Selfishness vs. Fairness

In class, we’ve distinguished between descriptive theories and prescriptive (or normative) theories.

Psychological egoism is descriptive: it says that people act selfishly (as a matter of fact). We can disprove this thesis when we give examples of people acting unselfishly.

Ethical egoism is normative: it says that people should act selfishly (whether they actually do or not). Acting to further one’s own self-interests becomes the way to define morality for the ethical egoist. An ethical egoist believes that an altruist is not living up to the highest standards of integrity. The egoist believes that the altruist is manipulated and weak for not pursuing egoism.

Looking at actual behavior does not necessarily tell us much about how people ought to behave. If morality were nothing more than always following our intuitions, there would be no point to having either moral codes or ethical theories.

However, I do think (and many other philosophers agree) that we can learn something from studying actual behavior. For example, we can learn whether people find it easy or difficult to act in ways they believe are moral.

I used the example in class of the ultimatum game, which shows that many people value fairness above self-interest. Studies by economists and psychologists have shown that while extreme acts of altruism are rare, altruism that meets the following criteria is quite common:

1. People are willing to sacrifice their own material well-being to help those who are being kind.

The attempt to provide public goods without coercion departs from pure self-interest. Experiments show that people cooperate to contribute toward a public good to a degree greater than would be implied by pure self-interest. Individually optimal contribution rates, as defined by the standard utility model, are close to 0 percent. However, in experiments, the willingness for an individual to contribute to a public good is highly contingent on the behavior of others.

2. People are willing to sacrifice their own material well-being to punish those who are being unkind.

Evidence is provided by the ultimatum game, consisting of two people, a proposer and decider, splitting a fixed amount of money. The proposer offers a division of the money, then the decider decides if he or she refuses or accepts the proposal. If the decider says yes, they split the money according to the proposer’s offer, but if the decider says no, neither person gets any money. The standard utility model would find that any offer proposed to the decider should be expected if it is greater than zero because utility should increase with any increase in income. Along the same lines, the standard utility model would predict that the proposer would offer the smallest amount of money possible to the decider in order to maximize his or her own utility. However, data shows that deciders are willing to punish any unfair offer and proposers tend to make fair offers.

3. Both motivations 1 and 2 have a greater effect on behavior as the material cost of sacrificing becomes smaller.

Slavery, Relativism, and Moral Chaos

So, to return to the student’s question:

You [actually it was David Kannyo] brought up the end to slavery as an example of moral progress. There is no minimum sentence or punishment for people found guilty of human trafficking in the US. (That’s the fancy modern word for dancing around the term slave trade.) And, in this article I read, a man found guilty of selling two teenage girls into the sex slave industry was sentenced to only 5 years imprisonment.

Anyway, in thinking about this, I came across a question I can’t answer dealing with moral relativism. It seems that the major counter-argument to relativism is that it leads us to a world of moral chaos. But the harder I look the more I come to the conclusion that we do live in a world of moral chaos.It seems that we keep being told in class and in the book that relativism is a naive moral position but I’m failing to see why?

Yes, so this is exactly the question that I hope I can make some sense of. First, I want to save for later the question of moral chaos. Perhaps we do live in a world of moral chaos. But there might be different ways of explaining it.

I don’t want to deny that there are sophisticated forms of moral relativism. There are some. Also, moral objectivism can raise some problems too. These questions are way too deep to answer in one week. In fact, we could have an upper-level philosophy class on only this question and still cover only a fraction of the material! My aim is just to identify some common inconsistencies that can be found in a version of naive relativism.

Here’s the problem. Say I’m an objectivist. And I think that slavery is wrong. I think that it was wrong in 1700, and I think that it was wrong in 1860, and I think that it is wrong in 2010. I think that slavery is wrong in the United States, in Sudan, and in Pakistan. I think that slavery is wrong because holding people in bondage is to treat people as animals and allows them no control over their lives. Because I’m an objectivist, I can give reasons of that sort. They are moral reasons, and they justify my position.

At the same time, I see that there are moral dilemmas that cannot be easily resolved. I understand that sometimes girls are sold into sexual slavery because it is the only way that their parents can afford to feed the other children in the family. The parents here have to make a regrettable choice. Perhaps their poverty is such that none of the options available to them achieves a positive result. I can understand that, and I can sympathize with it, and I can still say that slavery is immoral. This lays the foundation for treating it as a problem and for trying to change the conditions that force the parents to make that choice.

Now, do you think that there is something wrong with slavery? Always wrong with slavery? If you do, then you cannot also be a relativist. A relativist might say: if it happens in a culture, then it’s OK in that culture. Relativists cannot pass a negative judgment on others–not even within the secret walls of their minds.

A relativist says: slavery is wrong just in case the culture says it’s wrong. Thus, slavery was morally OK in Alabama in 1850 but not in 1870. Why? Because the Confederate States lost the Civil War. But isn’t there something odd about that? Should the moral status of slavery (its rightness or wrongness) depend, for example, on the size of the population in these warring factions or on which side had more industrial development?

So this is why we call naive relativism a threat to ethics–it’s because the reasons that relativism gives for moral beliefs are not rational reasons. They are contingent reasons.

