Benefitting a Person - Part 4 - Reviving a Person from a Coma

For the past few posts I have been looking at some objections that Dr. Chris Heathwood at the University of Colorado - Boulder - sent to me regarding a "desire satisfaction" (or desire fulfillment) theory of well-being.

I had presented the idea that desire fulfillment theory should not be understood as wanting as much desire fulfillment as possible. Instead, it should be understood as seeking the fulfillment of the most and strongest of one's desires.

This understanding handles an objection that Derek Parfit raised - that you can benefit a person by giving them a strong desire for a readily available drug. The addiction only counts as a benefit if having the addiction would contribute to the fulfillment of the agent's other desires. If this criterion is not met, then the agent has no reason to seek the addiction.

In the previous two posts I handled the question of whether giving a child an ability to read counts as giving the child a benefit (given that the child has no current desire to read), and whether giving the child a desire to read counts as a benefit.

Among Dr. Heathwood's objections, also included the following:

A more extreme case is that of a person in a coma. Let’s stipulate that this person has no desires (since he is in a coma). Does your theory imply that we would not benefit him if we were to cause him to have desires, which he will satisfy, as we cause him to wake from his coma — that this would be no more benefit to him than to let him remain in the coma? But that doesn’t seem right.

I would like to answer this question with a question: Do we have an obligation to bring as many people into the world as possible so long as each person has a desire that can be fulfilled?

The question of whether we benefit the person in a coma by reviving him such that the desires he acquires upon regaining consciousness can be fulfilled is relevantly similar to the question of whether or not to bring a conceptus to term as a person with desires that can be fulfilled - or whether to create the conceptus to begin with.

The view that Derek Parfit is arguing against has that implication. If, what we are after is as much desire fulfillment as possible, then a reason must exist to create beings that have desires that can be fulfilled. However, the view that I am defending here does not have this implication.

I have typically considered the “man in a coma” case as follows: Assume that a virus comes into existence that, when it infects a person, stops all brain function. While the patient is infected with the virus, the patient has no beliefs or desires – not even the ability to feel pain or pleasure. However, if doctors keep the body functioning, then the virus will run its course in about nine months and the patient will regain consciousness with no adverse side effects. She can then continue to live out the rest of her life.

If I were to say that it is impossible to benefit the person in the coma, since no activity could fulfill a current desire, then I would also have to say that it is impossible to harm the person in a coma. This not only applies to the question of whether one does harm by turning off the machines that keep him alive. It also applies to the question of whether it would do harm to perform medical experiments on the body, or to use it as a prop in a movie or to have sex with it. These implications seem problematic.

The case derives from an argument that Judith Jarvis Thompson made in "A Defense of Abortion" (Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971)). There, she postulated a skilled violin player in a coma being attached to another person as a form of life support for several months until he recovers. She asked us to consider whether a person who was kidnapped and connected to the violinist to keep him alive had an obligation to remain attached to the violinist.

In addressing this question, I first want to note that we would certainly have reasons – grounded on existing desires – to set up a set of institutions that would protect and preserve the body while the virus ran its course. We would have reason to see to it that the bank accounts of patients are protected, that the health of the body is preserved, and that the body not be used in ways that the patients, given their actual desires, did not or would not consent to. To the degree that it is possible, we would have reason to cause people generally to have strong aversions to mistreating the bodies of these patients and to respond with revulsion at the thought of these patients coming to harm. We would also have reason to cause people generally to want to revive the patients - or to feel an obligation to do so - when it became possible to safely do so.

However, none of this generates a reason to create an individual with desires that can be fulfilled from matter that has no desires.

Assume that we had a magic wand that can give desires to a rock – say, a desire bask in the sun – which it can easily fulfill. The question is whether there is a reason to use this wand and create as many sun-basking rocks as possible. We can assume that if we create such a rock that it would have a reason to bask in the sun. However, this does not translate into a reason to bring the rock into existence. If a reason for bringing such a rock into existence exists – then it exists in the desires of the person wielding the wand. It is not built into the fabric of the universe.

Similarly, there is no reason written into the fabric of the universe itself to combine sperm and egg into a being with desires that are fulfilled. The person created will have reasons to do certain things - and have reasons to have us treat it in certain ways (though it may not have the capacity to effectively act on those reasons). However, if a reason for bringing that being into the world exists, then it exists in the desires of others.

Returning to our person in a coma, the reasons that exist for protecting the person in a coma, for making certain that it is revived from the coma when this can be done safely, and that it emerge from the coma with its abilities to fulfill its desires intact come from the desires of people within the community. These desires give them reason to establish these institutions and to promote attitudes that would protect and preserve the body while the virus runs its course.

The main objection that I have to the idea that there is a reason to turn a collection of material having no desires into a being with desires that can be fulfilled is simply the fact that there is no evidence for the existence of such an entity. Using arguments of a type that run a range from Occam’s Razor to J.L. Mackie’s "Argument from Queerness" (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Penguin Press, 1977) there appears no reason to suggest that such a thing – such a reason – exists.

Furthermore, as with the case of the toddler, we can ask about the situation where a person is revived from the coma in a state where its desires are being thwarted. In this case, we can imagine a person waking in extreme pain. If he wakes up to be a person who has no reason to thank us for bringing him out of the coma, then he is a person for whom we did no favors – provided him with no benefit – by bringing him out of the coma.

Where there is benefit or harm to be found, it is found in the fulfillment or thwarting of the agent's desires.

As with the case of the toddler, we have two ways of describing this situation.

(a) We could say that the activity at time T (the act of reviving the person in a coma) provides a benefit at time T contingent upon its being put to use at a later time T + n to bring about the fulfillment of future desires. If no future desire fulfillment takes place, then the claim of "benefit" is revoked.

(b) Or we could say that the activity at time T does not provide the person with a benefit at time T; instead, the benefit comes at time T + n when the effects of that activity are put to use in the actual fulfillment of desires.

Of these two, (b) is technically more accurate. I find it odd to say that a benefit appears and is then lost – in fact, never existed – if not used.

However, in a community where an activity is almost certain to provide a benefit, option (a) is close enough to the truth for matters of public and social policy. It is useful, in this case, for establishing and maintaining the institutions and for promoting attitudes within the community that will protect individuals while they are in a coma. We can portray the case where a patient would wake up in extreme pain as exceptions to the rule, rather than more accurately understand them as examples of a more complex rule.

Benefitting a Person - Part 3 - Well-being and Giving a Child a Desire to Read

I am spending a few posts going over what Dr. Chris Heathwood of the University of Colorado suggested may be problems with my "desire satisfaction" theory of well-being.

Consistent with my earlier writings, I would rather call it a desire-fulfillment theory of well-being. A "desire that P" is fulfilled, on this account, in any state of affairs where the proposition "P" is made or kept true. I use the term "satisfaction" to refer to the the pleasing psychological sensation that a person has when she believes that a desire has been fulfilled. Other philosophers refer to this distinction using the terms "objective desire satisfaction" (when the proposition P is made or kept true as a matter of objective fact) and "subjective desire satisfaction" when the agent believes that the proposition P has been made or kept true.

With these clarifications in mind, I suggested to Dr. Heathwood that a desire-satisfaction theory of well-being should not be understood as a claim that the agent is made better off by obtaining as much desire satisfaction as possible. Instead, the agent is made better off to the degree that the most and strongest of an agent's desires are fulfilled. When Derek Parfit suggests that an person can be made better off by giving them an addition to a readily available drug, somebody who holds this theory can deny that it is a benefit because the agent has no reason to acquire this addiction. It serves no existing desire.

Dr. Heathwood responded in part by saying:

It seems that we sometimes *can* benefit people by seeing to the satisfaction of desires that they will have but do not currently have. Consider a toddler. He currently has no desire to be able to read. But we can be confident that in the future he will desire to be able read (if the future comes and he can’t read, while all of his classmates can, he will wish he could read; if the future comes and he can read, he will be glad that he can read). The theory that you are suggesting seems to imply that we would not benefit the toddler if we now do things to see to it that he will be able to read in the future. Am I right that your theory has this implication?

In my previous post, I examined the benefit of teaching a toddler to read. I argued that, whether this turns out to be a benefit depends on whether it actually aids in the fulfillment of future desires, and only insofar as it does so. If, instead, teaching a child to read turns out to be a waste of time or thwarts future desires (e.g., an emperor decides that scholars are a threat and rounds up anybody who is able to read for torture and death) that the ability to read contributes nothing to well-being. In short, the benefit of learning to read is found entirely in the fulfillment of future desires it helps to bring about, if any.

There is another interpretation of this argument that looks, not at giving the child an ability to read, but giving the child a desire to read.

