A Higher Law for Atheists

We thirst for meaning in our lives. As an atheist, I’ve struggled to find meaning. I want to be part of something bigger than myself but never believed such a thing existed. I’ve learned better.

As the psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl noted in his masterful Man’s Search for Meaning, people thrive when they have purpose. Cultural and technological changes over the past few centuries have eroded our sense of purpose and structure. Religion provided these in the past. Now our new, secular society needs a new, secular source.

Duty and purpose in older societies

Our distant ancestors didn’t face existential crises the way we do. In small tribes your role and purpose were clear. The meaning of life was to live the way your ancestors did.

More advanced societies were more complicated. Different demands were placed on the different classes. The peasant class had the least choice, so had the fewest responsibilities. More powerful classes had more expected of them. The warrior class, which held the power of life and death, had especially strong responsibilities.

These responsibilities became a rigorous code of conduct for warriors: the concept of honor. The West called it chivalry, Japan called it bushido. Honor originally meant doing what your liege commanded. They had spent tremendous resources training you and giving you the latest arms, armor, and transportation. You were honor-bound to follow their orders even if those orders felt wrong. To do otherwise was to bring dishonor to yourself and render your life worthless.

The concept of honor as duty to your lord changed over time. Honor became romanticized as a duty to higher principles. Instead of demanding obeisance, honor demanded that you disobey your lord if he ordered you to violate God’s law or a code of conduct.

Warriors were still expected to do their duty, but their duty was now more transcendent. It had become universal.

In a sense, this was the end of honor. It was no longer a separate system of ethics but an elevated form of normal practices. Knights were expected to show bravery, compassion, mercy, and humility – the same virtues as everyone else. Honor had been replaced by God.

The death of God

God died in turn. Society was upended by the one-two punch of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. People lost their sense of mankind’s place in the cosmos, and their personal place in society. Everything once concrete became murky.

The most profound observer of these changes was Friedrich Nietzsche. He’s been immortalized through his famous line, “God is dead.” In this one sentence he summarized the change overtaking Western society.

For centuries before Nietzsche, Christianity guided Europe. The Church was a source of values and purpose. Now the Church’s authority was waning, and a secular perspective was replacing it. Europeans could no longer count on shared beliefs, nor were they given a settled hierarchy where they could feel at peace.

The rise of existentialism

Existentialist philosophy arose to fill this vacuum. It was largely formed in Nazi-occupied France, so, as might be expected, it stressed freedom, individuality, and resistance to groups. This “do your own thing” ethos dominated Western culture throughout the latter 20^th century until it became so ingrained that we Westerns are shocked by the group-centric philosophies of other cultures.

The Nuremberg trials and a few famous psychological experiments (the Milgram experiment and Stanford prison experiment) convinced the intelligentsia that existentialism was right: group consciousness was the problem and individual conscience was the solution. They reasoned that evildoers knew what they were doing was bad but did it anyway because of their groupthink and conformity.

They rejected the possibility that Nazis individually believed they were justified in retaliating against their Jewish (supposed) oppressors, or that the Milgram/Stanford experiment subjects believed they were advancing science as part of a well-regulated system. Instead, the intelligentsia said, if these people had simply looked inward, they would have known the moral truth and found the courage to disobey.

This philosophy puts us in a dilemma: either we embrace a hubristic view of our own judgment or we give up on moral judgments altogether. Our own conscience is absolute moral truth and if other people disagree then we must reject them. Much as the ancient Hebrews were commanded to put no god before their God, we must worship our own conscience, for ours is a jealous conscience.

If we reject this and see ourselves as just one human among many, as fallible as anyone, then we risk nihilism. Who are we to say that some choices are better than others? Why even bother having ambitions if they’re just a product of our flawed human heart? Who’s to say that we have responsibilities if we don’t feel like accepting them?

Something more

When we compare ourselves to past generations, the starkest moral differences aren’t in individual character, but in overall social differences. There were noble, decent people a thousand years ago, but even the kindest among them had a casual attitude towards slavery, violence, and capital punishment. Our overall standards have changed so much that it dwarfs individual differences.

That suggests that our individual conscience is less perfectible than our collective social conscience. When we differ from society, therefore, society is more likely to be right. We can tell ourselves that our attitudes will be embraced by the society of tomorrow (and are therefore better than today’s) but people are remarkably poor at predicting the future. When we tell ourselves that the future belongs to us, we’re probably flattering ourselves.

That gives us a solution to the death of honor and the death of God. We have something that we can hold higher than our own judgment: the collective judgment of humanity. If that’s too lofty, then at least we can look to the judgment of our community.

This may sound like cultural relativism: the belief that good or bad are determined by a culture’s values. A cultural relativist would say that stealing is wrong if you’re part of a culture that says it’s wrong, and it’s fine if your culture says it’s fine.

I’m not advocating that view. Cultural values don’t determine right and wrong: if they did, “progress” would be meaningless. Instead, culture is the accumulation of millennia of refinements in our sense of right and wrong. It gets things right more often than our gut judgment. Cultural values are better guesses at right and wrong.

Think of science as an analogy: our body of scientific knowledge is always open to revision. Because it’s open to revision, it’s more likely to be true than the results of any individual experiment. It’s reached its conclusions from the results of thousands of experiments. Only the weight of many new experiments contradicting established theories justifies changing our old understanding.

Our moral sentiments are like the individual experiments. When we feel society is unfairly labelling something morally acceptable as evil, or vice versa, we must be tentative about rejecting society’s judgment. To a naïve critic this is cowardice, but fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Another analogy is the free market. Different businesses (or social movements) offer their wares. The best are selected for and the weakest are weeded out. Any new business or social movement is likely to fail, because it’s being introduced to an efficient market. Only the best can compete and succeed.

Application

This all sounds like abstract navel-gazing. How can we use it to find meaning and ethics?

First, it means the judgment of society matters. If you’re in a group that society scorns– a circle of thieves, a religious cult, political radicals –ask yourself hard questions about whether your group is really doing the right thing. The rest of the group will tell you that they’re good and everyone else is wrong, of course, so ignore them. Take a step back and look at it impartially.

Second, it means status-seeking isn’t as grubby as it feels. It’s easy to mock people who aspire to be managers, businesspeople, or professionals. Those roles have value, though, even if they’re scorned by pop culture. Pop culture, like soda pop, is temptingly sweet but lacks deeper value.

Status-seeking isn’t the only goal that matters, but it is a remedy for a lack of ambition or a sense of meaningless. If you can’t find goals for yourself, ask what accomplishments would make your grandparents proud of you then pursue those goals. There’s hidden value in the mundane life they’d probably want for you.

Most importantly, be humble. There’s something bigger and better than you. It’s older than you and will outlive you. Only if you keep your heart and mind open can you improve it.

Self-Improvement Through Double Standards

The right way to judge others and yourself

Double standards are underrated. Holding a single standard seems consistent, objective and fair; using different standards looks like favoritism and breeds resentment. That’s only half the picture, though. There’s hidden value in measuring people with different yardsticks.

Perhaps you’d prefer not to judge people at all. That’s unrealistic. No matter your intentions, you will unconsciously judge other people. We all do it. When we see misbehavior, we automatically feel a twinge of disapproval in our hearts. When we see self-sacrifice, we admire the martyr and our spirits rise.

