[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[vulcanlogician]

I’m not entirely convinced it was moral progress - independent of technological changes - that made the abolition of chattel slavery achievable. So with all due respect to my Quaker ancestors, I do not see this as a purely moral triumph. IMHO, individual human beings are about as virtuous as they have always been, it’s just that modern humans face different moral dilemmas than pre-historic, ancient, or pre-industrial men and women. For example, I’ll never be faced with the possibility of my brother’s widow wanting me to impregnate her so she has children to care for her in old age.

I suppose the modern world can boast that our institutions often mitigate the consequences of our more common individual moral failures. For example, while chattel slavery has been explicitly abolished and many Western countries have at least some workplace protections, the impulse to dominate and exploit one’s fellow man and/or indifference to the suffering of strangers still expresses itself. In the West, have we not off-shored exploitation to repressive governments, communist nations, and/or desperate populations? As Nietzsche might have said, we think we are good because our claws are blunt. Lack of vice is not the same as virtue. And there have been trade-offs, the ancients did not stockpile weapons capable of destroying all life as we know it. Can we truly say that today’s geo-political order which puts the world in danger of total annihilation is morally superior to scattered tribes raiding each other for resources?

Agreed that people are just as virtuous today as they were in ancient times. I meant that (stood side by side) an ethicist would prefer the modern world to the ancient one. Taking out technological advances helps the ancient world, yes. But stances on women's rights and such counts as a strike against them.

I don't hold blame over an ancient nomadic tribe for their practices. When the average life expectancy is low, child marriage, for instance, becomes more understandable. It's harder to justify slavery, but I suppose it could be done along similar lines. At any rate, I don't look down upon the ancients as some kind of morally superior moderner. But I do think that Enlightenment thinking (and not just technological advances) set the stage for abolition.

I also like Nietzsche's distinction between "not doing wrong" and being "virtuous." Or as he puts it, "virtue that is free of moral acid." Of course, to him, a savage person may count as virtuous, but that's beside the point. He has some pretty good insights when it comes to pointing things out that we take to be moral thinking that really aren't. For that reason, he's really valuable to read (for the moral skeptic and moral practitioner alike). We often like to dress our resentment up like moral superiority for instance. Nietzsche calls that sort of thing a sham, and it is.

[The Grand Nudger]

Is there anything specifically wrong with child marriage, or do we have a subset of child marriage in mind when we deem it so? Sally and Johnny are teenage sweethearts and they get hitched. What they've done is unwise, perhaps..but is it immoral? If we deem it to be so, how would low life expectancy alter the moral field? If there were a place on the earth where life expectancy was falling (and there are) - do those places then become pocket universes where their bad deed is not bad or perhaps even good? Understandable, maybe, but as human beings a great deal of what we deem to be immoral is and always has been understandable. One in five girls are married, down from one in four a decade ago. We never stopped with this one. If anything, we've ramped it up. More girls to go around now than there ever have been.

As for the abolition of slavery, nothing to do with enlightenment values whatsoever. The lines of thought were there, and had been there, for some time. We'd had thousands of years beforehand to end slavery, and we didn't. Just using the us as our example - ideas about the morality and necessity of slavery were entirely predicated on profitability and opportunity cost. In the north, the land itself wasn't amenable to the large scale production of field crops like tobacco and cotton. On the border (of the civil war) it was barely profitable. In the south, immensely. It's no surprise that the people in these regions held positions on the matter that aligned with those circumstances. A northern abolitionists moral opinion on slavery could be held at no cost to him - and shouldn't be confused with an opinion on the dignity, decency or even the shared humanity of that abolitionist and those they would free. A virginian or kentuckyian might pay some cost, but could surmount it or write it off (and had to weigh it against the social cost to abolition-minded peers or society), and the people in the deep south could in no sense hold such a view and act on that view without impoverishing themselves, and had no real impetus to do so. Then there was the issue of the use of ships. We like to think that the end of import was an intentional babystep to abolition - but it wasn't. There was a more profitable use of ships, and we had plenty of breeding stock on the continent. The same became increasingly true of every aspect of the logistics of slavery. Slave patrols could be militias or police, and all of their time spent chasing slaves they weren't providing that service. The markets and warehouses and carts and maintenance and all of the non-slave labor and resources and salable commodities involved in holding slaves as a society...all of it, became increasingly untenable as we made technological advancements and discovered new land use opportunities. Slaves were livestock, which is just a fun word for tech with a pulse, and producers abandon unprofitable or inconvenient livestock just as soon as an alternative presents itself. From their end of things, todays circumstance vis a vis african americans outside of the plantation model is no more or less than letting chickens run loose and left to their own devices, unkept, because you started breeding rabbits.