In having a desire to read, reading itself becomes something that the person pursues for its own sake, attempting to make or keep true the proposition, "I am reading". She reads, not merely because it is useful, but because it is something she wants to do.

We can compare giving the toddler a desire to read to Parfit's giving a person a desire for a drug where getting the drug becomes an end in itself. In the same way that such a person has no reason to acquire a desire for the drug (because it fulfills no current desire), the toddler has no reason to acquire a desire to learn to read in that, at present, the child has no desires that would be fulfilled by acquiring a desire to read.

An important difference between these two desires is that the desire to read is useful in fulfilling other desires, while the desire for Parfit's drug is not. It's not just that reading is useful, or knowing how to read is useful - a means towards the fulfillment of other desires – which I discussed in the previous section. The desire to read itself is useful.

The value of the desire to read is grounded primarily on the fact that future desires do not have backward causation. In other words, a desire that does not exist in the present cannot motivate an agent to act a particular way in the present. A "desire that future desires be fulfilled” can help in this regard. However, it is also useful to have current desires that bring about actions or states as a side effect that, in turn, will contribute to the fulfillment of future desires. A desire to read will motivate an agent to read for its own sake, which will give the agent knowledge, skills, and understanding that will be useful when those future desires emerge.

I generally refer to this as a distinction between a desire to fulfill other desires and a desire that fulfills other desires. A desire to read is not a desire to fulfill future desires, but it is (usually) a desire that fulfills future desires – and thus a desire that people have reason to cultivate - and that concerned parents have reason to cultivate in their children.

However, it would not be a desire worth having in a society where an emperor bans reading and punishes all who are caught engaged in this activity. Here, a person with a desire to read would be worse off as a result, since she would want to \engage in this prohibited activity. Consequently, she will be frustrated in the same way that an addict with no readily available access to a drug would be frustrated.

Our situation here with respect to a desire to read is similar with the situation with respect to reading discussed in my previous post. Whether or not the desire to read is a benefit is contingent upon it actually being put to use to fulfill future desires. If this does not happen, then the desire to read is not a benefit. If, instead, the desire to read thwarts other desires, then it is like a desire for a harmful drug.

The toddler, in this case, does not have a reason to acquire a desire to read. However, we can be relatively certain that, at least in most contemporary societies, she will acquire reasons to have acquired a desire to read. However, since those future reasons cannot reach back in time, parents and guardians who have an interest in the toddler’s welfare have reasons to provide the child with a desire to read – something for which the child will someday have a reason to be grateful.

Still, it is the case that, in fact, the benefit comes when (and if) the desire is fulfilled. The benefit of having a desire to read comes when the desire to read allows the agent to fulfill a desire, and does not exist if the desire never proves itself to be useful. The benefit, when it occurs, is located entirely in the fulfillment of those future desires that the desire to read made possible. (NOTE: I believe that this is comparable to what Heathwood called “Concurrent Intrinsic Desire Satisfaction Theory” in "Desire Satisfaction and Hedonism", Philosophical Studies (2006) 128:539-563.)

Also comparable to what I wrote in the discussion of giving a child an ability to read above, in everyday discussions of parenting and social policy, the claim that giving a child an ability to read is a benefit is true enough in contemporary society for practical purposes. There is no need for public discussion to go into the fine details of the benefit of a desire to read. The claim that giving a child a desire to read is close enough to the truth that it will become a benefit when it contributes to the child fulfilling future desires.

Benefitting a Person - Part 2 - Well-being and Teaching a Child to Read

In an email, Dr. Chris Heathwood of the University of Colorado - Boulder - suggested a potential problem with the desire fulfillment theory of value that I recommend here.

The specific context of this discussion was the "desire-satisfaction theory of well-being." In an article, "Desire Fulfillment Theory" (in G. Fletcher (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Well-Being, Routledge, 2016), Heathwood brought up Derek Parfit's objection that, if the desire-satisfaction theory were true, one person can benefit another by giving that person an addiction to a readily available drug.

I am about to make your life go better. I shall inject you with an addictive drug. From now on, you will wake each morning with an extremely strong desire to have another injection of this drug. … This is no cause for concern, since I shall give you ample supplies of this drug. Every morning, you will be able at once to fulfill this desire.

Against this, I employed Bernard Williams' theory of reasons - "A has a reason to φ iff A has some desire the satisfaction of which will be served by his φ-ing" - and argued that an agent would have a reason to choose to become an addict only if it served an existing desire.

Though claiming that this would provide an answer to Parfit, Heathwood suggested a couple of potential counter-examples to this theory. In one of them, he wrote:

Consider a toddler. He currently has no desire to be able to read. But we can be confident that in the future he will desire to be able read (if the future comes and he can’t read, while all of his classmates can, he will wish he could read; if the future comes and he can read, he will be glad that he can read). The theory that you are suggesting seems to imply that we would not benefit the toddler if we now do things to see to it that he will be able to read in the future. Am I right that your theory has this implication?

Dr. Heathwood is correct. However, I do not see this as a problem with the theory.

My answer to Heathwood is as follows:

Dr. Heathwood:

In the case of the toddler, you wrote, "we can be confident that in the future he will desire to be able read."

In order to respond to your objection, I would like to shake this confidence a little and see what falls out.

Allegedly, in 210 BC, Qin Shi (the first emperor of the Qin dynasty in China) ordered that a number of scholars be rounded up and buried alive. This provides a case in which we have reason to ask whether the parents of those scholars provided them with a benefit by teaching them to read. It seems reasonable to say that they did not.

Similarly, the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (Kampuchea) under Pol Pot engaged in a campaign of killing intellectuals. Reading is a primary cause of myopia (near-sightedness), and the Khmer Rouge used near-sightedness as a sign that one was a scholar, and would put those people to death. Here, too, we have reason to deny that these people obtained a benefit when their parents taught them to read.

We can add to this list any case in which the child dies before the child can obtain any benefit from learning to read. If one knows that a child only has a few months to live, then teaching the child to read - at least in the sense described above - is not a benefit. There may be some benefit in sitting with the child and reading, but that benefit comes from the current desires for companionship - which may also be fulfilled by playing a game or holding the child while watching her favorite movie.

This suggests whether teaching a toddler to read counts as a benefit depends entirely upon whether the toddler grows up to have desires that are fulfilled by reading. If the future desire fulfillment does not take place, then the present benefit does not exist.

I can see two different ways of describing this situation.

(a) We could say that the activity at time T provides a benefit at time T contingent upon its being put to use at a later time T + n to bring about the fulfillment of future desires. If no future desire fulfillment takes place, then the claim of "benefit" is revoked.

(b) Or we could say that the activity at time T does not provide the person with a benefit at time T; instead, the benefit comes at time T + n when the effects of that activity are put to use in the actual fulfillment of desires.

Of these two, (b) is technically more accurate. I find it odd to say that a benefit appears and is then lost – in fact, never existed – if not used.

However, in a community where an activity is almost certain to provide a benefit, is close enough to the truth for matters of public and social policy. We can loosely speak of such things as public education, immunizations, and the development of good eating habits as providing a benefit to the child in anticipation of the fact that it almost certainly will lead to the future fulfillment of desires. However, we can take the fact that this attribution is revoked if no future desire-fulfillment comes of it as reason to believe that the benefit is found in the future desire fulfillment, not the direct effects of the current activity.

In writing this response, I imagined another related example that would be much like the one Heathwood provided here which would be closer to the case of Parfit's addiction. In this alternative version one does not give the child an ability to read, but one gives the child a desire to read. Is this desire - to be fulfilled at a later date - any different from Parfit giving a person an addiction to a readily available drug?

I will examine this alternative in the next post.

Benefitting a Person - Part 1 - Dr. Heathwood Responds

Back in May, I wrote a letter to Dr. Chris Heathwood (Univ. of Colorado - Boulder) providing a possible answer to an objection that Derek Parfit raised to desire satisfaction theories of value.

I posted a copy of that email here.

Basically, Dr. Parfit said against a desire satisfaction theory of value:

I am about to make your life go better. I shall inject you with an addictive drug. From now on, you will wake each morning with an extremely strong desire to have another injection of this drug. … This is no cause for concern, since I shall give you ample supplies of this drug. Every morning, you will be able at once to fulfill this desire.

I responded by arguing that there is a difference between seeking as much desire satisfaction as possible and seeking the fulfillment of the most and strongest of one's desires. An agent with a desire that P, desire that Q, and desire that R would have no reason to choose to become an addict as Parfit describes it unless becoming an addict served an existing desire.

A few days ago, Dr. Heathwood responded to my email.

The good news is that Dr. Heathwood reported that, "Your response to Parfit’s case is interesting, and it does seem to help the desire-fulfillment theorist avoid having to say that Parfit would be benefitting you by turning you into an addict."

Take that, Derek Parfit! Ha!

