The burden of global misery - let's actually do something

One of the most obscene things about the burden of global misery - the extremes of poverty and disease we see in the developing countries - is that the money is actually there to relieve it. All that we need is the political will. Every rational calculation shows that the resources available to richer nations could be put to work with truly massive impact in improving the plight of the world's poorest people, and with no real harm to the lifestyles of any well-to-do Westerners.

In a new article, Peter Singer has produced a set of calculations that show how much money would be available just from the upper echelons of the wealthy in the US, without taxation at a level that would force any of them into a significantly less luxurious way of life. When you add in other wealthy Western countries, it becomes apparent how conservative UN goals for tackling poverty and related problems really are. They could easily be financed many times over.

Readers of this blog will know that I am not a radical egalitarian. I don't believe that wealth differentials need to be justified all the way down into some kind of metaphysical bedrock. If some people are fortunate enough to be born with talent and social support that provide them with a greater than average chance of success in life, I think that is something to be accepted - I'm not going to argue for state action to equalise everybody. But that is not the practical issue which confronts us when we look out at the world. We don't actually have to adopt any radical political philosophy to realise just how horrific the situation is at the moment in much of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia (and other places, too), and how easy it would be for the West to do something effective about it. We don't even have to make any significant sacrifice, just show a determination to tackle the problem with the resources that are readily available to us.

My heart sinks whenever I hear good-willed people complaining that we spend too much on foreign aid. The misunderstandings are so common, and so total, that it is difficult to know where to begin in setting the record straight. It would take someone far more articulate and far more patient than I ever manage to be in such situations.

We actually spend far too little, though it's true that much of what we actually spend is misdirected in an attempt to shore up supposedly friendly regimes, rather than to change the lives of the world's poorest people. But what I can't help wondering is how so much misinformation has got "out there" into the community, creating a completely wrong impression of how much is actually spent by wealthy nations such as the United States and Australia - and making it unnecessarily difficult for those of us who do have some understanding of the situation to get past first base in explaining it. Who sees a benefit in obscuring the truth about an issue of this kind, involving death and misery on a huge scale that it is in our power to avert for no significant sacrifice? Perhaps I am naive, but this aspect of the puzzle leaves me feeling frustrated and almost despairing.

Sometimes, when I contemplate this, I feel a moderate degree of shame that the causes I devote most of my intellectual energy to - such as defending stem-cell research - pale into insignificance beside the problem of how to help the millions of people in absolute poverty. Not everyone can be immersed in every issue, of course, and we all have our pet topics that fascinate us. What is so galling about the stem-cell research issue is that it shouldn't even be controversial. It takes a totally irrational mentality to be concerned about "harm" to tiny, insentient blobs of protoplasm. This does need to pointed out again and again and again. But there is an even more harmful irrationalism in refusing to face the facts about global poverty and disease, and our moral complicity in its persistence.

Given my meta-ethical views, I can't say that someone who frankly tells me that they don't care about other people's misery is making an intellectual mistake. Even psychopaths are not making an intellectual mistake in showing a lack of empathy for their victims. That's fine. If anyone wants to take the hard line of admitting to be a psychopath or a total psychological egoist, I'll accept that there is nothing I can say to you to prove you wrong - the philosophical quest to do so is understandable but futile, in my opinion. Of course, I'd rather not live in a society with too many people like that.

I'm confident, though, that most of us are not like that. For most of us, the salient fact is that there is a terrible burden of human misery in the world in which we find ourselves, but we have the resources to address it on a grand scale with no real harm to our own lifestyles. What are we going to do about it?

Rational relativism, vulgar relativism, and the naturalistic worldview

In some of my recent posts, I have been defending the rationality of certain moderate kinds of moral relativism, while making the usual sorts of points that philosophers love about the incoherence of vulgar moral relativism. I've also been trying to convey some idea of why I don't like to wear the moral relativist tag, myself - even though I'd be in good company with Gilbert Harman (for example).

One reason why an intelligent person might become a rational moral relativist is that she might come to see the moralities of various societies as different ways of ensuring a degree of social coordination (which involves gaining certain benefits from social interaction and avoiding certain things going badly wrong, etc.). If one looks at morality in this way, it may come to seem largely conventional, and therefore open to revision. However, this approach also involves placing a deeper value on actually gaining the desired degree of social coordination. That value will not be seen as merely conventional, and whichever moral norms seem especially vital to it will not be so easily revisable.