It’s still good advice to “judge not, lest you be judged.” Take that lesson figuratively, though, not literally. It’s a warning against over-judging. Even if someone seems like a jerk, don’t condemn them too much or make assumptions about their personal failings. We’re prone to a mistake called the fundamental attribution error: we reach conclusions about someone’s true nature as soon as we see them act.

Even better advice is “first, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye.” It’s fine to notice the speck in their eye. You’d be lying to yourself if you tried to ignore it. Just make sure you look inwards, as well, and first fix your own failings before trying to correct theirs.

When you’re looking inwards and judging yourself, “be the best version of yourself.” It’s easy to dismiss that phrase as corny, but it carries wisdom. Your mind is great at inventing rationalizations for your own misdeeds. Don’t let it; instead, imagine how you could have been better.

If you want to intellectualize it, study Aristotle’s virtue ethics. He prescribed developing your noble traits to pursue eudaimonia, meaning flourishing. Be more courageous, moderate, just, and prudent.

Think too of Confucius and his ideal junzi, meaning gentleman. Be a junzi through loyalty, generosity, and discipline. Strive for internal perfection rather than external reward.

When you’re judging someone else, though, you have no way of knowing if they’re being the best version of themselves. You can’t judge them fairly until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. When they wronged you, perhaps they had already walked a marathon in their shoes and were tired of hobbling along on raw, blistered feet in the pounding sun.

That’s why you mustn’t blindlytrust your gut judgment. Be tough when you judge yourself but forgiving when judging others. It’s the only way to overcome your innate bias. It’s a scary way of thinking, because it means giving people a second chance, and withholding judgment on potential threats. Be the brave, trusting version of yourself who takes that risk.

Analogously to these individual judgments, we can’t judge our allies the same way we judge other groups. In-group bias has been studied extensively by sociologists, and we now know that even in completely random groupings we favor our group members over outsiders. Regardless of how we separate Us from Them, even if it’s as meaningless as a coin toss, we see Us as more trustworthy than Them.

That’s not to damn human nature. We’re not destined to be xenophobes. Rather, it’s a fact that we must work around. We can beat this bias with discipline and love.

When you and your friends clash with another group (in politics, or religious differences, or race relations, for some examples) try to imagine yourself on the other side. You still posses all the same emotions and faculties; you aren’t a creature of pure hate, greed, ignorance, or sloth. You still have perfectly intelligent, well-intentioned motives.

When you’re doing this thought experiment, reason out what these motivations would be. Be strong: your side will discourage your exercise in empathy and try to stir up dehumanizing fear and resentment against Them. “Those people are fascists/socialists! They want to destroy us and everything we hold dear. We’ve already treated them too much like humans.”

It’s incumbent on you to rise above this hostility. A good life demands an open heart and an open mind.

Tribalism Can Be Positive

On the ethics of group conflict

People are good team players. Sometimes we forget that. We work together so often that it’s easy to take it for granted. It’s good for your soul to take a step back and look at all the incredible achievements that have been made by people cooperating.

When groups of people clash, though, they can behave very badly. I’m not just talking about historical horrors, such as wars or the Holocaust. Right now, there are groups of jerks are making the American political climate toxic. There’s plenty of blame to go around, from Antifa to the Proud Boys. Even mainstream media sometimes play host to hateful, resentful screeds.

Not all group conflict leads to destructive behavior. Businesses competition in the free market has, over generations, made humanity wealthy beyond our ancestors’ imagination. Teams of athletes competing drive each other to work harder and reach new heights. Competition in politics leads to the worst leaders being replaced and most groups of people having some of their demands met. Even war, the most destructive of human activities, has evolved rules to reduce its harm. The wars of today are gentler than the total war of World War 2 or the ambushes, raids, massacres and rape of tribal warfare.

Still, we’re much better at being good people individually than we are at being good in groups. If we thought more about how we ought to act in group competitions, then maybe we could raise our standards. At the very least, we could come to a common understanding of what group behavior is right or wrong, the same way we almost universally agree that murder, adultery, etc. are wrong.

Groups don’t have individual agency, of course. They don’t have a single mind that can choose between good or evil. Even when a group has a strong single leader, the leader responds to the needs of his followers and is guided by their reactions. That’s one reason why we can’t simply judge groups the same way we judge individuals. We must adapt our views on individual morality to groups.

There are three dominant perspectives on morality among philosophers. They’re called virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology. They say, respectively, that morality is about what kind of person you ought to be, what kind of outcomes your actions ought to have, and what kind of rules you ought to follow.

Virtues

Virtue ethics says that doing the right thing means behaving the way a good person would behave. Specifically, it means behaving in a way that’s kind, honest, brave, fair, etc. Different virtue ethicists have come up with their own lists of virtues, going all the way back to Aristotle.

It’s difficult to apply virtue ethics to group conflict. If we need moral guidance for our individual situation, we can think of people who inspire us with their personal traits. If I’m feeling lazy, I can aspire to be as hardworking as my grandfather; if I’m mad, I could try to be as forgiving as my friend Anthony.

When we want guidance for our group, it’s more difficult to imagine examples. The groups of people we celebrate are mostly honored for the consequences of their actions, rather than for their character. Even pacifistic, loving reformers like the Civil Rights Movement included a wide variety of people, some of them not so nice.

It’s also harder to get concrete guidance. If we want our own group to behave virtuously, we can try to ask ourselves “what would Gandhi’s movement do?” but it’s not clear we could answer that, given how different are our goals and situation.

Consequences

Some people think of morality in terms of its end results. In other words, they see the ends as justifying the means. The most important of these views is utilitarianism: the idea that an action is good to the extent that it creates more overall happiness than suffering.

In other words, it’s good for me to donate my money to an orphanage because it will bring the orphans more happiness than it could bring me. It’s good for a sick person to steal medicine he can’t afford, too, because the good the medicine does will outweigh the harm to the pharmacy.

Many of the worst atrocities in history were done by groups with this view. Think of the Communist revolutionaries that promised a utopia worth any amount of spilt blood and oppression. It’s a very dangerous way to think.

One problem is that humans are terrible at predicting the consequences of their actions on a large scale over a long period of time, which is the level that groups operate at. Communists and anarchists brawled with Nazis on the streets of Weimar Germany… and in so doing, helped the Nazis gain power. The sexual revolution, and the War on Poverty of the ‘60s, weakened family ties and inadvertently led to nearly 3/4ths of African-American children being born into families without father figures. Beautiful intentions can have terrible consequences.

Duties and principles

Ethics that deal with following rules are called deontology. One example of a principle-based approach to ethics is the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Jewish Rabbi Hillel came up with a negative version about a century earlier: if an action is hateful to you, don’t do it to others.

It’s not possible to directly apply these rules to a group setting. You can’t control what your own group does or does not do. You can, on an individual level, decide not to hurt other people, or make insulting or dismissive remarks to them, or lie to them. That already seems to be asking too much of people, though.

Why do people break these rules? The most common justification is “they did it first, we have to keep up to win.” That leads to people trying to silence each other because they believe their group has been silenced, or even getting violent with each other because they see their side as victims of violence.

