A New Theory of Consciousness

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A New Theory of Consciousness

 

 

The other night the angel Gabriel visited me in my dreams. He came, he announced, to inform me of the true nature of consciousness. I was eager to listen. His account ran as follows (I paraphrase, but this was the gist). The most important point to grasp is that consciousness is the body of God. That’s right—God has a body and it’s identical to the totality of consciousness, human and animal. It is quite wrong to suppose that God is disembodied being—no intelligent agent can be that—but it is equally wrong to suppose that all bodies are alike. Some are made of matter, but some take other forms. God’s mind is not a form of consciousness, at least not of the kind we are familiar with; it transcends anything of which we have experience. It is more like mathematics, as conceived by a Platonist. Consciousness and numbers are immaterial (whatever exactly that means—here the angel Gabriel was emphatic), but not in the same way; well, God’s mind has a higher form of immateriality, not to be assimilated to the immateriality of terrestrial consciousness. So we are to picture the being of God as dualistic: on the one hand, his mind is incomprehensibly immaterial, truly beyond what we can imagine (think of its powers!); on the other hand, his body consists of the consciousness with which we are familiar. It is spread out, indefinitely various, concrete in its way, always like something or other. This sprawling object is God’s body. We are thus at one with God, literally parts of his body–and so with all his animal creation.

What then is matter? Here the angel Gabriel was less decisive: he said two views of it were possible. One view holds that matter is a separate level of being, making up our bodies and the general nature of what we call the physical universe. The other view supposes that so-called matter is just mind in disguise—the view humans know as idealism. If we follow the latter view, then God’s body includes everything, excluding numbers and God’s own mind; if we follow the former view, then God’s body stops at consciousness, with the rest of the universe existing outside of it. The important point, as the angel Gabriel kept insisting, is that consciousness is the body of God. God can act through this body, though he is not required to, and it sometimes does things he does not will it to do, rather like our bodies (a problem of evil admittedly arises here). But it gives God some kind of concrete being and joins him inextricably to his creation—he is not the remote entity that theologians have conjectured. You can literally introspect the body of God! He is with us always, inside us, allowing his being to mix with ours. His mind, however, is a thing apart, like nothing we can experience. Theologically speaking, God is at one with his creation, intersecting with conscious life (he has a great fondness for conscious life). He has given his body to us.

The angel Gabriel allowed that this story might seem incredible, certainly not part of human tradition. He also allowed that mysteries remain—mysteries being the province of God. But he pointed out that the usual human theories of consciousness were also incredible, though we are dulled to their wackier features; was the truth really any more wacky?[1] If there is a God (and who could question that?), and if God needs to have a body (and how could he not?), and if matter could not constitute his body (far too common and grimy)—well then, isn’t consciousness the only thing left to constitute it? And from the point of view of divine design, that is exactly what we should expect: God wishes to unite himself with the creation about which he cares so much. When your consciousness hurts God’s body aches: he suffers with you. He cares as much about you as you care about your body. He is not one of those gods who stands magnificently aloof from conscious life; he is right there with us. So the angel Gabriel asserted, and I could not say otherwise. When I awoke the next morning the world took on a new aspect for me. I felt God’s body throbbing within me.

 

Colin McGinn

[1] I will spare the reader verbatim reportage of the angel Gabriel’s utterances beginning “Oh ye dullards and dimwits!” and going on in the same vein until the final “Get thee hence!” Suffice to say he was mightily unimpressed with human efforts to fathom the nature of consciousness. For how could anything so remarkable be anything other than an aspect of God?

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Comparative Morality

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Comparative Morality

 

 

It is plausible to suggest that our attributions of beauty are essentially comparative. To say that x is beautiful is to say that x is more beautiful than most things (or some such). More exactly, to say that x is a beautiful F (painting, person, motorcycle) is to say that x is more beautiful than most F’s. Objects are not said to be beautiful in isolation but only in relation to other objects; we certainly have the locution “x is more beautiful than y” and this locution is what underlies our use of the adjective “beautiful” used as a one-place predicate. It is the same with other adjectives: to say that x is large is to say that x is larger than most things of a certain class. Thus an ant can be said to be large because it is larger than most ants, though it is certainly not large in relation to other animals—it is large for an ant. Does the same hold for “beautiful”? Can something be a beautiful doorknob because it is more beautiful than other doorknobs but not beautiful tout court? It may not be a beautiful work of art compared to other works of art, suitable for exhibition in an art gallery. In any case, the word “beautiful” is best understood as a comparative: to be beautiful is to be more beautiful than other things of some class or other. This implies that an object can be beautiful in one world but not in another without changing its intrinsic character, since the comparison classes can vary between worlds: what is more beautiful than the majority of things in one world may not be more beautiful than the majority of things in another world. For example, a given bird may be more beautiful than most birds of its species in one world but not in another world in which avian pulchritude is of a higher order. Beauty is not then an intrinsic feature of objects that have it but a relative feature—a matter of how one thing compares to another. In a world of gods even Dorian Grey may seem plain—while what counts as ugly in one setting may be deemed handsome in another. Beauty comes on a scale and position on it is what matters. Accordingly, it makes little sense to entertain the idea that everyone might be beautiful, since that would imply that no one is more beautiful than anyone else: given that some people are more beautiful than others, some will count as beautiful and some will not (the same applies to doorknobs). The point of talk of beauty is to signal differences, so that to be less beautiful than others is to edge towards not being beautiful—someone has to lack this property in order than others may have it. The lowest ranked members of the relevant class will have to lack what the highest ranked members possess, on pain of rendering the concept of beauty nugatory. There can only be large ants because there are also small ants, and the same for beautiful people and doorknobs. In the land of the ugly some may yet be blessed with relative beauty, while in the land of the beautiful even Adonis may cringe and hide.

