Muddy Waters

 

 

Causation is one of those philosophical topics that drive you up the wall. As soon as you start to think about it you draw a complete blank. As Hume observes: “There are no ideas, which occur in metaphysics, more obscure or uncertain, than those of power, force, energy, or necessary connexion” (Enquiry, p.45).  [1] The cement of the universe is so much muddy water. Of course philosophers have done everything in their power to hide this fact from themselves, even going so far as to try to reduce causality to mere regularity. Hume’s own view was that causation is real but incomprehensible (by us). It is neither an affair of the senses nor of reason: we have no sensory impression of necessary connection (which is definitive of causation) but neither is causation grasped by reason (like logic, arithmetic, and geometry). It is a real relation between things but it is not revealed by perceiving them or by merely thinking about them. It fits neither empiricism nor rationalism. It sits uncomfortably between the two, awkwardly and inscrutably. No matter how much you gaze at an object or reflect on it you will never discover causation (as it exists in that object). But perception and reason are our only faculties of knowledge, so the mind draws a blank on the nature of causation. Yet we constantly refer to it, rely on it, and assume its reality. Evidently we can know that it obtains, relying on the observation of regularities of nature, but we can’t fathom its inner nature—or even fathom our lack of fathoming.

            The problem concerns not just particular causal relations but also the notions of law and power (disposition, capacity, potential). Objects fall under causal laws and have causal powers: this is why they have the effects they have. But laws and powers are at least as inscrutable as causal relations between particulars; this is an interconnected knot of problems. Perhaps the notion of power concentrates the problem most acutely (as Hume intimates): how are the potential effects of a cause contained in it? Are the effects somehow already present in the cause? Does the cause “refer” to the effects? Are there shadows or signs of the effects lurking silently in the cause? But you can’t discern anything like this if you examine the cause, even going down to its elementary constituents. When a moving object imparts motion to another object by collision is the other object’s motion somehow prefigured in the moving object? It had the potential of creating that effect, so doesn’t it already contain it in someway? What is potential? It’s a bit like the way the meaning of a word “contains” its uses: they are implicit in it, packed into it—but what does this way of speaking amount to?  [2] The problem of causation is how an object can contain what it does not contain. If we think of a cause as a conscious being for a moment, it is as if it knows what effects it can bring about, but only unconsciously: it doesn’t have these effects before its consciousness, but it is subliminally aware of them—they are implicitly known not explicitly known. But that looks like a dodge: they aren’t anticipated in any way that we can discern—the mind of a cause is blank about its future effects. Yet it has the power to bring precisely these effects about, and this power is internal to it, so… Thus the waters fill with mud.

            What can we say positively about causation? The logic, semantics, and conceptual analysis of “cause” are not so baffling. Thus “x caused y” expresses a relation that is irreflexive, asymmetric, and transitive: nothing can cause itself, effects can’t cause causes, and the effects of effects are caused by the initial cause. Semantically, it is plausible to suggest that “cause” generates a transparent context and expresses a relation between events (though this view is not without its critics). The concept may also be analyzable in terms of counterfactuals or other necessary and sufficient conditions. So it is not that we can say nothing about the word and what it means—and much philosophical energy has been expended on these worthy tasks. But they don’t touch the underlying metaphysical and epistemological questions, the ones so memorably raised by Hume. What exactly is causation, and how do we know about it? Specifically, what is it to have a causal power, and how can we know causal powers? There are suggestions—there are always suggestions. One suggestion is that a causal power is identical to a structural property of the object, as it might be molecular structure. But this just pushes the question back: how is the power present in the structure? Isn’t it as invisible as ever? Nor can it be excogitated by pure reason. It can’t be seen and it can’t be deduced—it flouts both empiricist and rationalist epistemology. It isn’t a posteriori and it isn’t a priori. It is a peculiar kind of fact, being neither perceptible (even by extended perception: microscopes etc.) nor rationally apprehended. As Hume would say, it is neither a “matter of fact” nor a “relation of ideas”; it hovers ambiguously between the two. No wonder there has been a marked tendency towards elimination: causation must either be reduced to facts less problematic (regularities, dispositions to project) or eliminated outright. To accept it as it is runs into insurmountable metaphysical and epistemological difficulties. Indeed, it threatens to bring down the most fundamental structures of philosophical thought.