This does not entail that values relating to social coordination must be seen as "objective" in the strong sense that any rational being who rejects them is making an intellectual error. But there is a middle ground between something's being merely conventional, and hence readily open to revision, and the "something"'s being objective in much the same sense as the laws of physics. The middle ground relates to those things that it is in our nature to value or fear, and which objectively have a power to affect human beings - inter-subjectively and cross-culturally. It seems to me that we have very good (if ultimately species-specific) reasons to build institutions and societies on the recognition of those things, without considering them to be either merely conventional or involving objective value (or disvalue) in the sense that Martians or psychopaths would be compelled, on pain of irrationality, to value/disvalue them.

Since there are various things that beings like us are naturally inclined to value (or to fear), it looks like there will be a plurality of sources for a rational morality for human beings. This, I think, must lead to a degree of pluralism in any workable normative system. Furthermore, some things may be valued/feared by human beings only in certain environments, but they might provide sources for moral norms whenever those environments actually obtain. An example might be the exercise of certain sophisticated kinds of personal autonomy that (arguably) would be incomprehensible in some kinds of societies but are typically highly valued once they develop.

To whatever extent it is true that commonsense moral thinking assumes morality is more objective than this, an error theory of commonsense moral thinking (or metaethical scepticism) is correct. That does not, however, entail that we lack good reasons for acting in accordance with at least some moral norms. Beings like us have reason to act in accordance with whatever moral norms are most important for human societies' obtaining some of the things that human beings rationally value and providing some protection against those things that human beings rationally fear. Note that this provides us with a test of actual or proposed moral norms. We can distinguish between core norms, which might be almost unrevisable, and more peripheral norms that might be long overdue for revision. By contrast, a vulgar relativist will advocate slavish acceptance of whatever norms actually prevail within her society (with all the problems this raises). At best, a vulgar relativist can act like an Old Testament prophet calling on her society to honour its own professed morality.

By this point, the theory of morality that I am developing (and which I elaborate in a slightly different way in my "Stem-cell research on other worlds" article in The Journal of Medical Ethics) does not bear much resemblance to vulgar moral relativism, though it is consistent with the idea that even the most vulgar of moral relativists are onto something.

In the end, that "something" is just that we need a morality which uses only cranes, no skyhooks. It should be able to be grounded in the naturalistic account of the universe developed by modern science over the past 400 years. We should not have to rely on anything spooky like the will of a supernatural being, or the presence of objectively prescriptive non-natural moral properties, to have a well-grounded and workable morality with practical implications for the situations in which we find ourselves.

Walker on moral relativism

Over on the IEET site, Mark Walker takes issue with my recent sympathetic discussion of sophisticated theories of moral relativism, such as those advanced by Gilbert Harman, David Wong, and Neil Levy (who prefers to call himself a moral pluralist, but thinks that his position is a moderate kind of relativism).

Before I go on, I should reiterate that I never refer to myself as a "moral relativist" because this expression tends to connote a vulgar and indefensible theory that has often been debunked, perhaps most famously by Bernard Williams. Indeed, I am more likely to be found elaborating on the views of Williams by delivering searching critiques of the vulgar relativist position. In my teaching this year, I haven't had much chance to fit in detailed argument about the issue, but whenever I've had time I've been known to inflict the full critique on my long-suffering students. I do, however, point out that this does not necessarily mean that more sophisticated relativist theories are false, and I now think that this point needs more emphasis.

In my experience, philosophers can be too impatient with the fairly naive ideas that are in the zeitgeist, and get picked up by students, without stopping to think that more sophisticated versions of those ideas may have something going for them - the likes of Harman, Wong, and Levy are not fools - and whether students might not have picked up ideas that are a lot worse.

Walker's response to my previous posts begins by saying that Mussolini purported to be a moral relativist, and used moral relativism to justify attempts to create our own ideologies and enforce them with all the power at our disposal. This, of course, is hardly a tolerant attitude, and it makes the well-known point (which Bernard Williams also makes, and which I make to my students) that relativism does not always entail tolerance. Whether or not it does so depends on what else goes with it.

