The Paradox of Choice and the Pursuit of Happiness

If you're hanking for a lecture and you don't know where to get your fix, you should check out TEDTalks. They have some good stuff by philosophers (Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins) and some fascinating stuff by nonphilosophers as well.

This response to singer is a little technical, but the author gives a succinct breakdown of his main argument, which you will be asked to recapitulate if you write about him on the test.

"Singer's argument for our obligation to assist can be stated very simply:

... if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it. Since it is in our power to prevent people from starving to death without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it. Therefore we have a moral obligation to give as much to the starving as we can do without reducing ourselves to a comparable level of poverty. (Singer 1993, p. 231)

As it stands, this argument is somewhat ambiguous. We can begin to deal with the ambiguities by making its structure a little more formal;

P1. If it is in our power, by performing action A, to prevent some bad event E from happening, and we can prevent his bad event E from happening without causing an event E' which is morally at least as bad as E, then we ought to perform action A.

P2. It is in our power, by donating money to overseas aid, to prevent people from starving to death, and we can prevent people from starving to death without causing an event which is morally at least as bad as allowing people to starve to death.

Therefore;

We ought to donate money to overseas aid."

From Singer's article What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?

"More important than questions about motives are questions about whether there is an obligation for the rich to give, and if so, how much they should give. A few years ago, an African-American cabdriver taking me to the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington asked me if I worked at the bank. I told him I did not but was speaking at a conference on development and aid. He then assumed that I was an economist, but when I said no, my training was in philosophy, he asked me if I thought the U.S. should give foreign aid. When I answered affirmatively, he replied that the government shouldn’t tax people in order to give their money to others. That, he thought, was robbery. When I asked if he believed that the rich should voluntarily donate some of what they earn to the poor, he said that if someone had worked for his money, he wasn’t going to tell him what to do with it.

At that point we reached our destination. Had the journey continued, I might have tried to persuade him that people can earn large amounts only when they live under favorable social circumstances, and that they don’t create those circumstances by themselves. I could have quoted Warren Buffett’s acknowledgment that society is responsible for much of his wealth. “If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru,” he said, “you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil.” The Nobel Prize-winning economist and social scientist Herbert Simon estimated that “social capital” is responsible for at least 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy societies like those of the United States or northwestern Europe. By social capital Simon meant not only natural resources but, more important, the technology and organizational skills in the community, and the presence of good government. These are the foundation on which the rich can begin their work. “On moral grounds,” Simon added, “we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent.” Simon was not, of course, advocating so steep a rate of tax, for he was well aware of disincentive effects. But his estimate does undermine the argument that the rich are entitled to keep their wealth because it is all a result of their hard work. If Simon is right, that is true of at most 10 percent of it."

The problem with Hobbes understanding of the social contract is that he thinks that fear and the desire for commodious living will bring people to install a governing body that will guarantee their safety and security. The sovereign is made the sole gauge of what is just and unjust however, and this seems problematic if the government becomes tyrannical. According to Hobbes, so long as it protects it upholds the law and protects its subjects, the sovereign is legitimate. This means that the sovereign can legislate unfair laws, but nobody can call them on what is just or unjust since the sovereign is the one that defines these terms.

Rawls takes Hobbes' idea of the state of nature and refines it to the point where we could imagine the principles derived from the state of nature thought experiment not just serving as the foundation for the existence of government, but also guaranteeing that the government and its laws are not arbitrary--rather they will be laws that everyone can agree on.

Rawls calls his state of nature original position. It is not of course an actual state of affairs, but a hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice. In the original position, members of a society must think about justice from behind a veil of ignorance. The idea is that in such a position everyone will be able to come to the same conclusions about the principles of justice that everyone will agree too, because the veil hides all the morally irrelevant information to those in the original position.

Rawls agrees with Hobbes, all human beings are rationally self-interested. The only condition under which someone will give up some of their liberty is when it offers some good to him/her. This is where the veil of ignorance and the original position come in. Behind the veil of ignorance, in the original position, "nobody knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like, or even their religious or moral views (555L)." Thus, the reasoning of individuals in the original position is "constrained by their ignorance, and their ignorance is expressive of the moral demand for impartiality" (Stanford). What is hidden by the veil of ignorance is indicative of a society's conception of justice; the veil hides all features that a society deems to be morally irrelevant to the principles of justice.

