Naturalism, pragmatism, impartiality
Joshua Greene’s naturalism
Joshua Greene sees morality as part of the natural world 1. It emerges from evolution, because certain kinds of cooperation are adaptive.
In his breakdown:
- Morality helps individuals cooperate 2. Codes of morality operate within groups, but vary between groups.
- “Metamorality” helps groups cooperate. For groups to cooperate, they need to find a common currency, even if they have quite different codes of morality.
On this picture, both morality and metamorality stem from a practical problem—how can creatures like us flourish, get along, and have many descendants?
What Greene calls “modern ethics” is mostly concerned with the question: how can we improve our metamorality?
Greene, following Jeremy Bentham, thinks that the best candidate for a common currency to support metamorality is: quality of experience. If you 5-whys ask people why they care about something, it often comes down to the quality of their experience—crudely: whether it amounts to pleasure or suffering, an experience they would gladly choose or strive to avoid.
Naturalism and impartiality
Where does the ideal of impartiality fit into this picture?
Moral philosophers and people associated with the effective altruism movement often characterise impartiality as:
Giving equal weight to everyone’s interests.
This is often cached out in negative terms, as:
Trying to avoid giving undue weight to particular interests based on (putatively) non-morally-relevant factors such as race, gender, proximity in space and time, nationality, species membership, or substrate.
Usually, such lists are motivated by a positive claim about what kinds of things are morally-relevant, such as capacity for wellbeing, or sentience.
Let’s bracket the question of what our positive claim, and our list of morally-irrelevant factors, should look like. Let’s instead zoom in on the “undue weight” part.
At the level of within-group morality, one can tell a story about how norms of (relatively) equal treatment and fairness could emerge as a stable equilbria, grounded upon (relatively) equal distributions of power in forager societies. 3
At the level of between-group metamorality, we can tell a similar story: groups will be reluctant to cooperate if they think their interests are unduly neglected (though they may in fact accept a bunch of unfair treatement, if their other options—e.g. conflict—seem worse).
So how do we cash out “undue weight” in naturalistic terms? Well, the obvious candidate is: non-adaptive.
In moral philosophy and effective altruism, the “impartiality story” is not told as though it’s based on evolutionary logic of adaptive bargains and long-run equilibria. The story is not “we should be impartial in order to solve our co-operation problems and maximise reproductive fitness”. But rather, the idea is “we should impartially promote the good because… well… that’s the right thing to do”.
This seems like a case where your metaethics, or the story you tell about what we’re up to when we do moral philosophy, rather matters.
Bernard Williams, discussing the limits to impartiality, approvingly quotes Max Stirner:
The tiger who attacks me is in the right, and so am I when I strike him down. I defend against him not my right, but myself.
—Max Stirner
Williams imagines that humanity is threatened by an alien civilisation, and suggests that in such a situation, it would not be appropriate ask:
- What outcome would maximise value according to our best impartial axiology?
For Williams as for Greene, our impartiality axiology is ultimately a tool that’s supposed to serve us, not an external imperative that we are supposed to serve. Thoughts to the contrary are “a relic of a world not yet fully disenchanted”, i.e. the artefact of a non-secular worldview 4.
Rather, he thinks we should ask:
- What outcome would be best for us (or according to us)?
The choice between (a) and (b) isn’t just academic: we face situations where we must decide which of these questions to ask now, soon, and in the long-run:
- (now) Western liberalism vs Political Islam; West vs China; etc
- (soon?) Digital Minds
- (long-run) Alien civilisations
Naturalism vs non-naturalism; pragmatism and normativity
For the naturalist, moral and metamoral questions are quite empirical. In the current environment, which ideals actually work?
(The normativity within “actually work” boils down to “adaptive fitness”, whether we recognise this or not.)
As Bostrom & Schulman reminded us recently 5, we can reasonably reject the insistence of many philosophers that there’s a fundamental distinction between descriptive and normative claims. After reflecting on Pragmatism last autumn, I became more confident is that this distinction is not, in fact, fundemental. Rather, things are blurry—there’s no such thing as a purely descriptive claim, when we begin our enquiry we’re always already bound up in the normative project of being humans trying to get by in the world, with various aims and agendas baked in 6.
On the naturalistic perspective, we started out trying to solve a practical problem—how can we get along with groups with which, on the surface, we don’t share much in common—and ended up mistakenly thinking of ourselves as doing something else (seeking the (meta)moral truth, then following that). If that’s our self-image, we won’t be so concerned with empirics: we’ll just try whatever our culture and our moral philosophers come up with, and if it “works” in the naturalistic sense, all good. Otherwise, we’ll get wiped out, perhaps gradually, perhaps quickly.