Then, Dr. Heathwood suggested that my proposed answer to Parfit had its own problems.

Consider a toddler. He currently has no desire to be able to read. But we can be confident that in the future he will desire to be able read (if the future comes and he can’t read, while all of his classmates can, he will wish he could read; if the future comes and he can read, he will be glad that he can read). The theory that you are suggesting seems to imply that we would not benefit the toddler if we now do things to see to it that he will be able to read in the future. Am I right that your theory has this implication?

A more extreme case is that of a person in a coma. Let’s stipulate that this person has no desires (since he is in a coma). Does your theory imply that we would not benefit him if we were to cause him to have desires, which he will satisfy, as we cause him to wake from his coma — that this would be no more benefit to him than to let him remain in the coma? But that doesn’t seem right.

With respect to the first proposed problem, I saw two possible interpretations. One interpretation said that we provide a toddler with a benefit by teaching it to read. The other interpretation suggests that the benefit is found in giving the toddler a desire to read.

Over the past few days I have been considering my possible answers to these (potentially) three proposed counter-examples. I will be posting my suggested answers in the next few posts.

Lies, Falsehoods, and Clinton's Email

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's State Department Emails provide a good example to use to illustrate some of the finer points about lying.

I would like to start by directing the reader to some background material on the topic.

Specifically, I wrote a post several years back on the ethics of lying. In that post, I described a liar as type of parasite. This parasite plants a mental state in another person's brain in order to cause that person to act in a way that serves the interests of the liar, rather than the interests of the infected individual.

A liar works in a way very much like the "zombie fungus". The zombie fungus effects ants and one of its symptoms is to effect the ant's behavior. The infected ant will leave its colony and find a warm, moist environment suitable for the growth of the fungus. Once there, it will fasten itself to a leaf and die - allowing the fungus to flourish.

Similarly, the liar intends to infect the brain of those he lies to. He hopes that her lie will alter the behavior of those that he lies to, causing them to act in ways that will serve the liar's interest. The infected person may give the liar money or something else of value, or help the liar in achieving some goal that the liar values. In one relevant option, the liar may seek to defeat a political candidate and, by infecting the brains of others with false beliefs, try to manipulate them into voting against the candidate he wants to defeat.

Desirism holds that, since liars effectively manipulate us into thwarting our own ends and serving theirs, we have many and strong reasons to condemn liars and, in doing so, to promote an aversion against lying. In looking at our current community, it is plausible to argue that a great many of our current (and future) problems can be grounded on the fact that we do not give liars the condemnation they deserve. We have entire news networks devoted to implanting false beliefs in others in order to manipulate them into serving the interests of their constituents.

On this measure, though I will be discussing Clinton's emails, I should specify that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made himself a paradigm example of a parasite in this sense. He shows absolutely no qualms about parasitically filling the heads of others with false beliefs that will cause them to behave in ways that serve his ends - and Trump's primary end in this sense is the promotion of Donald Trump. Actually, Trump cares absolutely nothing about whether a claim is true or false. He cares only about whether it is useful.

Let nobody get the wrong idea that this represents a partisan attack on Clinton. My intention is to discuss some relevant aspects of honesty and lying - and the server issue simply provides an excellent illustrative example.

Now, we do need to distinguish between telling a lie, reckless statements, and false claims. I wrote about this in my last post. A lie is a statement that the liar believes to be false. The statement might (accidentally) be true. What matters is that the liar thinks it is false and seeks to implant it in the brain of others to manipulate them into serving her ends.

An intellectually reckless statement is a statement that the agent reports to be true even though he put no effort into confirming or denying the claim. In this case, the agent effectively does not care whether the statement is true or false - what matters is its ability to influence others.

Sometimes, a person with an aversion to lying and an aversion to making intellectually reckless claims can still get the facts wrong. This is simply called a false claim.

In this context, this is relevant into looking at the claims of various fact-checkers to the claims that a politician may make. There are those who use the fact-checkers' scores as a measure of how honest a politician is. They argue that the politician with the lower fact-checker score must be a liar. In fact, it may be the case that the politician is not a liar at all - he is simply intellectually reckless. It's not that he believes that what he says is false and says them anyway. Instead, he does not care whether the claim is true or false - he only cares about whether he could benefit by infecting others with the belief that the proposition is true.

With these distinctions in place, I would like to bring forth what is true of Clinton's state department emails. This will allow us to determine which politicians and commentors are lying, intellectually reckless, or simply making false claims. (See the FBI report on Clinton's email.)

In turns out that, in order to discuss Clinton's state-department emails, we need to make another distinction.

(1) Emails containing information that was marked classified. Think of sending an email and attaching a document that had the word "Classified" stamped on the top.

(2) Emails containing classified information. Here, for example, imaging somebody writing an email that says, "John Smith is currently working under cover in Pakistan trying to infiltrate the Taliban." This information is not marked "Classified," but it still contains classified information.

(3) Emails that were up-classified. These were emails that did not contain information that was considered classified at the time it was written. However, on reviewing the emails, the reviewers determined that it contained information that should now be considered classified.

Here, then, are the true claims, according to the FBI report, about these emails.

With respect to Category (1), the FBI found three emails actually marked classified - but all three were improperly marked (See, FactCheck.org). They contained a "(C)" inside the document to identify specific information that was classified, but nothing on the document itself that told the reader that it contained classified information within. Thus, according to the FBI, these marks would be easy to miss. What is true: Clinton did not send or receive any emails properly marked as classified. Clinton sent or received 3 emails with information marked classified, but none of them properly marked. Remember, a lie is a statement that one knows to be false, whereas a false statement is a statement that happens to be false but which the speaker believes to be true. Clinton's claim that she did not send information marked classified could be false, but not a lie.

With respect to Category (2), the FBI found 52 email chains (110 emails total) that contained information that was classified at the time it was sent. This would be like an email where a person wrote something like, "John Smith is trying to infiltrate the Taliban" or "Obama will order an attack on the secret enemy hideout tomorrow afternoon."

"Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information.

What is true: Clinton sent or received emails that contained top secret, secret, and confidential information. She discussed top-secret, secret, and confidential matters through email on her server. If she said she did not, she is wrong. It may be the case that she did not realize that she was talking about anything that was top secret or secret - that she did not lie. Yet, it is reasonable to believe that, at least in some cases, she was aware of the fact that, "This is not information we want everybody to know." Thus, if she claims that she did not talk discuss classified matters over her email account, that is probably a lie.

With respect to Category (3), over 2000 emails were up-classified. The information contained within them was not classified when the email was received or sent but, once the reviewers saw the email, they determined, "This should be classified." Clinton has admitted that she had discussed matters that were not classified in any way when she discussed them, but was classified later.

At this point, I can shine a spotlight on two aspects of honesty or dishonesty that are particularly interesting.

First, there is the issue of the ambiguous question or the equally ambiguous answer, and the related issue of the evasive answer.

"Ms. Clinton, did you send or receive classified material through your private email server?"

Answer: "No."

Is this a lie?

Actually, it depends on how one interprets the question. If one interprets the question as, "To the best of your knowledge, did you send or receive information that was marked classified?" Under this interpretation, the "No" answer is - or is likely to be - an honest answer. However, if one interprets the question as, "Did you use your private email system to discuss classified matters?" - that is a different question, and a "No" answer would not only be false, it is probably dishonest. Either it is dishonest, or Clinton can be accused of being incompetent in her inability to recognize the sensitive matter of some of the subjects she discussed through her email.

This leads to the subject of the evasive answer.

It is still possible that a person, when asked the question, "Did you discuss classified information through your email system," that one can answer with the true proposition, "To the best of my knowledge, I did not send or receive anything that was marked classified."

This does not answer the question that was asked. The (probably) honest answer to the question asked would be, "Yes, I did." By instead answering with the statement provided, the individual can provide an answer that she knows to be true - and thus avoid the charge of lying, since a lie is a claim that one believes is false. However, on the model of honesty presented at the top of this paper - that a liar is a parasite to plants false beliefs in others in order to manipulate them into serving the interests of the liar - the evasive response proves to be morally no better than a lie. It is still an attempt to provide a false belief in others - a false belief generated by taking the answer provided to be the answer to the question asked.

Second, many readers have likely encountered some example, usually in a crime drama, where a person is asked a leading question and told to answer, "Yes or no." That is to say, the person being asked is prohibited - usually by the judge - to explain or qualify his answer.

The question, "Did you use your server to send or receive classified information?" may be interpreted as asking, "Did you use your server to transmit materials that were clearly marked 'classified'?" Under this interpretation, the correct answer is "No", but the original question requires an answer as "Yes" that somebody can interpret to be an answer to the second question.

