineau - and to defend act utilitarianism as a better theory.

Martineau argued that what matters in judging an action is not its consequences but the motives of the agent. According to Martineau, each motive comes with its own intrinsic value. We could know this value by calmly reflecting on the matter. God wrote this knowledge into the human brain at creation, and we have access to this information at moments if quiet reflection - prayer or meditation. Whenever we have a choice among two possible actions, our moral task is to determine the motive for each option, then choose the action that springs from the best motive.

According to Sidgwick, the moral concept of negligence proves that consequences are what matter in evaluating an action, not the value of the motive from which it sprang. Negligence springs from no bad motive. Yet, it is condemned. The reason it is judged harshly, Sidgwick tells us, is because of its consequences.

Yet, Sidgwick's response has its own problems.

One problem is that the farmer is guilty of negligence even if he does no harm. One can tell the farmer that it is wrong to stack the hay so high because it is dangerous even before the farmer leaves with the load. If the bails fall when there is no traffic, and the farmer clears the road before anybody is hurt, this does not allow him to escape the moral charge. Even if no bails fall and he reaches his destination safely then, like the person who drove drunk but arrived home safely, he can still be condemned for his negligence.

Nor is the farmer to be condemned just for creating a risk of bad consequences. Let us assume that one of the tires was made of substandard materials such that even a normal load would risk having the tire blow, causing a wreck. In this case, assume that the farmer did not overload the trailer but decided to make two trips. In this case, farmer is creating a risk. However, he is not guilty of negligence precisely because he has no way of knowing about the risk.

Here, then we have examples of condemnation without bad consequences, and bad consequences without condemnation, both of which create problems for the act-consequentialst.

Desirism differs from Martineau's theory in a number of ways. One important difference is that desirism evaluates motives (desires) according to their malleability and the degree to which they tend to objectively satisfy or thwart other desires. It does this because morality is concerned with applying social tools such as praise and condemnation to promote desires that tend to objectively satisfy other desires, and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires.

On this system, a right act is not necessarily an act that comes from good desires. It is the act that a person with good desires would perform. We do not say that the person who rescues a drowning child because he wants a reward should have let the child drown. We still say that rescuing the child was the right thing to do. However, we condemn the rescuer when he demands the reward or reports that, "If I had known I would not have been rewarded I would not have rescued the child." In these cases, we do not condemn him for rescuing the child (which still remains the right thing to do) but for the attitudes he has towards that rescue.

In the case of negligence, the good person would have sufficient concern for the well-being of others that he would have investigated potential threats and taken precautions against those threats he could predict. In this, an agent can be condemned not only for bad motives that are present, but for good motives that are lacking or nearly lacking. The reason is because condemnation is being used to build those good desires - in this case, an aversion to actions that bring harm to others. The moral crime that the farmer is guilty of is that of not caring enough about the interests of others. This concern is one that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote.

We hear this in the language of condemnation. "You should be more careful." What motivates carefulness? A genuine concern not to cause harm to others.

This account also handles the two cases that the act-utilitarian has problems with. The negligent person who, by luck, causes no harm still deserves condemnation because he did not care enough to prevent the risk. The person who causes harm by putting a normal load on a trailer with a defective tire is not condemned because people generally have no reason to completely paralyze society by making people unable to act until they have investigated every possible source of risk. Instead, we blame the tire manufacturer - the people who can more efficiently test the results of their manufacturing process.

Desirism even tells us where to draw the line between the two. We should demand a concern with the welfare of others that is strong enough to prevent easily prevented harms, but not so strong that people waste huge amounts of energy hunting down all possible sources of harm. We should draw the line between these at the point where the marginal cost of a marginally stronger aversion to having people harmed exceeds the marginal benefits. This defines the care that a reasonable person would take.

Desirism, then, shows its superiority over act-utilitarian theories on the issue of negligence. It explains negligence without bad consequences, bad consequences without condemnation, and where to draw the line between them. At the same time, it avoids the faults of a Martineau-like motive theory. It grounds the value of motives on the reasons people have to praise and condemn, and allows the application of praise and condemnation to cases not only where an agent acts on a bad desire, but fails to act on a good desire.

Culpability (Mens Rea or "guilty mind")

Mens rea is a term typically used in criminal law to define the mental elements that one must possess to be guilty of a crime.

It is also used in making moral judgments in determining whether a person is actually responsible for (culpable of) a moral transgression.

For example, let us assume that a person hooks up a car so that when somebody tries to start the car it sets off a bomb in a nearby building. The car owner, unaware of this tampering, gets in the car and tries to start it. The bomb goes off, killing a group of innocent bystanders. Is the person who starts the car guilty of murder?

The standard answer is that she is not. Yes, she turned the key that detonated the bomb that killed the people. However, being guilty of a crime also requires certain mental elements – that she had some reason to suspect that turning the key would set off the bomb.

These factors are not only relevant to the criminal charge of murder but to the moral charge as well. In the absence of any reason to suspect that her actions would cause harm, she has not acted immorally.

If a store shelf gets bumped and an item falls unknowingly into bag that a customer is carrying and the customer leaves the store with it, he is not a thief. If the brakes on a car fail and the driver crashes through a fence, the driver is not a vandal.

Furthermore, in morality as in law, we recognize a distinction between the murderer who aimed a gun known to be loaded at a person, flips off the safety, and squeezes the trigger - as opposed to the agent who accidentally fires a round on a shooting range hitting another customer unintentionally.

These illustrate just a few ways in which mental elements play a significant role in judgments of criminal and moral culpability.

The link here should not be surprising. In spite of the popular slogan that it is wrong to legislate morality, laws against murder, theft, rape, fraud, and the like - in fact almost all of the criminal law - aim to enforce moral principles. The major difference between a just and unjust law rests on whether morality identifies a law as legitimate or illegitimate.

Four Categories of Culpability

Typically, law recognizes four categories of culpability.

1. Intentional/Purposeful. A person’s act is intentional or purposeful if the agent actually sought to realize the end in question. If the assassin aims a gun and pulls the trigger seeking to kill a person, then this is intentional homicide.

2. Knowing. A person knowingly acts to realize a state of affairs if he is aware of the fact that the act will realize a state of affairs, though does not specifically aim to bring it about. For example, a demolition company demolishes a house knowing that there are people inside. They did not plan to kill anybody - but they did not let the fact that their act would kill people get in the way of blowing up the building.

3. Reckless. An action is reckless when the agent knows that there is a risk of others being harmed. A person who fires a gun randomly down the street might not harm anybody. However, he creates a risk, so his actions are reckless.

4. Negligent. An action is negligent when a person ought to have known that there was a risk of harm. A drunk driver may believe that he can get home safely. However, the fact that he is not aware of the risk he is creating does not absolve him of guilt. A concerned individual would have known of the risk and would have acted differently in the face of that knowledge. In this case, the drunk driver is negligent.

Morality recognizes these same distinctions. In fact, the recognition of these states in the law follows the moral distinction. They are included in the law in order to capture a particular part component of our moral judgments.

To see what culpability aims at, let us look at a thought experiment:

Let us assume that Person A creates a device that allows him to control Person B’s body. While he is in control, he has Person B take a weapon, go to Person C's house, aim the weapon at Person C and fire.

Let us ask, who is guilty of this murder? Is it Person A - the person who aimed the gun and pulled the trigger? Or is it Person B, the one whose mental elements motivated the murder? Or do they share responsibility?

The standard answer is that A is guilty. B is innocent - he was a tool, just like the gun and the bullet were tools. A gets 100% of the responsibility, while B gets none of it.

That is to say, the culpability applies entirely to the agent who provided the mental states (the mens rea) does not apply at all to the agent who performed the physical action.

Of the various mental states, what does culpability aim at?

If a person walks into a open garage and walks out with a set of power tools, what "culpable belief" could the agent actually have?

Beliefs are certainly relevant to culpability. If the agent believed that the garage and the power tools were his, he can offer an excuse of false belief to save himself from condemnation and punishment for taking the tools.

However, the belief is relevant because of what it implies about the agent's desires. A person is not expected to have an aversion to walking into his own garage and using his own tools. However, he is expected to have an aversion to taking the property of another without consent. The person who takes tools from a garage that he could not possibly believe is his own and takes the tools, with no reason to believe that the owner gave consent, lacks such an aversion. Once this has been established, we know that the agent is morally and - where the law follows morality - legally culpable.

This, then, is where we find mens rea or the "guilty mind" - in desires of the agent. In this case, it is in the absence of an aversion to taking the property of another without consent that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote.

In closing, I would like to add that this is yet another area where desirism - the view that morality aims primarily at the evaluation of malleable desires - best explains and predicts our moral practices. The defense of desirism does not rest on its ability to rationalize our moral prejudices - that very legitimacy of that process is open to question. It rests on the theory's ability to explain the elements of our moral practice such as "mens rea", "excuse", praise and condemnation, and the like. Here, we see that the practice of searching for "mens rea" in assigning culpability can be understood as a quest for the desires that motivated an act and whether they are desires that people generally have reason to promote or inhibit.