But I am not concerned here with aesthetics: I want to ask whether a similar story applies to morality. I take it that what I just said about beauty is pretty uncontroversial (if upsetting to the vain), but can something similar be true of goodness? Is it plausible to suggest that for a state of affairs or an action to be good or right is for it to be better than some chosen class of states of affairs or actions? Is moral goodness analyzable as a comparative concept, to the effect that it applies just when one thing is morally better than another? This would imply that moral goodness is not a fixed quality but something that varies with the comparison class: being good is a matter of a relation between the object in question and other objects. To put it simply, an action can be said to be good if and only if it is morally better than most actions. That will need some refinement, but the intent should be clear—goodness is a comparative concept. We can rank actions according to their degree of moral goodness and the property of being morally good is analyzable in terms of the relation of moral superiority. And the same for moral badness: some actions are worse than others and moral badness can be defined as being worse than other actions (of a certain class). The basic moral concept is thus a comparative concept, i.e. being morally better-than. Something like this conception is at work in classical utilitarianism: an action is said to be right just when it produces more utility than other actions that could be performed in the circumstances. Moral rightness is defined as being better than other actions, as judged by the utilitarian measure. If another action would produce more utility than the one actually performed, the latter action is not deemed right. A morally good action is one that produces more utility than other actions that belong to the class of actions that could have been performed. The same action that is deemed not right in the actual circumstances could be right in other circumstances—those in which it is the best of the available actions there. Actions are right only in relation to other actions not tout court. Utilitarianism doesn’t say that an action is right if it produces a lot of utility, which would be a non-comparative condition; it says that an action is right if it produces more utility than other actions. Since utility is the measure of goodness, this implies that actions are morally right according to whether they are better than other actions. And notice that the next-ranked action possible in the circumstances cannot be reasonably deemed wrong without qualification, since it would have been right if the first-ranked action were not available. It is not intrinsically wrong to give someone a hundred dollars—that is only deemed wrong when you could have given a hundred and one dollars. According to utilitarianism, actions are ranked on a scale of moral quality, with some better than others; it is not an all-or-nothing matter. The underlying notion is that of one action being better than others according to its ability to produce utility. In extreme cases an action could be very wrong in one set of circumstances and very right in another, depending on the other actions available (e.g. how much money you have to give).

There is a question how far the comparative account can apply under deontological theories. Isn’t it an absolute all-or-nothing matter whether keeping a promise is right and breaking one is wrong? But even here comparative considerations come into the picture, for two reasons. First, breaking a promise can be more or less wrong depending on the importance of the promise—promising to bring life-saving medicine to a sick person versus promising to sing “My Sharona” to a friend, for example. Clearly, it is worse to break an important promise than a trivial one, so promises can be ranked according to how immoral it is to break them. And it is not implausible to suggest that the scale might be differently set in a world in which promise breaking is more prevalent and serious than in ours: if people are continually breaking important promises, it will seem less immoral to break trivial ones. Or if people are extremely punctilious, what we would count as trivial promise breaking will incur strong condemnation from them. Similarly for lying, ingratitude, etc. It may even be supposed that in the land of routine genocide regular murder will not earn such powerful censure as in our world. After all, not all murders are equally bad, some being worse than others; thus we speak of particularly heinous murders and distinguish them from less grievous cases. The second point is that duties may conflict in a given actual case: telling the truth might involve breaking a promise, for example. Here it is natural to speak of one action as exemplifying more duties than another, thus ranking actions according to the amount of duty following they contain.[1]Comparative thinking is common even in a deontological framework, not just the simple statements “This is right” and “That is wrong”. We can always ask, “Yes, but which action is more right or wrong?” Much the same holds within a virtue ethics perspective, but I won’t go further into this, since the point is clear enough (some people are more virtuous than others, and some virtues more important than others). To be virtuous is to be more virtuous than the average or typical or some such.

The interesting question that arises from this is whether a certain kind of moral relativity follows. Is it relative to a given society how wrong an action is? Suppose that in one country immorality of every kind is rife with the murder rate sky high, while in another country bad behavior is rare and minimal with no murder at all. Won’t the people in these societies calibrate their moral scale according to the prevailing facts? Both will employ a scale ranging from “mildly objectionable” to “absolutely horrific”, but the same actions will be categorized under different moral descriptions—armed robbery deemed only “pretty bad” in the first society while excoriated as “the epitome of evil” in the second society. The prevailing and varying facts will fix how the scale is applied, just as in the beauty case. Our moral language is used to make distinctions, mark contrasts, and these distinctions will exist even when the actions described are different. Thus how bad an action is will depend on the nature of the society that we are dealing with: in a land of villains actions might be only mildly reproved that in a land of saints would be regarded as deserving severe sanction. Societies become more morally lax according to the amount of immorality within them.