We can perhaps see this better in a different example, such as, "Yes or no. Did you tell Mr. Smith the combination to the gun safe?" The answer, we may assume, is "yes" but the person answering the question is not being permitted to add, "Mr. Smith came wearing a cop's uniform and what looked like a search warrant."

In this example, In the case of the leading question, it is the questioner, not the person answering the question, who is behaving like a parasite. The questioner is trying to manipulate others by planting a belief in their head that is false. In this case it plants the false belief that the person on the stand gave Mr. Smith the combination to the gun safe while knowing it was Mr. Smith who was asking and (perhaps) knowing that Mr. Smith wanted the weapon to use in murdering somebody who had angered him. The tactic of refusing to allow the person asked to explain his answer is the questioner's way of protecting the parasitical false belief he generates.

In this type of case, I would suggest that, contrary to contemporary practice, the person answering the question has every right to interpret the question in a way that is least likely to generate a false belief. In this case, the person answering the question may say, "No, I did not. I gave the combination to what I thought was a police officer with a search warrant. It was only later that I learned that this was Mr. Smith in disguise." If an authority figure continues to insist on a "yes" or "no" answer, the proper response would be, "I can't know which answer is correct until I have a better understanding of what he is asking. If he is asking whether I gave the combination to somebody I knew to be Mr. Smith, the answer is 'no'. If, instead, he is asking whether I gave the combination to somebody who ultimately turned out to be Mr. Smith, the answer is 'yes'. Let me know which question you are asking and I will answer it." People need not feel obligated to give answers that may be misleading.

As far as the specifics of Clinton's case goes, it seems to be true that she did not knowingly send or receive transmit clearly marked classified materials through her email system. However, she did use it to discuss, in some cases, top secret matters. To say anything different would be false. Intellectual responsibility requires looking into the matter before saying anything. Honesty requires saying that which is true.

“Trumpian Ethics” – Lies and Intellectual Recklessness

As a writer, I recognize an obligation to make certain that what I write is true.

This does not only mean writing what I believe – refusing to include claims I know to be false. It also means going through the effort to make certain what I write is not false. I have to check my claims and make certain that I have the evidence to support them.

There have been too many times where I have written a brilliant post filled with tight logic and insight, where I then went online to make certain that I could support an essential claim on which I built that argument, only to fail to find what I thought I had once found, or to discover that I was wrong. My brilliant post ends up in the trash bin - because it would be fundamentally dishonest to post it.

In spite of these efforts, I know there are false claims in this blog. Sometimes, I misread a source, or I misinterpret it. Sometimes I fail to appreciate some of the context. I swear I looked up those numbers on the Nebraska primary. I have no idea where those numbers came from. I was framed! (Okay, I wasn’t actually framed.)

Sometimes a reader will point out my mistake.

That's embarrassing. I kick myself for whatever oversight resulted in the error. It shouldn’t happen.

There are many and strong reasons to have and promote these values - not only among obscure blog posters in the dark corners of the internet, but in society as a whole. Many may consider these reasons as too obvious to mention. However, it seems that they need to be mentioned since there seems to be a lot of people who currently do not care about either honesty or intellectual integrity. They shrug these off as unimportant - and that threatens to cost us a great deal.

The value of true beliefs is found in the fact that they are useful in reaching our goals.

Let us assume that you wish to drive from Los Angeles to Miami. True beliefs about the route are essential to making a successful trip. False beliefs could put you in Anchorage. When you ask for directions, you want that person to provide you with a set of true statements. This means that you want him to know what he is taking about, or admit that he does not know. If he does know, you want him to report what he believes, rather than report what he knows to be false.

Let us assume, instead, you are trying to get your child to a hospital. She has been stung by a bee and is having trouble breathing. You ask for directions - and the person who sees your child lies to you and sends you into the wrong direction. Or, he gives you directions even though he has no idea where the hospital is at. At this point, the failure becomes nearly - if not actually - criminal. Such a person deserves our contempt.

Republican nominee Donald Trump is clearly this type of person.

These reasons to condemn the dishonest and intellectually reckless become stronger - not weaker - when we get to the realm where people are making policy decisions and making decisions on whether or not to go to war. Here, lies and intellectual recklessness do not just cause you to drive to the small town. They cost the lives, health, and destroy the well-being of innocent people - lots of innocent people - sometimes for generations to come. They result in commanding soldiers (and the police) to kill people who they have no good reason to kill, and being killed by the people we have wrongly attacked.

On policy issues such as infrastructure improvements, health care, minimum wage, and prescription drug regulations, there are lives and well-being at stake. When we get these wrong, people suffer.

On the scientific issues of climate change, nuclear energy, vaccines, GMO foods, and the like intellectual recklessness kills people - or gets in the way of preventing disease, feeding the hungry, and saving lives.

Honesty and intellectual responsibility should be among our highest values.

We have reason to condemn - harshly - those who habitually lie or who are intellectually reckless. We have reason to praise and to hold in high regard those who are honest and who put the effort into making sure that the claims they make are true.

It is particularly foolish to take somebody who shows a total disregard for truth and praise and make him President where he can serve as a role model for the next generation, teaching them to show the same disregard for truth as he does. It is one thing to fail to condemn the liar and the intellectually lazy. It is quite another to praise him, cheer him, and reward him. The latter can only be expected to promote lying and intellectual laziness the standard of the community - and that will cost us a great deal.

Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump is one of the greatest liars and most intellectually reckless people in politics.

There are measures for these. I am an evidence-based person. If we look at the claims that Trump has made that PolitiFact identified as “Pants On Fire” it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Trump simply does not care whether the claims he makes are true or false - or even consistent with what he has said only days before.

Lying is harder to prove than intellectual recklessness. A person lies when a person asserts something that they believe to be false. In order to prove lying, we have to know what a person believes – and that is sometimes hard to discover. A charge of lying requires providing evidence that the agent believed that what he said was false but said it anyway. A charge of intellectual recklessness requires only showing that he doesn't care whether it is true or false.

However, there is one type of lie that is built into intellectual recklessness. A person who makes an assertion and says, "Believe me" or "Trust me" is saying that he has put the effort into making sure that the claim is true. When the phrase "Believe me" or "Trust me" accompanies what anybody who put the slightest effort into it would have discovered is false, then he is a liar. He has not put the effort into verifying what he tells us to believe and trust that he claims to have done.

This willingness to cheer and promote one of the most intellectually dishonest and reckless people of the age, let alone try to make him President of the United States, is not only insanely foolish, it is morally bankrupt. The whole nation will pay for this disinterest in honesty and intellectual carefulness. If we give such a person four years not only to recklessly guide national policy and determine whether there will be war or peace, but to promote these values of dishonesty and intellectual laziness across the community, we will suffer for it.

As a final remark, I suspect that a reader cannot read this without thinking, "What about Hillary Clinton's lies? What about her dishonesty?"

This raises two questions.

First, even if it is the case that Hillary Clinton is also basically dishonest, that is not relevant to the discussion. We do not - and we should not - excuse a rapist or a murderer because he is not the only person who commits rape or murder. Instead, the existence of a second rapist or a second murderer implies that we should hold them both in equal contempt.

If we fail to condemn both equally for equal wrongs - if we say one rapist that his rapes do not matter, while we harshly condemn the other, we are saying that rape is not what matters to us. We could not care less about rape itself. We are simply trying to use our condemnation of rape for some other end - to serve some other interest. There must be some other difference between the two that we are reacting to - something that makes one person different from the other. It is not the rape, which they have in common.

Similarly, if we discover a group of people condemning one liar in the harshest terms, and utterly ignoring the lies of another, we can conclude that they really do not care about lying. If they really cared about lying, they would condemn both liars equally. If they do not condemn them equally, then there must be something true of one person and not true of the other that is the true source of their hostility. Perhaps, it is the fact that one is a man seeking political power, and the other is a woman, that they don't like, and claiming that they do not like the woman's lies is just something they tell themselves.

Second, is it the case that the accusation of being a liar accurate, or is the accusation that she is a liar also, itself, a lie (or, at best, an intellectually reckless belief)? On this matter, I will refer the reader to Clinton's Politifact record and this article: Why Can't You Believe Hillary Clinton Is Inherently Honest?" This could be another example where the lies of other people about Hillary, and the intellectual laziness of those who believe those lies, risks causing people to do things that an intellectually careful person presented with the truth would not do (and potentially suffer for the errors).

It is widely claimed that civilizations fail when the people living in them lose their sense of morality – of right and wrong. This is one of the ways in which that happens. When lying and intellectual laziness become acceptable, when people quit caring about truth, they lose their ability to create successful plans. Good intentions lead to disasters. Ultimately, a civilization can be brought down.

Those who care to avoid these consequences are people to condemn liars and the intellectually reckless - and we are particularly careful not to hand them political power where their lies and intellectually reckless attitudes can cause a great deal of harm.