I paint this picture above on the two issues so that we can dispense with the notion of moral superiority or moral improvement whatsoever, for a moment at least, and more directly address the related but very distinct issue of blame and shame. Ideas about moral desert, and what a person should get for having done such and such. Of holding some past society or tribe in moral contempt. There are people who do so - but it's not a requirement. Low blame/shame high reward systems are aimed squarely at the notion that we all falter and fall. That we all find reason, find it understandable, to do some bad things. People aren't improving, our decision field is improving. A southern slaver put in a time machine and transported to present day would probably not change his opinion of the lesser races, but it would be surprising as shit to find that person slaving with their land, as opposed to any of the far more profitable uses of the same unknown to them (or unavailable to them) at the time.

Have we improved, as individuals? Unlikely. Full modernity hit 50k years ago. No More Moral thought that any person has ever had now or during the enlightenment or even in classical history was a new thought then unthought of before - not even close. We'd always had those thoughts, and we see them expressed as in-group organization. As soon as we start writing we write about them, we'd been mulling it over for alot longer than narrative records existed for us to use as a reference. We've just gotten better at extending the sphere of the ingroup and have found ourselves with greater opportunities to do so..and even so, we all falter, we all fall...still.. This isn't a fringe or novel or new or whackaddodle apprehension - we find it well represented in the things we hold to be religiously true. The christ myth serves as a vehicle for this comment on the human condition, and leverages it's truth (or seeming truth) as a borrowed ladder, for example. How we feel about blaming and shaming in present from or toward our contemporaries can be extended to any past evil or bad person.

As a society? Indisputably so, but probably not because of any fundamental change in our nature as human beings, imo, or because one smart person wrote down what countless generations before them had already considered and discarded or put on the shelf for some later time, some other circumstance. If wishes were horses, and all that. Drawing it all together - Robert E Lee freed his slaves and married a woman that would have been an old maid, comparatively - and we can imagine that he did so because he held certain moral opinions (and he expounded on both at length) - but we also know that both cases were, whatever else they were, calculated political and economic moves predicated on circumstance. The available decision field. This, I think, is why we can associate what we call more moral behavior with technological advancement. Our tools expand our range of decisions, of consequence. Give us..we hope, more control over those items we deem of moral import. Allow us the privilege of extending that sphere as practical actors in an amoral environment. Absent that, we say that we understand why the savages of so and so may have done whatever they did. The idea that it's as much a tragedy as it was villainy, if not more.

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-it even comes to mind, as an aside, that Lees own notion of slavery as a moral evil for whites but a moral good for africans is well at home in the utilitarian goods of consequentialism today. It would be difficult for a person who accepts as much to thread the needle here - I can't see any other way than to contend that while Lee may have been (or was) right about the utilitarian good, he was wrong about slavery being part of it. That the benefits used to justify the practice (or some, at least) really were desirable or lead to a desirable outcome for those people. Wrong not in moral fact, but wrong in point of fact on a matter of moral import. This is, as above and ofc, not new - people thought as much and explained as much at the time.

[vulcanlogician]

As for the abolition of slavery, nothing to do with enlightenment values whatsoever.  