But this relativist position encounters resistance from another aspect of our moral thinking, namely that we are wedded to the idea that some actions are intrinsically wicked (or good) irrespective of what other actions may occur. Can it really be that murder is less wicked in a society in which murder is common, as opposed to being described as less wicked by (numbed) members of that society? The intuition to the contrary is certainly strong, and relaxing it likely to lead to nasty consequences, but it appears to conflict with the comparative view of moral discourse. People might rate actions according to their comparative status given the general function of moral discourse, but it doesn’t follow that actions themselves vary in their moral standing as these ratings vary. I think this is a real tension in our moral thinking, since we are committed to both things; and it leads to an uncomfortable form of moral skepticism, to the effect that we might be wrong about how bad various actions actually are. Maybe we are rating actions comparatively so as to preserve the full spectrum of moral language but the underlying moral facts are not varying with our ratings. For example, we rate armed robbery as less immoral than murder, and no doubt it is, but it might be a lot worse than we normally suppose: it might be really bad, just not as bad as murder, which is really really bad. Or it may be that promise breaking is a lot worse than we think, even though it compares favorably to others types of immorality. We apply a fixed set of moral categories but that may not be adequate to the moral facts. Surely a society in which child murder is common is missing something if they regard adult murder as only moderately wrong (comparatively speaking)! So we could be in error about how bad (or good) things are because we deploy a comparative scheme that glosses over questions of absolute rightness. But what are we to do—should we start declaring that certain actions are extremely bad (e.g. promise breaking) and other actions superlatively bad (e.g. murder), phasing out such pallid locutions as “pretty bad” or “not OK”? That seems pointless, so we seem committed to a comparative conception of morality, notwithstanding contrary intuitions. I think that in the course of history our sliding scale has moved around a good deal, though from a wider perspective the moral facts have not changed—murder was always as bad as it is now (and it may be a lot worse than even we recognize). It is clearly important to our moral thinking that we retain a comparative point of view—we need to count some actions are worse than others not just as good or bad simpliciter—but we don’t want to devolve into a kind of relativism that makes the moral status of an action dependent on people’s comparative judgments. Thus there is a tension at work here as we try to do justice to both ways of thinking. This tension does not appear to exist in the beauty case, since there we have less trouble with the idea of relative beauty: a given person might really be less beautiful in a world in which everyone is at the Cleopatra level (though that person is equally beautiful relative to our world). A large ant in our world might be a small ant in another world in which ants are twice as large, but it is less easy to accept that a person who is fairly wicked in our world is quite virtuous in another world in which wickedness is doubled. But then isn’t “fairly wicked” clearly a comparative term, inviting the question “Compared to whom?” We seem to operate uneasily with a moral system that is largely comparative but also contains hints of the absolute.[2]

 

Colin McGinn

 

[1] W.D. Ross formulates the point this way in The Right and the Good (1930): “right acts can be distinguished from wrong acts only as being those which, of all those possible for the agent in the circumstances, have the greatest balance of prima facie rightness, in those respects in which they are prima facie right, over their prima faciewrongness, in those respects in which they are prima facie wrong”. Note the comparative form of this definition of rightness.

[2] I can find no analogy for this situation drawn form elsewhere: nothing else has this kind of dual structure. Pragmatically, our moral discourse operates comparatively, at least most of the time, but metaphysically we are also drawn to a conception of moral facts that transcends such comparative truths. If we compare non-moral uses of “good”, as in “good knife”, we find a comparative account compelling, but there is no countervailing tendency towards absolute judgments: to be a good knife is just to be better than the majority of knives (in a given possible world), and no knife is deemed non-relationally good. We would expect on semantic grounds for the moral “good” to follow the pattern of the non-moral “good”, but it seems also to connote an absolute trait of actions that doesn’t vary between possible comparison classes– hence the tension.

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Instantiating the Mental

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Instantiating the Mental

 

 

Objects have properties: that seems safe to say. But what is an object and what is a property and what is having? We can point to paradigms: the object that is my desk has the property of being brown. Philosophers like to paraphrase such a statement as follows: the desk instantiates the property of being brown. So now we have a threefold scheme—object, property, and instantiation. My question is whether this scheme applies to the mental: can we say that there are objects which instantiate mental properties? Put aside the question of how to define “mental”; the question is whether mental facts (let’s help ourselves to that notion) consist of objects instantiating properties. Does the paradigm of a material object instantiating a physical property carry over to the mind? Put differently, is the threefold scheme a universally applicable structure under which both physical and mental fall?