Responses to Mackie's Error Theory

Error theory is a theory about morality that makes the following claims.

(1) Moral statements are statements that make a claim of “objective intrinsic prescriptivity." they are claims that some actions contain an intrinsic property of ought-to-be-doneness or ought-not-to-be-doneness that is the source of our moral obligations and prohibitions.

(2) Objective intrinsic prescriptivity does not exist.

From this, it concludes that all moral claims are false (or errors).

Desirism accepts Proposition 2.

This essay concerns Proposition 1. Is it true that our moral language contains a claim of objective, intrinsic prescriptivity? If so, what are the implications of this for morality in general and for desirism in specific?

The answer will be: It is probably not true and, even if it is true, it would have little importance. J. L. Mackie himself, the philosopher who developed error theory, provides us with easy-to-follow instructions for a low-cost way of dealing with the problem that all moral claims are false. I will look at his suggestion after considering two ways in which we can reject Proposition 1.

Response 1: The Objective Intrinsic Prescriptivity Hypothesis Is False

The claim that moral terms contain, as a part of their meaning, a reference to objective, intrinsic prescriptivity is a hypothesis meant to explain a set of observed facts about how moral terms are used. In this case, the set of observations particularly relevant in supporting the objective intrinsic prescriptivity hypothesis are those where claims about the rightness and wrongness of some action implies that other moral agents - even non-human agents - are supposed to perform or avoid those actions.

However, there is a significant problem with the Objective Intrinsic Prescriptivity hypothesis. No such property exists.

Yet, people use moral terms as if they are talking about something that is both real and important. They use moral claims as justification for inflicting real costs - real punishments, including death - on other human beings.

Many of the things that people talk about turn out not to be real - even where people believe that they are real. However, a hypothesis that says that all of the statements in a general category of discussion are false should not be our first guess. If we have more than one interpretation available to us, we should go with the interpretation that allows those claims to be true unless compelled to select another option.

An alternative interpretation says that whether some act is obligatory, permissible, or wrong can best be understood as claims about actions that people generally have many and strong reasons to praise (or to condemn the refusal to act), have little reason to praise or condemn, or have reason to condemn (or praise the refusal to act) respectively. These reasons to act are desires themselves, and the reason to praise or condemn are reasons to apply reward and punishment to the reward systems of other brains to promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires.

I offer that this is a better hypothesis because it better explains a wide range of phenomena associated with moral statements such the use of praise and condemnation in moral claims (to mold malleable desires), the logic of excuse claims (to deny that an act type is one that people have any reason to condemn), the moral concept of negligence (condemning the absense of a sufficiently strong aversion to causing harm to others), and “ought” implies “can” (it makes no sense to use praise and condemnatin where no malleable desires are involved). Furthermore, it allows for some moral claims to be true.

If we compare the strengths of each hypthesis in allowing us to understand the elements of our moral life, desirism has far more explanatory power than the objective, intrinsic prescriptivity hypothesis and, as a result, is a better theory about how moral terms are actually being used.

This would imply that Proposition 1 is false and we can reject error theory.

Response 2: Pluralistic Moral Reductionism. We have No Common Moral Language

Another approach we can take to Proposition 1 is to deny that moral terms actually have a common meaning. This is the approach taken by Luke Meuhlhauser in a view he calls "pluralistic moral reductionism".

Pluralistic moral reductionism looks at the way that languages are learned and concludes that it is highly unlikely that there is a common meaning to moral terms. Languages are learned through experience. Each of us has a variety of experiences, meaning that each of us has a slightly different understanding of many common terms. Moral terms do not have a fixed definition. Rather, they are a set of fuzzy concepts that generally have something to do with getting people to perform or refrain from certain actions. These concepts are fuzzy, and any attempt to find a fixed and universal meaning is a waste of time.

In the case of moral terms, this problem is compounded by the fact that the meanings of moral terms are theory-laden. Merely adopting a moral theory itself involves accepting a set of definitions - a set that would not be consistent with the set adopted by somebody else who adopts a different theory. Some people have adopted a theory that says that some actions contain intrinsic prescriptivity. Another person can adopt a theory where a statement of obligation means, "I approve of a state in which everybody does X." every utilitarian, divine command theorist, prescriptivist, emotivist, Kantian, and Objectivist speaks a different moral language.

Adopting a language does not entitle a person to their own facts. A person who adopts a divine command theory adopts a language where all moral claims are false. However, the fact that they are false does not change the fact that people have many and string reasons to praise some act types and condemn others. We can all adopt the same facts, Yet report those facts using different languages. It is inconvenient, but not impossible.

If there is no common moral language, then Proposition 1, which assumes a common languagem can be rejected.

Response 3: Mackie's Moral Revisionism

Response 3 accepts Proposition 1, but says that we can easily navigate around the problem.

Mackie himself argued that the fact that we have built a false assumption into the meaning of our moral terms is not a major crisis. We can easily remove that false assumption and continue to work with what is left. This would allow us to make true value claims in such a way that even many of our previous claims can be interpreted in such a way that they are true.

To illustrate what he was talking about, Mackie used the example of the word ‘atom’. Originally, the word ‘atom’ meant ‘uncuttable’. An atom, then, was defines as the smallest bit of matter that could not be reduced into smaller bits.

The term ‘atom’ came to be used to refer to the smallest particle of an element such as carbon, oxygen, or gold.

Eventually, scientists started to suspect that these smallest particles of an element could be split. They had parts: electrons, protons, and neutrons.

This left chemistry in a bit of a bind. They could keep ‘without parts’ as a part of the definition of ‘atom’ and deny that these things they have been talking about are atoms (since they had parts). Or they could change the definition, drop ‘without parts’ from the meaning, and continue to claim that these smallest pieces of an element were atoms. Many previous papers and findings about atoms would still hold true. The only difference is that we would drop the implication that those previous papers were talking about things that could not be split. That error was not relevant to the claims made in those papers anyway.

Mackie argued that we should do the same with moral terms. Wr can drop ‘objective intrinsic prescriptivity’ from its meaning and go ahead and continue to make moral claims. We would no longer infer that wrongness implied an intrinsic property but, instead, argue that it referred to something that tended to have a negative impact on people’s interests or desires. This lead him to some form of utilitarianism, which he then applied to issues such as abortion and euthanasia to yield what he implied were objectively true moral claims.

Chemistry went through its revision painlessly. Science has gone through a great many revisions without trauma. "Malaria" went from meaning "bad air" to a disease typically spread by mosquitoes. "Water" went from "a common colorless, tasteless liquid that living things needed to consume in abundance" to "H2O". The term "planet" went from "wandering star" to "something large orbiting a sun but not so large that it generated energy through fusion".

Chemistry is filled with revisions of this type. Lead, gold, and sulphur are all among the terms that have all changed their meaning as chemists tell us more about what we now know to be basic elements. This change has taken place without any great trauma.

Conclusion

Mackie's error theory holds that all moral claims are false because they contain a claim of objective intrinsic prescriptivity that does not exist. We can allow that objective intrinsic prescriptivity does not exist yet still reject Mackie's error theory by denying that this is a part of the meaning of moral terms. We could argue that moral terms have an alternative meaning that does not include this element. Or we can deny that moral terms even have a common meaning.

Yet, even if Mackie is right and moral terms contain this meaning, we can easily deal with this problem. We can do what scientists routinely do - simply redefine our words in such a way that they keep as much of the original meaning as possible while dropping the part that is in error, or adopting a more efficient definition. Scientists practice this form of revisionism constantly without any great difficulties. Ethicists can learn from this example.

Favoritism

Does desirism require that we weigh all desires equally? Or does it allow a person to give special attention to friends and family?

Think of the last gift that you bought. Chances are you did not weigh all desires in the world equally and buy the present that was most wanted for the person who most wanted it. Instead, you bought it for somebody in a particular relationship to you - a family member, a friend, or a co-worker.

Is this permitted with desirism? Or does desirism require that we purchase presents instead for those people in the world who most need a gift - giving them what they most need? Must we abandon these particular interests in those near to us in favor of complete indifference among individuals?

Desirism follows a relatively recent development in moral philosophy regarding two-tiered moral systems. It evaluates action relative to one standard (what a person with good desires would do), and then makes a second evaluation according to that standard (good desires are malleable desires that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote).

The most widely held interpretation of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism is that it represents a two-tiered moral theory known as rule-utilitarianism. Actions are evaluated according to whether they are consistent with the best rules. Rules, in turn, are evaluated according to whether they maximize utility. As agents engaged in our day-to-day activities, we do not have the time or the resources or even enough data to determine the utility of each individual action. In order to decide what to do, it is more efficient to invent a set of rules where actions consistent with the rules will tend to maximize utility, and to judge actions by those rules.

