Lazari-Radek and Singer on the Objectivity of Ethics and the Unity of Practical Reason

Katarzyna Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer’s paper “The Objectivity of Ethics and the Unity of Practical Reason”, published in Ethics 123 (2012): 9-31, aims to defend the objectivity of ethics, or more precisely the objectivity of a particular ethical judgement, against the kind of evolutionary debunking argument that was brought forward especially by Sharon Street.[1] They take as their starting point the “dualism of practical reason” that confounded Henry Sidgwick in his Methods of Ethics[2] and that prevented him from concluding that there is only one rational answer to the question what we ought to do, namely the utilitarian one that favours impartiality and tells us to aim at the good of all. Sidgwick’s problem was that it seems just as rational to only aim at one’s own good. Thus practical reason commands us to both pursue our own best interest and the best interest of all. Although those two goals may often coincide, there are clearly also situations where they can clash. Therefore, in those situations, reason cannot tell us what we ought to do. Sidgwick thought that this problem could not be resolved and that, therefore, ethics cannot be completely rationalized. Lazari-Radek and Singer think it can.

Their strategy is to revisit Street’s evolutionary critique of objectivity in ethics and then to show that while the maxim of universal benevolence or impartiality survives the attack, rational egoism does not. Street has argued that our evaluative attitudes including our moral beliefs about what is right and wrong have been shaped by evolutionary forces and that because our knowledge of how evolution works gives us no reason to suppose that it favours the development of evaluative attitudes that are objectively true (rather than beliefs that are conducive to our survival and to reproductive success), it would be a very unlikely coincidence if our moral beliefs actually were all true. If we were constructed in a different way (say, more like social insects), so that our survival and reproductive success were dependent on different evaluative attitudes, then we would think differently about what is right and wrong. Hence, we have no reason to suppose that our moral beliefs are objectively true.

However, Lazari-Radek & Singer argue that while this argument is on the whole persuasive, it does not undermine the objective truth of the ultimate principle of ethics, which, with Sidgwick, they take to be the principle that we should always do “what is best for the well-being of all” (16), precisely because such a principle does not seem to improve our chances of survival or to increase our reproductive success. On the contrary, it seems to diminish it (19-21).

Indeed, if believing in the objective truth of that principle were conducive to our survival or reproductive success, then we would have no good reason to suppose that the principle was objectively true. But if it is in fact not conducive to our survival or well-being, then, paradoxically we do have a reason to regard the belief as objectively true. Why is that? Because if that belief does not stem from our evolved evaluative attitudes, then it can only be the result of the use of reason. Of course our ability to reason generally is very useful for us by allowing us to solve problems that would otherwise have threatened our survival, so it no doubt has evolutionary value, too, but it is quite possible that it also allows us to do things that are not relevant to our survival, like doing advanced physics and mathematics and grasping objective moral truths. So when we ask why we developed those particular abilities in the first place if they are not conducive to our survival, then a plausible explanation for their existence is “that the ability to reason comes as a package that could not be economically divided by evolutionary pressures. Either we have a capacity to reason that includes the capacity to do advanced physics and mathematics and to grasp objective moral truths, or we have a much more limited capacity to reason that lacks not only these abilities but others that confer an overriding evolutionary advantage. If reason is a unity of this kind, having the package would have been more conducive to survival and reproduction than not having it.” (17)

The unity of reason helps us explain why we have the ability to track moral truths despite the fact that we could survive and reproduce just as well, or even better, without it, and this lack of an evolutionary explanation allows us to conclude that the principle of universal benevolence must be objectively true: “there is no plausible explanation of this principle as the direct outcome of an evolutionary process, nor is there any other obvious non-truth-tracking explanation.” (26)

For the same reason we can now also conclude that practical egoism, i.e. the maxim that we should always choose the action that produces the best outcome for ourselves, is not objectively true. We do, after all, have a perfectly good evolutionary explanation for why we should have that particular evaluative attitude. The belief that we primarily ought to promote our own good and that of our kin rather than that of everyone is exactly the kind of evaluative attitude that we should expect to have developed under evolutionary pressures. It is therefore not reliable and should not be seen as having any normative significance. Since we have that attitude not because we have used our ability to reason and as a result grasped the truth of the underlying principle of egoism, but merely because we have been shaped by the forces of evolution to be that way, practical egoism is in fact not rational. Sidgwick’s dualism of practical reason is thus proven to be unfounded. There is no dualism of practical reason. What practical reason commands is one thing, and one thing only: that we always seek and promote the best outcome for all (28).