            So why not just bring them down? Because we have nothing to put in their place, that’s why. It is not as if we have some other way to think about causation that we can substitute for the old inadequate dichotomies: the waters are thick with mud and our vision fails us. It is really a horrible problem. Best not even to go near it; just leave it alone to fester. But maybe we can articulate the problem better, gain a better sense of its dimensions and density. Can we at least pinpoint why it is so difficult? It is in some ways worse than the problem of consciousness, because in that case at least we know what we are talking about—we don’t just refer to consciousness, we experience it. But we don’t experience causation (as opposed to its symptoms), despite our readiness to refer to it. We refer to a we-know-not-what. Appealing to mental causation won’t help, despite our immediate acquaintance with the mental phenomena between which causation holds: for mental causation is as opaque as physical causation (as Hume noted). We can say that physical causation is no less active than mental causation; the will is not somehow a livelier form of causation. Nor is causation by physical contact more transparent than causation-at-a-distance, since its operation is as obscure there as it is in the remote case. In this respect old-style mechanism offers an illusory paradigm of transparency (this was Hume’s central insight, in effect): it isn’t that causation by contact is quite clearly grasped while causation-at-a-distance must be deemed “occult”. Neither is really intelligible to us, not when you get right down to it. Hume’s billiard balls hit each other, unlike orbiting planets, but their causal powers are no more evident to sense or reason than gravity. For some people this was taken as a reason to eliminate causation altogether from physics, and one can appreciate the motivation.

            Can we be more constructive? I think we can say two positive things, though nervously. The first is that nature must be more tightly interlinked than we tend to suppose going by the appearances: causation connects things because any effect of a cause must be somehow written into the cause (though not in a way we clearly conceive). The colliding billiard balls don’t appear to sense perception as having any intelligible connection; nor can human reason discern any such connection: but they must somehow be intelligibly linked. The laws of nature essentially relate separate things, because causal powers are essentially powers to bring about certain specific effects: an object x has the power to make an object y have a property P. There is thus more “holism” at work in nature than is apparent to our epistemic faculties. We could introduce the idea of the “causal boundary” of an object to signify the class of objects that fall within its causal reach—for instance, the class of solids a given liquid can dissolve. This class falls within its causal boundary but not its spatial boundary. Then nature will be said to consist of the totality of such causal boundaries—these are the true units of nature.

The second thing we can say is that whatever causal powers are they must be very different from their manifestations in observable phenomena. This is because the manifestations never add up to a causal power, as it exists in objects. It can’t be mere regularity and it can’t be a “categorical base” (e.g. molecular structure)—these are not what the power is or else we would know what it is. Powers must be as different from their manifestations as mental states are from behavior—perhaps more so. Potentiality must be different from actuality; yet the two must be intimately related. I can’t tell you how potentiality differs from actuality because of its obscurity, but it evidently does differ, dramatically so. (Or else actuality is merely the way potentiality looks to our senses and doesn’t go deep ontologically speaking.  [3])

            Would other things become clearer if we had a better grip on causation? Anything in which causation directly figures would be—laws of nature, the origin of the universe, the operation of fundamental particles. But it might also help with the mind-body problem and the free will problem: How is the mind caused by the brain? How are free actions caused? Certainly this is an enormous gap in our understanding of nature, what with the ubiquity of causation, but a gap there seems little prospect of filling. The water may remain forever muddy.  [4]

 

  [1] I will be accepting the “skeptical realist” view of Hume in what follows, according to which causal powers are real existences that defy our limited understanding, not the positivist interpretation of Hume according to which the concept of causal power is incoherent and should be rejected.

  [2] I am alluding to Wittgenstein’s discussion of meaning and use in Philosophical Investigations. He explicitly connects this issue to that of causal powers in the sections on machines (193, 194).

  [3] Such a view is suggested by the thesis that all properties consist of causal powers. Then there is nothing to nature but powers.

  [4] This essay is intended to reflect the inadequacy of our understanding of causation, containing little in the way of genuine illumination. But perhaps it serves to scratch the depths.