When faced with the question of whether to lie to a grand jury, one applies the rule, "Do not lie to grand juries." When deciding whether to have a rule against lying to grand juries, one looks at the overall utility of having such a rule.

Richard M. Hare developed a much more sophisticated two-level system. According to Hare, moral claims are commands of the form, "Do this." "Do not do that." These commands are given to people in our role as "proles" or mere followers of orders. However, there is a second level of moral thinking that Hare calls the level if the arch-angel. At this level, we examine the commands to determine which commands produce the most utility.

When faced with the question of whether to lie to a grand jury, one yields to the command, "Do not lie to grand juries." When deciding whether the arch-angels would command us not to lie to grand juries, we ask whether the arch-angel would see that such a rule maximizes utility.

Both systems have a way of justifying the practice if showing preferences for those who are nearest to the individual.

Imagine that you are the CEO of a massive multi-nation company. This is far too big for any person to manage efficiently. Therefore, you decide to divide the company into regions, and assign a vice-president to each region. Even though your concern is with the overall profitability of the company, it seems at east plausibly sensible to give each vice-president the following instructions:

Do not concern yourself with overall profitability. That is my job. You are explicitly prohibited from looking at each region with indifference towards any other regionl. Insead, you are commanded - or given a rule - to concern yourselves with what is going on in your region. Focus your attentions and concerns there. If you think that it is fitting to hand out performance bonuses to your employees, feel free to do so. Do not concern yourself with whether the employees in some other region could benefit more from such a bonus - they are the responsibility of some other manager who knows that region better than you. They are not your responsibility. You focus on your region.

The vice-president may, in turn, give the same instructions to the regional manager, and the regional manager may give the same instructions to each store manager. In each case, the individual is given a command or a rule to focus on those subordinates in a articular relationship to herself. They are not told to be indifferent to all employees regardless of what store or region they work in. In fact, they may even be prohibited from doing so on the grounds that no person could do so efficiently. Furthermore, they are evaluated as employees according to their capacity to take care of their store or department.

By comparison, in society as a whole, at the level of the arch-angel or the rule-maker, we may instruct each person, "Do not weigh the interests of all individuals equally. Your job is to take care of your friends and your family. Let others worry about their friends and their family. Like the department manager authorizing a celebration for the people in his department without regard for whether some other department in an office on the other side of the planet could better use the money, you may have a birthday party for your children and buy them gifts and focus on their education without regard for the fact that somebody on the other side of the planet needs the money more."

Of course, as with store managers and department managers, there are limits to what one may do in expressing their concern for the people in one's store or department - or for one's friends and family. Yet, these limits do not invalidate the call to have a special concern for people in the given relationship.

All the while, thus rule is justified by the fact that, on the whole, such a rule will benefit the whole company in the first case, or all of humanity in the second.

Desirism also uses a two-tiered moral system. The difference is that it focuses on desires or affections rather than rules or commands. It suggests that you not buy your child a present because some indifferent rule says to, or because some arch-angel would command it. It says to buy a present for your child out of love for your child - out of an affection for the child and a partiality for that child that is far above your affection for other children.

When asking whether such an affection is something that people generally have reason to change, one consideration to weigh is whether it is even possible to bring about a change. Like indifference to personal pain, indifference towards people may not be possible - or it might be so costly in terms of the psychological trama one must endure to break these affections that no benefit is worth the cost.

However, even independent of these considerations, there are reasons to promote and encourage these types of affections rather than to argue for their dissolution in favor of an indifference towards all people. It is simply more efficient to take each child and assign them to an adult, saying, "Your responsibility is to watch over these children. Let other adults watch over other children. You get this child to adulthood as a decent human being whose interests are compatible with the interests of others." In doing this, it is only prudent take advantage of natural affections, such as the bonding between a mother and a child to whom she gives birth, to further strengthen interests that there are many and strong reasons to strengthen.

John Stuart Mill and the Qualities of Pleasure

When John Stuart Mill defended his version of Utilitarianism, he confronted an objection that the theory failed to account for a number of common observations.

In one set of objections, it was argued that if wtilitarian theory was correct, the happiness of a pig would be more valuable than the unsettled contemplation of a philosopher. This conclusion was absurd, it was claimed, so Mill's utilitarianism had to be rejected.

Mill sought to defend the view that Utilitarianism was compatible with these observations by arguing that there are different qualities of pleasure.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

For his argument, he claimed that we should trust to the judgment of those who are capable of both pleasures. If those people who are capable of experiencing the unsettled pleasure of a philosopher and the simple pleasure of the fool unanimously - or nearly so - declare the former to be superior, we are as justified as we can be in saying that it is actually superior.

Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.

This is like determining that one coffee is superior to another by asking those who experience both. If those who have done so unanimously or nearly unanimously prefer Brand A (Socrates Unsatisfied) over Brand B (Fool Satisfied), we may conclude that Brand A is better in fact.

The argument fails on a number of levels. The most obvious objection springs from the coffee example itself where the conclusion most people will draw is simply that some most people are so constituted to prefer Brand A over Brand B. It is just as plausible and sensible that people could have been so constituted to prefer Brand B. Neither is actually better than the other in any sense other than being the most widely preferred.

In other words, arguing that Brand A is objectively better than Brand B because more people like Brand A is like arguing that having light skin is better than having dark skin because more people have light skin. After all, what we are really comparing is having a brain structured to like Brand A versus having a brain structured to like Brand B - with no obvious reason why we should treat differences in brain structure different from differences in skin structure.

However, for our purposes, concerning the intrinsic value of pleasure, we need to look at another consideration.

Let us assume that tasters do prefer Brand A over Brand B. Let us assume that it is because Brand A is stronger, or sweeter, or has an almond taste. Perhaps they cannot easily identify the reason for the preference. There is just something in Brand A that causes them to like it more.

Whatever it is that is responsible for this difference, it is not due to the coffeeness. If we took that which made it better out, we would still have coffee. Consequently, we cannot attribute these two values to coffeeness - the difference belongs to something else.

Similarly, if two pleasures have different value, the difference must not reside in its pleasantness. It is in something that can be removed and we would still have pleasure. It us that which can be removed that provides this quality, not its pleasure.

Desirism has no problem with the idea that things other than pleasure have value. For a person with a desire that P, any state of affairs in which P is true is one that has value for that agent. It is a state that the agent has reason to bring about. P can be any proposition. It is not limited to "I am experiencing pleasure." It could be "I am experiencing pleasure and I am experiencing a sweet taste" - a set of desires that would make the sweeter coffee preferable.

We have reason to reject Mill's theory on the quality of different characters - the dissatisfied philosopher or the satisfied food - as we do for rejecting that theory applied to different coffees.

But how does desirism evaluate the dissatisfied philosopher in relation to the satisfied food?

In making such an evaluating, David Hume provides us with a better method than Mill.

Mill would have us look only at the quality of pleasure experienced by the philosopher and the fool and judge the first superior.

Hume would have us ask a broader set of questions. He would consider Mill's concern with the pleasure provided to the philosopher or the fool. However, he would also ask whether the state is useful to the agent - will it help the agent to recognize opportunities and avoid strife? He would ask which is more useful to others? If it is the philosopher, then people generally have reason to offer greater esteem to those who prefer the philosophical arts to promote those interests in the population. Whereas, if the fool tends to be incapable of helping - and is sometimes a risk to others due basically to his inability to understand the world around him - people would have reason to view those traits as worthy of condemnation.

To be fair, Mill brings these other considerations into play as well. He is, after all, a utilitarian, and ultiamtely concerned with the greatest good for the greatest number. He falsely believes that this greated good includes a greater intrinsic value found in some pleasures and not others. However, this does not mean that he is going to exclude other goods in the final analysis.

That Mill is wrong in this one area - in the claim that value can be found in the different qualities of pleasure rather than in the objective satisfaction of desire - does not discredit the whole of his theory.

More on the Definition of "Should"

I am letting the discussions in the desirism facebook group guide my writings here to some extent.

One of those discussions involves a post from a few days ago where I described three uses of the word "should". They were (1) basic "should" relating an act to a specific desire, (2) practical "should" which relates an act to all of an agent's current and future desires, and (3) moral "should" that relates the act to the desires of a good person -a person with those desires that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote.

The debate is over what to do with option 3.

Debates about the meaning of words do not lend themselves well to argument. Even proof that people use a word a particular way is not proof that they should continue to do so. When astronomers changed the definition of "planet" it was not because they discovered that the traditional use of the word was one that excluded Pluto. Nor was it because they took precise measurements and discovered by means of scientific proof that Pluto did not fit the traditional use. It was because they thought - or some thought - that a new definition would be more efficient.