Principle of Non-Escalation

If we can’t aim as high as treating other the other side with love and kindness, we can at least adopt a principle of non-escalation. At worst we only use the same unkindness as the other guys do. If they disagree with us without saying we’re bad people, we don’t tell them they’re bad people. If they say we’re bad people, we don’t try to silence them with threats or reporting their tweets or anything. If they try to silence us, we don’t harass them in the real world. If they harass us in the real world, or worse, we call the police, and that’s where it ends.

As a caveat: one of the quirks of human psychology is that we give the benefit of the doubt to ourselves and our in-group and we’re more skeptical of outsiders, especially threatening ones. If we want constructive group conflict, we must always hold ourselves to higher standards than our rivals, because we inevitably overestimate our own morality and underestimate theirs.

Look at the example of the Covington Catholic students. Earlier this year, during a protest, a group of Catholic school students stared awkwardly at a Native American man. Their behavior was interpreted by some people as disrespectful. An appropriate response, then, would at worst be disrespect towards the students. Arguably we should show more leniency towards children, so not even advance to the level of disrespect.

Most people did react that way. Some went farther and, among other things, advocated violence towards the students. They violated the principle of non-escalation. Groups that counted the over-reactors as members had a choice: either denounce (and possibly eject) the offenders or accept responsibility for the behavior. If they chose the latter, then rival groups would be justified in threatening them in response.

Ideally, their rivals would choose to turn the other cheek instead of matching their threatening behavior. If their rivals did choose to match the behavior, though, they couldn’t be accused of occupying the moral low-ground.

Of course, their rivals might go beyond matching the critics. Instead of vaguely advocating violence, they might send specific death threats. In that case they’d be violating the non-escalation principle as well. Each step of escalation is worse than the last (going to war is a far bigger step than name-calling) so they would be the bad guys.

Principle of Precision

Limiting your response to your rivals requires that you identify them correctly. Kicking a puppy because you think it’s a member of Al Qaeda will not do. You must be precise in recognizing what group a person belongs to, and to what extent they represent that group.

If the Prime Minister of Canada talks about invading the US, it’s appropriate to see that as the first group threatening violence against the latter. If a random homeless Canadian person delivers the same speech, it shouldn’t be treated as Canada violently threatening America. The Canadian hobo is a Canadian just the same as Canada’s leader, but he doesn’t represent the nation.

If someone calls themselves a Trump supporter and other supporters recognize him as such, then he’s part of that group. If he escalates the situation, and isn’t condemned by his group, then it counts as his group escalating. If a random wacko starts threatening people, and everyone condemns it, then it doesn’t represent either side. We can’t use it as an excuse to escalate the situation.

The higher position in a group someone is, the more they represent that group. Think of the Nuremberg trials: the Allies wanted to punish the Nazis for starting World War 2 and committing mass atrocities. Out of the 8+ million Nazi party members, the Allies put 200 on trial. That’s less than 1% of 1%. The Allies ignored the rest of the Nazis because they didn’t represent the party.

Sometimes we want to retaliate against more people than just those who wrong us. We want justice against anyone who benefitted from their misdeeds. If a gang of thieves steals everything we own, we should be free to steal from them or any of their friends and family who benefitted as well… right?

This impulse has ugly consequences. For example, a nation’s military fights for the interests of that nation’s civilians. We don’t want all wars to turn into massacres of civilians, though. Civilians may be benefiting from their military’s protection (and even their aggression) but we still shouldn’t treat them as legitimate targets.

By the same logic, even if a mainstream party benefits from a radical fringe, we shouldn’t treat the party the way we treat the fringe group. As an example, don’t treat mainstream animal rights activists with the same hostility that you would treat members of PETA. Even if the former group benefits from the latter’s actions (which isn’t clear, anyway) it isn’t culpable for their extremism.

What’s the moral of the story?

Let’s move out of the realm of airy abstraction and return to the example from the beginning. Antifa and the Proud Boys are controversial new political movements. They both have a history of escalation: silencing those who haven’t silenced them, threatening those who haven’t threatened them, and committing violence against those who haven’t been violent towards them.

They also both are imprecise in their attacks. Antifa lumps all their critics into the alt-right, and so treats a defenseless journalist as a target for violence. The Proud Boys accuse their targets of being part of Antifa, even when they’re as mainstream as the Democratic mayor of Portland.

That’s not to imply the two groups are morally equivalent. The question of whether they’re equivalent is a distraction, though. If a murderer and a torture are engaged in a fist-fight, you don’t have to pick one to support. They’re both awful, and you should simply call the police on them.

The Ethics of Reciprocity, Part 3

(This is part 3 of a three part series. Part 1 is the introduction and justification. Part 2 spells out the implications in more detail. Part 3 deals with objections and comparisons to other moral philosophies.)

Distinctiveness

Is there a need to have a separate way of talking about a duty of reciprocity? Can it be covered by other ways of describing right and wrong? No. I’ll go over specific moral beliefs and why they can’t do the job.

Utilitarianism

You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. When you cut down the forest, splinters will fly. The ends justify the means. These phrases all point to the same idea: that the end results of an action are what matters, and they can justify any collateral damage.

This is the moral philosophy called consequentialism. The consequences of an action are what matters; the motives are irrelevant, as are any ethical principles. All that matters is the end result. The most important consequentialist philosophy is called utilitarianism. Utilitarians believe that the specific consequence that matters is the net happiness created. If an action creates more happiness than unhappiness, it’s a good action.

Imagine a relationship between Tom and Jane. Jane dumps Tom, and he’s heartbroken. A utilitarian would look at that and say Jane did something wrong if she made Tom unhappier than she made herself happy. That’s not how we feel about break-ups, though. If Tom had spent years caring for Jane and being a good boyfriend, then we’d say Jane did something wrong- she owed Tom, in a sense. On the other hand, if Tom had been negligent or even had affairs, then we would applaud Jane’s decision. She deserved better- which is to say, Tom owed her more.

Utilitarianism wouldn’t be able to describe the relationship in a way that reflects our values. Reciprocity offers a distinct, useful perspective.

Golden Rule deontology

“Deontology” is just a philosopher’s way of saying ‘code of ethics’. The “Golden Rule” is possibly the most famous code of ethics, and it’s a single rule: do to others what you’d have them do to you. There are variations of it across cultures, such as the Jewish teacher Hillel saying that you shouldn’t do to your neighbors the things that are hateful to you. The Golden Rule is very flexible, so it can cover the same situations as our ethics of reciprocity, but perhaps not as well.

Imagine a young man named Steve. He had a falling out with his parents a few years ago over politics, and now they never talk to each other. He gets a call from his sister saying that their father has died and Steve should go home to comfort his mother and help her prepare the funeral. Steve thinks of the Golden Rule: if his girlfriend had died, would he have wanted his parents coming to comfort him and help him prepare for the funeral? No, he hates them and doesn’t want anything to do with them. Therefore, he shouldn’t help his mom.

Our ethics of reciprocity would give the opposite result. Steve owes a debt to his parents, even if he doesn’t like him, and the least he can do to repay that debt is help his mother in her grief. That answer jibes much better with our natural sense of right and wrong.