"Trumpian" Ethics - Bigotry

People object to many of Donald Trump's policies, but seldom offer more than grunts of disapproval.

This is an ethics blog, and I want to look at the reasons why Trump deserves these grunts of disapproval.

Imagine that you are walking down the street on a warm sunny day wearing a green shirt when some other pedestrian hits you over the head with a broom handle.

Why?

He answers, "When I was driving down here this guy in a green shirt cut me off and nearly made me wreck my car."

"It wasn't me," you protest. "I took the bus."

"I know that," the assailant says. "The guy who cut me off was bald. But he was wearing a green shirt, just like you are."

My guess is that you would feel angry. You would judge the assault to be entirely unfair, vicious, and malevolent individual. You would certainly not be inclined to vote that person into public office. You would feel justified in having your assailant punished for his unjust assault.

If your assailant had a red shirt, how would you feel about the legitimacy of finding somebody else in a red shirt and assaulting him?

These are emotional reactions, and the mere fact that one has a particular emotional reaction does not justify the action. We can identify a number of emotional reactions people have had, and still question whether those reactions are legitimate or appropriate. We can include disgust at interracial relationships, anger at disobedient slaves and improperly servile royal subjects, offense at somebody who said something one disagreed with. We cannot point to the fact that a particular emotional reaction exists and say that it is sufficient to justify the action. We need something more.

In fact, the person who struck you over the head with a broom handle acted was having an emotional response - one that gave him satisfaction by hitting anybody with a green shirt. If having an emotional reaction justified an action, then his hitting you with a broom handle was justified. That is an absurd conclusion that fully discredits this method of proof.

Here's the test: Take that emotional reaction and ask if people generally would be better off - whether they have reason - to promote that attitude so that it is common within the community. Imagine living in a society in which people generally found satisfaction in assaulting anybody wearing the same colored shirt as somebody who committed a perceived wrong. Compare that to a community where people were averse to harming the innocent - who felt that it is important that only the guilty are to be punished.

I am going to assert that we have more and stronger reason to prefer the latter type of community over the former.

Donald Trump, however, is a champion of the former option. He is an advocate of striking back at anybody wearing a "Mexican" shirt regardless of the guilt or innocence of the wearer. He advocates attacking anybody wearing a "Muslim" shirt, without regard to who they are as individuals - even if they are children.

"The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families," Trump said. http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/02/politics/donald-trump-terrorists-families/

If we look a little more closely at Trump's "ethics", we see that it harms - even kills - a lot of innocent people.

Imagine a community who accepts Trump's ethics where it is permissible - even obligatory - to retaliate against anybody wearing the same color shirt as somebody who is perceived to have committed some wrong.

In this community, somebody with a blue shirt unjustly kills somebody with a black shirt.

As a result, somebody with a black shirt adopts the attitude that anybody wearing a blue shirt is "fair game". He takes a weapon and kills a number of people wearing blue shirts.

As a result of this attitude, everybody wearing a blue shirt feels threatened any time they have to interact with somebody wearing a black shirt. Consequently, when they interact with people wearing black shirts, they are far too quick to use deadly force. Some of them, if they accept Trump's ethics, will use deadly force precisely because they are using it against somebody wearing a black shirt - and anybody with a black shirt is "fair game".

Nobody is safe in this environment.

To create a safe environment we condemn anybody who argues that they may legitimately retaliate against anybody wearing a blue or a black shirt. In its place, we promote an attitude that only those individuals who commit the aggression deserve punishment, and the innocent shall be left to live their lives in peace.

Of course, we also can't have it be the case that people get away with their crimes - and are given support and protection - just because they are wearing either a blue shirt or a black shirt. We will actually have to hold the guilty accountable for their wrongs.

This is not likely to happen if the leader of the community is somebody who holds, defends, and asserts "Trumpian" ethics (i.e., the leader of the community is Trump himself). Instead, we can expect the violence to continue, and a lot of innocent people to suffer the consequences.

You do not need to know a lot of history to know of far too many instances where "Trumpian" ethics has lead to violence.

We see it in small cases such as the Hatfields and McCoys - where McCoys targeted anybody wearing a "Hatfield" shirt and the Hatfields felt justified in retaliating against anybody wearing a "McCoy" shirt. We see it in conflicts between gang, where every person wearing the opposing gang's colors is considered a legitimate target.

We see it in larger cases where "Protestant" shirt-wearers target anybody who wears a "Catholic" shirt, and "Catholic" shirt-wearers feel comfortable killing anybody wearing a "Protestant" shirt. Similar, we see it in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and between Shiite and Suni Muslims.

The Nazis took out their aggression against anybody wearing a "Jew" shirt, and many Europeans in America adopted the slogan that, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian".

These are all historic examples of "Trumpian" ethics - Trump's way of conceiving and organizing the world - being put into practice.

Do you think that more of this - do you think that this way of thinking - is going to make you feel safer?

In fact, "Trumpian" ethics is the ethics behind terrorism. The 9/11 attacks were carried out by people who think that everybody wearing an "American" shirt deserves to die. A person who sets off a bomb in a bus, or enters a club and opens fire indiscriminately, is somebody who is killing others based on the shirt that they wear, rather than punishing people specifically because of wrongs for which they, individually, have been convicted by an impartial jury.

This leads to another question.

What happens when Trump fails?

Trump has promised to end terrorism and to end crime. Yet, as I have argued above, Trump's harming of the innocent is going to generate the very types of resentment and anger - as well as provide the moral foundation - for retaliation against innocent people. When this retaliation takes place, people are going to turn to Trump and say, "But you promised!"

How is Trump likely to respond to this failure - to these terrorist attacks that he failed to stop after he promised the he is the only one who can stop it?

If he follows historical tradition, he is going to respond by claiming that we have not gone far enough. He is going to argue that harsher steps be taken against the target population, that more burdens and costs be placed on the innocent, that those wearing the "Muslim" or "Mexican" shirts be subject to even harsher treatment.

This is where authoritarians tend to adopt principles such as, "If you kill one of my people I will round up and kill 10 of your people," or "That village has been aiding the enemy so let us kill everybody in that village - man, woman, and child - and utterly destroy it." This is where Authoritarian leaders tell the people, "I do not like concentration camps, but peace requires that we round 'them' up and put them into camps. That is the only way we can have peace."

Or we just kill them all outright, and when they are all dead then we do not need to worry about their attacks anymore. Then we can have peace. This is actually the only way to bring their attacks to a full stop, so Trumpian ethics cannot end until it ends here. Trump cannot actually keep his promise with anything short of this final solution.

Nothing Trump has said has suggested that he is unwilling to take that road. In fact, many of the things that Trump has said suggest that he would not be willing to entertain taking any alternative road - a more conciliatory road. He may not like these solutions today. However, when his original plans fail, when America faces further terrorist attacks in spite of his original actions, history shows that under people who think like Trump - people who embrace "Trumpian" ethics - the inconceivable becomes conceivable, and then becomes actual.

A lot of people are responding to Trump's claims with grunts of disapproval. However, there is more behind this then just a set of dislikes and grumblings. Trump is the type of person, and "Trumpian" ethics is the type of ethics, that has brought about the worst atrocities in human history. There are a lot of many and strong reasons to grunt in disapproval.

Conservatives, Libertarians, and Bigoted Values in the Market

Is "conservatism" compatible with civil rights?

This question arises from an article I read that argued that, in 1964, a branch of the Republican party began to oppose civil rights legislation - not because they were racist, but because it was incompatible with their ideology. This had the unintended consequence of making the Republican party the party of the "white nationalist".

Zack Beaucham reported in A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die, on Republican scholar Avik Roy's argument that the problem in the Republican party began in a branch of the Republican Party that felt that a small, conservative government ought not be in the business of forcing desegregation. According to their ideology, this was not a proper role of government.

The consequence, according to Roy, is that the Republicans became the party of segregation and the Democrats became the party of civil rights.

This had a double effect, Roy says. First, it forced black voters out of the GOP. Second, it invited in white racists who had previously been Democrats. Even though many Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in Congress, the post-Goldwater party became the party of aggrieved whites.

This has raised the question in my mind of whether there can be a conservative argument for civil rights or if, instead, this is an area within which "conservatism" is fundamentally flawed.

To assess this problem, we need to focus more precisely on where the problem exists. It would be wrong to attribute the problem to "conservatives" since this term is far too broad, and it is objectionable to attribute this view to all conservatives when many would disagree with it.

More precisely, it is a problem with the libertarian political philosophy.

Libertarian argues that the only thing that is immoral are "acts of aggression", where "aggression" is understood as the first use of violence.

There are two major arguments for this philosophy.