                                               

 

 

Moral Minimalism

 

 

I shall explore the prospects for a minimalist theory of normative ethics. By “minimalist” I mean a theory (analogous to minimalism in linguistics) that seeks to base normative ethics on the most exiguous of foundations, viz. a single moral principle, with other aspects of the ethical life consigned to something extraneous to morality strictly conceived. The moral principle in question is exceedingly familiar: DO NO HARM. That is all that morality contains, according to the minimalism I envisage, neither more nor less. The only moral principle is the injunction not to do harm. Usually this principle is included in a total utilitarian package: Do no harm and maximize wellbeing (welfare, the good, happiness, pleasure). I propose to drop the second conjunct so that morality only prescribes the avoidance of harm. Clearly the two conjuncts are logically independent, though the second is generally taken to include the first: if our aim is to maximize wellbeing, it should surely include minimizing harm. But we may live in a possible world in which there is no harm to be undone or produced, yet still we are subject to an injunction to maximize wellbeing—we must increase the level of wellbeing even if there is no suffering to be eliminated and none that can be produced (this is a world of harm-proof people). More obviously, one could accept the injunction not to harm while rejecting the injunction to promote wellbeing: I mustn’t harm anyone, but I have no duty positively to improve anyone’s lot. For example, I must not strike an innocent man for no reason, but I am under no obligation to make him happier than he already is. So I propose dropping the second injunction while insisting on the first. I call this position “disutilitarianism” because it emphasizes the avoidance of disutility not the production of utility. It is a negative prohibition: it says what we must not do not what we must do. We must not cause harm, though we have no duty to cause its opposite (if it has a real opposite)—we have no duty to maximize the general good, or even to produce it in a particular case. There is a duty against maleficence, but no duty of beneficence.

            Let me immediately address a natural objection, namely that it is clearly morally praiseworthy to promote the good. I don’t disagree, though there are notorious cases in which promoting the good is not the morally right thing to do (the bane of utilitarianism); but I would distinguish between what morality requires and what it is admirable to do. It certainly shows the virtue of generosity to help the poor and needy, but that is not the same as saying that this is a moral duty. It may just be supererogatory. We have a duty not to harm, but we have no comparable duty to make people happier—though it might be virtuous so to do. I will come back this point, noting now only that moral minimalism does not preclude acting virtuously in promoting wellbeing; it claims only that this is not part of morality in the strict sense. We might even say that not causing harm isn’t a virtue at all, being merely our most basic moral obligation—there is nothing virtuous in declining to strike an innocent man for no reason. Duty and virtue are separate domains.

            A main reason for advocating moral minimalism as against full-blown utilitarianism is that the stronger doctrine runs into well-known problems. I won’t rehearse these problems, but they concern considerations of justice and the problem of moral inflation, whereby we turn out to be the moral equivalent of murderers by not helping starving people in distant lands to the point of self-impoverishment. What is crucial, I think, is that there is a deep asymmetry between harming and benefitting: we have an absolute duty not to do the former, but the latter is optional. Partly this is because of the difference between pain and suffering, on the one hand, and happiness and wellbeing, on the other: the former are clearly defined and obviously bad, while the latter are amorphous and not invariably good (e.g. the pleasure-loving happy sadist). The dentist must do his best to avoid hurting you, but he is under no obligation to make you feel happier when you leave his office than you were when you came in—and what exactly would that be? He knows how to avoid harming you, but he may have no idea what would make you happier (a joke, a donation, a pat on the back?). So the harm principle has a different deontic status from the benefit principle. This is of course exactly how we operate in daily life: you avoid stepping on people’s toes as you walk down the street, but you don’t try to cheer everyone up as you pass them by. They will blame you for hurting them, but not for failing to improve their mood. They may think that that is none of your concern, while avoiding crushing their toes indubitably is. So we can say that the harm principle has a greater hold on us than the benefit principle; I propose accordingly that we restrict morality to the harm principle.  [1]