The vulgar argument is that if morality is relative to culture we should be tolerant of other cultures with their own moralities. As Walker hints, this is a non sequitur. If we are working with a naive form of moral relativism that claims we are all morally obliged to follow the moral norms of our respective cultures, then what moral norms we follow will (of course!) depend on what norms our cultures actually have. If we live in a culture where toleration is an ideal with normative status, then we are required to be tolerant; if we live in a culture where intolerance and war are held in high moral regard, however, we are required to be intolerant and warlike. Thus vulgar moral relativism does not entail tolerance. It demands tolerance only of those who already live in tolerant societies.

Nor, however, would naive moral relativism of the usual kind support Mussolini. It would not entail that Mussolini is entitled to make up his own peronal system and then use violence to support it. It would merely entail that he was required to obey the norms of his own culture, the Italy of the 1920s and 1930s, say. Whether the generally-accepted morality of the time really supported the actions of the fascist regime is not at all clear, though obviously the regime garnered enough popular support to survive.

More generally, the theory that Mussolini seems to have sketched is itself a vulgar one: that the fact that there are no moral absolutes entails a moral right to impose one's own values by violence. But of course, that "right" could not be absolute, either. The most that could be said is that such acts of violence would not be open to criticism from some "absolute" perspective, which still leaves wide open what might be said from various less-than-absolute perspectives. From those perspectives, it seems to me that the rest of us can find plenty of reasons for condemning a fascist thug such as Mussolini. We don't have to claim that our condemnation is transcendentally underwritten.

Levy's book, Moral Relativism: A Short Introduction, which I praised so highly a couple of weeks ago, contains a careful exploration of whether moral relativism leads to toleration. Levy makes the usual points about how it does not logically entail toleration, and the practical effect of vulgar relativisms depends on what else you believe, or what norms are found in your culture. However, he does not end up dismissing the full range of arguments that moral relativism does at least psychologically encourage toleration, at least in some circumstances. He seems to find the arguments on both sides rather inconclusive, and raises questions about whether toleration is really what we want from a moral theory anyway, as opposed to something stronger, such as mutual respect. I can't go into the intricacies of the argument here: I must ask people to read Levy's book for themselves.

Partly, the psychological implications of relativism depend on why one is a relativist. If one motivation for Abigail's becoming a moral relativist is that she comes to see codes of moral norms as essentially solutions to problems of social coordination, rather than as bodies of transcendentally underwritten truth, then, as a matter of psychology rather than strict logic, she is likely to see these codes, including that of her own society, as conventional. In that case, she is likely to see them as open to rational improvement and, in particular, to be prepared to revise those norms that she sees as the more peripheral ones. Furthermore, she will not embrace the vulgar relativist idea that she just is under a duty to obey the norms of her own cultures. Rather, she will tend to respect them (since they have an important job to do), but she will probably come to perceive some as more central than others. The most central ones, she might decide, are those which severely restrict the acceptability of violence to pursue our plans.

If Abigail reaches this point, she is likely to see the efforts of other cultures as acceptable attempts to solve coordination problems. She will not withhold severe condemnation when seemingly "barbaric" norms shock her sympathies - nothing in her understanding will preclude her from thinking that certain societies will have developed practices that merit condemnation from various human viewpoints. But she will allow other cultures considerable leeway in how they solve coordination problems, as well as being open to the idea that her own culture's moral norms are not set in stone, but are open to piecemeal revision.

In other words, she is likely to adopt a stance whereby she sees no norms as transcendentally guaranteed, but sees some core norms as very important from a less-than-transcendental viewpoint. She will see others as more open to revision. In all cases, she will see the justification for moral norms as ultimately lying in the needs and interests of human beings, as social animals with an evolved psychology, rather than in something like the will of a deity or the existence of spooky objectively prescriptive moral properties. She will not expect that every rational creature in the universe would adopt the moral norms, irrespective of its nature and evolutionary history. She won't even expect every human society to do so, though she'll expect to see considerable commonality within the norms of just one species on just one planet.