One, the natural rights argument, claims that people simply have a natural right to be free of aggression. Any act of aggression effectively enslaves its victim - turning him or her into an unwilling servant of the ends or goals of the aggressor. That is intrinsically wrong.

The other, a utilitarian argument, argues that to permit aggression leaves everybody worse off. If we allow acts of aggression, we create a situation where individuals pursue their self-interest through aggression against others rather than through production and trade. As more and more people demand that wealth be forcefully redistributed, less and less wealth gets created. Consequently, people get into more and more violent fights over less and less overall wealth.

[NOTE: I know it is tradition to spew bile at any opposing philosophy and hatred of anybody who holds it - to assert that it has no redeeming characteristics. In spite of its popularity, there are reasons to object to such a way of proceeding. I favor an option that begins by trying to understand how a decent person may be tempted to adopt the view one is criticizing, and then pointing out something that such a person may have overlooked.)

Libertarianism supports a form of equal rights in that it condemns acts of aggression on anybody regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, or any other property. It doesn't even matter if the agent has a choice - no choice that an agent makes him or her a legitimate object of aggression. The prohibition on aggression is absolute.

However, one must remember that the prohibition on aggression is a prohibition on the first use of violence. If somebody violates this principle, nobody is prohibited from using violence in response, either in self-defense, the defense of another, or to inflict punishment.

An argument can be made that a libertarian society would abandon discrimination because it is not profitable. A business wants the best employees - regardless of whether they are black, white, male, or female. Consequently, they would blind themselves to these irrelevant factors and focus only on the potential employee's ability to do the job.

Again, libertarians see their philosophy as inherently non-discriminatory.

However, we must ask, "What is the job of a business?"

Answer: To give the customers what they want, of course.

What if it is the case that what the customer wants - what those And, in doing so, those potential customers with the most money are more influential - more

Businesses do not just provide customers with "that which the customers can use to make money". Business provide customers with that which satisfies entertainment, social, aesthetic, and cultural values.

What if the cultural values of those with the most wealth - the most economic power and, thus, the ability to influence the nature of the economic goods - are bigoted? What if, for example, the vast majority of economic value is in the bank accounts of white males who value an environment where they can avoid interacting with blacks and women, for example, except as servants?

Libertarianism would still prohibit acts of aggression, but libertarianism would create an economy that serves these bigoted market values. It would have to do so - as long as this is what those with economic power wish to purchase.

There is a parallel argument that applies to hiring itself. In hiring, a company offers the perspective employee a basket of goods that suits the employee finds valuable enough to agree to take in exchange for labor. What if the best employees are willing to take less salary in exchange for working conditions that excludes interacting with people of a certain race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and the like? Then, within a free market, a business can and should offer this value - a "whites only" work environment - to its employees in place of salary.

The argument that a business will be blind to race and gender because their only interest is in hiring the best employees ignores the possibility that their customers and their employees may not be blind to race and gender and are building those values into their purchase and employment negotiations.

This form of discrimination would be self-perpetuating. The system would deny the victims of discrimination the economic power they need to change the situation, while the bigots themselves take control of more economic power. This increased economic power then turns into an increased ability to express their bigoted sentiments in the market, and push businesses into adopting and serving those interests.

According to the libertarian philosophy, the proper way to bring about desegregation and to end bigotry is for customers to pressure businesses to abandon bigoted practices in their roll as customers. However, the effects of bigotry is to make it the case that economic power is concentrated in the hands and bank accounts of the bigots, and that its victims are left lacking economic power. A person can use their economic power to purchase desegregation and racial and gender equality only to the degree that they have economic power.

Now, let us turn to the two arguments offered in defense of libertarianism.

First, there was the intrinsic value argument - that the use of aggression involves enslaving a person to serve somebody else's values. In this case, we are talking about enslaving the wealthy white bigot to serve the values of the egalitarian.

In response, there are no intrinsic values. The libertarian is summoning a learned emotional response to a situation and using "intrinsic value" as a reason to impose their personal likes and dislikes on others.

This many be a sentiment that it is good to have - that it is good to want everybody to have. After all, to the degree that this sentiment exists in a community, to that degree the people in the community suffers less from aggression. However, this takes us out of the intrinsic value defense of libertarianism and into the utilitarian defense.

Second, the arguments given above are arguments against the claim that this sentiment produces the best overall public good. It allows and makes possible a great deal of disutility brought about when prejudice and discrimination become market values for those who have the bulk of the economic power. Those arguments provide utilitarian reasons for a different set of sentiments.

The original argument is effectively built on the claim that once aggression is permitted there is no principled position on which to stand to prevent that aggression from getting out of hand. It is a slippery slope argument.

However, that assumption is false. We can draw a line based on the very same principle that was used to defend the libertarian non-aggression principle - a line determined by overall social utility. What we have here is an argument that suggests that the bigoted use of economic power - in hiring, and in other market transactions such as home-buying and in who may shop in a store and how they are treated - represent a type of economic aggression that people generally have little reason to tolerate. Drawing a line here is no less arbitrary and prone to slippage than drawing the line at the point originally suggested under libertarianism.

Before closing, I would like to make a brief call out to the desirism theory on which this blog is based. That theory admits that bigoted actions can and do fulfill bigoted desires or values - that is beyond question. However, desirism does not look for the action that fulfills the most desires. It looks at the desires that people generally have reason to promote or inhibit. There are few reasons to promote or even permit bigoted sentiments, and many and strong reasons to condemn them. The reasons that exist to condemn them are reasons that exist against respecting and building those values into their market transactions.

Strict libertarianism gives free reign for the expression of bigoted values in the market. Whatever those with economic power want, that is what those with economic power shall have. This is a problem. This problem does not spring from a misunderstanding of libertarianism. And libertarianism can correctly claim to be entirely non-bigoted in its restriction on the use of aggression. However, insofar as libertarianism permits the expression of bigoted values in the market place, it still does a great deal of harm. The flaw exists in libertarianism itself - in its willingness to see bigoted values expressed in the market, not in our failure to properly understand it.

Third Parties and Voting on Principle

Some people make the false claim that those who reject voting for third parties in a winner-take-all political system such as the United States are against voting on principle - or favor abandoning principle in order to obtain some non-moral good.

This straw-man put-down of those who disagree with them may be psychologically comforting to those who present it, but it has little relationship to the fact of the matter.

First, a caveat. The comments that follow are applicable to political systems like those of the United States where the winner takes all and the loser gets nothing. They would not be applicable in a country where minority parties are still allowed to have representation in Parliament.

With that caveat in mind, the main argument against voting for a major party candidate instead of a third party is based on the idea that, among the principles that guide one's vote, producing the best consequences for the people at large also matters. This is one of the things that a principled voter should consider.

If we follow the claim that people should ignore the consequences of one's vote and vote only for the person who "most closely represents my views and interests" - and we take this principle to its logical conclusion - it implies that nobody should vote for anybody but themselves. Anybody that a person votes for other than themselves is somebody whose for whom the claim, "This person represents my views better than any other" is false. In other words, anybody who votes for a person other than oneself votes for a candidate other than the one who best represents her views.

To avoid this absurd conclusion, we must allow that it is permissible, at least to some degree, to vote for somebody who does not perfectly represent the views of the voter - that "perfectly representing my views" is a value that can be sacrificed for the same of some other good - such as "has the education and skill to be an effective administrator," and "will most likely produce the best results for the community as a whole."

The person who argues against voting for a third-party candidate, even where that candidate represents an overall set of values, typically argues from the moral principle that one of the things that matters in casting a vote is the well-being of the community as a whole. On this respect, supporting a third-party candidate may lead to the election of a candidate who will not, in fact, be the best thing for the community as a whole. One gets to express one's preference, but at a cost of realizing a significant loss in well-being for a number of people other than oneself.

In the 2000 election, many of the voters in Florida, claiming to value the environment, corporate responsibility for the quality of their products, and concern for the poor, performed an action that proved highly destructive of these ends. Florida ended up in a near tie between George Bush and Al Gore in a state whose electoral votes would determine the outcome of the election.

If those who had voted for a third party had voted for a major candidate party candidate who best represented their views, there is reason to believe that Al Gore would have carried the state and won the Presidency. In this situation, it is reasonable to ask of those who voted for third parties, "Did your principles include a principle for producing the best consequences for the people of the country generally?" It seems that they did not, because such a principle would not support such a vote.

Now, those who hold to this principle that consequences matter must acknowledge that this principle is only relevant to the degree that one's vote has potential consequences. In Washington DC, for example, the Democratic candidate will reliably get 85% of the vote and is all but guaranteed to get the region's three electoral votes (which themselves are so few that they will not likely sway any given election. Consequently, the principle of consequences does not apply to the DC citizen who wishes to support a third-party candidate.