Kantian deontology

The brilliant German philosopher Immanuel Kant invented his own code of ethics. He called it the “Categorical Imperative,” and it consists of three (or more) formulations.

One part of the Categorical Imperative is that you should never treat people as a means to an end, but instead as an end unto themselves. Don’t use people, basically. That’s certainly good advice, and it does cover some situations we’re interested in: if you just take from other people without acknowledging your duty of reciprocity, then you’re treating them more as a means to an end (getting stuff) than as individuals just as worthy as you are.

It doesn’t cover all the situations, though. What about our debts to abstract entities like our community or nation? They aren’t people, so it’s not clear under the Categorical Imperative that we have a duty to honor our debts; the reciprocal approach is clear. It’s also fuzzy on the nature of how we could avoid using generous people as a means to an end. If someone is always there for us and helps us out, we certainly ought to do something instead of taking them for granted, but Kant isn’t clear on what we should do, just what we shouldn’t do. Reciprocity does – to an extent – tell us how to act.

Another part of the Categorical Imperative is that you should behave in a way such that everyone else in the world could act the same way and it would be fine. You can’t steal, because otherwise everyone else would steal, and the whole idea of private property would collapse and stealing wouldn’t even make sense any more. It’s a contradiction.

This formulation does allow for a duty to abstract entities. If no one helped their community, then communities would no longer exist as such, and no one would be able to survive long enough to make that choice. No man is an island, after all. It has the same fuzziness issue as before, though, as it still only tells us what we shouldn’t do, not what we should do. To continue our example, how much do we owe our community? Just enough to allow the species to survive? Kant would call this an imperfect duty, which means we don’t owe it our entire time and energy, but he doesn’t give us much more help than that.

Virtue ethics

The idea of virtue ethics dates back at least to Aristotle, and it’s regained popularity recently. Virtue ethicists believe that we should focus less on actions in the abstract, and more on what kind of person we want to be. There is some overlap with ethics of reciprocity: a virtue ethicist could say that gratitude is a virtue that should be cultivated, therefore it’s important to pay back your debts.

Virtue ethics is a very personal view of morality. That makes it great for finding our direction in life. That makes it less great for answering questions about social issues like justice or civic disobedience. Reciprocity can tell us more about these things.

Moral Nihilism

Moral nihilism is the view that there is no such thing as right or wrong. Nihilism can’t be used to judge right in wrong in the kinds of reciprocal situations we’re looking at, because it can’t be used to judge right or wrong in any situation. It denies the validity of any such judgment. There’s no question that it’s distinct from the ethics of reciprocity.

Moral Hedonism

Moral hedonism is the philosophy that doing good means having fun. An action is good if it pleases you, and bad if it makes you feel bad. Hedonism is opposed to principles of duty, obligation, and responsibility, which is a core part of reciprocity. It’s also opposed to doing things for other people at your own expense, which is another core part.

Objectivism

Ayn Rand is a controversial figure. A refugee from communist Russia, she developed a philosophy of Objectivism which is almost the opposite of communist ideals. Her attitude and approach towards other philosophy lead many to view her as not really a philosopher. Still, her ideas are interesting and have been very influential, especially in the US, so it’s worth addressing them.

In Objectivist philosophy, something is right so long as it serves your self-interest. Objectivism’s distinct from hedonism, as Rand defines self-interest as something other than just satisfying your desires. It’s not completely clear what self-interest means to Rand, though.

Objectivism, like hedonism, is directly opposed to reciprocity. If you’re given a gift, a sense of reciprocity demands that you return the favor. Objectivists deny that you have any such duty. Your only duty is to serve your own self-interest, and if you spend your time repaying unspoken debts then you’re misguided or even immoral.

Objections

Not all moral intuitions are equal

Why should we treat all moral intuitions as equally legitimate? Why should we think of this kind of moral debt as being on the same footing as the Golden Rule, for example? If we do treat them equally, wouldn’t we have to start recognizing all moral feelings as legitimate, and treat ‘blasphemy’ as immoral, and condemn eating ‘unclean’ foods, and all the other moral beliefs humans have had?

If we could find other broadly shared moral sentiments like reciprocity, then I would bite the bullet and say we should account for those sentiments as well. There just aren’t, in fact, very many of those, so accounting for them isn’t difficult. Maybe you could look around human societies and say “all human societies treat their dead with respect, even if ‘respect’ means different things to different groups. Must we therefore consider treatment of our dead to be a moral issue?”

I would respond yes, it’s fine to start thinking of respecting the dead as a moral issue, arguing about it the same way we argue about offensive speech or adultery or corruption or any other moral concern. It’s just that “respect” is so subjective, and so bound up in specific traditional practices, it will be hard to reach any consensus about how to respect our dead. Whether it’s a moral issue isn’t the problem; whether it can be handled philosophically is the problem. That’s true for other moral sentiments, but not for reciprocity.

Creating moral blackmail

If reciprocity means you owe a debt to anyone who gives you something, then people who keep giving you things – even against your objections – will hold power over you. By creating a debt, they will gain influence you, in a kind of ‘moral blackmail’ (or, perhaps, just an extreme version of guilt-tripping). To an extent, we already recognize this power of gifting: giving gifts to politicians is heavily regulated, and many times people don’t accept gifts from enemies.

Our duties to over-givers like these are naturally lessened. As an analogy, think of someone who complains all the time. Normally we have an ethical duty to avoid making people feel bad, but if someone always finds a reason to feel bad about everything we do, there’s a point where we can stop taking their objections seriously. Our duty to be nice to them is reduced. Likewise, if someone bombards us with gifts, then we don’t have to treat that debt seriously.

Wouldn’t recognizing the moral force of reciprocity therefore lead to a society where we’re trying to help each other all the time to hold power over each other? That’s certainly not the worst dystopia imaginable, and even resembles some real-world cultures. Still, if we were to explicitly recognize the moral weight of reciprocity, then we’d be more likely to turn gifts down. Rejecting gifts would be less insulting when it has a known, rational explanation.

Not everyone senses this reciprocal debt

If reciprocity is a universal moral truth like duty and compassion, then why do some people not feel it very strongly, if at all? And why is it lessened in some cases, e.g. we don’t feel any duty when a company gives us free samples?

Not everyone feels the pull of duty, compassion, empathy, or other moral goods, either. Some people are amoral or selectively moral. The near-universality of slavery throughout history doesn’t prove that compassion and egalitarianism aren’t moral values, it just shows that people can find a way to work around their morality and ignore uncomfortable realities.

In brutal societies, treating executions as entertainment is normal, so one’s compassion is attenuated. In corrupt societies, fair play is for fools, so one’s sense of justice is attenuated.

The Ethics of Reciprocity, Part 2

The implications of reciprocity

(This is part 2 of a three part series. Part 1 is the introduction and justification. Part 2 spells out the implications in more detail. Part 3 deals with objections and comparisons to other moral philosophies.)

Justice

An ethical code of reciprocity can help us rationalize our views of justice. We want to draw a line between justice and vengeance, for example. Justice demands punishment proportionate to the social damage done by someone’s actions. Vengeance (and revenge) are when one delivers punishment greater than is demanded by justice. They’re when you overstep the bounds of justice out of a personal emotional desire.