The non-naturalist impartialist thinks there is an external, non-human standard, so they are likely to be more interested in revisionary or revolutionary maximisation—maximisation of whatever they think is valuable, independently of humans—and chafing against the constraints imposed by being the kinds of creatures we find ourselves to be.
On the naturalistic perspective, we’ll be more concerned with thinking about what flavours of impartiality are going to work well for us over the long run. We’d be more inclined to, like the pragmatist, keep coming back to the question: what problem are we actually trying to solve here?
See Moral Tribes or his interview with Sean Carroll.↩︎
“A set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.” Moral Tribes p.23↩︎
People seem to think that before the agricultural revolution, human tribes were much more egalitarian. C.f. Hanson on forager vs farmer morality.↩︎
Derek Parfit, and other non-naturalists, would disagree, but despite some hunting, I’ve not found arguments for non-naturalism that strike me as persuasive.↩︎
Nietzsche was also very clear on this.↩︎
writing moral philosophy impartiality pragmatism naturalism joshua greene bernard williams
Digital minds: descendents or rivals?
Should we think of digital minds as our descendents, or our rivals?
If they are descendents, we can think of them as children—different from us in important ways, but carrying on the flame.
If they are rivals, well—they are rivals. If they inherit the future, then we have, in some important sense, lost.
If you think that digital minds will inherit the future whether we like it or not, the main way in which this matters is how it affects your attitudes toward this future today. And so perhaps we should make more effort to like it.
Iain McGilchrist on the left and right hemispheres
The left hemisphere is good at helping us manipulate the world, but not good at helping us to understand it. To just use this bit and then that bit, and then that bit. But the right hemisphere has a kind of sustained, broad, vigilant attention instead of this narrow, focused, piecemeal attention. And it sustains a sense of being, a continuous being, in the world. So, these are very different kinds of attention. And they bring into being for us quite different kinds of a world.
It is not so much what each hemisphere does, it’s the way in which it does it. By which, I don’t mean by what mechanism. I mean, the manner in which it does it. The two halves of the brain have, as we do, different goals, different values, different preferences, different ways of being.
In a nutshell: the left hemisphere has a map of the world, and the right hemisphere sees the terrain that is mapped. So, the right hemisphere is seeing an immensely complex, very hard-to-summarise, nonlinear, deeply embedded, changing, flowing, ramifying world. And in the other—the left-hemisphere take on the world—things are clear, sharp, distinct, dead, decontextualised, abstract, disembodied. And then they have to be put together, as you would put things together like building a machine in the garage.
https://www.econtalk.org/iain-mcgilchrist-on-the-divided-brain-and-the-master-and-his-emissary/
Pragmatism, evolution & moral philosophy
Those who grow passionate on one or the other side of arcane and seemingly pointless disputes are struggling with the question of what self-image it would be best for human beings to have. —Richard Rorty
Pragmatism casts philosophy in a different light. It sees philosophy—including moral philosophy—as just another thing that humans do to get by.
That’s to say: it situates philosophy within the glorious indifference of the natural world, the competition and selection, the evolving universe, the dust clouds, the equations of physics.
In general and on average over the long run 1, we see things as good or bad insofar as it helps us get by. And “getting by” ultimately means: survive and reproduce. In the long run, your belief-value bundles have to be adaptive.
On this view, moral philosophy is not—as the non-naturalist moral realist would have it—a quest for values that are “correct” independently of the evolutionary environment 2. Strange as it sounds, evolutionary processes are the source of normativity. Philosophers who hope to improve our values need to think about the messy, hard realities of adaptiveness, equilibria and economics at least as much as they think about moral principles we can all (currently) agree on. The former underwrite the latter 3.
Maladaptive belief-value bundles can emerge and persist for short periods, of course 4 5. I once heard the story of the Scottish Highlanders, whose inflexibility of custom kept them in relative poverty while the modernising Southerners became rich. Eventually, economic incentives for the Southerners led to the Highland Clearances, the forceful destruction of the Highlander way of life.
As the environment changes, our values change too, whether we like it or not.