Some argued against changing the definition - for some very unscientific reasons. People - particularly children - wanted Pluto to continue to be a planet and many astronomers were happy to sacrifice efficiency for the sake of pleasing a child - or to include in their definition of efficiency the fact that the traditional definition was pleasing to children.

The question over what to do about moral "should" likewise has to do with what would be more efficient, less confusing, more traditional, and the like.

One caveat is that changing definitions does not change the world. You cannot make Pluto bigger by calling it a planet. You cannot make slavery intrinsically good by calling it moral.

As I have described it, moral statements are both truth-bearing and emotive. "You have no right to do that," reports an alleged fact of the matter - it is either true or false. Specifically, it states, "The act is of a type that people generally have many and strong reasons to condemn." Claims about the effects of praise and condemnation on molding desires and aversions further refine the claim about what people generally have reason to condemn. At the same time, the statement is also emotive. It contains within it the condemnation that it claims that people generally have a reason to give.

One objection to this is that moral 'should' actually refers to intrinsic prescriptivity in some form. These claims are always false (intrinsic prescriptivity does not exist), so we should drop all use of moral terms when we talk about real-world acts, policies, or institutions. We can still continue to talk about desires that people generally have reasons to promote. However, using moral terms confuses people into thinking that these malleable desires are intrinsically good or bad. Regardless of the fact that desirism explicitly denies this claim, people who hear moral terms applied to desires will still instantly draw the assumption that one is making a claim about intrinsic prescriptivity. To avoid this confusion, we should drop moral 'should'.

A problem with this option is that dropping moral 'should' leads to another type of confusion - this one potentially fatal. If nothing is wrong, then everything is permissible. If it is not wrong to rape or abuse children (meaning that it contains no intrinsic badness - even though the desires are those that people generally have reason to respond to with condemnation and punishment), then it must be permissible to rape and abuse children.

We have many and strong reasons to avoid giving people an opportunity to make this mistake. Not only would it be dangerous for children, it would also be an avenue by which people would make fallacious objections to the theory itself. "Desirism says that it is not wrong to rape and abuse children." Well, yes, in the sense that it is not intrinsically wrong - but not in the sense that people lack reason to respond to such acts with condemnation and punishment.

Another option, closely related with the previous suggestion one, is to drop the factual component of moral claims but to keep the emotive component. On this option, we recognize that a statement of moral outrage is an act of condemnation, but we remove all attempts to relate the act of condemnation and outrage to any fact, such as what people generally have reason to condemn.

A potential source of confusion that this would create arises from the shift of moral terms to all expressions of moral outrage. The parent who beats a child for spilling a glass of milk, or a man who rapes a woman claiming, "You deserve this," would be making moral statements no different than that of the person who condemns the abusive parent or the rapist. We would have to treat the rapist's statement, "You deserve this" as a legitimate claim, though not one that draws implications of what people generally have reason to promote or inhibit.

Technically, this change in language would not change the fact that there are some sets of acts that that people generally have many and strong reason to praise or condemn. It would not change the fact that people have many and strong reasons to condemn parental abuse or rape. All that would change is the way we use moral language. However, the shift of moral language to these brutal acts would invite a confusion over what people have many and strong reasons to condemn, with some potentially harsh conseqeunces.

Another option for shifting the meaning of moral "should" is to drop the claim of intrinsic prescriptivity, but shift to the closest truth-bearing alternative. This is the option that JL Mackie argues for in the book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. He used the word "atom" as a model. This term originally meant "without parts". When scientists began to suspect that atoms had parts, they could have dropped the term "atom". However, what they did instead was drop "without parts" from its meaning and keep the rest.

One potential objection to this is that moral 'should' is not like the others. Other types of 'should' relate the action to the desires of the person one is talking to. Moral 'should' relates the action to the desires of the good person - the desirs that people generally have many an strong reasons to promote. These desires may differ from those that the person one is talking to actually has.

Though the previous posting made it easy to draw such a conclusion, it is not true. We use 'should' in a number of ways that refer to desires other than those of the agent. For example, a person may tell her friend, "You should let your daughter go to the concert." In a case like this, she is not referring to a practical 'should' of what the mother wants. Nor is she claiming that the mother has an obligation and is worthy of condemnation for refusing to allow her daughter to go to the concert. It is simply an invitation to give the daughter's own desires more weight. Advice routinely given on "what you should give your father for father's day" are "should" statements that focus primarily on desires other than those of the person one is talking to.

All "should" statements - or, at least, all that are true - relate the action to some set of desires somewhere. This is because "should" relates actions to reasons for action, and desires are the only reasons for action that exist. However, it is not at all uncommon to use "should" statements to describe relationships between actions and desires other than those of the agent. Consequently, using "should" statements to relate actions to desires that people generally have many and strong reasons to support is actually not unusual.

On the other hand, the claim that this ambiguous use of the word "should" - having no clear meaning - is easily a source of confusion is well justified. It is not at all unusual for two people in a dispute, where one says, "You should do X" and another says, "You should not do X" to both be making true claims. The appearance of conflict is because they are using the same term while talking about two different relationships. Their dispute is like that of a person in San Francisco talking on the phone to somebody in Hong Kong, where the first person says, "Oakland is not very far," and the second person says, "Are you insane? It's half way around the world!"

The charge of confusion and the suggestion that we can be well served by coming up with a more precise language are both well founded.

There is no easy answer to this question. Each option would eliminate some confusions and provide some clarifications. At they same time, they invite new confusions and imposing some costs. Furthermore, we suffer the problem in that nobody has the ability to impose a new definition on all of society. To a certain extent, in communicating with others, we must accept the language that people generally seem to have adopted, even with its imperfections and confusions.

In these posts, I use 'should' in a sense that is both fact-bearing and emotive. It describes an act as one that people generally have reasons to praise, and it praises the act, both at the same time. It uses terms that are also used with other relationships between acts and desires - generating some confusion and inviting some equivocation. However, that is less dangerous than some of the alternatives.

Desirism versus Brain-State Theories of Value (Happiness)

Brain state theories of value are those theories that declare that the only thing of value is that the brain itself be put in a particular state. If one then adopts the reasonable proposition that brain states are physical states, this means organizing the matter and forces of the brain in a particular way or putting it though a particular sequence of changes. Nothing else matters; or, if it matters, it only matters as a means or a tool for getting the brain into a particular state.

This description may sound odd when phrased this way. However, it applies to many moral theories - some of which are widely held. Theories that state that all that matters is pleasure and freedom from pain, or all that matters is happiness are brain state theories. Pleasure and happiness are brain states. They describe states of affairs in which the matter and forces of the brain have a particular organization or structure or go thorugh a particular type of change.

Today, the most popular brain state theory holds that the only thing that matters is happiness. To a person, all actions aim to promote his or her own happiness. To the community as a whole, what matters is the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number.

The primary argument in favor of brain state theories has been that it appears to be true. John Stuart Mill defended the greatest happiness principle by arguing that the proof that happiness is the sole end of human action is found in the observation that all people aim in all things for happiness. Even moral theories that deny utilitarianism ultimately can be found to defend their moral conclusions on the basis that they produce the most utility - usually considered pleasure or happiness.

All brain-state theories fall victim to the same type of objection.

If it were true that all that mattered was putting a brain in a particular state, then all of our energy should be devoted exclusively to putting brains in that state and keeping them there.

This implies that it would be obligatory upon us to create a system for putting brains in such a state and preserving them in that state. First, we get a brain and organize its structure in such a way that has the requisite state (one in which a person is experiencing pleasure or happiness, for example) and, once it is in that state, lock it in that state and keep it there. Chop off the head, put it in a box where a computer and a set of magnates would then preserve the brain in that state or put the brain in a loop so that it goes through the required set of changes.

Yet, few people actually want these things. While they value happiness and pleasure, they do not like the idea of their brain being put in a state of happiness or pleasure and kept there. When it comes to making choices, a lot of people are not choosing to have or to maintain a particular brain state. There are other things that interest them than whether or not the molecules in their brain have a given structure.

Robert Nozick provides an objection to hedonism that can be expanded to cover all brain-state theories of value. Hedonism holds that the only thing of value to a person is their own pleasure and freedom from pain. Nozick asked us to imagine an experience machine that will give us pleasant experiences. We step in, plug into the machine, and spend the rest of our lives laying there experiencing pleasure.

This option has very little value to many people. Whatever reasons for action motivate them, they are not seen as reasons to act in such a way that one finds oneself in an experience machine.

One possible response is that people simply are not in the habit of seeing such a machine as producing pleasure. Though it can be described to them in this way, in fact they are familiar with other things in life (e.g., actually enjoying the company of friends and family) producing pleasure or happiness and not with getting it from a machine. "Common sense" denies the premise that a machine can produce such an effect and motivates the agent to stick with the trusted sources of pleasure or happiness.