To be more specific, when someone is in pain or has a belief or is dreaming or feels angry or understands a sentence is that analyzable as an object instantiating a property? The first question that confronts us is what the object might be, and that is already problematic. Is it the mind or the person or the brain or the body or the soul or particular mental events? Each of these could be the instantiating object—the thing that has mental properties (the property of being in pain, of believing, of dreaming, etc.). Let’s assume it is the person or self, since that is our common way of talking; the main question concerns the notion of instantiating a mental property, no matter what the appropriate instantiating object may be. Is it true that when I am in pain a person instantiates the property of being in pain? Is this true in the same sense that it is true that my desk instantiates being brown? Are there any important differences here? We can certainly point to differences between mental and physical properties such as the privacy of mental properties and the publicity of physical properties, subjectivity and objectivity, perceptibility and imperceptibility, consciousness and unconsciousness. But on the face of it these differences don’t entail any difference in the logic of instantiation—in the ontological structure captured by the threefold scheme. Isn’t the mental case just another example of the universal structure consisting of objects instantiating properties? After all, it may be said, that structure applies equally and univocally to abstract objects like numbers, so why not to mental objects (persons) and their attributes? We can say of the number 2 that it is even, and isn’t that just to say that the object 2 instantiates the property of being even? Some may shiver at the use of “object” here, but once that notion is accepted isn’t it a short step (no step at all) to talk of objects instantiating properties? Similarly, a person may be said to be an object instantiating various properties, both mental and physical: the person’s body has a certain shape and color and his or her mind likewise possesses properties like belief and sensation. This is the metaphysical structure that underlies our talk of mind and body and it is uniform in both cases. Facts necessarily consist of objects instantiating properties, it may be said, so how could the mind fail to fit this conception?

But not all philosophers have seen things that way, though skepticism about extending the instantiation relation from the physical to the mental has not been the official motivation. Some have suggested a bundle theory of the self according to which there is no object called the self to do any instantiating; rather, mental attributions are to be analyzed as analogous to set membership—being in pain, say, is one of the several mental states that may constitute a constellation of such states. The mind is nothing but a collection of mental states, so that talk of someone’s being in pain is just including that state in a collection that currently exists (the bundle theory of physical objects has the same consequence: a given property is conceived as a member of a bundle not as something instantiated by an object). Someone who holds that the mind is a subject-less congeries will be resistant to the idea that any object does any instantiating; the only object here is the collection itself, but it contains members without instantiating those members. Then there are those who invoke the idea of a feature-placing sentence to characterize the way people have mental states: just as “It’s raining” has no logical subject, so “I am in pain” has no logical subject, the word “I” acting as a dummy singular term. Mental sentences function as feature-placing sentences and their semantics does not invoke the object-property dichotomy: for how can there be instantiation without denoted objects to do the instantiating?  Another approach is to declare that it is a category mistake to compare mental attributes (so-called) with physical attributes like shape and color, because they are to be analyzed by means of conditionals; and conditionals are not instantiated in the way properties are. Here one thinks of Ryle: the mind is not a repository of categorical properties but a set of tendencies or dispositions or capacities or propensities. And such facts are not composed of properties at all, since there are no if-then properties, but rather reflect our conditional ways of talking. The mind just isn’t substantial in the way it would have to be for the object-property scheme to apply.[1] Similarly, we have the expressive view of mental utterances, according to which no facts are stated in such utterances but rather various acts of expression occur—this is a radical rejection of the physical object paradigm. Persons don’t have mental properties at all; talk of the mental is to be interpreted in terms of expressive acts that lack even truth-value.

So the object-property instantiation model has not been viewed as compulsory, but it is not clear that any of the above really get to the heart of why it can seem misguided. Admittedly, it is difficult to articulate what is dubious about it, though it does seem forced and unperceptive. Isn’t there something unique about the having of states of mind? Perhaps we do better to dwell on another aspect of the case, namely the application of the concept of ownership. There is a sense in which my mental states are mine that goes beyond any idea of mere instantiation: objects simply exemplify properties blindly, as it were, but I claim them as my own—I feel them to be part of me. No doubt this is connected to the fact that they are conscious: I am conscious of my mental states as inhering in me, as bearing an especially close connection to what I think of as myself. This relation is not captured by the general notion of instantiation, which is a pale simulacrum of what I experience. One is tempted to say that I super-instantiate my conscious mental states—they belong to me; they are extensions of me. No one else could have just these mental states, whereas physical objects share their states indiscriminately. There is no conscious possession in the case of physical objects and their properties, but conscious subjects feel their mental states to be their personal property, so to speak. This is mine. However, though that intuition is powerful, it is hard to give any theoretical account of it—or even to pinpoint it precisely. One is quickly reduced to metaphor and invitations to “look within”. We simply have no model of it, and no perceptual representation of what is going on. I can see my body instantiating various perceptible properties, but I can’t see my mind doing this—though I feel my mind to be mine in a much more intimate sense than I feel my body to be mine. It is easy to feel myself to be merged with my mental states, for them to be integral to my identity; but mere instantiation is not enough for this to be so.

What can we say about this special kind of possession? What kind of fact is it? This is where we run into a theoretical brick wall—our conceptual scheme falters. But that is not very surprising, given the generally problematic character of the mind and consciousness. If consciousness is a mystery, it is predictable that its possession will also be: we don’t know what it is for its states to be possessed in the peculiar way that they are. I know that I have various beliefs, sensations, emotions, etc., but I don’t grasp what it is for me to have these states (if “states” is even the right word). The self-mind nexus is a mystery. We say airily that a person instantiates various mental properties, but what this comes down to remains opaque. The self is a notorious puzzle, and so are mental states, but so also is the relation between them—how could it not be, given what it relates?[2] For example, I may utter the sentence “I am in pain” and thereby state a fact, but what is this relation of being in pain? It sounds like saying,  “I am in Miami”, but it clearly means nothing like that. Is it a weak attempt to make sense of the relation between the sensation of pain and myself? Then why don’t we say that I am “in” pleasure or “in” belief? I have a pleasurable sensation and I have a belief, but what is this “having”? It strikes one as a mysterious and unanalyzable relation, certainly not as nothing more than the general relation of instantiation. Perhaps we will one day come to understand its inner nature, but perhaps we won’t. The first step, at least, is to recognize the problem. Here I am, and here are these mental states, and the former evidently has the latter: but what kind of having is this—what mode of possession is invo

[1] So-called adverbial theories of mental language have a similar upshot.