Nor does it apply to any voter in a district where the opposition party will almost certainly win that district. Here, too, one cannot make a rational argument to the effect that such a vote risks bad consequences.

In fact, these same points actually argue in favor of supporting a minor party candidate where (1) one's preferred major party candidate is almost certain to win the district, or the major party candidate that least represents one's views is almost certain to win, and (2) a minor party candidate represents one's views more closely than the opposing leading party candidate. The odds of ill consequences are extremely low, and there are benefits to indicating the direction one would like the major parties to go.

I would like to repeat, these principles are only applicable in a winner-take-all political system as found in the United States. In counties that allow political representation of minority views - such as a parliamentary system where a party that has 5% of the vote still gets representation - it is generally less costly to support the party that best represents you.

IT is simply false - in fact, it counts as a type of hate-mongering - to argue that those who argue against voting for a third-party candidate under conditions where the vote has potential serious consequences have abandoned principle. They are, in fact, operating on a very important principle.

Aristotle: Challenges in Interpretation

Aristotle's theory of well-being, as Richard Kraut presented it, is a tangled mess.

I am reading through the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Well-Bing, trying to prepare for graduate school. The second article in this anthology, "Aristotle on Well-Being" is proving to be a slog.

The problem begins with the fact that Kraut's term for that which constitutes well-being is "advantage". That which constitutes the ultimate end of human action is supposed to be that which is valued for its own sake and not for the sake of someone else. Yet, "advantage", as I understand the term, refers to an instrumental good - as something that is useful.

For example, in a battle, one side may have a height advantage or an advantage of interior lines of communication. A chess player may have a positional advantage, or a runner may have an advantage in virtue of having trained at higher altitudes. In each of these cases, what gives a person an advantage is something that is useful - something that serves some other end (typically, winning).

This might simply be an idiosyncrasy on my part having no impact on the argument. However, when Kraut argues for this in part by pointing out that Aristotle uses the term to refer to several crafts - all of which happen to be useful.

To read him in this way, we need only observe that every activity Aristotle mentions, after his opening line, can plausibly be understood as an endeavor that seeks some goal on the assumption that it brings some advantage to someone. He is, in other words, implicitly offering an inductive argument for a narrower and stronger claim than the one with which his treatise begins. “Health is the end of medicine, a boat of boat building, victory of generalship, and wealth of household management” (1094a8–9). In each case, it is advantageousness that motivates a pursuit. Similarly for all of his remaining examples: bridle making, horsemanship, generalship. The doctor is not aiming at pleasure (his own or that of his patient) or at something beautiful, fine, and noble. He is trying to benefit a sick individual. Similarly, each of the other activities mentioned is obviously designed to bring about some beneficial consequence.

Boats and bridles are both useful. Medicine concerns such things as the absence of pain or discomfort (the counterpart to pleasure) or with restoring mobility, the use of a limb, or other biological functions that an agent finds useful. Victory in military matters - the concern of the general - similarly serves whatever ends that motivated the battle to start with. These are not things valued only for their own sake.

There is an additional problem in that we are looking at things written long ago in a different language. Perhaps "advantage" is not the best translation. Or, perhaps, it is my understanding of "advantage" that is flawed. The meanings of words change over time, and within certain communities. Perhaps there is a linguistic community that uses "advantage" to refer to something that is an end rather than a means - that uses the term as I may use the term "privilege" or "status", for example.

These are the complications of language - and they are always with us.

This is not a posting about Aristotle as much as it is a posting about difficulties in communication. Some people read as if a phase wears its meaning on its surface. Instead, every phrase comes with a huge context that is relevant to its meaning. Sometimes, it takes real effort to figure out what somebody is saying. An individual unwilling to put in the effort ends up swatting at air.

States' Rights

I agree with Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tx) on something.

The issue I agree with him on is the issue of states' rights. This is the idea that certain policies should be decided on a state level rather than a federal level.

Take, for example, the minimum wage.

Minimum wages should be determined by the state - not by the federal government.

One of the reasons for this is because there are disputes, even among academic economists, regarding the effects of legislated minimum wages. This dispute not only concerns the effect on overall employment, but the effect of who has jobs.

For example, one possible effect of raising the minimum wage is that more highly-qualified native English-speaking workers seek these jobs - as a way of supplementing their household income to acquire more luxuries - and crowd out less-skilled, non-English speaking, minority job seekers. There may be more jobs, but those jobs help the middle class at the expense of those who truly need the money.

The purpose of this post is not to argue whether or not this is the case. It is to argue that one of the ways we can find out whether and to what degree this is the case is to allow states to determine their own minimum wage laws.

Much of most fruitful research done on minimum wage laws recently has involved comparing the effects on two demographically similar states - one of which changed its minimum wage while the other kept its minimum wage the same. This gives us a "study state" where the independent variable has been altered, and a "control state" where the independent variable has been held constant. This allows us to then better determine the effect on the dependent variables.

We can obtain these benefits on a number of policies where there is reason to dispute the effects of the policies - on health care, on education, on drug legalization or prohibition, on capital punishment, on the regulation of pornography or gambling or prostitution, and the like. By allowing states to adopt different policies we gain a way of gaining insight into the effects of those policies.

Furthermore, we can offer a moral argument for allowing people with different beliefs to create a political and social climate consistent with those beliefs.

There is a great deal of arrogance behind the idea that one's own attitudes and values are so perfect - are so certainly the one and only right way to live and organize a society - that one may legitimately impose those attitudes on all people, many of whom have different opinions.

A less arrogant person would say, "You live the way you want to live, and let us live the way we want to live." Allowing states to set up different laws according to different cultural norms is consistent with this more tolerant - less arrogant - attitude.

Of course, there has to be limits.

The paradigm case of states rights in American history was the state's right to slavery. There are certain things that are clearly wrong and that ought not to be allowed in any state. States' rights should not be so broadly interpreted that it grants states a legal permission to institute racial segregation and other forms of discrimination.

We can expect that there will continue to be disputes - not on whether states should have the legal permission to establish their own rules, but on where to draw the line between what states should be permitted to choose and what shall be prohibited.

One of the things that states should not be permitted to regulate, for example, is migration into or out of the state. The morality of "states rights" in part depends on a person's freedom to move to a different state if they do not like the political or cultural environment being created. This entails also prohibiting a state from passing restrictions on who may migrate into their state from another state.

Having a variety of states with a variety of cultural norms, and a liberty to move to the state of one's choosing, is one way in which we can give people the freedom to find and join a community that corresponds to their interests. This grants a type of freedom that is not available in a "one size fits all" establishment.

Similarly, there are reasons to have federal controls regarding air and water pollution and water use. For example, California cannot give a "states' rights" argument for air pollution that drifts into Nevada or for causing acid rain that kills fish and forests in Virginia. Greenhouse gas emissions legitimately demands not just a federal but a global solution.

Still, there is a realm within which "states rights" makes a good deal of sense. We could, perhaps, use a presumption in favor of state determination unless evidence is provided - beyond a reasonable doubt - that a broader solution imposed on all states is required.

"Imagining That" - Imagining as a Propositional Attitude

What are imaginings?

This blog posting is actually a description of my thinking as I came across what I found to be an interesting philosophical question.

The story began yesterday, when I wrote on the difference between beliefs and desires.

Beliefs, I said, had truth-makers but failed to motivate. Desires, on the other hand, do not have truth-makers and do motivate.

On the issue of truth-makers, if somebody says "I believe that P" a reasonable response is, "It is a mistake to believe that P, since 'P' is false."

On the other hand, if somebody says "I desire that P" it makes no sense to say "It is a mistake to desire that P because P is false." It makes no sense, in other words, to say, "It is a mistake for you to desire to be free of pain since, for you, 'I am free of pain' is currently false."

On the other hand, the belief that one is in pain provides no reason to get rid of it. It is the aversion to pain that provides the motivation. Similarly, the belief that there is chocolate cake in the kitchen provides no reason to go eat it - it is the desire to eat chocolate cake that provides motivation.

I argued in that post that a mental state that has a truth-maker and which motivates is problematic. Trying to make sense of an attitude that both motivates and has a truth-maker (other than a belief that something stands in a particular relationship to a desire that provides motivation) simply raises far more questions than it answers. I assert that such things do not exist.

I then began to wonder if there are mental attitudes that both lack an intrinsic motivation and lack an intrinsic motivation.

Let us imagine a purple dog with yellow spots.

This does not have a truth-maker. In other words, there is no sense in saying, "It is wrong to imagine a purple dog with yellow spots because there is no purple dog with yellow spots."

This also does not provide any intrinsic motivation. Once a person imagines a purple dog with yellow spots, the next question is, "Now what?" There is no call to do anything.