Is that argument convincing? I think not. While it may make sense to distrust beliefs and evaluative attitudes that we merely have because having them increases (or at one point did increase) our evolutionary fitness (so that we can assume we would also have them if they were not true) and to try and confirm them on independent grounds, this gives us no reason at all not to hold on to those beliefs and attitudes. It merely gives us reason to doubt that those attitudes are objectively true. If I have to have a healthy concern for my own good to survive, and I do have an interest in surviving, then it is perfectly rational for me to promote my own good first and foremost. It is just not rational to believe that this is what I ought to do, or more precisely that it is objectively true that this is what I ought to do. In other words, it is difficult to uphold moral realism in the face of an evolutionary explanation of our moral beliefs, but it is not difficult to continue letting ourselves be guided by certain moral or prudential principles.

Perhaps more importantly in the context of the present argument, the fact that we do not have an evolutionary explanation for some of our evaluative attitudes, e.g. universal benevolence or the belief that we should do what is best for all, does not imply that they are more reliable than those that can be thus explained.  When Lazari-Radek and Singer state that “there is no plausible explanation of this principle as the direct outcome of an evolutionary process, nor is there any other obvious non-truth-tracking explanation” (26), they simply assume without further argument that those acts of reasoning that lead us (or some of us) to postulate that particular moral principle of universal benevolence are truth-tracking. But surely the fact that a belief is not directly caused by evolutionary forces does not prove that we have it because it is true. If reason comes indeed in one package, so that our ability to postulate the truth of that particular moral principle is a mere (not fitness-enhancing) by-product or our (generally fitness-enhancing) ability to reason, then we have already explained it. A further explanation – we have it because that belief is true – is not needed. Moreover, it is difficult to see why we should assume that, although reason is generally an ability that has evolved because it increases our chances of survival and not because it leads us to the truth, should in some instances allow us to see the world as it really is. If reason is not generally truth-tracking, why should we suppose that it is when it leads us to have beliefs that are not conducive to our survival? The hypothesis of a “unity of reason” helps us explain how we could have developed an ability to grasp objective moral truths, just as it helps us explain why we have developed the ability to grasp abstract mathematical truths that have no practical value, but it doesn’t do anything to show that we have indeed developed such an ability.

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[1] Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”, Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 109-166.

[2] Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7^th ed. London: Macmillan 1907.

Peter Singer on Ethics and Intuitions

In his 2005 paper “Ethics and Intuitions” (The Journal of Ethics 9: 331-352), which I recently reread, the Australian philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer sets out to “argue that recent research in neuroscience gives us new and powerful reasons for taking a critical stance toward common intuitions” (332). The argument follows an argumentative pattern that I have noticed is increasingly being used by ethicists today, especially those of a broadly utilitarian persuasion: some science or another is said to present us with indubitable facts that clearly show some of our commonly held moral convictions to be wrong, unfounded, or simply not worth holding on to. In Singer’s case, the scientific findings that he builds his case on are the results of measuring test subjects’ brain activity through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while confronting them with trolley problems and asking them what the right thing to do in such situations was. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that people are generally more reluctant to get involved in “personal violations” than in “impersonal violations” in order to achieve a certain morally desirable outcome. If all that needs to be done to save five people on a railroad track who are about to be crushed by an oncoming trolley is to throw a switch that redirects the trolley to a different track where it will kill only one person (who would otherwise remain unharmed), most people are prepared to say that one should do it. If, however, the five people can only be saved by pushing a stranger with sufficient mass and weight to stop the trolley on the track, then most test subjects say that this would be wrong, even though the outcome (one life is sacrificed to save five others) is exactly the same. So in the first case they judge like good utilitarians, while in the second they don’t. The question is why. Neuroscience provides the answer: while in the first, “impersonal”, case those areas in the brain that are associated with the emotions show less activity than the areas associated with cognition, the opposite happens in the second, “personal”, case. Also, those few people who thought it was right to push the stranger onto the tracks showed more cognitive brain activity than emotional brain activity. It did, however, take them longer to come to a decision, indicating that they, too, first had to overcome an instinctive negative emotional reaction to the idea of personally harming people.