There is a lot more to be said here, of course, but it looks to me as if people who espouse some sort of relativist position of a rather vulgar kind might nonetheless show a degree of good sense in practice. Their theory might not have the resources to explain this, but it is likely that at some level they sense the more sophisticated points that Abigail has identified. I.e., they sense that human beings need some core moral values, for non-transcendental reasons, so not just everything is up for grabs. They also sense that there is a conventional element in the moral systems of their own cultures, so it is not a matter of slavishly obeying their own cultures' moralities - as vulgar relativism would imply when its logic is teased out. Rather, they sense that there is a moral core that can be defended on the basis of important human interests, but they also sense that the precise way this is elaborated in different societies is conventional, as is much else that can be found in systems of morality. They will agree with our more sophisticated friend, Abigail, that at no point is morality based on spooky objective moral facts.

I can't find any other way of explaining how moral relativists of the more vulgar variety think ... at least not without being uncharitable to them. There may be a contradiction in their thinking, but I don't believe that it is necessarily incurable.

In the above, I have sketched what a reasonably sophisticated relativism might look like. Once we start spelling it out like this, it begins to resemble a contractarian theory of morality - though the human interests it relies on do not have to be limited to those that would be recognised by egoistic Hobbesian contractors - and less like the vulgar theory that Bernard Williams demolishes so effectively. If anything like this form of sophisticated relativism is true, it entails that platonist meta-ethical theories are false. To whatever extent platonism is part of our naive meta-ethics, any sophisticated form of moral relativism also entails an error theory about naive meta-ethics, but that is not a point against it. Quite the opposite. I think that the only interesting issue here is how far naive meta-ethics really is committed to meta-ethical platonism. If it is so committed, it needs to be revised (like most of our pre-scientific commonsense picture of the world).

Walker's critique of relativism concludes by suggesting a sort of Pascalian wager in which we bet on objectivism being true, because nothing is lost if it really is true; conversely if I bet the other way, and objectivism is true after all, then I have lost the opportunity to solve differences by reason rather than by force.

However, this is making some huge assumptions, notably that those of us who reject meta-ethical platonism (or some other kind of objectivism at the meta-ethical level) are inclined to agree with Mussolini. I.e., we are inclined to think it is legitimate to use force, rather than persuasion. However, I see no evidence that moral relativists tend to think like that. Indeed, there is evidence to the contrary. Modern university systems are full of people (staff and students) who, under the sway of anthropology and the other social sciences, have embraced some kind of (often rather naive) moral relativism. Those people do not seem to be more inclined to using force than the rest of the population. Nor should they be - there are very good human-level reasons to try to resolve conflicts peacefully.

In practice, people who base their moral positions on a theory of human needs and interests, rather than on a transcendental guarantee, are usually open to exploring their commonalities with other human beings, including those from other cultures, and to negotiating mutually-acceptable solutions. Mussolini notwithstanding, it tends to be people who believe that they are acting in accordance with some kind of transcendental mandate who take rigid, mutually opposed positions, and are prepared to resort to force to back them up. Just have a look at the ongoing catastrophe in the Middle East.

I remain convinced that something like the sophisticated relativism of Gilbert Harman (though perhaps not Harman's exact elaboration of the idea) is not only true but does well at catering for human needs and finding a place for values that many of us share, such as those of peace and tolerance. Such values are not transcendentally guaranteed, as meta-ethical platonists believe, but they serve us well as human beings (and they will continue to serve us if we ever go posthuman in our capacities).

If commonsense meta-ethics includes a large dose of meta-ethical platonism, as J.L. Mackie believed, then commonsense meta-ethics requires revision. So be it. I doubt that this revision will lead to violence or the end of civilisation, because we will still find plenty of human-level justifications for our central moral norms. If some of our moral norms cannot survive, once they lose the claim that they have a transcendental guarantee ... well, I suggest that those norms are probably doing more harm than good in any event.

Dawkins blogosphere kerfuffle

Over the past two days, the blogosphere has been in an uproar over the revelation that Richard Dawkins had signed an on-line petition that called for an end to religious indoctrination and classification of children in the UK. I've expressed that in a way designed to bring out the ambiguity - was the petition merely talking about reforms to the British school system (such as the abolition of religious instruction classes) or did it intend the criminalisation of all efforts by parents to teach their religious beliefs to their children?