The way we normally think of morality has led to this retributive desire being stigmatized. Some believe that all suffering is bad, so anything that increases suffering must be bad, therefore any punishment that doesn’t deter or rehabilitate offenders is unjust. That view of justice is too narrow to fit our moral intuitions. Even many of its adherents can’t bring themselves to be consistent. For example, I’ve seen left-wing believers in this view of justice make an exception for people convicted of rape or hate crimes. At that point, they’re no longer concerned about reform and deterrence, but about making the punishment fit the crime. They’ve tried to dull their sense of reciprocal justice but in the cases they find most egregious it comes roaring back.

It’s also why improving the condition of prisons is so controversial. To those with no sense of reciprocity, improving prison conditions simply results in the standards of living of some people being higher. What can be wrong with that? The problem is that prison is a way of paying back the harm inflicted on society. A tough, spartan life is the prisoner’s way of paying his dues. A life where the greatest problem is a limited Playstation game catalogue – as the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik complained of – is not a suitable way of paying back a debt to society.

Loyalty

Loyalty has a mixed reputation. It might make you think of faceless, mindless hordes doing what they’re told. You might instead think of a band of brothers sticking together when their lives are on the line. You might even think of the romanticized loyalty codes of the past, like the codes of chivalry or bushido.

The ultimate meaning of loyalty is being reliably good to the people who’ve been good to you. It’s simply another example of reciprocity. Loyalty, then, should be proportionate. People who don’t want to be loyal to a group (or to a partner) will try to describe all the ways the group has been bad to them, as justification for why that group isn’t owed (much) loyalty. The group members will take the opposite position and lay out benefits that person has received and why they do owe the group continued loyalty.

When someone talks about how their country has mistreated them, or their parents neglected them, they may be implicitly making this kind of argument for why they don’t have any duty of loyalty. When someone complains about their partner’s behavior, even after all they’ve sacrificed for their partner, they’re implicitly making the argument that their partner isn’t paying the ‘loyalty debt’ that they owe.

That doesn’t mean those arguments are automatically suspect: some people really have been mistreated and shouldn’t be expected to show a typical level of loyalty. Think of Muhammad Ali: one reason he refused to fight in the Vietnam War was the racism he experienced in the US. You could argue that he was right, that the suffering other Americans inflicted on him reduced his duty to them. You could argue the other way, too, of course; the hardships Ali experienced weren’t so bad that he could abandon his duty, or that his duty was to America writ-large and the bad behavior of racist Americans was irrelevant. The point is that there’s a real, intellectual argument to be had about the merits to this justification for draft dodging (setting aside his other, legally defensible religious objections).

Tradition

Tradition is how we practice reciprocity towards our ancestors, and how our descendants will practice reciprocity towards us. Many things we do will benefit the people of the future. Think of environmentalism or investing. One this they can do to pay us back is respect our values.

We would be demanding too much loyalty if we expected future generations to behave just as we do, but considering how much their lives will have been improved over hunting-gathering, it’s fair to expect them to observe (or at least pay lip service to) some of our most basic values, such as a high respect for freedom or a taboo against infanticide.

The Ethics of Reciprocity, Part 1

Why one good turn demands another

We have a moral duty to repay what we owe. Not just literally repaying money owed to our creditors but repaying favors and gifts. On an intuitive level we all know this, but it’s not normally explicitly talked about on a moral level. It’s time to spell out an ethics of reciprocity.

(This is part 1 of a three part series. Part 1 is the introduction and justification. Part 2 spells out the implications in more detail. Part 3 deals with objections and comparisons to other moral philosophies.)

Prison sentences: a case study

When we bring morality into a debate, it’s usually to argue about the harm or benefit done to people and our duty to follow certain principles. Take, for example, arguments about prison sentences. We argue over the ability of prisons to rehabilitate, thereby making the prisoners happier in the long run as well as making the rest of society happier by changing a destructive person into a productive one. We talk about how we have a duty to keep society safe from dangerous people by locking them away, or how it’s unjust for us to lock someone away for a long time in bad conditions.

That ignores part of our intuitive understanding of justice. When someone hurts society, they owe a debt to us. They repay this debt through their time imprisoned. Once they’ve served their sentence, we even explicitly say that they’ve “paid their debt to society”, or “paid their dues”. This is called retributive justice. We know it, but we tend not to bring it into our arguments.

That’s one reason why it’s so difficult to motivate public opinion about prison reform. Reformers talk about how prisons don’t work to reform the prisoners. They’re right, but people don’t much care, because that’s only one role of prisons. Reformers also sometimes point to criminology research and say that we don’t need to keep so many people imprisoned, that it’s reached a point where it isn’t making us safer. They may also be right about that, but again, it doesn’t motivate public opinion because that’s only part of what prisons do. Prisons are still serving their purpose as a place where people are punished to repay their debt to society. Because we don’t normally talk about these kinds of moral debts, it’s hard to have constructive arguments about issues, like prison reform, where these debts matter.

Reciprocity is a fundamental moral sensation

Morality feels simpler than it really is. It seems to us like some things are obviously good and noble and right, and others are clearly wrong and outrageous. Moral philosophers have worked for centuries (if not millennia) to create logical systems that can justify these feelings and resolve disagreements, with mixed success.

The systems are all derived from our basic feelings of right and wrong. We have a fundamental sense that we ought to treat people well, not harm them, and follow certain rules. We argue about how to weigh those different feelings – should we be honest even when it hurts people? – but the inputs to our arguments are those moral feelings.

The sense of reciprocity is another of those basic moral feelings. Think of someone who just takes and takes but never does anything for anyone in return. Their ingratitude doesn’t feel like a minor character flaw, like if they were forgetful or chronically late, but a more serious moral defect.

We think the same way when we hear about someone being fired or dumped by their lover. We don’t just think about how bad they’ll feel. We mostly worry about whether they deserved to be treated that way. If someone was a good employee, we’ll be outraged that their employer wasn’t good to them in return. If they had always been cheating on their partner, then we’ll shrug at the news they’ve been dumped, even if it left them devastated. We care about more than the emotional impact; we keep a mental tally sheet of what people deserve.

People throughout history have seen filial piety the same way: if you don’t pay back your parents for the work they did raising you, then you’re doing something morally wrong. They held the same attitude towards repaying your ancestors, or the spirits of the animals you hunted, or other gods or spirits. Think also of the concept of “blood money” – paying money to the victims of a crime you’ve committed as a way of literally settling the debt. No amount of money can restore the life of someone you’ve killed, but that’s not the point. It’s to settle a moral debt, not to undo damage.

Reform and wisdom

Change isn’t always progress

“It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease.”
-G. K. Chesterton

The history of reform is normally told as a story of brave individuals exercising their individual conscience and triumphing over the unfair old way of doing things. This isn’t always wrong! It’s not always right, either, and it risks turning arbitrary social change into a Manichean story of good versus evil. The end result is that ambitious people will look for things they can change with no regard for whether the change is wise or foolish.