I disagree here. I'm not saying Enlightenment Ideals™ were wholly responsible for the eradication of slavery. Other factors were involved, like the ones you described. Keep in mind that my notion of moral progress has nothing to do with desert. Metaphysically speaking, you could gauge moral progress in a deterministic world --where moral responsibility is impossible-- by whatever metric you want (total happiness if you want to be a utilitarian). I'm also looking at the world in a New Moorean sense (at goodness simplicita) and judging different worlds from that vantage point.

From that perspective (I want to argue) you could genuinely observe moral progress. One world is better than the other. Good and bad intentions exist (perhaps in equal measure) in both worlds. But the better world is arranged in such a way that bad intentions come to fruition less and good intentions come to fruition more.

I mean, are you totally convinced that there is no such thing as moral progress? If humanity ever turns Earth into a Star Trek-like utopia, would you look at that world and say no moral progress has been made? Because I want to say otherwise.

***

Yes, utilitarianism could in theory permit slavery (and that's a problem with the theory). I've always wondered if I could investigate that issue and develop a line of thought that reveals that slavery is in fact not allowed by some variants of utilitarianism. Perhaps an quasi-Epicurean may say "Yes, pleasure is good and suffering is bad. But we prioritize the reduction of pain and suffering. Adding to overall happiness comes second to this." If that was your principle as a utilitarian, would slavery still be permissible?

I am not familiar enough with utilitarian theory to do legit scholarly work on it. But it's something I'm motivated to do. In the end, I may be wrong... and there is no way to find a strong abolitionist notion within any brand of utilitarianism. But it's important to note that slavery as we know it (and have known it historically) is pretty much forbidden by utilitarianism. Because it creates a large amount of suffering and a trivial amount of happiness.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm totally convinced that there has been moral progress, but that no moral betterment of man accounts for it.

The world was shittier, by our measures, before we got here, and is less shitty, by our measures, since. I don't think that's us changing, I think that's us changing stuff.

As for consequentialist abolitionism - it's not that you can't find a way to argue against it today, it's that the notion yesterday that some bad now for an ultimate or greater good, or some suffering for some good consequence, is the same idea that robert e lee had, the arguments against it the same that they had at the time.

-and yet.

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Perhaps an quasi-Epicurean may say "Yes, pleasure is good and suffering is bad. But we prioritize the reduction of pain and suffering. Adding to overall happiness comes second to this." If that was your principle as a utilitarian, would slavery still be permissible?

Yes.  Unequivocally and demonstrably, as some of the very final arguments for slavery were valid utilitarian arguments.  Even if we disagree with the conclusions, we can see that and how they would be true if the contents were true.

I am not familiar enough with utilitarian theory to do legit scholarly work on it. But it's something I'm motivated to do. In the end, I may be wrong... and there is no way to find a strong abolitionist notion within any brand of utilitarianism. But it's important to note that slavery as we know it (and have known it historically) is pretty much forbidden by utilitarianism. Because it creates a large amount of suffering and a trivial amount of happiness.

It isn't forbidden -by utilitarianism, at all.  We're thinking of some other thing when we imagine as much. Referring to some other value or value system.

[vulcanlogician]

Perhaps an quasi-Epicurean may say "Yes, pleasure is good and suffering is bad. But we prioritize the reduction of pain and suffering. Adding to overall happiness comes second to this." If that was your principle as a utilitarian, would slavery still be permissible?

Yes.  Unequivocally and demonstrably, as some of the very final arguments for slavery were valid utilitarian arguments.  Even if we disagree with the conclusions, we can see that and how they would be true if the contents were true.

I know, I know. I haven't read the essay (by a philosopher who survived the holocaust and labor camps) who (begrudgingly) --because he was a utilitarian-- analysed utilitarianism and found (as you say) "unequivocally" that slavery could-- in some circumstances contribute to maximal goodness. (I totally forget his name.)

All I want to do is investigate and test this position. Perhaps I will return from my investigation concluding the same thing. (shrug) But perhaps not...