I’m not sure how best to caveat this.↩︎
At this point, the non-naturalist says: “surely pain is always instrinsically bad”, or “pain is bad because of how it feels”. And the naturalist-pragmatist replies: sure, perhaps its adaptive to think this way. But it’s not quite the right way to think about things.↩︎
It always seems like the non-naturalists don’t linger enough on the question of why they find certain truths about value to be self-evident.↩︎
It’s almost a tautology to say that maladaptive behaviours don’t last. The key insight is that the reason they don’t last is competition from more adaptive behaviours. If you can prevent competition, you can get away with all sorts of not-maximally-adaptive behaviour. But the more not-maximally-adaptive behaviour you preserve, the more you risk your ability to prevent competition.↩︎
I’m not sure how close we should expect cultures get to “optimal” adaptiveness, even over the very long run. I guess they usually just approximate local maxima.↩︎
writing pragmatism moral philosophy evolution robin hanson richard rorty value drift
Tyler Cowen on axiology: I see the good as more holistic than additive-aggregative
These days, I see the good as more holistic than additive-aggregative. […] We can make some gross comparisons of better and worse at the macro level, with partial rankings at best, but for many individualized normative comparisons there simply isn’t a right answer. I view “ranking” as a luxury, occasionally available, rather than an axiomatic postulate which can be used to generate normative comparisons, and thus normative paradoxes, at will. I see that response as different than allowing or embracing intransitivity across multiple alternatives and in that regard my final position differs from Temkin’s. Furthermore, in a holistic approach, the “pure micro welfare numbers” used to generate the paradoxical comparisons aren’t necessarily there in the first place but rather they have to be derived from our intuitions about the whole.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/01/rethinking-the-good-by-larry-temkin.html
Reading Robin Hanson
Tyler Cowen characterises Robin Hanson and Thomas Malthus as “thinkers of constraints”. I read them both while wondering: what constraints apply to moral philosophy?
In This is the Dream Time, Robin Hanson claims that we are living through an unusual period of abundance. Usually, in the natural world, when the available resources grow, population grows too, so after a brief period of abundance, most members of the species revert to subsistence level. Since the industrial revolution, the resources available to humanity have been growing much faster than population, and so, Hanson suggests, we should think of ourselves as living through one of these unusual periods of abundance. In such periods, competitive pressures are eased, and we can sustain all sorts of belief-behaviour packages that do not maximise our rate of reproduction.
How’s this for a prediction:
Our descendants will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialed to the max.
In the future, we should expect population and wealth growth rates to converge again, and for most people to once again live at subsistence levels—unless we co-ordinate to constrain the reproduction rate.
Hanson predicts that our descendents will eventually explictly endorse maximising their reproduction rate as a value. The basic thought:
Biological evolution selects roughly for creatures that do whatever it takes to have more descendants in the long run. When such creatures have brains, those brains are selected for having supporting habits. And to the extent that such brains can be described as having beliefs and values that combine into actions via expected utility theory, then these beliefs and values should be ones which are roughly behaviorally-equivalent to the package of having accurate beliefs, and having values to produce many descendants (relative to rivals). […] with sufficient further evolution, our descendants are likely to directly and abstractly know that they simply value more descendants.
During a conversation with Agnes Callard, Hanson says:
I do tend to think natural selection, or selection, will just be a continuing force for a long time. And the main alternative is governance. I actually think one of the main choices that we will have, and the future will have, is the choice between allowing competition or replacing it with governance.
The question of where and how to push back against the logic of competition and selection will be central over the long-term. Co-ordinating humans on earth to make such decisions will be hard, but perhaps not impossible. Co-ordinating with other civilisations from other galaxies… seems very hard, but perhaps not impossible.
On this perspective, there’s a direct tradeoff between sustaining non-adaptive values we care about over the short-term and sustaining our existence over the long-term. Invest too much in non-adaptive values, and the long-term viability of your group will be threatened by another group that is less invested in these values.
Attitudes towards this evolutionary perspective vary. Hanson does not consider this model of things “that dark”, though he concedes it is not “as bright as the unicorns and fairies that fill dream-time visions”. In fact, Hanson is concerned about a future where our descendents restrain competitive dynamics too much:
When I try to do future analysis one of the biggest contrary assumptions or scenarios that I focus on is: what if we end up creating a strong world government that strongly regulates investments, reproduction and other sorts of things, and thereby prevents the evolutionary environment in which the evolutionary analysis applies. And I’m very concerned about that scenario. That is my best judgement of our biggest long term risk […] the creation of a strong civilisation-wide government that is going to be wary of competition and wary of allowing independent choices and probably wary of allowing interstellar colonisation. That is, this vast expansion into the universe could well be prevented by that.
Eliezer Yudkowksy and Carl Schulman, by contrast, are more keen on the idea of replacing competition with governance, and I think Nick Bostrom is too.
Reading Hanson, and reading more about Pragmatism, has left me with a greater awareness that, over the long run, value systems need to promote survival, reproduction and resource accumulation, or else reliably prevent competition in these domains. If they don’t, they will be replaced with those that do.
If you’re in the business of reflecting on how we should change our values, you probably want to bear this in mind.
One option is to relax the longevity demand. We could settle for pursuing things we care about over the short run, and accept that in the long run, things will come to seem weird and bad by our current lights (but hopefully fine to our (very different) descendents).
writing robin hanson evolution futurism moral philosophy pragmatism parenting