The upshot of this is that since everyone is effectively the same in the original position, nobody has any information about themselves that would bias them toward any particular position of justice and everyone is rationally motivated to seek their own self-interest, the result will be everyone will come to agreement on the same principles of justice. Rawls sketches them in rough outline:

1. Equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties
2. Social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society (556R).

The important thing about 1 and 2 is that they are arranged in serial order. "This ordering means that a departure from the institutions of equal liberty required by the first principle cannot be justified by, or compensated for, by greater social and economic advantages" (560)...i.e. you can't sell your vote.

Hobbes sets out to justify the authority of government through the discovery of the rational principles that provide its foundations. In order to find these principles Hobbes uses a thought experiment; he imagines what human life would be like prior to the existence of government, in a state of nature rather than a civil state. The question is how and why we get from one state to another. Before we can ascertain this, first we must flesh out what life is like in the state of nature.

Hobbes assumes that in the state of nature:

1. Everyone is equal in their mental and physical powers such that "the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself."

2. Everyone is concerned with preserving themselves at all costs, by any means necessary.

3. Nothing is just or unjust, there is no property, men have a right to all things. (This follows from (2) in concert with the fact that there is no law forbidding the extent to which people may go to preserve their own welfare against the encroachment of others.)

The state of nature is "a war of every man against every man" for "war consists not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known." (542)

The result? "There is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

It should be clear why we would want to avoid the state of nature in favour of the civil state. The motivations for the construction of the civil state are:

1. Fear of death
2. Desire for things that are necessary for commodious living, or in contemporary English, a desire for the basic amenities of pleasant everyday life (food, shelter, conversation with your neighbour without fear he's going to kill you and take your wife and possessions).

How contract that gets us from the state of nature to the civil state:

From the points made above, Hobbes concludes that it is a law of nature that all rational individuals ought to seek peace when they can get it, and when they can't, then they have the liberty to seek all the help and advantages of war (544L).

From this fundamental law of nature, Hobbes infers a second, that "a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defense himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself" (544L).

This liberty is transferred to the government, what Hobbes calls the sovereign. The sovereign is thereby given the authority to enforce the social contract, with violence if necessary, in order to preserve the civil state and prevent its degeneration into the state of nature. The validity of the social contract is dependent on the existence of "a civil power sufficient to compel men to keep [it]" (548R).

I was just reading up on the naturalistic fallacy and I found something pertinent to our reading of Kant here.

"In using his categorical imperative Kant deduced that experience was necessary for their applications. But experience on its own or the imperative on its own could not possibly identify an act as being moral or immoral. We can have no certain knowledge of morality from them, being incapable of deducing how things ought to be from the fact that they happen to be arranged in a particular manner in experience."

Kant argues that we cannot investigate morality empirically (like how Mill recommends in his discussion of utilitarianism), because experience does not tell us what we should do, it only tells us the way things are.

Kant makes a similar point about the pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The problem is that what we desire cannot tell us what is right, no more than the way things are tell us what we ought to do. To repeat an important point from the previous post on Kant's ethics:

Morality must put constraints on the will to act in a specific fashion (i.e. out of duty in keeping with what is right and in doing so respecting the dutiful behaviour of the community of rational agents who also recognize this fact), whether or not it's what one desires. The fact of our desire cannot determine what we're supposed to do.

Neglecting our duty excepts us from the community of rational agents, the community of human beings. It dehumanizes us because rejecting one's duty is equivalent to endorsing a contradiction (as I said in class and as Kant says in your textbook, when someone does this they say both that it should be a universal law that people, for example keep their promises, but then at the same time, the duty-breaker wants to make an exception of themselves. Universal laws cannot admit exceptions because they would eventually collapse from the pressure. For if everyone were to make an exception of themselves like the duty-breaker then nobody could make promises anymore. Breaking a promise when it benefits you cannot be made a universal law, obviously, because if everyone did it then nobody would trust anyone. This is why as a community of rational beings we agree that everyone ought to keep their promises.

A Problem for Kant: What do we do with the person who has a Jewish family hidden in their cellar and a Nazi stormtrooper asking if she knows their whereabouts. It is a universal maxim that we should not lie, because if everyone were to lie then the activity of telling the truth would be undermined. But exposing a family that could otherwise be saved to Nazi death camps seems like the wrong thing to do in this situation. I like Kant's moral theory, but I don't know how to answer this objection. Any ideas?