The objectivist can argue about moral problems. The objectivist can reason about what is good or bad, and why, and whether moral problems have solutions. The objectivist can also change his or her mind and explain why that happened. The objectivist can say “I used to be in favor of the death penalty because I thought x and y. But then I learned something new and saw it in a new way. I had overlooked the importance of z, and so now I think that the death penalty is wrong and should be abolished.” That is how we do ethics.

But the relativist can only ask: “Do people believe that?” And if they do, then go with the flow.

So, to repeat, it is not consistent to agree to both these statements:

1. People make their own moral rules.
2. Abortion should be illegal. (Or any other policy that would deny others the ability to make their own moral choices.)

Now, what is the objectivist’s answer to the question of moral chaos? Is this the same as asking “If ethics is objective, then why don’t we all act according to the same ethical rules?” Here are just a few reasons, and there are many more:

1. We don’t all know the same things, and we sometimes disagree about the facts.
2. Some people know what’s right but do what they know is wrong because they are led by passion rather than by reason or a moral sense.
3. Thinking about ethics is really hard, and there are many things to take into account.
4. Sometimes we know what is right (ending slavery) but we don’t know how to do it–or we know in general how to do it (e.g. by ending poverty) but we don’t have the resources.

The Source of Moral Rules

In my last post I said that there is

a problem for objectivist accounts of morality. Objectivists need to explain why, if there are universal moral rules, so many people seem to be wrong or mean or unjust so much of the time. If there are universal moral rules and they are knowable, then why isn’t it easy to a) act morally and b) agree on what the most moral action is?

How objectivists explain moral diversity depends, in part, on what they think is the source of moral rules.

Ignorance and fallibility: One possible explanation for moral disagreements is that the human mind is fallible. Thus, moral rules might be knowable but some people might be mistaken about what they are. For instance, if moral rules exist independently of us in what philosophers call a “Platonic realm”–much like mathematical truths–then they can be discovered by reasoned thought. However, following through with reasoned thought can be quite difficult or even impossible for some people in some situations.

Self-interest or evil: Another possible explanation for disagreements about morality is that self-interest leads us to deceive ourselves about what is right or leads us to reject what is morally right in favor of what is profitable or pleasurable. Some people believe that there is a natural (psychological, biological, social) source for morals. According to a naturalist account, moral rules are the set of actions that make human lives go well–by avoiding pain, by getting love and admiration, by having healthy lives. But on this account, there is often a trade-off between short-term self-interest and the long-term public or general interest. This preference for immediate pleasure over helping others is sometimes construed as weakness of the will or as desire winning out over reason.

Free will: It seems like some religious accounts might have an especially hard problem dealing with this question of moral diversity or of people defying moral rules. Because if God is the creator of humans, and also perfect, and also good, why weren’t humans created so that they could know and do only good? Why is there evil behavior in this world? One answer that religious accounts give to this question is that humans were created with free will. Having the freedom to act immorally also gives humans the possibility of acting morally. Having the ability to make a wide range of choices and of taking credit (or blame) for those choices is a central feature of being human.

Morality and Consistency

Last week I argued that a shared human psychology and social experience provide the foundations for morality. That observation is relevant to what we’ll discuss in class this week: moral relativism and moral objectivism.

The moral relativist and subjectivist hold that there are no universal moral rules. Basically, morality is relative to something else, like the culture that you were raised in.

This view has (at least) one virtue, which is that it explains the diversity that we see in various people’s and society’s moral beliefs. It also points to a problem for objectivist accounts of morality. Objectivists need to explain why, if there are universal moral rules, so many people seem to be wrong or mean or unjust so much of the time. If there are universal moral rules and they are knowable, then why isn’t it easy to a) act morally and b) agree on what the most moral action is?

Looking at the survey questions that I gave you the first week of class, it appears that only one person can be clearly identified as a moral objectivist or what Pojman calls a “moral absolutist.” Such a view has certain virtues: it is obviously consistent, and its consistency makes it rational. According to this view, there are universal moral rules that are either given to us by a higher being or can be discovered. For this reason, it is possible to identify individuals who act immorally and cultures who have immoral norms. Morals are thus a matter of fact and not mere opinion. When two people disagree about a moral choice, it’s possible that they have different interpretations of more general moral rules, or it’s possible that one of them is wrong. It’s not possible that “what’s right for me may not be right for you” any more than it’s possible that mathematics is different for me than it is for you.

I also identified (at least) six consistent relativists or subjectivists among the surveys. Relativists hold that:

• moral rules do not exist as absolutes independent of individuals or cultures,
• moral rules can and do change from place to place, time to time,or person to person
• we may make our own moral rules (technically, that’s subjectivism)
• moral choices legitimately differ from one person to the next or that people are unconstrained by moral rules
• (and sometimes) that morals are a matter of opinion and not fact.

The remaining 31 responses to the survey gave a set of responses that I could not clearly interpret. Probably, some of these sets of answers are inconsistent. That would be easy to understand: the testing conditions were not ideal, we had not yet spent time talking about morality, some of the questions were ambiguous, and some of these insights about the nature of morality require deeper thought than many people have given to them. It is also likely that some of these sets are not inconsistent. Rather, they express subtle positions that require more words to explain than this survey permits.

If you feel like commenting, I’d be interested in seeing your reaction to the quiz and whether you have thought about these questions before. It should be possible to comment anonymously.