[2] We can therefore add the “having” relation to the mind-body problem alongside mental states and the self that has them. It seems like a sui generis relation not reducible to the relation between the brain and its physical states. Certainly, it would be odd to suggest that it is a “physical” relation in any intelligible sense.

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Self-Knowledge

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Self- Knowledge

 

 

Knowledge expressed using “I” is different from knowledge expressed using other modes of reference (names, descriptions, demonstratives). I know that I wrote The Subjective View and I also know that Colin McGinn wrote The Subjective View, but these are different pieces of knowledge despite the identity of reference. This is made vivid in amnesia cases: I might forget that I wrote that book while coming to learn that someone called “Colin McGinn” wrote it—I don’t know I am the author though I know who the author is (that McGinn fellow). I also might know that I did something and not know that Colin McGinn did, because I have forgotten who I am and what my name is. Thus “I am Colin McGinn” is an informative statement. But how exactly do the two pieces of knowledge differ—what makes them different? What is distinctive about first-person knowledge? Evidently I can acquire knowledge of myself expressible using “I”, but what is the specific nature of such knowledge—what makes it stand out from other sorts of knowledge of objects?

One possible response is that it is not unique but merely a special case of an informative identity statement. It is similarly true that “Hesperus is a planet” and “Phosphorus is a planet” express different propositions, but there is nothing special about either proposition. There are simply two modes of presentation associated with the two names, so knowledge of one doesn’t imply knowledge of the other. Likewise, it may be said, “I” in my mouth expresses a different mode of presentation from “Colin McGinn”: that is what the difference consists in. But this response misses an important point, namely that I could also not know a proposition that refers to me by a different name (or description or demonstrative). But that difference is not the same difference as the difference between my name and “I”: the former could just consist in a different description being true of me, while the latter does not. The proposal blithely employs the notion of a mode of presentation without saying what it consists in for my use of “I”, but that is empty unless something is said to explain what this mode of presentation might be. In reply to this objection it may be offered that the difference is that “I” is an indexical while proper names are not: that is how the two propositions differ (now pick your favorite theory of indexicals). But again this conflates cases, since “you” and “he” are also indexical but don’t track what is special about first-person knowledge. I might also think that he wrote The Subjective View while seeing myself in a mirror without realizing it, but this again doesn’t give me the knowledge that I wrote that book. It is something about first-person knowledge in particular that is special not indexical knowledge in general or merely the possibility of more than one name for the same object. We can’t assimilate the case to a wider phenomenon; we need to identify what it is specifically about first-person knowledge that makes it different from other sorts of knowledge of objects. When I know a fact about myself that I express using “I” how does this differ from knowing the same fact about myself without using “I”?

I think that to answer this question we need to dig deep, metaphysically and epistemologically; it is not a merely linguistic phenomenon that we are concerned to understand. The answer I want to propose is not easy to grasp and I may have trouble explaining it. The basic thought is that we may not have the sort of knowledge of ourselves that we think we have—there is something peculiarly problematic about such knowledge. I don’t really know that I wrote The Subjective View, even though I know quite well that Colin McGinn wrote it. This is because there is a gap between my knowledge of myself qua myself and my knowledge of the person known as Colin McGinn. I can coherently say to myself, “I know that CMG did such and such, but I’m not sure that I ever did such and such, because I’m not sure that the person so named is really me”. I think he is, but the question admits of rational doubt. Put differently, I am not certain that I am a particular person in the objective world—that this self is that person. I am in a sense alienated from that individual, as if he is more my avatar than I myself. So I am unclear that his exploits are really mine. Let me try to elucidate this doubt by constructing a fanciful thought experiment.

Suppose that I actually exist in an immobile form in a safe room of some sort (a brain in a vat, to make it concrete). However, I have a body assigned to me that leaves the room and wanders around the world acquiring a history—that is, the experiences generated by this body are reproduced in my mind, so that it is as if I am wandering about. I thus acquire information about the doings of this body. We might be inclined to say that I leave the room with my body (though my brain stays put) and come to have various properties as a consequence. This already sounds strained and a further wrinkle can put it under pressure: suppose that another person commandeers my body and goes out into the world using it as he desires. This individual is called “Colin McGinn” and he does many things, including write books. He is not I. Nevertheless, I might acquire various beliefs about myself as a result of what this individual does, e.g. that I wrote a certain book. These beliefs would be false in the situation described: I never do anything—he does all the doing. It merely seems to me that I do these things.