I have taken a hiatus from updating this journal in recent weeks in the hope that anyone who was skipping my tutorial and just reading the lecture notes online would come and hear the words from the horse's mouth.

Kant is difficult enough that not only should you read the notes I am putting up online, but you are also strongly encourage to come and attend the tutorial on Friday. It could payoff bigtime come quiz time, as those of you who came out to the lecture today know.

To begin, I would like to recommend this amusing little comic that sums up part of what Kant is going on about in a bite sized piece.

Second, I would like to direct you to an articulation of Kant's ideas that I think is pretty much bang on, and also offers a way of thinking about Kant in the fun context of a game!

"HOW TO BE MORAL: THE BOARD GAME ( the CI procedure)
Hey, kids! Let's play the Practical Deliberation and the Categorical Imperative Procedure game! ;)

START HERE -- C'mon everyone! Join in!

Step One: Formulate a maxim in roughly this form:

I am to do X (some action) in circumstances C in order to achieve Y (some state of affairs).

Step Two: Test this maxim in accordance with the Hypothetical Imperative (the principles of self-interested rationality suitably understood) in the following way:

A rational agent who wills an end (or set of ends) is also to will some means that are effective (necessary and sufficient) in achieving this end (or set of ends) and preferably is to will the most effective means.

Wheee! Having fun yet? I know I am! ;D

Step Three: Test only the maxim which has survived Step Two by a separate test, videlicet, the Categorical Imperative procedure. Here's how it goes:

1. Start with the maximum which survived the Hypothetical Imperative test and hence was proven to be rational. Such a rational maxim will take the following form:

I am to do X in circumstances C in order to achieve Y.

2. Generalize the preceding maxim so it now takes the following form:

Everybody is to do X in circumstances C in order to achieve Y.

3. Transform the general precept from (2) into a law of nature as follows:

Everybody does X in circumstances C in order to achieve Y.

4. Adjust the system of existing nature in accordance with the law of nature from (3):

Everybody does X in circumstances C, etc., in this now adjusted or perturbed system of nature.

If the maxim produces a contradiction at (4), then it has failed the CI procedure. If it doesn't, it has passed.

Step Four: If the rational maxim from Step Two fails the CI procedure, then player must return to Step One without collecting $200 and must try again. He must formulate another rational maxim, run it against the CI procedure, and keep doing so until the maxim is rational and reasonable. Only then is the agent supposed to act on the maxim.

STOP

Here's the general idea behind the CI Procedure:

All moral philosophy before Kant depended on the view that the good was an object of desire, of knowledge, of volition, etc. The notion of the good was identical with some intrinsically valuable material concept, be it happiness (encapsulated in Mill's utilitarianism and criticized in the first half of of your Kant reading), perfection, moral feeling, the will of God, the Ten Commandments, the good life for man, etc. All of these are objects that we're supposed to seek after.

But all of these moral theories suffer from a fatal paradox: none is sufficient for the possibility of morality. They're all absolutely wrong in principle.

There are two premises that are constitutive of moral obligation, and pre-critical moral theories violate one or both:

1. There is a constraint on the will to act in a specific fashion, whether or not it's what one desires. The fact of our desire cannot determine what we're supposed to do.



2. This constraint (call it "duty") not only determines the will but must also be capable of being freely chosen by the agent. Otherwise it's coercion and not morality.

Both premises are constitutive of moral obligation and tell us what we have to do with necessity. They're determinative features of our moral experience. For the good to be a meaningful concept, it must be related to the agent as an obligation to internalize it and make it a principle of the will.

All human acts are a priori legislative. The presupposition of all modern moral philosophers (e.g., Kant and Nietzsche) is that the moral law points out a contradiction in my willing. But why is a contradiction immoral? Because it amounts to making an exception for myself, thereby excluding myself from the community of human beings. Logical consistency is the minimal necessary condition of free action. This means that moral action is the law of contradiction in action. All of the formulations of the moral law -- the categorical imperative, humanity as an end in itself, and the realm of ends -- all have this idea as their source. The immoral action is the one that makes an exception for an individual, thereby excluding him or her from the rules that the rest of humanity has to follow."

Procrastination

Come on now, get started on that essay!