The Problem With Imagining (2): Simulation, Tragedy and Farce

When you try to understand a person, you imagine yourself in her situation, and some psychologists call it “simulation”. I tentatively use the term “Runaway Simulation” to describe the countless cases when a reasonable working assumption – “the other person thinks and feels the way I would have thought and felt if I were in their situation” – morphs into a stubborn belief that persists despite loads of glaring counter-evidence.

Sometimes it’s nearly harmless: you love looking at pictures of your children and can’t imagine anyone could fail to enjoy pictures of your children, so you post too many baby pictures on Facebook. You are a ravenous person and so you doubt anyone, however generally honest, who claims to be full after a salad. You are an organized person and you ask someone like me for her flight itinerary six month in advance, despite your experience with her disorderly lifestyle. But things can get trickier. You meet a person who claims not to want children, and you can’t imagine not wanting children, so you come up with some other explanation for her having no children and claiming she doesn’t want them. Perhaps she had a bad mother and is afraid she might be a bad one too? Perhaps she is afraid of commitment in general? Perhaps her romantic partner is wrong for her, and not wanting children is her unconscious’s way to tell her the relationship isn’t working? You violate Ockham’s Razor like nobody’s business, because the best explanation is under your nose: she just doesn’t want children. This however you can’t imagine, and we humans trust our imaginations a lot. Like a twisted Holmes, you accept an improbable story because the alternative seems impossible, and some profound misunderstandings begin that way.

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What Kantianism Gets Wrong

With regard to moral theory I have two hunches. One is that the wellbeing of one’s fellow humans is an intrinsic moral value. Intrinsic not only in that a moral agent will care about it for its own sake but also in that its value is not derivative from other values, like, say, that of rational agency. So Kantianism is false. The other is that the wellbeing of one’s fellow humans isn’t the only intrinsic moral value.  There are virtues that are independent of  benevolence, and respect, of the sort that makes paternalism wrong, is one of them. So utilitarianism doesn’t work either.

But after decades of Kantian dominance in analytical ethics, some of us have become used to thinking of concern for the wellbeing of others as a somehow coarse, primitive virtue befitting swine and Jeremy Bentham, unless it is somehow mediated by, derived from or explained through something more complicated and refined, like the value of rational agency.

Suppose one is roughly Kantian. Reverence for rational agency is the one basis of morality as far as one is concerned, where rational agency is thought of roughly as the capacity to set ends. What to do with the sense that benevolence is a major part of morality? The answer seems to be “think of benevolence in terms of a duty to adopt and promote other people’s ends”. Now suppose that, as many contemporary Kantians do,  you reject the idea that adopting and promoting a person’s ends is the same thing as protecting her wellbeing – after all, most humans have some ends for which they are willing to sacrifice some wellbeing. In this case, what you say is that at the heart of benevolence we have a duty to adopt and promote people’s ends. We also have a duty to protect human wellbeing because, even though it’s not the only thing people care about, it is a very important end for all agents.

I don’t think this works, though. My argument goes like this:

  1. If the reason protecting a person’s wellbeing is important is purely the fact that her wellbeing is an important end to her and we have a duty to adopt her ends, then it would be of at least equal moral importance to protect any end that is at least equally important to her.
  2. Protecting an agent’s wellbeing is something we are morally called upon to do in some cases where, other things being equal, we would not be called upon to protect her pathway to achieving another equally important (to her!) end.

Therefore, it is false that the reason protecting a person’s wellbeing is important is purely the fact that her wellbeing is an important end to her and we have a duty to adopt her ends.

 Let me talk about 2) and why it’s plausible.

Take a case where an economically comfortable person, let’s call her Mercedes, is asked for help by her desperate acquaintance, Roger. She can, by paying 50 dollars, rescue him from being beaten up. If beaten up, Roger would suffer pain and then have to spend some days in a hospital, but he is not going to be killed. I am trying to stick to 1000 words so let me just promise you I have a half-way-realistic case.  Now imagine an alternative scenario in which a person – call him Leonard – asks Mercedes for 50 dollars because without them, a great opportunity to travel and spread his Mennonite religion will have to be relinquished.  Leonard’s end (spreading his religion) is as at least important to him as Roger’s end (not being beaten up) is important to Roger, and more important to Leonard than Leonard’s own wellbeing – he is willing to suffer for it if needed. For all Mercedes knows, spreading Leonard’s religion is itself strictly morally neutral – she has no particular reason to spread it independently of him.

There is an asymmetry between the cases. In the first scenario, Mercedes would display a lack of benevolence – perhaps of decency! – if she were to refuse to rescue Roger from a beating by giving him $50, given that this would be easy for her, no harm would be caused by it to anyone, etc. In the second scenario there is no such presumption. If Mercedes likes Leonard’s cause, it makes sense for her to make a donation. If she’s indifferent to his cause, no compelling reason to donate is provided by the very fact that Leonard would be ready, if worst comes to worst, to suffer for his cause. Unless she does fear for his wellbeing – fears, for example, that Leonard is a bad shape and will plunge into a horrible depression if she declines – Mercedes is not any less of a good Samaritan, certainly isn’t a sub-decent Samaritan, for not wanting to donate to another’s morally neutral cause, however crucial her donation would be to the cause.