The skeptic now steps in to urge that this might be true of my actual situation. How do I know that what the person called “CMG” does is really done by me? Maybe I am not embodied at all and the wandering person I think of as myself is not me. Maybe I went through the mental motions of writing a book but none of this caused a book to be written; instead someone else in a certain body did the actual physical writing. I have all sorts of impressions as of that body, as well as knowledge of my subjective states, but when I think I have acted in certain objective ways I really haven’t. After all, it doesn’t follow from the fact that I performed a certain series of mental actions (choosing words, etc.) and that a certain body moved in ways corresponding to this series that I performed those physical actions. I might be ensconced impotently somewhere while all the action is going on elsewhere, mistakenly taking credit for it. I might have no active presence in the world at all, though someone that does matches me in certain ways. I think I have a history of objective happenings, but perhaps I don’t, having only a mental history and an uneventful history of physical immobility. For instance, I never went to school in Blackpool, even though it seems to me that I did—it was someone else who went there in my stead. Accordingly, my beliefs about myself are generally false: my self-knowledge is not what I thought. This is because of the gap between how I appear to myself from the inside and what I objectively do or am subject to. I could express this gap by saying, “I might not be Colin McGinn”. The person with that name might well exist and have the history I take myself to have, but I am not identical to that person. I can therefore sensibly say to myself that I might not be Colin McGinn, i.e. the person who has such and such a history. I know various facts about him and I have no qualms about attributing those facts to him, but there is a question as to whether he is I, i.e. the individual I encounter from a first-person perspective. The objective self that is called “CMG” might not be the subjective self I refer to with “I”. That objective self, so conceived, certainly did various things, but he might not be me, so it is doubtful that I did those things. My putative identity with CMG is thus questionable because of the gap that exists between the subjective self and the objective self, i.e. between the self I encounter within and the public self that exists objectively. The very thought that I have an objective identity can seem like a rash conjecture, even when I don’t doubt that there are objective persons. How can I be something in the world? The world exists with persons in it, but the thing I refer to with “I” might not be one of these persons.

Let me try to put the point more intuitively. When I think of myself (de re) as Colin McGinn I have no trouble with the idea that this individual has a certain objective history—that very individual. I am thinking of an entity that has an objective existence, is observable by others, with a body, etc. But when I think of myself as myself using “I” I feel a gap open up between this entity and the objective facts I associate with it, which I might express by saying, “It is problematic that this entity ever did any of those things”. From the first-person perspective it is moot whether the self even has such attributes; they seem external to it, not part of its intrinsic character, not part of what is given with the self. Thus we feel that the self stands apart from the attributes commonly attributed to it when conceived from the third-person perspective. This is the difference between “I” and “CMG”: the latter presents no gap between the object and the facts that hold of it, while the former does present just such a gap. That is why it can seem surprising that I am an objective being at all: for how can I be that? I seem to myself from the first-person perspective to be of the wrong category to be an objective person, so I am uneasy about claims to self-knowledge of the usual kind–for example, that I wrote a certain book. I feel myself to be curiously remote from the facts of my supposed objective history, and would not be confounded by the discovery that I am not the real subject of these facts, as in the skeptical possibility described earlier. The fundamental form of this kind of thought is that Iam not my body, so that anything it does is not an attribute of me—though I have no qualms about attributing these things to the person I call by my name. This is no doubt what Descartes (and many others) was driving at—the self is not to be identified with the body, so that the history of one is not the history of the other. We could put this by saying that the inner self is not the objective person; of if he is, that is a problematic proposition.

Metaphysically, we could say (riskily) that the self is a bare particular with respect to objective facts: it is not qualified by such facts or presented as instantiating the properties in question. But when we think of a person from a third-person perspective he or she is not similarly conceived as a bare particular: here the facts are integral and salient. It would accordingly be bizarre to offer a theory of the semantics of “I” that defines it by reference to objective circumstances, as that “I” in my mouth means “the author of The Subjective View”, though that theory is by no means absurd as a theory of the name “Colin McGinn”. Put in these (risky) terms, self-knowledge is knowledge of a bare particular (relative to objective facts) that has certain extrinsic attributes by virtue of a relation to something else, while knowledge of the third-person kind is knowledge of an object endowed with various intrinsic properties. Of course, we must add that the self is not a bare particular tout court, since it has an array of mental properties that can be introspected—but we have been speaking of knowledge of physical properties of the person. With respect to mental properties, there is a strong contrast with the kind of self-knowledge discussed so far, since in their case we can’t envisage the possibility of someone else being the subject of these properties. I can’t say, “Someone else may be the person suffering these pains” as I can say, “Someone else might be the author of The Subjective View”. In the self-ascription of mental states I am not venturing beyond the subjective self, as I am when attributing physical attributes to myself. In a sense, then, the former case is like the case of the objective self in that both don’t involve any attempt to cross a metaphysical divide; it is only self-knowledge of objective facts that involves this kind of leap—the kind of knowledge expressed by “I am the author of The Subjective View”. That is the peculiar case, mixing as it does the subjective with the objective, thus inviting the protest, “But how could I have such attributes?” What I most intimately am is divorced from such worldly matters, or so it seems to me from the inside. That may be a false view to take, but it infects our attitudes towards self-knowledge nonetheless: it is what makes “I am CMG” such a potent and troubling thought—the very idea that this might be that. Surely there comes a time in everyone’s life when they recognize that they are a person existing in an objective world, as well as the subjective self with which they have become so familiar; and this is a potentially vertiginous thought—a kind of expansion and contraction at the same time (“I am more than this locus of subjectivity, but also only one object among many”). I am suggesting that such fraught thoughts are built into self-knowledge and give it the peculiar character that it has. There is nothing particularly strange about knowing objective facts about a named individual, or about someone knowing in the first-person that he or she has certain mental states, but it is strange to know that you yourself have certain objective attributes—because that is to combine the inner and the outer in a problematic way (as the skeptic points out). At its most basic, the remarkable (and terrifying) thought is that I am someone.[1]

 

[1] Readers familiar with Thomas Nagel’s work on these topics will detect some points of contact between it and the present reflections.