However, if we postulate that the simplest explanation is usually the best, then the simplest explanation for the fact that people claim not to want to have their brains frozen in a particular state or perpetually looped through a particular set of changes is because they actually do not want it. The claim that they are deluded or employing a strategy that, in this case, motivates them to make the wrong choice needs more than the mention that it is a possibility.

This type of thought experiment can be expanded to cover all brain-state theories of value. Regardless of the brain state that one holds to be the sole holder of value, we can imagine a machine that can manipulate the structure of the brain to put it in that state and keep it there. If the brain-state theory of value has any merit, then this is the ultimate end - this is the highest value. This is the thing that we have the most and strongest reason to do (whether we realize it or not). However, many people do not find themselves motivated to enter such a machine. As a measure of what people value, brain states do not appear to be high on the list.

Besides, why would brain states be the only things on the list? Brain-state theorists need to provide us with an explanation as to how it can be the case that the organization of matter and forces within the brain can have value, but the organization of matter and forces outside of the brain cannot. Or, where the organization of matter and forces outside the brain can have value, why they do not or should not. There is no relevant difference between matter within the skull and matter outside the skull that can account for this distinction.

This problem is compounded by the fact that our evolutionary fitness depends less on putting our brain in a particular state than on putting the world in a particular state. It does more harm to one's ability to reproduce to be happy while being eaten by a lion than it does to be unhappy while grazing peacefully on the savannah. "Don't get eaten by lions" seems to be a more important rule to follow than "Don't be unhappy."

Desirism is built on a theory of intentional action that is immune to these objections. This theory holds that motivation to perform intentional actions come from desires, where a 'desire the P' is a motivating reason to act so as to realize states of affairs in which P is true.

The reason that the Nozick's experience machine does not work is because for many of our desires, the experience machine fails to provide a state of affairs in which P is true. A parent concerned for the welfare of her children is not going to be content to enter the experience machine to be fed the experience of safe and healthy children while her actual children suffer extreme agony. A doctor who values providing health care to people in desperately poor parts of the world would not be satisfied with the mere experience of such a state. They seek to make the propositions that are the objects of their desires true - something the experience machine cannot deliver.

This theory answers the question of how the organization of matter within the skull can have value while the organization of matter outside the skull cannot by saying, "There is no reason. An agent can be motivated to realize states outside the skull just as easily as she can be motivated to realize stares inside the skull."

Evolution suggests that we will be descendants of beings that were very much concerned with realizing states outside the skull since their very survival depended on it.

Desirism versus Egoism

Egoism is a theory that holds that the only thing people do care about (psychological egoism) or the only thing that they should care about (ethical egoism) is themselves.

The psychological egoist holds that every act is selfish. If we look at any act and trace it back to its fundamental motive we will discover that the agent was ultimately moved by his own pleasure or happiness or interest in avoiding pain or unhappiness or some other self-regarding concern. The well-being of others is only considered as a means to an end - as a way for the agent to experience pleasure or happiness themselves. Even the quintessentially selfless act of a parent sacrificing himself for his children, we are told, rests on the interest in avoiding the pain of one's child being lost, not on any concern for the child.

On the principle of 'ought' implies 'can' (and 'cannot' implies 'it is not the case that one ought'), if an agent cannot consider anything but his own pleasure or happiness, it is not the case that they ought to consider anything but their own happiness.

It is easy to confuse this claim with the claim that desirism is built on - the claim that people act to objectively satisfy the most and strongest of their desired.

Superficially, this looks like a form of psychological egoism - everybody is interested only in their own desires and nothing else.

This appearance comes from a failure to distinguish between two different ways to relate desires to those who have them: desires in the self versus desires of the self.

The psychological egoist holds that all intentional action springs from desires in the self. For every desire that P, if we look at P we will discover a proposition that refers back to the agent. "I desire that I experience pleasure," or "I desire my happiness," or "I wish to avoid my own pain."

Desirism, on the other hand, is built on the view that there is no limit to the propositions that make up the potential objects of a person's desires. "I desire that my children are safe," or "I hope that we can find a cure for AIDS" or "I want to make sure that the human race does not become extinct." These are things that an agent can desire, and the proposition does not take the agent as the object of the desire.

In short, the thesis that all desires are desires in the self is false.

At the same time, desirism is build on the idea that all intentional action is motivated by desires of the self. It us an agent's own desires that pull the strings and push the levers that cause an agent's intentional actions. This is not only true, it is logically necessary. If one agent were to hook up a device that allowed him to control the body of another remotely, then those actions would no longer belong to the agent being controlled. They would belong to the controller. An intentional act belongs to the agent whose desires are motivating that action .

The agent who is deeply concerned about impoverished children not getting proper medical care is certainly acting on her own desires when she goes to impoverished parts of the world to care for children. If she did not care, then she would not act. However, it is odd at best to say that the person who cares so much about the plight of impoverished children is "selfish".

Egoists often argue for their position by blurring this distinction. They will begin by claiming that all actions are selfish - motivated by desires in the self. When challenged, with stories such as the possibility of the doctor mentioned above they retreat inside the fortress that claims that an agent's intentional actions spring from her own desires. That is to say, they are desires of the self. When the opponent gives up, they will claim to have successfully defended the claim that all of an agent's interests are interests in the self.

In addition to the considerations raised above, there are other problems with the idea that all agents are motivated by their own pain or pleasure.

It is an inefficient way to build a system. For a system that seeks food, it would be much simpler to design a system that can detect food and respond with behavior that aims at acquiring food than to design a system that seeks pleasure, somehow knows that acquiring food is pleasurable, and then seeks food, not for its own sake, but as a way of obtaining pleasure.

When we look at animals, we see the strangeness in the thesis that they seek only pleasure or happiness. In order to save the gazelle from the lion it is much more efficient for signs of a lion to trigger the flight response directly than to program the gazelle with some sort of realization that lion signs hint at a future situation that would be unpleasant and to try to figure out that running is the best way to avoid unpleasantness.

Evolutionary theory tells us of how and why creatures can evolve a certain amount of selfishness. A parent who cares for its children - not as a means for an end but as ends in themselves - have children that grow up to have and care for their own children. Thus, we are more likely to be the descendants of creatures with some amount of evolved altruism than from selfish ancestors.

Finally, egoism fails to account for conflicts among our desires. If all desires melted down to concern with our own pleasure or happiness, and there is a conflict, then we simply need to choose the option that gives us the most pleasure. If somebody were to offer an agent either five dollars or ten dollars, the rational agent takes the ten dollars with no regret at all over losing the chance of not having five (though possibly some regret over the fact that there is no possibility of having fifteen). Similarly, a person given a choice between ten units of pleasure or five will take ten.

However, our desires do not work that way. When we must make a choice between two options, we choose the one the option that (given our beliefs) will fulfill the most and strongest of our desires. However, we regret the options that are closed to us. A person who must decide between going to a movie with a friend or staying home with her sick mother regrets the option she must give up. This suggests that the agent has more than one incompatible interest - that the motivating force behind the desires sacrificed are still present even if stronger desires force the agent down another path.

The ethical egoist can accept all of these problems with psychological egoism and still say that of all of the possible desires only self-regarding desires have merit. They are the only legitimate reasons for action that exist while all non-selfish motives are illegitimate and ought not to be considered. The objection here is that the ethical egoist cannot defend the claim that there is anything in the universe that justifies this distinction between legitimate and illegitimate desires. That is a myth pulled out of the imagination. A reason for action is a reason for action - regardless of what it takes as its object.

Desirism is not an egoistic theory. It appears to be one only to the person who fails to distinguish desires in the self and desires of the self. All of an agent's intentional actions are motivated by desires of the self - if they were not motivated by her desires then they are not her actions. However, those desires are not limited to desires in the self.

Desirism and the Naturalistic Fallacy

The Naturalistic Fallacy stands as an objection to all attempts to reduce moral terms such as "good" to natural terms such as 'happiness'. G.E. Moore argued that any such inference is a mistake.

Desirism may be accused of resting on this fallacy and, on that basis, it can be rejected. Specifically, desirism reduces 'good' to a set of natural properties - relationships between states of affairs and desires. This is exactly what Moore says cannot be done. If Moore is correct, then this is a fatal flaw for desirism.

What Moore is attempting to argue for is the idea that 'good' refers to a basic, unnatural property. We cannot reduce this term and further. We cannot reduce it to 'pleasure', for example; or of 'happiness'. Interestingly, we cannot reduce it to non-natural properties either. For example, we cannot reduce 'good' to 'that which is pleasing to God'. That, too, would commit the naturalistic fallacy.

This type of move is shown to be a mistake is shown through the Open Question Argument. According to this argument, we can show that a reduction from Term 1 to Term 2 fails by showing that competent users of he language can question the relationship.