            It is a significant fact that all the standard rules favored by the deontologist can be seen to stem from the rule against causing harm. Breaking promises, lying, stealing, assaulting, murdering, acting unjustly—all involve causing harm to others. These rules are prohibitions designed to minimize suffering, ranging from disappointment to physical agony. None of them reflects the utilitarian’s insistence that we should maximize wellbeing—as if by sitting at home doing nothing we have committed grave evils. Of course, it is possible to harm by omission—and that is equally proscribed by the harm principle. You can fail to save someone from being hit by a car, so that your omission harms him or her. But doing nothing to make people happier is not ipso facto a form of indirect harm. We can’t somehow squeeze beneficence in under non-maleficence. The usual rules of morality concern things we are not to do (“Thou shall’t not…) and they all concern the harms that result from doing these things. Bringing each of these specific rules under the harm principle effects a major simplification, making moral thinking easier to manage and sharper in focus. All we really need to remember—all we need to know—is that it is wrong to cause harm. Whenever you are faced by a difficult moral choice you need only ask yourself what action will cause the least harm and then do that. For instance, you should not break a promise to meet A because meeting B instead will increase the total level of happiness in the world; you should avoid harming A by leaving him hanging (maybe suggesting to B that she finds something else to do). It is no small advantage to morality that it should be codified in a single easily remembered slogan. Children need to be instructed in it, and many adults have no aptitude for moral complexity, so keep it simple.

            Can you harm someone in order to benefit him later? If so, there is no absolute ban on causing harm. Here we need to distinguish two cases: causing harm now to prevent greater harm later, and causing harm now in order to increase happiness later. The dentist drills the tooth now in order to prevent the pain of later toothache, so she is minimizing pain in the long run: that is morally acceptable and in accordance with the harm principle. But it is another thing entirely to try to justify causing harm now by citing future benefits that don’t involve harm minimization—as it might be, applying the rod to the child in the expectation that she will grow to be happier than she would be otherwise. This is far from obviously acceptable and it gains no support from the harm principle, which speaks only of minimizing harm not maximizing happiness. Omitting to do something harmful today can cause greater harm tomorrow, and is therefore morally proscribed; but omitting to do something harmful today that will result in less overall happiness in the future is not to be morally condemned (except by the rigid utilitarian). Even if beating children is known to make them happier in later life, that is no ground for beating them—though if it will prevent them from excruciating suffering later, then it should be done (however reluctantly).  We must always seek to minimize harm, even if harm is necessary to bring that about; but harm can’t be justified by considerations of overall utility, as if pain now is made up for by elation later (as opposed to mere contentment).

            It is important to minimalism to distinguish between what it is good for a person to do from what it is morally obligatory for a person to do. Minimalism is only a theory of the latter; it is neutral on the broader question of virtuous or admirable conduct. Living a good life includes acting generously and kindly, even if no harm is reduced thereby. That may seem to leave a lot of moral life outside the scope of the minimalist theory, but in fact it covers more than might be supposed. For much generosity and kindness involve the avoidance of suffering not merely the production of utility. You can harm someone by not being concerned about his or her welfare, as when you callously decline to give food to a starving person. But not all generosity is like that, as with the generous host: she is not avoiding harming her guests by laying on a great feast, but rather adding to her guests’ enjoyment. That is what is not morally required—increasing other people’s happiness. By not voting for tax increases to help the poor you may be harming them indirectly and by omission, so this falls under moral criticism; what does not invite moral criticism is declining to share your resources with people already amply resourced. So quite a lot falls under the prohibition against causing harm, not merely refraining from attacking people directly (animals too). Someone might be exceptionally generous with his friends, by always treating them to fancy dinners and the like; that may be commendable, but it is not morally obligatory. This is a distinction well worth preserving, and it is a virtue of minimalism that it makes the distinction firmly (unlike classical utilitarianism). Much virtuous behavior is discretionary, but moral behavior never is—it is strictly obligatory. Being a miser may not be admirable, but it is in a different category from being a sadist. The paradigm of the immoral act is maiming someone, not providing a thrifty meal instead of a lavish one.

            Is the anti-harm theory deontological or consequentialist? You can take it either way, either as a moral rule or as a statement about consequences. That is, you can say that an action is right if and only if it actually minimizes harm, or you can say that the agent must always intend to minimize harm and that this is what makes it right not the actual consequences. I prefer to think of it as an absolute general rule with a number of sub-rules as special cases (such as “Don’t break promises”), but clearly the consequences are crucial in justifying the rule—pain and suffering being bad things in themselves.