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The Connected Mind

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The Connected Mind

 

 

Massive modularity is the order of the day. The mind, like the body, is made up of a large number of separate mental organs (faculties, systems). Here is a typical list: the five senses, memory (several kinds), the moral faculty, the mathematical faculty, the theory of mind faculty, the commonsense physics faculty, the language capacity, the will (motor control), the emotions, the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, facial recognition, sexual competence and performance. The picture is of an array of distinct modules that specialize in certain tasks or competences, each with a characteristic structure and mode of operation, rather like the distinctly individuated organs of the body; the mind is not an undifferentiated blob or a tabula rasa or an indefinitely plastic potentiality with no discrete components or subdivisions. The body is made up of a great many autonomous organs each dedicated to a certain function, each with a distinct type of cellular composition and mode of operation, all contained in a single envelope; the mind is viewed as similarly divided and segregated into heterogeneous units, all comprehended under the broad label “mind”. Correspondingly, the brain is also conceived as modular, with anatomically distinct areas dedicated to particular mental functions; it is nothing like porridge. In each aspect the organism, whether human or animal, is viewed as a collection of separate elements that together add up to a whole bearing a simple name: “body”, “mind”, “brain”. The organism is a feat of modular engineering through and through, no doubt formed by the demands of evolution, the mind as well as the body.

But it is not an unconnected collection: the parts interact and interface with each other. This is as much an aspect of the mind’s nature as its individual components. It can be studied in its own right. This is a large subject that has only just begun. I am concerned here to articulate some general principles and distinctions. I begin with Fodor’s celebrated discussion of the modularity of the senses: the idea that vision (say) is an “encapsulated” system incapable of modification or supervision by the cognitive components of the mind, as is evidenced by the persistence of illusion under conditions of cognitive correction.[1] You will keep on seeing that stick in water as bent even when you know perfectly well that it is straight. Your beliefs are powerless to bring about any alteration in the deliverances of your senses, no matter how you might try to change how you see things. This shows, according to Fodor, that the senses are modular and exist as separate systems in the overall economy of the mind. Of course, the senses are also modular (encapsulated) with respect to each other as well as the “central system” of rational thought: the fact that you feel the stick to be straight with your hands has no power to alter the way it is visually perceived. In general, the senses have no power to govern the operations of each other: what you see doesn’t affect what you hear, what you smell doesn’t determine what you feel. The senses are certainly coordinated, but they don’t penetrate each other’s domains (synesthesia is the closest thing to that). They are self-governed, refusing to heed with their neighbors assert. They are as separate as the bodily organs that serve them. We might say that they form the unconnected mind—as unconnected as the lungs and kidneys or the stomach and the feet. Similarly, bodily sensations are impervious to outside influence: you can’t stop feeling pain simply because you want to or because your intellect tells you there is nothing to worry about. Nor does the sinner stop feeling pleasure because his conscience tells him it is wrong (the sexual module is notoriously impervious to the moral module, and likewise for the gustatory module and the prudential module). There is clearly a good deal of encapsulation in the human mind, as each part of it blithely goes about its specific business. It is not all harmony and concord. It is as if the parts have a will of their own.

But encapsulation is not the general rule; in fact, it is more the exception. Consider memory: memory is open to all-comers, quite promiscuous in what it will allow in. Anything from the senses, thoughts, feelings, acts of imagination, passing desires, other acts of memory: you can remember pretty much anything you can be conscious of (and maybe more than that). Memory is a module that is receptive to every other module, allowing itself to be ruled and structured by what happens outside of it. It is like an organ of the body that takes input from every other organ. Memory is maximally un-encapsulated, hyper-connected: “Only connect” is its invariable motto. Thought is quite similar: Fodor never claimed that thought is encapsulated with respect to the senses—that would be clearly false. What you think is obviously responsive to what you experience perceptually or else empirical knowledge would be impossible. What you believe is obviously affected by what you see, hear, etc. Not everything you think is controlled by your senses—not if there is such a thing as a priori knowledge—but in general thought is not closed to outside influence from the organs of sense. We can perhaps imagine that it could be: there might be a pathological condition in which thought becomes closed off from perception, so that a person’s beliefs are never shaped by what he or she senses. But that is not the wiring-diagram of the normal human and animal mind: the lines are always open to what the senses have to report. Here the modules are different but they are systematically connected (at least in one direction).