The risk of foolish change is real. It’s easy to overlook, because, when we learn about history, we study the history of things that worked or were at least important. We don’t study many of the dead-ends or false starts or pointless back-and-forth tugs. Those movements didn’t fail because people were dumb, but because they were human. We’re as error-prone as they were

We don’t always know why traditions work, and we’re always susceptible to our own biases. The most pernicious bias may be motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is the technical term for the way our mind deceives us into believing something is right and true when, really, it’s just something we like. Welfare programs and tax cuts always sound better when they benefit people on our side, and worse when they benefit our rivals.

Motivated reasoning means we’re automatically biased towards reforms that benefit us and against traditions that constrain us. If you combine that with the belief that all traditions should be evaluated by our individual perspectives, and the fact that traditions are tacit knowledge not explicit arguments, you have a recipe for people always pushing to change society in a way that benefits themselves. It won’t be out of cynicism, usually, but out of these systemic problems. They’ll be even more motivated to action by our limited historical perspective, where nearly all the change we study turns out well and nearly all reformers are heroes.

That’s good and bad. It’s good when it motivates justified reformers even when the odds are stacked against them. It’s bad when it motives foolish reformers when the odds are stacked against them because their ideas are terrible. It empowers change without regard to the quality of the change.

The main problem is that the reformers who succeed tend to be the ones who reflect the values of the powerful. Those with the most economic, political, or cultural sway pick reforms they like and dismiss reforms they dislike. It can be hard to accept that, because our myths of reform describe them as crusades taken by the oppressed against the oppressor, but in reality, if a crusade succeeds that means it had more power on its side than against it.

That may sound too cynical. Sometimes, reforms attract the powerful because they speak to a deeper moral truth. Perhaps abolitionists didn’t start with power on their side (although it was an attractive cause to industrialists) but became powerful because freedom for all is such a compelling ideal. Perhaps the reason we passionately embrace their legacy isn’t history being written by the victors but because that ideal is so meaningful that it still resonates with us.

But that surely doesn’t describe all reforms, especially when there are so many incentives to invent new reform movements. Motivated reasoning is a huge part of the moral reasoning of every human: if something is good for us, it will look a little more noble; if something is bad for us, it will look a little more wicked. By itself that’s enough to start crusades against morally neutral issues, but when you add in the social prestige attached to reform, the sense of purpose, and, sometimes, the financial incentives, the result is necessarily a lot of dubious reform efforts.

Even if we remove motivated reasoning from the picture and assume the reform is built on the best ideas, there’s still the practical argument against it. Think of the difference between communism and capitalism. Communists believed they could engineer a perfect economy, without all the waste and corruption of capitalism. They were proven wrong.

We may believe that we can engineer a perfect society, without all the ignorance and barbarism of tradition. We’re likely to be proven even more wrong than the communists. A top-down imposition of order on seeming chaos is appealing for those at the top, but it comes at the cost of the invisible merits of the chaos. The tacit knowledge of traditions has been proven by the continued existence and continual improvement of the societies they’ve created. Any new, untested idea has the potential to disrupt this process. The more radical the proposal the greater the risk.

That doesn’t mean all reforms are bad, and all reformers are deluded and self-interested. It does mean that the reforms come with hidden risks and should be evaluated with wisdom and patience, and that reformers should be held to a high moral standard. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a minister and a father. He had spent years contributing to society by tending to his flock and raising his family. He would have been a great man even before his successes in civil rights.

Contrast that with some campus radicals. They’ve only taken from society, never given, and are hostile to the ideas of patience and wisdom. They may still have good ideas – a stopped clock is right twice a day – but they do no credit to their cause. It’s easy to dismiss them as glory hounds who don’t understand their targets and don’t care about the consequences of their plans. Just as someone should learn medicine before trying to be a doctor, a would-be reformer needs to invest years into their subject before making a diagnosis. Society is much more complex than the human body.

Feelings Can’t Be Wrong

It seems obvious but leads to uncomfortable conclusions

Morality is about the choices we make. There’s been much thinking, writing, and sermonizing about morality, and one of the most common themes is that we should judge actions. It’s not about judging the things we have no control over. That means condemning bullying, not contempt; condemning adultery, not lust; condemning violence, not hatred.

Yes, even hatred, the most taboo emotion in American society, is neither good nor evil. People don’t choose hatred: it’s a feeling that automatically burbles up from the depths of their brain, the same as any other. It can motivate awful behavior, but the same is true of other emotions like hubris and greed. That’s not enough justification to condemn it as evil. Only our choices can be morally judged.

Some feelings are dangerous but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong

Many emotions are like fire: handled improperly, they can do tremendous damage. Greed, anger, ambition, hatred, lust, jealousy, etc. can motivate people to do awful things. They can also be channeled into constructive activity, though. The emotions that we think of a positive, such as love and compassion, can be channeled into harmful activity.

Some Allied soldiers fought Nazis because they hated “krauts,” an ethnic slur for Germans. They may have had anger in their hearts, but they still played a role in ending WW2 and the Holocaust. Mirror-wise, black community leaders and the Black Congressional Caucus wanted to defend their community from the epidemic of crack cocaine. That noble intention led to them passing laws that gave very harsh penalties to crack possession, which has had terribly racist consequences.

I’ve written before about how emotions don’t matter in politics, but it can be applied more broadly than just politics. Your choices and their consequences are what matter. What’s in your heart might be interesting, but it doesn’t determine whether you’re a good or bad person. Your bad feelings might tempt you to do bad things but it’s how you react to that temptation that matters.

Human hearts are all the same

We spend an awful lot of time thinking about how We have good feelings and They have bad feelings. We are filled with love and faith and tolerance, They are filled with greed and hatred and a hunger for control.

Ultimately, though, that’s unproductive. If we think of other people as having fundamentally different feelings than we do, it’s impossible for us to empathize and cooperate. Stigmatizing emotions makes us unable to recognize those feelings in ourselves and handle them appropriately.

If we use ‘desire for power’ as a label to dismiss our enemies, we won’t acknowledge that desire in ourselves and our allies. Because we’re made of the same flesh-and-blood as our opponents, though, we’re just as likely to feel that desire. We’ll just be repressing it, so we’ll be unable to think clearly about it, and we might ultimately express it in a destructive way.

Only choices are good and evil

There aren’t very many settled arguments in moral philosophy. Is the Bible the ultimate guide? Are the consequences of our actions the only thing that matters? Is morality just about following principles?

Fortunately, I don’t have to settle any of those arguments. Very few moral beliefs actually condemn emotions. Let’s run through some moral philosophies to prove the point.

Consequentialism

Consequentialists believe that the consequences of an action determine whether it’s good or evil. The most well-known kind of consequentialism is called utilitarianism, and it says that the happiness or pain caused by an action is what matters. If you do something that creates more good feelings in humanity (and maybe animals too) than bad feelings, it’s good. It doesn’t matter what the specific action was.

Consequentialists care solely about actions. That makes it immediately clear that they can’t condemn hatred, jealousy, greed, or any other feeling. Consequentialism is about your conduct, not what’s going on in your mind.

Deontology

Deontologists believe that you should follow moral principles. The philosopher Immanuel Kant created two influential moral rules. The simplified versions are: first, act in a way that everyone else could act; second, never treat people as a means to an end. It’s like when your mother asked you “what if everyone else did that?” as a way to discourage your bad habits.