            I would emphasize the formal merits of the minimalist theory. It is simple, clear, manageable, and practicable. It is intuitively compelling and scarcely controversial in its recommendations (unlike utilitarianism). Its only questionable claim is that there is nothing more to morality than what it includes; but this is mitigated by the distinction between morality proper and what counts as virtuous conduct. It combines the best of deontology and consequentialism. It is what you would expect of a moral system that is designed to help people live together in close proximity. It is non-paternalist. It doesn’t seek to meddle in other people’s lives, as the prescription to make everyone as happy as possible does.  It has a pleasing homogeneity. It is readily universalized. It does not attempt to combine disparate ideas (as in W.D. Ross’s mixed theory). It is easily teachable. It does not call for extremes of altruism and intolerable guilt over never doing enough. It takes what is good in utilitarianism and discards what is bad. The disutilitarian is a realistic, clear-eyed, compassionate, commonsense type of fellow, mainly concerned to prevent pain and suffering. Everything else is icing on the cake. If he can prevent us from harming each other (animals included), he thinks he has done his moral duty. What we choose positively to do, as a matter of personal virtue, is our own affair and of no concern to morality as such.  [2]

 

Colin McGinn

  [1] A further asymmetry is this: the harm principle applies impartially to intimates and strangers, but the benefit principle applies differentially according to personal distance (at least according to common morality). You must not harm anyone equally, but it is morally permissible to benefit members of your own family over others. This suggests that the harm principle is part of non-negotiable moral law, while the benefit principle operates according to personal discretion. 

  [2] The disutilitarian might well contend (echoing Nietzsche) that morality since the advent of Christianity has indulged in a kind of duty-creep whereby virtuous behavior has been converted into a species of strict moral duty. Thus Jesus urges us to give to the poor and needy (defined relatively) and his followers have interpreted this as an extension of our moral duties. But that is not necessarily the right way to interpret the words of Jesus: he is not assimilating charity to the deontic level of non-violence, merely suggesting that we cultivate the virtue of generosity and not content ourselves with the mere observance of our strict moral duty. Perhaps under the influence of Christian ethics, as it came to develop, utilitarian ethics made a virtue of blurring the line between moral duty and personal virtue, thus assimilating the demerit of not being charitable with the demerit of violently assaulting people. That was a conceptual error and one the minimalist is anxious to remedy.   

                                               

 

 

 

Moral Distance

 

 

We tend to think that our moral obligations fall off with distance: the closer someone is to us the greater is his moral claim on us, and the further away the less. Morality operates like gravity—it weakens with distance. True, morality is an expanding circle, but it is also a diminishing sphere. At the outer limits it hardly gets a grip at all. It would be a mistake to interpret this notion of distance as mere spatial separation, though that seems to be one component of it. In addition to distance in space there is also distance in time: the more temporally remote some future person is the less hold she seems to have on us morally. What obligations do I have to people in the 30^thcentury? If I have any, they are not so strong as the obligations I have to people now. Whether this is rational or morally justifiable is a debatable question, but as a descriptive truth about our moral attitudes it is surely correct. Further, there is the dimension of personal contact or emotional proximity: the more intimate my relationship with someone the greater the obligation I feel. This applies to family, spouse, friends, colleagues, and so on. It may be that spatiotemporal distance is really just correlated with this dimension, which is the underlying factor; relationship-distance is the main consideration. We might also add psychological similarity: we tend to regard beings similar to us psychologically as deserving more of our moral concern—humanlike, mammalian, warm-blooded, non-alien. Thus our contemporaneous close relatives have a stronger claim on us than a jellyfish-type creature living in a remote galaxy two million years from now. Moral distance is multi-factorial and complex not just a matter of physical miles. It introduces degrees of obligation into moral duty instead of just the all-or-nothing binary opposition of duty and non-duty. It also introduces uncertainty and messiness into our moral calculations.