It isn't forbidden -by utilitarianism, at all.  We're thinking of some other thing when we imagine as much.  Referring to some other value or value system.

(forbidden was the wrong word)

Some value system that wants to reduce suffering and make people maximally happy. That system. 

I think abolition of slavery fits very well into that system. Of course, my investigation wants to see if it can fit perfectly into it.

I don't think I'm imagining something other than utilitarianism. But maybe I am. I want to argue that maximal happiness simply cannot exist where people are enslaved and controlled by another person. Like I said, I need to do some research (and maybe I'll turn up empty handed) but I want to investigate this. I think it's possible to argue this.

Right or wrong, it's worth the investigation. As they say... a negative result is still a result.

[The Grand Nudger]

Granted, and when you come to that point, you have to have some way to measure aggregate happiness and happiness by utilitarianisms definition. I'd restate it as a possibility, that -even if- there were some utilitarian good to slavery that showed itself in the final analysis - you'd still think it was wrong.

-and, I'd say, you'd be right. It was only ever a utilitarian good, even in that event, and the need for qualification says everything.

[The Grand Nudger]

We drift and wander, but there's a good springboard there for the discussion about abortion and environmental action. A direct answer to the question of how and why a person can think we have moral obligations towards possible worlds that includes one but not the other.

Environmental action is the retained goal in an agglomerative value theory. Where we get the good (or bad) by adding up the good for all the people involved.

If we consider all of the people involved in abortion - banning abortions is bad. It harms more people than it helps. Environmental action, not so much. Approached from the other end, abortion could only be an agglomerative bad in the sample size of two people, maybe extend it out to family if your heart bleeds. Environmental inaction, otoh, is an agglomerative bad for the sample size of all people regardless of whether our heart bleeds enough to include them, even in the event that they fail to include themselves.

If I have a moral obligation towards possible (and in this case future) worlds - then I have an obligation to consider the broadest sampled import and an obligation to pursue goals or actions which would or at least could accomplish those/their stated goals. Anti abortion activism fails in both cases where environmental activism succeeds.

[The Grand Nudger]

That same agglomerative value system can also give us granularity in environmental activism. We all want the same thing, for our children not to starve or suffocate or die of thirst or be forced to kill their peers directly or through apathy and assent. So - burn your carbon. Meet your level and reach parity with the good life - and then, immediately then, join us in figuring out how to live beyond those means...because, then, you'll be where we are now. Then, but not before then, our arguments that apply to us will apply to you.

Back to that comment I made about people who, like myself, think abortion isn't a good thing. That's all well and good, but until we successfully overcome the valid objections to our insistence - what are we even talking about? It's all on us, all on the interested.

[vulcanlogician]

Granted, and when you come to that point, you have to have some way to measure aggregate happiness and happiness by utilitarianisms definition.  I'd restate it as a possibility, that -even if- there were some utilitarian good to slavery that showed itself in the final analysis - you'd still think it was wrong.

-and, I'd say, you'd be right.  It was only ever a utilitarian good, even in that event, and the need for qualification says everything.

But can slavery be a utilitarian good? That's what I want to know.

1. A slave is subject to the whims of a master.
2. A master may have whims to abuse, harm, or exploit a slave.
3. Abuse, harm, and exploitation decrease happiness and increase suffering.

Therefore, utilitarians be like no.

A crude argument, yes. But can you find a response? 

Abolition protects people from suffering. I want to say that as long as a master could potentially have reasons to harm a slave, such harming is possible.

[The Grand Nudger]

Plenty of utilitarian goods allow or are explicitly produced by some harm. If it were true that slavery benefited a majority, or that slavery benefitted a majority of the enslaved, it would satisfy the criteria of utilitarianism by definition.

There's really no question of whether or not it can be - it has been. We don't drag slavery because it fails to produce the greatest happiness for the largest number - but the manner in which it attempts to achieve it. Same reason we might drag a policy aimed at protecting future children even though we agree that we have such an obligation, for the manner in which it seeks to achieve that.