If all that made Roger’s wellbeing matter morally was its importance to him as an end, she would have had as much of a duty to help Leonard.

Some Kantians would reply that what matters here isn’t protecting Roger’s wellbeing but the fact that Roger might lose rational agency. Roger, however, is not in danger of death or brain damage. He might suffer pain, but it takes a truly extreme amount of suffering to deprive someone of basic human rationality. His ability to perform successful actions will be impaired for a few days, but being a rational agent is not about being a successful performer of actions – it is about being responsive to practical reasons. It would be quite wrong to say that anyone with whom the world does not collaborate – because of an injury, or due to being in chains for that matter  – is thereby not a rational agent. Further more, preventing a few days of suffering is more morally urgent than preventing a few days of involuntary deep sleep with no significant harm expected, though involuntary sleep deprives you of agency if anything does.

There is something special about wellbeing.

Just the Booze Talking

I still think,contra many agency theorists, that when you act and feel that it’s not really you acting, as happens when you think “it’s the anger talking, not me”, when you feel passive with regard to your action, “possessed” by some alien motivation – that feeling, however disturbing, doesn’t mean that your action is in any way not yours. Or less yours. Or less deeply yours. Or not a full-blooded action. It offers no deep insight into agency. It’s just…a feeling.

Does everyone experience this feeling, sometimes called “alienation”, salient to eminent philosophers from Harry Frankfurt on? No, some people assure me they don’t, and

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Raw Reflections on Rationality and Intelligence + Two Cat Pictures

So I have two cats. One is a British Shorthair named after the very English Philippa Foot. The other is an Ocicat named Catullus, after Gaius Valerius Catullus, an ancient Roman poet some of whose stuff is decisively Not Safe For Work. I often refer to the two as “the irrational animals” – as in “the irrational animals are hungry” or “thank you for taking care of the irrational animals” – but I suspect this is just an Aristotelian slur. They are probably more rational than I am, though I am surely smarter.

Can you be smarter but less rational? I hear epistemologists talk as if you can’t. But you can, easily. Consider a mentally healthy child of 11. Imagine the same child at 14. She has gotten smarter, but probably less rational.

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Motivation Without Charm

O Duty,
Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?

 That’s Ogden Nash. Now Kant:

Duty! Sublime and mighty name that embraces nothing charming or insinuating but requires submission, and yet does not seek to move the will by threatening anything that would arouse natural aversion or terror in the mind but only holds forth a law that of itself finds entry into the mind and yet gains reluctant reverence (though not always obedience), a law before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly work against it; what origin is there worthy of you, and where is to be found the root of your noble descent which proudly rejects all kinship with the inclinations, descent from which is the indispensable condition of that worth which human beings alone can give themselves?

 (Exhale)

Kant appeals powerfully to the sense that doing the right thing often feels different from doing something you want to do. The Neo-Humean – as in one who thinks moral motivation, like other important motivation, is based on desire – is often asked: if, as a good person, you do right because you want to do right– (de dicto or de re, doesn’t matter for the moment) – why doesn’t doing right because you want to do right feel like going to the beach because you want to go to the beach?

Fair question. Let me have a go.

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The Problem with Imagining

The problem with human imagination is really two problems. One is that our imagination is very limited. Thus, for example, I can’t properly imagine the life, or even the schedule, of someone who has two children. The second problem is that we trust our puny imagination a huge deal, enough that we accept its testimony despite perfectly good evidence to the contrary. Thus, for example, an academic with a young child might say things like “they told me that I won’t get any research done the first few months but…. I guess I didn’t take them seriously!”. In other words, he received reliable information but ignored it because his imagination told him he could just get work done when the baby is asleep.

My favorite cases involve not believing a person when she talks about her inner life. Far be it from me to think that people are never wrong about their inner lives, but when a person tells you she thinks or feels or wants something, the simple fact that you can’t imagine thinking or feeling or wanting it is not in itself a reason to doubt her. I once told a relative stranger that though I grew up in a certain country, I do not feel identified with it. The man said “that’s highly unlikely”. I am still a little angry at the person telling me what I feel, but I don’t have the right to feel superior to him. After all, for decades, I believed that any person who claims to be “full” after a salad – a mere salad! –  is either lying to me or lying to herself. To my defense, there exist some people who confess that they have kidded themselves on this particular topic, but I admit that the main reason I failed to believe people who claim to be full after a salad is that I can’t properly imagine being full from eating (only) a salad. That’s a bad reason.

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