But what do those findings tell us about what is right and wrong, and more specifically whether it is right or wrong to kill people, either personally or impersonally, in order to save a larger number of lives? It seems to me that they don’t tell us anything at all about this. Singer, however, believes otherwise. The very fact that anti-utilitarian judgements are apparently due to strong instinctive emotional reactions rather than an emotion-free process of reasoning provides sufficient grounds for rejecting those judgements as unfounded. Although admittedly those neuroscientific findings in and of themselves “cannot prove any normative view right or wrong” (347), they should ultimately lead us to embrace utilitarianism as the best normative ethical theory if we consider them in the context of what we know about our own evolutionary history. For what we know is this: for a long time humans lived in small groups, and in these groups “violence could only be inflicted in an up-close and personal way – by hitting, pushing, strangling, or using a stick or stone as a club. To deal with such situations, we have developed immediate, emotionally based responses to questions involving close, personal interactions with others” (347-8). Knowing this, we can understand why “pushing the stranger off the footbridge elicits these emotionally based responses” (348), while merely throwing a switch to kill someone from a distance does not, namely because that kind of situation simply did not arise when those responses were developed. This means that our current emotional response to personal violations is a mere accident of our evolutionary history and hence without normative significance. We should therefore disregard those responses and conclude there is no morally relevant difference between the impersonal violation (throwing the switch and thereby causing a person’s death) and the personal violation (pushing somebody to their death). Moreover, we should also conclude that the way most people react to the thought of impersonal violations, judging them as justifiable when they are required to bring about a greater good (i.e., in this case, more lives being saved), is the right way to react, simply because it is clearly the rational answer: “The death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five people. That reasoning leads us to throw the switch in the standard trolley case, and it should also lead us to push the stranger in the footbridge” (350). Of course believing that the death of anyone is a tragedy (and hence ought to be prevented) may be said to be based on a moral intuition, but if it is, then it is a “rational intuition” (351) which derives from an impartial, objective consideration of the situation and not from the accidental circumstances of our evolutionary past. To support this view, Singer approvingly cites Sigdwick’s third ethical axiom according to which “the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other.” (351)

Now I can see at least three problems with this argument. First, contrary to what Singer suggests, the fact that humans used to live in small groups and that because of the short range of their weapons all killing was necessarily personal does nothing at all to explain why most people in our society are reluctant to regard personally killing someone as morally permissible. Especially not when it comes to strangers. On the contrary, if it is correct that all violence had to be up-close and personal (i.e. “by hitting, pushing, strangling, or using a stick or stone as a club”), and if we can assume, which I think we can, that such violence was not uncommon, especially between those small groups who, after all, had to compete for scarce resources, then believing in the formative power of our evolutionary heritage should lead us to expect people to be rather unconcerned about inflicting mortal harm on strangers. It is hard to see what evolutionary purpose a reluctance to kill strangers could have had 50,000 years ago. So the whole evolutionary explanation of our emotional reaction in the trolley case scenario is nothing but pseudo-scientific hogwash.

Secondly, it may be true that “from the point of the Universe” nobody’s good is of more importance than the good of any other, but that is because from the point of the Universe nobody’s good is of any importance at all. This is the perfectly reasonable conclusion drawn by the psychopath who entirely lacks the instinctive emotional responses that ordinary people have to inflicting harm on others. Singer mentions the psychopath in passing when he describes the reaction of those who judged that pushing the stranger off the bridge was the right thing to do.  Even those more rational test subjects, he points out, had to struggle with their emotions and ultimately judged the case “in spite of their emotions”. Anyone would, “unless they were psychopaths” (341). But since Singer argues that those emotional inhibitions, and indeed all non-rational moral intuitions, are misplaced and ought to be ignored or discarded, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ideal moral reasoner is in their mental constitution rather like a psychopath. Singer seems to sense this himself when, in a curious move towards the end of his paper, he, once again citing Sidgwick in his support, warns us from praising “people who are capable of pushing someone off a footbridge in these circumstances” (350) because that might encourage them to “do it on other occasions when it does not save more lives than it costs”. This is clearly a form of the slippery slope argument that is occasionally employed by utilitarians, but I find it difficult to get my head around it. The slippery slope argument may have some plausibility when we consider acts that are just a bit wrong or bad and that may easily pave the way for acts that gradually become worse. You start with one little theft or lie or act of bullying, add another, and soon you have created a habit that runs out of control, especially if you receive some encouragement. But why on earth should we expect that being encouraged to do the right thing (and praise surely is a form of encouragement) should lead people to do bad things (such as morally unjustified killing sprees)? Unless of course there is something already deeply wrong with someone who is capable of doing that supposedly right thing.