For example, let us look at an attempt to reduce the term 'bachelor' to 'unmarried male.' we then ask a competent speaker of English a question like, "John is a male who is not married, but is he a bachelor?" The competent speaker of English who understands the meanings of the terms would consider this an open question. "Certainly he's a bachelor. That's what 'bachelor' means."

This marks a successful reduction.

When we attempt to reduce 'good' we get nothing like this type of success. If we try to reduce goodness to pleasure, a competent speaker who understands the terms can still sensibly ask, "Bullying that kid was pleasant, but was it good?" It even works on non-natural properties. "Releasing a plague that killed all first-born children was pleasing to God, but was it good?" in both cases, the answer might be "yes". Then again, it might not be. This is an open question. Consequently, these two attempted reductions fail the Open Question test.

Desirism also fails the Open Question test. Any attempt to reduce 'good' to some relationship between states of affairs and desires will fail the test."X stands in the proper relationship to the relevant desires, but is it good?" this will remain an open question regardless of how we flesh out 'proper relationship' and 'relevant desires'.

Reduction of Good

The claim that desirism reduces 'good' to relationships between states of affairs and desires would be false. Desirism reduces 'good' to reasons for action that exists. The fact that desires are the only reasons for action that exist is not true by definition. If categorical imperatives, intrinsic values, divine commands, social contracts, and the like were real, they would provide reasons for action relevant to whether something is good. The fact that they are not real is not something that can be learned from a conceptual analysis of the word 'good'.

Ambiguity of Good

Another confounding fact that bears on Moore's Open Question test rests on the fact that 'good', even when referring to relationships between states of affairs and desires is ambiguous. One can always ask the open question, "Which desires?"

Consider the following:

San Francisco is closer to the north pole than Los Angeles, but is it north of Los Angeles?

This is not an open question. Competent speakers of English who understand the terms will answer, "Of course. That's what 'north' means."

However, if we change the wording slightly, we get:

San Francisco is closer to the north pole than Los Angeles, but is it north?

North of what? North of you? I don't know. Where are you?

The question becomes an open question. However, its openness is not due to any inability to reduce the term 'north'. It is due to the fact that 'north' is a relational term and the thing that we are relating San Francisco to has been left unclear.

Relationships between states of affairs and desires suffer the same effects as relationships between objects. We need to clearly state which relationship we are talking about. The act that something stands in a particular relationship to one set of desires does not eliminate the possibility that it stands in a different relationship to other desires. Consequently, "This is the best tasting chocolate cake on the whole planet, but is it good?" remains an open question. Is it good for you? Absolutely not.

The Masked Man Fallacy

Another reason we can dismiss the Open Question argument s because it is an instance of another fallacy, the Masked Man Fallacy.

Imagine yourself in London in the late 1800s. There is a robber about, known only as “the Masked Man,” who has been stopping carriages on dark roads at night and robbing the passengers. One day, while you are at a party, an inspector from Scotland Yard comes in. He walks up to the host of the party and says, “We have arrested your brother. We believe that he is the Masked Man.”

Your host answers the Inspector, “That cannot be true. Yesterday, I was talking about the Masked Man with some dinner guests. At the time, I certainly knew the name of my brother James. However, I did not know the name of the Masked Man. In other words, the question, 'James is my brother, but he is the Masked Man?' was an open question. It still is, for that matter. Therefore, inspector, you have arrested the wrong man."

The inspector can dismiss this objection as bogus. Certainly his claim that the Mayor's brother and the Masked Man are the same person does not depend on what the Mayor was aware of the day before.

Similarly, the fact that, “X is good, but is it such as to fulfill the desires in question?” is an open question does not prove that ‘good’ and ‘is such as to objectively satisfy the desires in question.’

We look to see whether James is the Masked Man by looking to see if there is anything true of James that is not true of the Masked Man. If we learn, for example, that James was attending an important business meeting at 10:00 yesterday night – the same time that the Masked Man robbed a carriage on the corner of Wadsworth and Main, then we know that James could not be the Masked Man.

To be fair to Moore, it is not clear whether he was referring to this type of reduction. Moore's argument may be interpreted as being fixed on the issue of reducing one definition to another, not one phenomena to another. However, several critics of desirism raise this objection.

We see similar objections raised in other fields of study. A person may attempt to describe a toothache in terms of decomposition of a tooth resulting in the firings of a signal to the brain that is processed in a particular way, causing the agent to put his hand to his face and say "Ow!". Against this, somebody may argue that he can fully be aware of all of these physical facts and still not know whether the agent is in pain. So, we cannot, in fact, reduce a toothache to a set of physical interactions.

However, using the agent's ability to question whether the person is experiencing actual pain as reason to deny the reduction follows the masked man fallacy. The Mayor's ability to know all he did about the masked man and still be able to question whether the masked man was his brother is not a valid objection to the claim that the masked man is the Mayor's brother. Similarly, the ability to question whether an entity experiencing all of the physical qualities of a person with a toothache without feeling pain does not disprove the thesis that toothaches can be reduced to that set of physical interactions.

The Correct Test

The actual test for whether a particular relationship holds is not found in Moore's open question argument. The test for whether desirism provides an accurate account of morality is not found in an open question test. It is found in the fact that the terms actually make sense of a great many of our moral practices.

For example, equating a wrong act with an act that people generally have many and strong reasons to condemn (in terms of promoting aversions that would aid in the fulfillment of many and strong desires) explains the moral practice of "excuse". An examination of excuses shows that everything that counts as an excuse is a claim that denies the proposition that people generally have many and strong reasons to condemn somebody who performs such an act.

It makes sense of the practice of incorporating praise and condemnation in our moral statements - since these social tools work on the reward centers of the brain to mold malleable desires.

It makes sense of the principle that "ought" implies "can" because using praise and condemnation where malleable desires cannot affect action is a waste of time and energy.

These are the tests that a moral theory must pass. The Open Question Test is not a legitimate test of a moral theory.

Desirism: Objections to Motivational Internalism

In yesterday's post I argued for the possibility of deriving 'ought' from 'is' by making 'ought' a hypothetical imperative. "You ought to do X" means that people generally have many and strong reasons to praise those who do X and condemn those who do not do X. The latter can be derived from 'is', so the former can be derived from 'is'.

One of the implications of this view is that it conflicts with the doctrine of motivational internalism.

Motivational internalism holds that if a person sincerely believes that X is wrong, then he is motivated not to do X. On some versions of internalism, this motivation may be overridden by other concerns, but it is always there.

A person can accept that people generally have many and strong reasons to condemn people who do X without at all being moved not to not do X. He can shrug his shoulders and say, "Eh, I don't care."

Consequently, desirism is inconsistent with motivational internalism.

The justification for motivational internalism comes from the observation that we never see a person change their moral judgment without changing their behavior. A person who changes her mind on capital punishment - who goes from thinking that capital punishment is obligatory to thinking that it is wrong - is expected to undergo a change in behavior as well. In fact, she is required to undergo a change in behavior - otherwise we doubt that she has actually changed her mind or, at best, she is pretending that she still holds her former views.

Motivational internalism explains this my making motivation a part of the meaning of moral terms. A person who says 'X is wrong' when not motivated to refrain from doing X has not learned to use moral terms correctly.

If we break it down, there are two major types of motivational internalism. Strong internalism states that if a person judges X to be wrong she has an overriding reason not to do X. Correspondingly, weak internalism holds that if a person judges X to be wrong then she has some aversion to doing X, but it can be overridden by other interests.

So, how can desirism explain the observations that seem to support internalism - the near perfect match between moral judgment and motivation?

First, when we are talking about something that people generally have many and strong reasons to condemn, we are almost always talking about something that the agent has many and strong reasons to condemn. The hit man still has reasons to encourage society to use condemnation to build in people generally an aversion to killing. The rapist who has any female friends whatsoever (or male friends who themselves has female friends) has reasons to promote condemnation of those who force sex on women without consent. We all have reasons to promote a general aversion to lying or to taking the property of others without consent.

Second, many of us have a desire to do the right thing. One way to get a person to refrain from lying is to give him an aversion to lying. Another way is to give him an aversion to doing that which is wrong and a belief that lying is wrong. We use both methods. Giving him a belief that lying is wrong is not sufficient to motivate him. However, it will motivate anybody with an aversion to doing that which is wrong - and the vast majority of us have that aversion.

Third, People generally have reason to avoid condemnation and punishment. Desirism identifies what is wrong with what people have reason to condemn or punish. Condemnation and punishment play on the reward system - they are inherently things that those condemned or punished have reasons to avoid. You cannot punish a kid by denying him permission to watch a television show he would never want to watch. Consequently, even the person who has no interest in avoiding that which is wrong has an interest in avoiding what others judge to be wrong. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, admitting that something is wrong implies admitting that others have reasons to condemn those who do X. People have many and strong reasons to deny that others have a reason to condemn or punish them.