In an earlier post, I pointed out that, while I pay a great deal of attention to beliefs and desires, I agree that there are other mental states - other than beliefs and desires - that influence intentional actions. I have included in this set "habit" and "memory".

Another mental state that seems necessary to explain human behavior is "imaginings" or "let's pretend" - propositional attitudes that lack both a truth marker and a motivation.

Now, being the curious person that I am, I next wanted to see if anybody has written anything on the idea of imaginings as propositional attitudes. Towards that end, I consult Google.

My search brings up a 2014 PHD thesis, A Pluralistic Account of Propositional Imagination" by Michael Joseph Ferreira.

The thesis begins with what Ferreira called, "default cognitive account of propositional imagination". Ferreira reports that his intention is to argue against a simple propositional account of imaginings because, "...recent efforts to provide a unified cognitive theory of propositional imagination have failed ... because there is no unified phenomenon of which to give an account."

Apparently, there is a literature on propositional imaginings that introduce some complexity to the issue.

Some of that complexity can be found in my original account of imaginings. I mentioned both imagining that a purple dog with yellow spots exists, and "let's pretend" that a purple dog with yellow spots exists. These are not precisely the same thing. "Let's pretend" is an invitation to act as if one is in a world where the proposition "there is a purple dog with yellow spots" is true. Stage acting, for example, involves more than just imagining. It falls more into the real of "let's pretend."

Yet, I think we can define a general category of imaginings - a category under which a number of more specific types (such as "let's pretend") live. What this general category has in common is that they lack truth-makers and they fail to provide motivation.

Now that we know what imaginings do not do, what is it that they do?

Motivational Beliefs

I got into a discussion recently that included the topic of beliefs that can motivate.

I deny that such things exist.

Or, if they do exist, it us because "beliefs that can motivate" is simply an alternative way of saying "desires", and desires do exist. (Actually, more than 2 - but see note below.)

More specifically, I accept David Hume's theory of motivation - updated to include some advances in our understanding of intentional action in the last 250 years.

This modernized version of Hume's theory holds that there are two types of mental states:

Beliefs - which can be expressed in the form "agent believes that P", where P is a proposition capable of being true or false. To believe that P is to believe that the proposition "P" is true. In other words, to believe that there is a mouse in the kitchen is to believe that the proposition "there is a mouse in the kitchen" is true.

Desires - which can be expressed in the form, "agent desires that Q", where Q is a proposition capable of being true or false. Desires lack truth-makers. If an agent has a desire that P, he cannot be wrong in the way that he can have a belief that P and be wrong. However, desires motivate. To desire that P is to be motivated to make Q true if Q is false, or to keep Q true if Q is already true.

It follows from this that if an agent has a belief that P, and P is false, he should change his beliefs - they fail to describe the world accurately. On the other hand, if he has a desire that P and P is false, then he is moved to change the world. His desire cannot be mistaken the way a belief can be mistaken.

Motivational beliefs are typically understood to be beliefs about the value of things. If an agent believes that P is good, then the agent will be motivated to make it the case that P is true.

If this is an actual belief, then it needs a truth-maker. Recall, to believe that P is to believe that the proposition "P" is true. To believe that P is good is to believe that the proposition "P is good" is true. This brings up the question: What does it mean to say that the proposition, "P is good" is true? What are the truth conditions for "P is good?"

I have a suggestion here. "P is good" means "P is such as to fulfill the desires in question." In other words, let us assume that the desire in question is a "desire that Q". Then, to say that P is good is to say that P is such that it can make or keep Q true. Q can either be a part of P, or P can be useful in realizing a state S where Q is true in S.

However, if this is an accurate account of "P is good", then these beliefs do not motivate. To say that a state of affairs is such as to fulfill the desires in question is to say that the people with those desires would be motivated to realize P if they knew about its relationship to their desires. It is the desires that provide the motivation, not the belief.

Just to quickly fend off the most common objections to this account - something can be "such as to fulfill the desires in question" when the objects of evaluation or the desires in question change. A hot cup of coffee may be good when drank by a person who likes coffee and terrible when drank by a person who hates coffee. Wearing a ski mask may be a good way to avoid being identified when one rubs a convenience store, but that is not to say that robbing a convenience store is a good thing to do.

Back to the topic of this post, this account of what it means for "P is good" to be true ties goodness to motivation - but only because it ties goodness to desires and desires provide motivation. What the "motivational belief" theorist needs to do is to provide an account of what it means for "P is good" to be true that somehow brings about reasons to act independent of desires.

An alternative is to deny that "P is good" (as in, "Agent believes that P is good") has a truth-maker.

I would argue that this immediately disqualifies the attitude in question from being a belief. Beliefs have truth-makers.

In fact, if the proposition, "P is good" lacks a truth maker, yet motivates the agent to realize a state in which P is true, then "X believes that P is good" and "X desires that P" become indistinguishable. If you were to examine an agent, there would be no way to distinguish whether the agent has a "belief that P is good" in this sense, or a "desire that P".

This, then, is the dilemma for anybody who believes that a "belief that P is good" can motivate action.

For the agent who believes that P is good, either "P is good" has a truth-maker that explains motivation independent of desire or it does not. I suggest that the agent will be incapable of coming up with a sensible theory for a truth-maker for "P is good" that explains motivation independent of desire. And if the claim is that "P is good" lacks a truth-maker then "Agent believes that P is good" is simply another way of saying, "Agent desires that P."

Anyway, motivational beliefs are make-believe. They don't exist. There is no set of observations that requires that we use such things in order to explain any intentional action. Updated Humean beliefs and desires are sufficient.

(NOTE: As I argued elsewhere, we will ultimately need to also include such things as habits and memory to explain intentional action. However, none of these things provide end-reasons for intentional action and can be left out of the discussion at this level, the way physicists talk about massless strings and frictionless surfaces.)

The Historical Significance and Practical Irrelevance of Plato

For the past week, I have been focusing on Plato – and, in particular, The Republic.

Why?

This is actually a question I ask myself. Plato’s Republic is of great historical significance. It is the first lengthy treatise on moral and political philosophy – about how to be a good person and how to create a good state.

However, the relevance of his ideas to today’s political systems is little different from the relevance of Hippocrates to today’s medicine.

Hippocrates, too, is a significant historical figure. One of his major accomplishments was to establish a set of practices that effectively started the science of medicine. Practitioners were to record symptoms, the steps they took to try to deal with those symptoms, and the results. This way they had a chance of identifying options that were not effective, discover options that were effective, and promulgate that knowledge.

However, there were some significant problems with this system.

One set of problems revolved around coming up with an accurate theory of biology – a way of explaining what was effective and why. Greek and Roman physicians had become fixated on the idea that health had to do with balancing four bodily fluids to the point that they could scarcely consider options outside of this model. This caused them to interpret all of their observations in terms of effects on these liquids – grounding all of medicine on a set of false premises.

Another set of problems concerned the objectivity of those observations. Researchers today recognize that humans have an amazing capacity to see what they want to see. Researchers who have a particular theory in mind will “see with her own eyes” that they theory is either confirmed. People inherently focus on those things that support a favored belief and dismiss those things that would falsify the favored belief. Science did not actually make much progress until scientists recognized this innate human failing and began to design research and take measurements that circumvented these biases.

Anybody who is suffering from a physical ailment may pay Hippocrates her respects regarding his historical significance, but is well advised against seeking a cure in ancient Greek medicine.

Similarly, somebody who is interested in creating a healthy political system may pay Plato his respects regarding the fact that he introduced the habit of thinking about these issues and was one of the first to address many of the relevant questions. However, he founded his idea of the best state on assumptions regarding human psychology and “the forms” that are as fictitious as the relevance of Hippocrates’ four bodily fluids. Consequently, he is a poor authority to appeal to if one is more interested in the practical problem of improving an existing political system.

Accordingly, looking at Plato’s political philosophy can be interesting in the same way that looking at ancient Greek medicine can be interesting. Some people simply have an interest in ancient theories – in the ways in which different cultures have seen things.

There is, however, another – more practical – reason for somebody in political philosophy to become familiar with these ancient theories. For some reason, political philosophers are expected to have a working knowledge of Plato’s ideas, whereas physicians are not expected to have a working knowledge of ancient Greek “humours”. It buys a political writer some “street credit” if the philosopher can write or speak knowingly about what Plato wrote. Where, in contrast, a physician who spoke knowingly, and perhaps even reverently, about ancient ideas in medicine might actually generate a little bit of worry.

Of course, that “street credit” likely gets taken away from any such writer who then writes a blog posting where he questions Plato’s importance. This may happen even if that writer acknowledges Plato’s historical significance, and merely denies that a 2500 year old political theory created at a time of primitive understanding has much relevance in a quest to improve modern political systems.