Finally, even though Singer briefly addresses the genetic fallacy in his paper, denying that he commits one, his argument seems to me a paradigmatic case of such a fallacy. The fact that the specific way we look at the world and judge what is good and bad, right and wrong, has its origin in our human nature - which has been shaped by our evolutionary history and generally circumstances beyond our control that conceivably might have been different and, if they had, might have left us with a different nature - in no way discredits it. If it did, then we would be left with nothing at all that we could rely on, because the way we reason is just as much rooted in what we have grown to be as the way we feel. There is no view from nowhere, and the universe couldn’t care less whether we live or die, or how many live or die. Singer claims that a normative ethical theory may reject all of our moral intuitions “and still be superior to other normative theories that better matched our moral judgments” (345). I don’t think such a theory would be desirable, or useful, or indeed possible. Ethical theory cannot ignore who and what we are. It must refer back to our nature, which includes our moral nature. For better or worse, there is no escape from our way of looking at the world. Trying to get away from this, to leave our human perspective behind, is not “a way forward” (349), but a fool’s errand. For what leads to moral scepticism is not, as Singer claims (351), the acknowledgment of our grown nature, but on the contrary its denial.

Are Ethicists an Obstacle to Progress?

When people who don’t know me ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a philosopher. When they ask me what I specialise in, I tell them that I am mostly, even though I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that label, an ethicist. This used to be a good thing, or at least not a bad one, but things are changing. People like me are now increasingly being described as at best a nuisance, and at worst a threat to human well-being and possibly even survival.

In this vein, Steven Pinker, the well-known psychologist and bestselling author, has recently (1 August 2015) published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe, entitled “The moral imperative for bioethics,” in which he chides ethicists for hindering the progress of our species. According to Pinker, biotechnology could do amazing things for us if we only stopped hampering research by raising flimsy ethical concerns about it, which is not helpful at all. Scientific and technological progress is already slow enough as it is, and given the “vast increases in life, health, and flourishing” that biomedical research promises, every day we lose worrying about the ethics of the matter is one day too many. While biotechnological research is urgently needed to rid us of all sorts of terrible diseases, what we most certainly do not need are professional worriers who call themselves ethicists second-guessing every promising new development and thus stalling scientific and technological progress by throwing “nebulous but sweeping principles such as ‘dignity’, ‘sacredness’, or ‘social justice’” in its way. A true ethicist, Pinker decrees, would realize that there is in fact only one valid moral imperative they should promote and follow, namely to “get out of the way”.

For Pinker and others like him ethics is a luxury that we cannot afford. People are dying, people are suffering. The biotech industry is attempting to do something about it, working very hard to succeed, while the “so-called ethicists” are attempting to prevent this from happening. Humanity is painfully pushing a rock up a hill, while all that ethicists are doing is help push it back down again. For Pinker it is as simple as that. Except of course it is not. Surprising as it may be, it is in fact not the primary goal of us ethicists to make life difficult for those who want nothing but make the world a better place. Ethics is not about issuing “red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecution” (although ethical reflection may occasionally give rise to all that). Instead, ethics is about making sure that we know what we are doing and why we are doing it, that the path we are following is really the path we want to be following and that the place where this path is likely to lead us is really the place where we want to end up being.