The rules deontologists create are, again, about actions. It’s about what kind of choices you should make. It’s not about who you are deep in your heart-of-hearts, it’s about how you choose to interact with people and the world.

Divine Command

Another view of morality is that right and wrong are determined by the will of God, or multiple gods. There are many religions, so it’s not possible to cover all of them, but generally speaking they’re concerned with actions and faith. Take the Ten Commandments, for example. Of the ten of them, only one is concerned with how we feel, rather than what we do.

The commandment not to covet thy neighbor’s house etc. is a prohibition against feeling a certain way. That’s difficult to reconcile with the “emotions can’t be wrong” argument. In fact, Jesus would expand on this, saying that anger towards one brother is a sin, and that desiring adultery is committing adultery in your heart. This is like the Buddhist condemnation of desire.

When these (and other) religions condemn feelings, they aren’t necessarily doing the same thing as other kinds of moral condemnation. When we say an action is evil, we say that we should avoid doing it, and perhaps even that it should be punished. It’s impossible to avoid feeling a certain way, and it’s not feasible to punish people for their innermost feelings, though it’s certainly been tried before!

These yearnings are stigmatized as evil so that followers will try to discipline their inner voice. If they’re told it’s shameful to feel lust, or that desire leads to the cycle of suffering, then they will try focus their thoughts away from those feelings when they experience them.

The downside is that they may feel shame and inadequacy because of their longings. They will repress or sublimate those feelings and possibly express them in a bad way later. Take the common criticism of the Catholic Church: their attitude towards sexuality leads to priest repressing their desires, so some priests end up expressing those desires in an unhealthy way, as pedophilia. I don’t completely agree with that criticism of the Catholic Church (I think it’s more complicated than that) but the reasoning makes sense.

Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics is an old-fashioned view of morality that’s enjoying a popular resurgence among philosophers. The central idea of virtue ethics is that we shouldn’t be concerned about actions and consequences at all, but rather that we should be concerned about virtues: positive personal traits like courage, humility, grace, or wisdom. The right thing to do is simply what a virtuous person would do.

A straightforward reading of virtue ethics contradicts my theses: a virtue ethicist believes that feelings certainly can be right and wrong, and they’re actually the basis for judging right and wrong! If you feel courage when faced with a threat, you’re a virtuous person; if you feel cowardly, you aren’t.

That may be a valid understanding of virtue ethics, but there’s another way to look at it. If a person is filled with terror at the sight of a mouse, then we could condemn them as lacking the virtue of courage. If they’re able to overcome their terror, though, are they really less courageous than people who didn’t feel fear in the first place?

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!-incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.”
Mark Twain

If a person is inclined towards vanity, but can control their impulses and act with modesty, then are they less virtuous than someone with a natural inclination towards modesty? If someone can acknowledge their feelings of fear, hatred, or pride, and behave virtuously regardless, then perhaps virtue ethicists would recognize their goodness.

In Defense of Conformity

Existentialism’s mortal sin deserves a fair hearing

The end of the second World War was followed by a flowering of creative activity in Western Europe and the US. The philosophical and artistic movement called existentialism spread like wildfire during this time. Our culture is now saturated with existentialist ideas.

The essence of existentialism is that we must choose what kind of person we are. We aren’t born a certain way, nor are we created by society; instead, we make ourselves who we are by the actions we take. Our choices define us, and there are right choices and wrong choices. The right kind of choices are “authentic,” and driven by one’s internal beliefs and desires. Wrong choices are “inauthentic” and are driven by outside forces like social or economic pressures.

Existentialism had great social value when it was a story that quirky, iconoclastic outsiders told themselves to feel worthy despite being scorned by society. Its value was lost when it became the dominant ideology. Its ugly flaws are becoming clear now. One of these is the way it treats conformity, social pressure, and inauthenticity.

Conformity is the compromise made between individuals and society so we can all get along

To us as individuals, being expected to conform is an intolerable nuisance. But we rely on others- the rest of society- to conform to our expectations, at least in some ways. Even if you’re fine with all kinds of un-“PC” language, for example, are you really fine with people cutting in line or farting in an elevator? If we choose not to conform, though, how is it fair for us to expect everyone else to?

Following social standards, such as dressing ‘normally’ or avoiding offensive language, is a symbolic way of showing that you’re willing to compromise. You’re willing to do what people expect of you. It creates trust and a common identity. By adopting common cultural tokens, you’re showing solidarity with others.

People see it as a red flag if you can’t be bothered to make that compromise and conform to basic expectations. It’s a signal that you might be a taker who wants the benefits of being part of society while considering yourself above it. Their mistrust isn’t just bad you personally, but weakens the bonds of trust of society as a whole.

Social expectations push us to fulfill unpleasant responsibilities

Other people have expectations for how we ought to behave, and these subtly shape our identities. This idea is sometimes taken to the extreme and leads to claims that society is forcing us to behave a certain way and that we’re robbed of free will.

Existentialists would be disgusted by that idea; they believe you have a terrible responsibility to create your own identity by choosing the actions that coincide with the person you want to be. Jean-Paul Sartre, king of the existentialists, called fulfilling this responsibility living in “good faith”; conversely, ducking this responsibility is living in “bad faith”.

The problem is that the person we want to be, our ideal self, is often a glamorous fantasy. For how many people does “good faith” living mean trying to be an Instagram celebrity or reality TV star? Even Sartre’s life is not something attainable for most. If a janitor comfortably accepts his role in society, does that mean he’s living in “bad faith” because it isn’t an expression of his true self? Cleaning toilets is almost never an authentic expression of one’s inner self. The janitor is sacrificing part of himself (his time and energy) in return for part of someone else (their money). It’s easy to sneer at that as ‘selling out’ but he’s choosing to live a life that benefits himself and others.

Think of the movie American Beauty. The main character, going through a midlife crisis, finds his life as an office worker and family man to be inauthentic. He begins to smoke weed, leaves his job for an entry-level job in fast food, and pursues a relationship with a teenage girl. To an existentialist, this would be a positive transformation: he’s started to live life more authentically. To the rest of us, his “good faith” lifestyle changes did unimaginable damage to the people around him.

The existentialists are right that the character should choose to live better than just sleepwalking through life, only doing what’s expected of him. But his “bad faith” life is a minimum, not an alternative to an authentic life. It’s his responsibility to fulfill his social roles. After that, he’s free to pursue his “good faith” life.

Those societal expectations are on him for a reason, and when he abandons his responsibilities he’s doing something morally wrong. He’s hurting other people to pursue his own fulfillment.

Nonconformists can’t lead

Another problem with existentialism is that it makes a terrible dominant philosophy. It’s great for scrappy rebels on the edge of society to talk about how it’s important to do your own thing and ignore expectations and so on. It’s not a great message for the overbearing weight of mainstream culture to push on people.

How do you tell everyone that they’re expected to find their own bliss? There’s no need to answer that question; we already know what it looks like. There’s now a shortage of people with technical skills able to do the dull, unglamorous work of society, and a surfeit of people dreaming of being rock stars but ending up miserable.