                It is helpful to picture the diminishing moral sphere as follows. At the center lies the ever-present self: this is the being minimally distant from the moral agent (they are identical) and it has a uniquely strong influence over our decisions. Given that prudence is also moral concern for one sentient being among others—I am a valuable being just like everyone else—we can think of prudence as the basic case of moral obligation. I am obliged to be concerned about my own interests and I am extremely close to myself. I am the center of the sphere of my concerns and others radiate outwards from me. The next closest being is then a matter of individual variation: it could be my spouse or my parents or my children or my friends, depending on circumstances. Then we get to the much more extensive circle of my general acquaintance. After that we have members of my local community perhaps; then other countries; then other species; then the next generation; then more remote generations; then beings in other galaxies; finally completely alien life-forms in remote regions of space millennia hence. My own interests come first (other things being equal and given a degree of selfishness) and then the interests of others according to their place in the sphere. This is the whole sphere of my moral obligations, and it varies in degree of demandingness. Most obviously, there is variation in the strength with which I am obliged to reduce or prevent suffering.

            Imagine if someone inverted this ordering of moral priorities: she treats the more remote beings as having a stronger hold on her moral concern. Creatures in the distant future on remote planets that are psychologically dissimilar to her occupy the center of her moral universe, while family and friends have merely marginal moral interest for her (she might even regard herself as morally negligible). That would certainly strike us as bizarre, insane even, but it is not easy to see how we could persuade her that it is irrational or immoral (she might point out that they are suffering sentient beings too, equally deserving of respect and care). But by the same token it is hard to see how we could be deemed irrational for our ordering. Nor does it seem justifiable to insist that only equalconsideration is rational or moral, so that we must treat spatiotemporally remote beings as morally interchangeable with our nearest and dearest. In fact, the distribution that seems the most natural is precisely the one that we adopt—despite the fact that no obvious foundation for it can be produced. Perhaps it is just psychologically necessary for human beings or other evolved creatures, or even for all beings with emotions directed at others: no other moral psychology is feasible given the basic nature of sentient beings. Ought implies can, so there is no point in reprimanding us for favoring the more proximate beings. Not that we can or should have no concern for the remote and alien, but it must of psychological necessity be diluted and relatively undemanding. If this means that we cannot occupy an entirely impartial and objective moral perspective, then so be it; at least the perspective we have is workable and not too destructive or callous. Brain surgery that changed our moral psychology so as not to discriminate against the distant and different might totally wreck everything that makes human life worthwhile, or even possible. How could you marry someone who systematically favored the remote over the proximate? What would happen to loyalty, trust, solidarity, etc.? What would happen to family life if parents treated every child in the world as deserving the same care and attention as their own?

            It is not an easy matter deciding how robustly moral obligation extends to the distant objects of possible concern. Morality has not evolved with these quandaries in mind. For instance, we have not had to think about how our actions will affect the wellbeing of people in future generations, as in climate change; nor did our ancestors put much thought into our obligations towards animals. I don’t want to argue that our current distribution of moral concern is correct and beyond reproach, only that it is not irrational to treat distance (in the multi-factorial sense) as morally relevant (certainly we should be careful about trying to reconfigure our psychology to adopt a more impartial point of view). I would not, for example, be happy to see support for foreign aid curtailed in favor of a supposed more pressing need on the part of future generations, or the political plight of the Venusians. This is also not a point about favoring humans over non-humans: I am all for treating our own animals as having moral priority over more distant animals, because this exhibits the kind of relational closeness that confers moral priority (though I also think remote animals do deserve some moral consideration). Some sort of moral ordering seems inescapable, but whether we have it right now is another question. What we should not do is try to motivate concern for our fellow man (and other animals) by appeal to some perfectly general principle banning all forms of moral distancing, as if every sentient being in the universe had an exactly equal claim over us.  [1] Things are more nuanced than that, and more difficult to resolve.

 

  [1] People sometimes say that we should try to occupy a God’s-eye view of creation, morally speaking, treating all sentient beings equally. But God does not exist in space and time, and he has no selective emotional relations with human beings and other animals. We do, and it is folly to try to make us take up a Godlike moral perspective. We can take this perspective into account, but we shouldn’t be governed by it, on pain of possible psychological collapse. In any case, there is no demonstration that the diminishing sphere that we habitually operate with is irrational or immoral.