Fourth, humans are great rationalizers. They tend to adopt propositions that they want to believe are true. Being motivated to perform an action implies being motivated to believe that the state that the action brings about or the act itself is good. This brings about a correspondence between what a person is motivated to do and what he is motivated to believe that does not depend on any type of necessary connection between the two.

These elements point to a pernicious implication of internalism - it's use in deflecting guilt.

Under intenalism, 'I have an obligation to do X' implies 'I am motivated to do X'

If this is true, then 'I am not motivated to do X' implies 'I have no obligation to do X'.

In other words, the following reasoning would be sound. "I am not at all moved by the plight of the sick and hungry. Therefore, I have no obligation to help them. I can test your moral claims by testing my motivation. If my motivation does not correspond to your claims, then your claims are false."

An answer to this may be, "Obligation does not depend on what you are motivated to do now, but on what you would be motivated to do if you had all of the relevant facts."

Still, this means that if a person knew all of the relevant facts about a poor and starving community and was indifferent to their fate, then the claim that he had an obligation to help would be false. It also means that if a person can cultivate an indifference to the plight of the poor in the face of knowing all of the facts, then he can rid himself of any obligation to help the poor.

Desirism holds that claim that one has an obligation would still be true, even if the agent had no interest in living up to that obligation. Desirism would says, "It may not be the case that you do not care, but you should care. By this we mean that people generally have many and strong reasons to make people care by praising those who care and condemning those who do not."

In other words, with desirism, moral claims do not concern what we ARE motivated to do. They are concerned with what we SHOULD BE motivated to do - and seek to use social tools such as praise and condemnation to cause people to have the motivations they should have.

Motivational internalism has a lot of people measuring what they should and should not do by measuring what the want to do or not do. They are concluding, in effect, "I am obligated to do what I want to do - what I find myself motivated to do - and prohibited from doing what I have no interest in doing."

This is a very convenient moral theory. It probably goes a long way towards explaining why it is so popular and so widely used. However, in this case, what is convenient for the ego of the agent is something other people still have reason to condemn - whether they want it to be or not.

Deriving 'Ought' From 'Is' - Moral Hypothetical Imperatives

Desirism denies the proposition that you cannot derive "ought" from "is".

Actually, given the form of "ought" that desirism uses, there are few who deny that "ought" can be derived from "is". The derivation is straight forward.

• Agent desires that P (for some proposition P)
• Doing X will realize P
-----------
• Therefore, Agent ought to do X.

This 'ought' can be overriden by stronger conceerns elsewhere. This is not an 'all things considered' ought (or an 'all desires considered' ought) - however there is a sense of the word 'ought' that applies. However it is still the case that, in the absence of other concerns, the agent agent ought to do X.

This is a classic hypothetical imperative. It gets this name because the "ought" clause is conditional on what Agent desires. Hypothetically, if Agent's desires change - if he changes from wanting P to wanting Q, and doing X will not realize Q - then what he ought to do changes. It would no longer be the case that he ought to do X.

This derivation of a hypothetical 'ought' from 'is' is not considered a problem. The problem comes from the fact that there seems to be another type of 'ought' - the moral 'ought' - that is not hypothetical. For this type if 'ought', there is no derivation from 'is'.

To illustrate this second type of 'ought', if I were to say 'You ought to tell the truth when you are under oath,' this is not generally understood to be a hypothetical imperative. I am not saying, 'If the things that you want can be gained by telling the truth under oath, then you ought to tell the truth under oath.' I am saying that it does not matter what you want, you ought to tell the truth under oath. This 'ought' is unconditional.

This is the type of 'ought' that cannot be derived from 'is'.

Desirism states that the reason this type of 'ought' cannot be derived from 'is' rests on the fact that it does not exist. It is not real. It is a fictitious or mythical 'ought'.

Ultimately, desirism does not recognize a distinction between 'is' and 'ought'. It only recognizes a distinction between 'is' and 'is not'. Any 'ought' that cannot be derived from 'is' is an 'ought' that 'is not'.

If we are going to claim that 'moral ought' has any type of influence in the real world - that real-world atoms changed their velocity as a result of the influence of some 'moral ought' - that at some time or some place a moral ought reached out and changed a person's behavior, then we need to fix that 'ought' in the real world. It has to be something capable of producing real-world effects.

If 'moral ought' has no influence in the real world - if everything that happens in the world is entirely unaffected by 'moral oughts' - then we have no real-world reason to refer to them. They are not real-world reasons to adopt a law or an institution, to perform an action, or to engage in real-world praise and condemnation.

Consequently, desirism states that we are stuck with hypothetical 'oughts' - the type that are unproblematically derived from 'is'.

However, there is a specific set of hypothetical imperatives that functions so much like a moral ought so as to be nearly - if not entirely - indistinguishable from it.

On this account, "Ought to do X" means "People generally have many and strong reasons to praise those who do X." Their reasons for praise have to do with tapping into the reward system of the human brain to promote a stronger and more widespread sets of desires that would motivate people to do acts like X. Those reasons for tapping into the reward system in this way have to do with the desires that people have.

On this model, "You ought not to lie under oath" means "People generally have many reasons to condemn those who lie under oath" because the aversion to lying under oath - made more widespread and stronger - will tend to help in the fulfillment of many and strong desires.

Among other things, this explains why moral statements include elements of praise and condemnation and why they tend to refer to act-types (or acts relevantly similar to the act in question). It also serves to explain what qualities are relevant in defining the range of an act-type; they are the set of actions that would be influenced by the desires being targeted.

For centuries, people have been looking for a moral 'ought' to provides some type of reason to the person one is talking to where just making the agent aware of that reason will motivate the agent to do what he morally ought. For centuries they have not met with any success. They will continue to meet with no success because what they are looking for does not exist.

What does exist are many and strong reasons to praise/condemn people who do acts like type X so as to promote those desires and aversions that will motivate people to perform/avoid acts of type X. Pointing this out to a person may not automatically give him a reason to do/refrain from acts of type X. However, it directs people generally to give him and others a reason to do/refrain from acts of type X using the social tools of praise and condemnation.

It also provides a moral claim that does not depend on the sentiments of the speaker. While the agent can respond that he does not care about what people generally have reason to praise/condemn, it does not change the fact that people generally and genuinely do have reason to praise/condemn such a person.

it provides a moral claim that makes use of many of our practices. Not only does it account for the elements of praise and condemnation in moral practice, it makes sense of moral counter claims such as excuses. If we take a moral claim to be a claim about what people generally have many and strong reasons to condemn, then an excuse is a claim that refutes the assertion that the act is one that people generally have many and strong reasons to condemn.

You can find an account of the concept of "excuse" under desirism at the desirism wiki.

Finally, this 'ought' can be derived from 'is' and has a real-world effect on real-world events.

This is going to raise a huge number of questions concerning the implications for and legitimacy of this substitution. In order to prioritize those issues, I would like to ask readers, "What is your biggest concern or objection at this point?"

Desirism: Resolving Conflicting Desires

In my last post I discussed a simple conflict of desires. In it I drew a contrast between an evaluation made by one of the two agents inside the simplified world in which conflict exists, and an evaluation made by us outside the world.

In this post, I am going to make things more complicated. I will take a conflict in the current world and point out how one would approach that issue using desirism.

My purpose in this post is not to draw a specific conclusion on the issue selected. My purpose is to identify the types of claims that would be relevant in drawing a conclusion.

The conflict that I will use can be expressed as follows: "If a person who opposes homosexual acts thwarts the desires of homosexuals, then don't homosexuals thwart the desires of those who oppose homosexual acts?"

What do we do when faced with this kind of conflict?

Step 1: Remove the clutter - reasons for action that do not exist.

We are applying desirism to this question. This means that the first thing we are going to do is remove all of the clutter that will get in the way of a conclusion that is true in the real world. We are going to throw out all claims based on the idea of a god and divine commands – because there is no god and his alleged commands are actually the prejudices of people who died thousands of years ago.

We are going to throw out all appeals to what is "natural" - since these claims assume that "natural" has some type of intrinsic merit, and intrinsic merit does not exist.

We are going to throw out any appeals to individual sentiment of the form, "It seems right to me; therefore, it is right." Personal sentiment tells us an agent’s current likes and dislikes – it does not tell us what likes and dislikes people in general have many and strong reasons to promote.

We are going to toss out any claims based on a "moral sense" – a faculty in the brain that allows us to perceive moral qualities by contemplating the situation in which it arose. We have no "moral sense". What some people call "moral sense" is simply their personal opinions and prejudices.

The only thing we are going to allow are appeals to reasons for action that exist – which is to say, appeals to desires. Desires provide the only reasons for praising or condemning certain attitudes – the only thing in the real world that will allow us to determine if people generally have many and strong reasons to promote an attitude or inhibit it.