We teach people to look down on the ‘majority’ as a faceless rabble living meaningless lives just because they can’t go on book tours and get paid for interviews. There’s already a natural human tendency for high-status people to look at low-status people with disgust; existentialism just reinforces that sense of superiority.

It’s important for leaders to have a sense of noblesse oblige and common identity with their followers. Teaching them that the majority are beneath them, and living “bad faith” lives, and that they have no responsibilities to the commoners but only to their own hearts, results in profoundly irresponsible and selfish leadership. There’s a reason why so many people have lost faith in the elites; the elites have embraced a philosophy that treats them as a superior class of person to the rest of humanity.

Nonconformists can’t breed

Existentialists are not known for having stable, successful family lives. To be fair, philosophers in general aren’t disposed to domestic bliss. Existentialism, though, makes it especially difficult to create and raise a new generation. If you see your primary duty as being true to the whims of your heart, how can other people possibly trust you?

Families must rely on each other through thick and thin, good times and bad, for decades. It’s not easy for a child to grow up knowing that their mom would run off as soon as she felt her motherhood was inauthentic.

Healthy, intelligent young adults only see downsides to being restrained by society’s demands. Why should they have to sacrifice their autonomy for the good of the group? It takes a village to raise a child, though, and if every able-bodied individual opts out because they consider the responsibility too onerous, then it becomes impossible to raise the next generation.

Everything in moderation, including authenticity

I’m not arguing that you should give up on all your dreams and do whatever you’re expected to. Existentialists may have overrated authenticity, but that doesn’t mean authenticity is a terrible thing and you should always do the complete opposite. Rather, you should be comfortable with a certain amount of “selling out,” of doing what’s expected of you, and of tempering the passion with which you pursue your dreams. These things have a hidden value even though they’re uncool.

The Utilitarian Argument for Eating Meat

We may be entering an era of vegetarianism. For generations, vegetarians (and vegans) have advocated against meat-eating. Even when their arguments were sound, they didn’t change people’s behavior. Their cause faced insurmountable barriers: meat tastes good, is an easy source of protein, and is a traditional part of most cultures.

Two of those barriers are collapsing. Fake meat is becoming tasty and convenient. There will always a be a hard core of traditionalists who want to cook things the way their grandparents did, but the rest of us will look at a menu and think “why not order the gardenburger and save a cow’s life, if it tastes and costs the same?”

Vegetarian arguments against carnivory haven’t been much tested by criticism. One of the advantages of being ignored is that you aren’t scrutinized. Now that vegetarianism has the possibility of changing society, it’s worth applying a critical lens to it. Let’s look at utilitarian perspective for why the meat industry is good.

[Disclaimer: I’m not a utilitarian. I also don’t have strong feelings about eating meat or animal products. This isn’t meant as a polemic, but as a novel argument.]

Utilitarianism 101

Utilitarianism is a moral philosophy dating back to the mid-1800s. Its essential idea is that the goodness or evilness of an action depends only on the outcome. Specifically, how much that outcome effects net “utility,” which usually means happiness, but other utilitarians interpret it as well-being or other positive subjective states.

For a concrete example, imagine asking a group of moral philosophers whether you should kill Mr. X. One philosopher might say no, because it’s against God’s commands. Another might say no, because you wouldn’t want Mr. X to kill you. A utilitarian would say maybe: you should kill him if it makes people happier overall more than it makes them unhappy. You should let him live if the murder would make people more unhappy than happy.

There are wrinkles on the idea, but that’s the gist of it. Utilitarianism isn’t a tremendously popular view of morality, but it’s had its adherents, and its been influential for the century-and-a-half that it’s been around. Among other things, utilitarians were leaders in pushing for animal rights and banning animal cruelty.

More animals, more happiness

The mathematics of utilitarianism mean that more happy sentient life forms = more total happiness = more good. If you breed a chicken, and over its life that chicken feels more pleasure than pain, then you’ve increased the total happiness of the world and thus done a good thing. The more net happiness it felt, the better your choice to breed it.

It doesn’t matter if you kill the chicken as soon as it’s plump (so long as the killing isn’t painful). Remember, for utilitarians, acts are only as good or evil as the happiness or suffering they cause. Painlessly killing a chicken is therefore neither good nor evil. Breeding and raising that chicken was a good thing, assuming you kept it content and relatively free from pain, so you’ve done a net good.

That’s without even thinking about the benefits people get from eating chickens. People really, really like eating chicken. The average American eats 90 pounds of chicken per year! Eating that chicken is another increase to net happiness, which makes your chicken breeding even better, morally speaking.

Counter-arguments

Someone squeamish about this conclusion might object that we wouldn’t have to eat the animals we raise, most of the good would come from breeding them and raising them in a happy lifestyle. That’s fair enough, but at that point it wouldn’t be a farm anymore, it would be an animal sanctuary.

Animal sanctuaries are fantastic, but they need donations to keep running. People are only willing to donate so much money. Farms, on the other hand, not only generate enough money to keep running, but can even turn a profit and then, theoretically, use that money to do more good in the world. Raising animals for meat can be done in addition to, and on a much larger scale than, raising animals just to give them happy lives.

A different objection is a slippery slope or reductio ad absurdum argument. If raising animals for meat is good, then wouldn’t a good person just keep breeding more and more livestock until the world is one large pasture? Is that really utopia?

This objection fails because, at some point, adding more livestock would do more harm than good. About 25% of the earth’s land surface is currently used for livestock; increasing that to 26% would be a small change, but going from 99% grazing area to 100% would mean (among other things) razing the last human cities and turning them into farmland. That’s not good!

That means there’s some peak point in the middle, after which adding more chickens makes the world worse. The “slippery slope” looks more like a hill. We’re climbing up the hill now and would stop when we reach the peak.

Green objections

There are environmentalist utilitarian arguments against eating meat. One is that raising livestock is bad for the environment, which in turn will lead to unhappiness. This can be true, but it isn’t necessarily true. A utilitarian would have to look at the specific environmental consequences of raising one more chicken (for example) and weigh it against the net happiness produced by that chicken. The environmental consequences of raising individual animals can be very low with the right approach, and those individual animals are possibly capable of feeling as much pleasure as an individual human, so it’s very unlikely that the unhappiness caused by the environmental consequences must outweigh the net happiness caused by that animal’s life.

Another green argument is that livestock experience more suffering than happiness, so each chicken/pig/cow/etc is decreasing the net happiness of the world. This is something else that can be true but isn’t necessarily so. There are ways of raising animals that make them suffer– the way we treat chickens, in particular, is quite bad – but animals can be raised in ways that are much better than if they lived in the wild. Some livestock are raised in conditions that are better than most humans live in!

Non-utilitarian objections

There are non-utilitarian arguments against the meat industry. You could say that it’s wrong to kill lifeforms, especially relatively advanced lifeforms like cows and chickens. You could also say it’s wrong to breed animals just because you like how they taste, not because you want their companionship.

These counter-arguments may be good, but they’re outside the scope of this article. A rule against killing has no place in (most) utilitarian philosophy, because utilitarianism doesn’t allow for moral rules; it’s concerned only with consequences. Calling an action evil because it has selfish motives also has no place in utilitarian philosophy, because utilitarianism doesn’t care about motives, only consequences.