Dawkins himself was contacted, saw the problem, clarified several points, including the fact that he'd not intended to support any coercive actions against parents, and withdrew his name from the petition. Since then, he has further clarified his position here at The Panda's Thumb, where you can find an excellent summary of the whole thing.

Considering the uncharitable interpretations being placed on his motives by some detractors, Dawkins has displayed remarkable grace and dignity, and has emerged reasonably well out of the whole kerfuffle. Indeed, objective onlookers should conclude that his willingness to admit a mistake has added to his stature. It does, however, show how careful you have to be when in the public eye for promoting highly controversial views. At one point Dawkins himself notes ruefully that he can see why lawyers and diplomats need special training - and it's clear that he looked at what he was signing in a spirit of generosity, not while taking the cramped defensive posture of a lawyer. That is hardly a criticism - such defensiveness is not what we want from our leading public intellectuals.

Still, it all shows how careful you have to be these days if you are prominent in public debate over large, symbolically important issues. From this incident and others, I have a sense that Dawkins, in particular, is now in a position where his every move will be narrowly scrutinised in real time; every effort wil be made to discredit him, if there is the slightest opportunity. Even much lesser intellectual lights could find themselves in a situation where they come under a potentially destructive level of scrutiny if they achieve some success in popularising unpopular ideas. This environment is not especially healthy for public deliberation and debate, but it is the unavoidable downside of the wired-up world that we now find ourselves in. Somehow, we all have to adapt.

Pluralism as a sign of strength

In (re-)reading Max Charlesworth's lovely little book Bioethics in a Liberal Society, I came across a paragraph in which the author discusses feminism - this is in the context of different feminist attitudes to assisted reproduction. While some of those attitudes strike me as irrational and and generally deplorable (there are plenty of feminist bio-Luddites around), Charlesworth does make a nice point about the sheer diversity of positions.

Rather than seeing the diversity as showing incoherence within the feminist movement, we can see it positively. Charlesworth suggests that it is an index of the maturity of any movement that it has moved beyond a single monolithic view, to accept and even welcome a variety of views and positions. This is, he says, a sign of diversity and strength.

Charlesworth's suggestion is worth recalling when we encounter disagreement from people who are generally our allies and share many common values with us. We should be open to different views and positions from them, as long as it does not get to the point when they disagree on so many specific issues that we can no longer think of them as allies at all. Perhaps transhumanism is reaching a point, after its development in the 1980s, where it is now something far less monolithic and a variety of views and positions can now be found within the broad movement - showing that it has matured and gained strength.

Execution of Saddam Hussein

I broach this topic with a heavy heart, because I can see no good coming out of the current situation in Iraq.

In principle, I am not opposed to all use of military force to remove tyrannical regimes - not where there is some urgent issue and it appears very likely that the operation can be carried out with a balance of good over harm. That is not meant to be an easy test: when you go to war, the potential for horrific, individually unpredictable, ramifications is endless. Without wanting to embrace any precise set of principles, such as those of traditional just war theory, I am always going to look with a sceptical eye at any proposal to go to war, and will want to see some convincing explanation of how the ramifications can be managed, as well as powerful humanitarian justification. Unlike most of my friends, I thought the war to remove the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was justified, but I am now dismayed by the way the aftermath is being managed. I have always been opposed to the invasion of Iraq - from Day One, it looked like madness - but I have no wish to crow about how badly the operation has gone since Saddam was actually removed from power. I just hope there will, against the current odds, ultimately be some reasonably satisfactory outcome.

Furthermore, my opposition to the death penalty is less than absolute. First, let me clear: I cannot imagine realistic circumstances in which I would support its re-introduction to the penal codes of countries that have abolished it. Nor can I imagine circumstances where I would support its retention in, for example, those US states that still have it. There are many good reasons not to have the death penalty as an option in ordinary domestic systems of criminal justice.

That said, the balance of considerations may be different in one-off cases like this involving murderous tyrants who have killed and tortured on a mass scale, and whose guilt in a vast range of crimes against humanity is not in serious doubt, even if particular details are uncertain. I find it hard to believe that such people have a "right" to go on living that trumps all else, so whether we retain the option of a death penalty in these special cases is much more open to argument. Or so it seems to me.