We all, naturally, want things to be better than they are, if that is possible. We all want progress. But just as nothing is ever better as such, but only ever in certain respects, there is no such thing as progress as such, or in the abstract. We are not sitting in an evolutionary elevator that has only two directions: up and down. Instead, there are many different ways of going up and going forward, many different ways of going down and backwards, and many different ways of going sideways, or around in circles, or of moving without any clear direction at all. Moreover, the ways that lead upwards in some way may also lead downwards in some other way. Things are usually more complex than we would like, and for this very reason also more complex than we may care to acknowledge. In order to progress, to step forward, you need to have a goal, or at least have made up your mind about a direction. Spending a thought or two on the reasons for choosing that particular goal or direction before you start running doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. And that is all we are doing when we are engaging in ethical reflection. The one question that ethicists keep asking is whether the things we do or propose to do are actually good for us, all things considered. Would we really prefer that this question be no longer asked?

It is highly naïve to assume that all biomedical research will necessarily benefit some of us, let alone humanity as a whole. What is powerful enough to save us is also powerful enough to harm us. To demand that such research not be regulated in any way because some of it might eventually help us find a cure for Alzheimer's and other diseases is like saying that politicians in government should be granted unlimited legislative, judiciary and executive power and not be checked in any way because some politicians might actually use that power for the good of the people: we just need to trust that they know best and that they want only what is best for us. But why should we believe that?

I suppose most people would agree that granting such unlimited powers to politicians would be a singularly bad idea, and that, even if scientists and biotech firms were generally smarter and more trustworthy than politicians, they are certainly not trustworthy enough that we could afford not putting any regulations and safeguards in place and thereby retaining some measure of control. Ethical reflection helps us determine the nature and extent of those necessary safeguards. Ideas such as human dignity, sacredness, and social justice may strike tough-minded empiricists like Pinker as decidedly airy-fairy and not worth serious consideration, but even though they are a bit airy-fairy, for many of us they do capture something that is both elusive and very real, a sense perhaps that living disease-free and surviving as long as possible is not all that matters, that sometimes more is at stake, that there are other dimensions of our life and experience that are important to us and for us, whatever they may be. Ethicists are the ones who try to figure out what those dimensions are and why they matter to us. They are not the professional doomsayers that some like to depict them as. Their role is more that of psychopomps who guide us from the present to the future, providing safe passage and making sure that we get there safe and sound.

Je suis un migrant

The migrants are coming. They want in. Europe is their Promised Land, a safe haven from war, hunger and persecution. They are desperate and brave, crossing oceans to get here. But the waves are not parting for them. Many drown. We watch them approach with trepidation. There are so many of them. A horde, a “swarm” of migrants, climbing over fences, hiding in lorries, sleeping on the streets, crowding into train stations, trying to break through our defences. But we don’t want them. We slam our doors into their faces. Hungary even considered building a wall to keep migrants out. Go away, we say, we have already given you lots of money, what more do you want? A life, they say. A future. But we do not care. Not much anyway. Our compassion is, before it can prompt us act, curtailed by our presumed self-interest and self-righteousness. We are worried about murderous Muslims sneaking in undetected. We are worried about limited resources that we would have to share with them. We are worried about so many strangers living in our country. But mostly we feel that they are coming for what is rightfully ours and that they have no right to it. After all, we tell ourselves, it is not our fault that their country lies in tatters. We have simply done a much better job of holding it all together. They should do the same rather than come here and make claims on the fruits of our hard work and good sense, which we alone deserve to consume because it is we who planted the trees from which they have sprung. 

Except, of course, we didn’t. Most of us have actually contributed very little, if anything, to the wealth, comfort, and peace that we have become used to enjoy as a matter of course. And what we have contributed we have been able to contribute only because we were fortunate enough to be born into a country where such a contribution was possible. We benefit from what others have done before us. It is largely the fruits of their labour that we eat. We are the lucky ones. None of us deserves what we have got, at least not more than those who had the misfortune of being born into the wrong area of the world. We are the lucky ones. If we deserve anything, we deserve it by virtue of being human, that is, by virtue of having certain human needs: which is in the first instance the need for food and safety, but then also for recognition and dignity. And we are all migrants. We have all come to the place where we live now at some time. Some came there when they were born, others later. It makes no difference. We don’t own our places. 

We should also keep in mind that the situation in which we find ourselves can change anytime. A war, an epidemic, a natural disaster, an economic crisis can easily take it all away from us. Soon it may be we who seek refuge in other parts of the world. We may not always remain the lucky ones. Let us hope the world will then not close its doors on us.