Step 2: Removing desires that cannot be objectively satisfied.

After we have removed reasons that do not exist from the calculation, we are going to remove reasons that exist but cannot be objectively satisfied.

A person may have an aversion to a state in which God is offended. He may believe that a state in which people engage in homosexual acts is a state in which God is offended.

His aversion is real. As such, it is a reason for action that exists.

However, the state that this person is averse to – a state in which their god is offended – can never be realized regardless of the number of homosexual acts that take place. No actual homosexual act will offend a god, because there is no god to be offended. This agent may believe that he has a reason to condemn the desires that motivate people to engage in homosexual acts, but he does not.

Desirism looks at reasons for action that exist – not reasons for action that people wrongly believe exists.

People with an aversion to acts that are intrinsically wrong are in this same situation. No homosexual act is intrinsically wrong, so an aversion to intrinsically wrong acts is not a reason to oppose any actual real-world homosexual act. This is true even if one falsely believes that homosexual acts are intrinsically wrong.

On the other hand, a person might simply have an aversion to a state of affairs in which homosexual acts take place. If this is the case, then this person has a reason for action that exists – and it is a reason for acting in ways that reduce or eliminate states of affairs in which homosexual acts take place. This means that he has a reason to condemn those desires that would tend to cause people to engage in homosexual acts.

These reasons count. These are reasons for action that exist.

Step 3: Measure the effect that a desire has on objectively satisfying or thwarting other desires.

Let us take this aversion to states in which homosexual acts exist and the desires that motivate agents to engage in homosexual acts and evaluate them according to actual reasons for action that exist.

We already know that each thwarts the other. However, we need to ask about how strong and how common those desires are. How many people have an aversion that homosexual acts take place, and how many people have desires that motivate them to engage in homosexual acts?

Remember, we are counting aversions that homosexual acts take place. We are not counting aversions to intrinsically bad acts taking place. We are not counting aversions to states in which some god is offended. We are only counting aversions that homosexual acts take place.

We are also not talking about an aversion to engaging in homosexual acts. An agent might find the idea of having sex with somebody of the same gender repulsive. However, the response to this is for that agent not to have sex with somebody of the same gender. It is not a reason to prevent others from having sex with people of the same gender.

One of the mistakes that people often make is to take their own attitudes towards a particular state as evidence of an intrinsic property. From this they infer that all other properly functioning humans should respond as they do.

An agent with an aversion to having sex with somebody of the same gender may make the mistake of thinking that he is responding to a badness intrinsic to those acts. From this, he concludes that others who do not perceive this truth about homosexual acts and responds as he does are defective (sick, perverse). This mistaken belief is actually not a reason to condemn desires that motivate people to engage in homosexual acts. It is a reason for the agent to come to a better understanding of his own response.

So, we are counting the people with actual desires that are fulfilled by engaging in homosexual acts, versus people with an actual aversion to states in which homosexual acts are taking place.

The next thing we look at is the strengths of those desires. How strongly do people with a desire to engage in homosexual acts value those acts? How important are they? And how strong is the aversion to homosexual acts taking place?

Many and stronger desires trump fewer and weaker desires. We are, after all, looking at what there is more and stronger reason to condemn.

Then, we need to figure out the effects of each of these desires on fulfilling or thwarting other desires.

We may discover that people with homosexual desires tend to abuse children, in which case the desires thwarted by this child abuse would be a reason to condemn homosexual desires.

These effects are relevant – if they are true. Is it the case that, by condemning homosexual acts, we can reduce those desires that contribute to the abuse of children? If it is not true, of course, then preventing the desire-thartings of child abuse do not create real-world reasons to condemn the desires that motivate homosexual acts.

Is it the case that, by condemning heterosexual acts, we can do an even better job of reducing those desires that contribute to the abuse of children? After all, by condemning heterosexual acts, our condemnation will impact a larger audience and, consequently, eliminate even more child abuse.

Heterosexual desires are not our concern in these posts. However, comparing a desire to engage in homosexual acts with a desire to engage in heterosexual acts will help to illustrate the types of concerns that are relevant in evaluating each desire.

In the case of heterosexual acts, we do have reason to condemn those subsets of heterosexual acts that contribute to the spread of disease, cause physical harm, or violate rules of consent. In the case of homosexual acts, we also have reason to condemn those subsets of acts that contribute to the spread of disease, cause physical harm, or violate rules of consent.

However, it makes no sense to argue in one case that these concerns provide reason to condemn only a subset of heterosexual acts, but in the other they provide provide reason to condemn all homosexual acts. In fact, there is an argument against such a distinction - it confuses and makes less effective our condemnation of the subset that has these consequences.

On the issue of thwarting other desires, we may also discover that people with homosexual desires tend to engage in behavior that is self-destructive (thwarting their own future desires) or harmful to others (engaging in violent behavior towards others). If fewer people had those desires that motivate homosexual acts, then fewer people would engage in desire-thwarting self-destructive or anti-social behavior.

However, it may also be the case that if fewer people engaged in the condemnation of homosexual desires –(thus psychologically harming those people, particular children, who cannot escape that condemnation) - that this, too, would reduce the amount of self-destructive and anti-social behavior. In this case, it is not the homosexual desire that we have reason to condemn, but the aversion to homosexual acts and the psychological abuse that this creates.

Step 4: Determine which of these desires can be most easily modified.

This comes after Step 3 because we are going to distinguish between moral evil and a mental illness. After determining that a particular desire is harmful and one that people have many and strong reasons to be rid of, we are going to ask if it can be countered using social forces such as praise and condemnation. If it can, then it is a moral evil and we bring these social forces to bear against it. If not, then it is an illness. It makes no sense for us to condemn such a person – that condemnation does no useful work. However, we still have reason to confine them or to remove the conditions that make them a danger to others.

In this conflict between desires that motivate people to engage in homosexual acts and the aversion to states in which homosexual acts take place, which can be most easily eliminated?

It appears to be the case that the desires that motivate agents to engage in homosexual acts are quite firmly established. On the other hand, the aversion that homosexual acts exist is learned and can be unlearned.

There are biological reasons to suspect that this is the case. As a matter of fact, there is no desire to engage in homosexual acts. There is a desire to engage in sex with a male – embedded in the brain of somebody with a male body. And there a desire to engage in sex with a female in the brain of somebody with a female body. These "desires to engage in sex with a male/female" are likely to be firmly fixed in the brain – regardless of the physical properties of the body that that the brain finds itself in.

On the other hand, evolution has no reason to fix in the brain an aversion to a state in which homosexual acts exist. Evidence suggests that it is acquired through learning - from a childhood of being exposed to people who (and to religious texts that) condemn those engage in homosexual acts. Where it is the case that these social forces are causing the aversion, a change in social forces can eliminate the aversion and, in doing so, eliminate the conflict.

We need to apply these criteria not only to the desires themselves, but to the other desires that are fulfilled or thwarted. The aversion to homosexual acts causes people to condemn those with desires that would motivate homosexual acts. This, in turn, causes people who suffer this condemnation to experience self-hatred, which leads to self-destructive and anti-social behaviors. These self-destructive and anti-social behaviors thwart further desires. Can those further desires be easily modified? Or are they desires that are fixed? If fixed, then this strengthens our reasons for condemning those with an aversion to homosexual acts taking place.

Even if the desires affected can be easily modified, we have to ask whether we have reason to promote those desires or inhibit them. Laws against homosexual acts may, for some, motivate them to act in ways that would thwart a desire to obey the law. The desire to obey the law is learned. Yet, we do not have many and good reasons to toss aside this desire to obey the law - it is important (in a just society). The mere fact that this desire can be modified does not argue that it should be modified.

Conclusion

All of these considerations suggest that the moral calculus may be difficult. However, there is no fault to be found in a theory that reports as true what is in fact true – that on some issues determining the morally right answer is very difficult, or nearly impossible.

This does not change the fact that there are issues where determining the right answer appears easy – such as the value of promoting an aversion to killing aggressors, or lying, or engaging in acts intimately involving others without their consent.

Furthermore, we do not need to compute the effect of every little desire. The movement of an object through space is influenced by every asteroid, star, and galaxy that exists. However, a rocket scientist plotting the course of a probe to Mars does not need to put all of this data in her calculations. She only needs to include those items that have the greatest influence on the final result.

In the case of homosexuality, it would appear that the case can be easily drawn against the aversion to homosexual acts taking place. By reducing incidents of this aversion – which is susceptible to social tools – homosexuals can better fulfill their desires, we can reduce the psychological harms that cause those with these desires to engage in self-destructive and anti-social behaviors, and can give more support to principles that aim at reducing the spread of disease, cause physical harm, or violate rules of consent. There are more reasons to condemn an aversion that homosexual acts exist than to condemn those desires that cause people to engage in homosexual acts.

Or so it seems.