But at the end of the day, I can't see what has been gained by killing Saddam Hussein. Better to have let him eke out his old age in prison somewhere. Besides, there is too much of a sense that this was a kangaroo court ... and then there is the not-so-small matter that many of his other crimes will never be able to be investigated properly. The whole thing just looks too contrived, like something the victors wanted to get out of the way as quickly as possible. Whatever else we want to say, this does not look or feel like justice.

Beagle solution

The official answer to the beagle puzzle is "p = 1/3", which is a relief. But I see people are still arguing about it over at EvolutionBlog. I know I have some readers out there somewhere, but none of you got excited about it, it seems.

Surviving

Well, the good news here is that my mum has been a lot better the last couple of days, and I'm hopeful she'll be out of hospital next week.

My own lesser health problem also seems to be resolving - looks like it was, as speculated, a dental abscess that went a bit crazy. With some heavy antibiotics, my face has just about returned to a symmetrical shape already.

At the moment, I'm working like a fiend at this second Ph.D.; whenever I run out of energy, I tackle some of my target articles at Wikipedia, where I've done a lot of work lately on the Second Life article, among others. One article that is in very good shape already, but which I'm trying to improve as much as I can in my spare moments, is the one on Richard Dawkins.

Ideally, I'd be submitting the Ph.D thesis in March, but that seems like it might be beyond me if I'm going to read/re-read and properly consider everything that is still on my list - sometimes I'm perhaps too much of a perfectionist. In any event, the thesis will definitely be submitted in 2007 - hopefully in the first half of the year.

We currently have something of a short-term strain on the household finances - Jenny and I live in a house on which the mortgage is, fortunately, all paid off, but which nonetheless has all the associated expenses of a big house for two well-paid professionals, not a place for two people scraping a living by freelance writing and editing, some part-time teaching, and a much-valued but certainly not huge Ph.D scholarship. Sooner or later, something will have to give, but I'm sure we'll survive. It's essentially a short-term cash problem - our underlying financial position is healthy, or we wouldn't be doing this - but there are sometimes pressures from being income poor, even if you're relatively wealthy in assets. I may have to take an actual full-time job again some time, but it would have to be something I really wanted to do.

Beagle puzzle

I spent a good part of yesterday puzzling over this, published on Jason Rosenhouse's EvolutionBlog (and getting involved in the surprisingly enthusiastic debate over it):

"A shopkeeper says she has two new baby beagles to show you, but she doesn't know whether they're both male, both female, or one of each. You tell her that you want only a male, and she telephones the fellow who's giving them a bath. “Is at least one a male?” she asks him. She receives a reply. “Yes!” she informs you with a smile. What is the probability that the other one is a male?"

At the moment, I'm firmly in the "p = 1/3" camp - after initially putting an argument for "p = 1/2" - but I'm anxiously awaiting Rosenhouse's analysis. So far, he's just let us debate it back and forth.

I find these sorts of probability puzzles fascinating, but they often make me feel as if my head is spinning. It took me a full day to convince myself that the solution to the famous Monty Hall problem is correct, after my pal Chris Lawson introduced the problem and the solution to me some years ago. There was a similar problem (wish I could remember the details) doing the rounds at the AAP conference earlier this year, and I never did manage to bring myself to agree with the most popular solution - although I'm willing to concede I was probably overlooking, or not getting, something ... and that the popular solution was sponsored by better logicians than me.

Merry Yuletide to all

It's that time of the year to wish everyone, regardless of belief or background, a happy solstice festival. I've had a particularly quiet time this year, partly because I visited my folks interstate a couple of weeks ago, partly because, after being incredibly healthy through the last several months or so, I've suddenly been struck with what seems to be a tooth abscess or something that has led to one side of my face being swollen and sore - and initially to a throbbing toothache that then receded, thankfully - making me not a happy camper these last couple of days. I'll get to the doctor tomorrow and try to find out what is wrong.

I'm also worried that my mother has come down very sick (a helluva lot sicker than I am) in the last week, though there's little I can do at the moment beyond keeping in touch with my dad and my sister about the situation, as they're all 600-odd miles away from me.