Emotion and thought provide an interesting case. There is clearly an interaction between emotion and thought that cuts both ways: emotions can influence thought (even “color” thought) and thought can influence emotion. The connection might be seen as adaptive: it is good for emotion to be shaped by thought so as to enable it to be more fine-grained and rational; and it is good for emotion to influence thought because of its motivational force (emotion can proverbially concentrate the mind). So far, so platitudinous: but the example suggests a useful general distinction between types of intra-mental (but cross-modular) connection, namely that between causal and constitutive connection. It is one thing for causal connections to exist between distinct modules, but it is another thing for the connections to determine the very nature of what belongs internally to the connected modules. It seems true to say that emotions can have their nature fixed by the thoughts that influence them; that emotion has to involve those thoughts. Here cognition and emotion are inseparable. For instance, the thoughts one has about a loved individual are integral to the emotion of love that one feels toward that individual. This is not merely a causal connection but a constitutive one. In view of this constitutive connection, we can reasonably speak of a kind of intra-mental “externalism”: emotions (some of them anyway) have their nature fixed by factors external to the module proper to them; or better, the two modules coalesce at this point. If we consider the cognitive faculty as existing in the “environment” of the affective faculty, then we can say that the latter has its content fixed by something external to it—though that something becomes internal to emotions themselves. The connections are not merely extrinsic but intrinsic—they determine the very nature of emotion. If there were no such connection, the emotions available to a subject would be limited in a way that are not when there is such a connection. On Twin Mind-Earth different thoughts coexist with the same affective module and the result is a different set of emotions: if you vary the thoughts, you vary the emotions. Thought content penetrates emotional content; the psychological “environment” contributes to fixing the inner form of a given mental module. Here we have not just connection between one module and another but annexation, appropriation, penetration. One type of mental state bleeds into another, suffusing it. According to standard externalism, the mind and the environment are not just causally connected but also constitutively enmeshed; and the same kind of relation can bind mental modules to each other. So separation of modules is consistent with constitutive connection. The mind may be an array of separate systems but those systems can saturate each other, shaping their content. We might call this “internal externalism”.

Language affords another example of overlap and interpenetration. The language capacity is best viewed as an internal system that has become hooked up to a sensory-motor system, generally vocal speech (but also sign language in some cases).[2] The two systems interface and cooperate but they are not to be identified: one could exist without the other. Double dissociation is possible, as when a creature can make vocal sounds but not speak a language, or possesses an inner language but has no means of expressing it publicly. But when a creature has a normal vocal language that faculty is an inextricable combination of one module and another: the inner language faculty becomes linked to an outer sensory-motor system and the outer system comes to embody the inner faculty. The two are joined together, even though strictly they are separate mental systems capable of dissociation. Normal human language use is a phenomenon of connection not of the connected things considered separately. Thus sounds come to express meanings and meanings get expressed in sounds. Without the ability to connect the distinct modules the human organism would be incapable of vocal speech. The connections are as vital as the things connected. Evolution can produce modes of connection as much as it can produce the things that are connected; and that is apparently what happened when human speech evolved from the joining of a sensory-motor system and an internal linguistic system.

So we have three types of relation between separate compartments of the mind. First, we have encapsulation in which no pathways exist between one compartment and another—no influence from one part of the mind to another. Here we have what might be called “the unconnected mind” (Fodor’s encapsulation). Second, we have causal pathways that allow for what happens in one part to be affected by what happens in another part, as with conscious events affecting memory and the influence of perception on thought. Third, we have connections that amount to contributions, in which one part of the mind actually shapes another part: here there is a new synthesis that resembles traditional externalism (only now it’s an internal externalism).[3] Modularity can obtain in all three situations, though it is most conspicuous in the first kind of case. What I would emphasize is that the connections are as important as the elements combined: the mind is a connected ensemble of separate modules. Those connections are as worthy of study as the connected elements. Psychology is really the science of the constituent parts of the mind and of their modes of connection: modular connectedness (compare physiology). First it isolates and describes the parts; then it studies their inter-connections.[4]

 

[1] Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (1983).

[2] This is Chomsky’s general position: see What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2018).

[3] I am not intending to endorse traditional externalism, which comes in several forms, some more plausible than others; I am merely pointing to an analogy in order to bring out the way components of the mind can interpenetrate. Once the disunity of the mind is acknowledged it is natural to ask whether the components enjoy constitutive connections with each other, and it appears that in some cases they do. Faculty psychology is thus consistent with inter-faculty crossover.

[4] The inter-module connections can be as innate as the modules themselves, as much the product of evolution. This is presumably true for the connection between the internal language faculty and the sensory-motor system that typically expresses it in acts of human communication.

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A Counterfactual Theory of Morality

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A Counterfactual Theory of Morality

 

 

It is frequently maintained that moral sentences are logically misleading: they look like straightforward fact-stating descriptive statements but actually they are not. Their underlying logical form differs from their surface grammatical form. Thus the emotive theory treats them as expressions of emotion (exclamations); the prescriptive theory takes them to be recommendations (imperatives); the anti-categorical-imperative theory interprets them as hypotheticals about desire; the existentialist philosophy condemns them as dispensable symptoms of bad faith not eternal truths. The thought is that the surface form of moral sentences (e.g. “Stealing is wrong”) invites errors of reification and that a paraphrase away from that form will reveal their logical nature to be other than it seems (compare Russell’s theory of descriptions, always the paradigm). We thus rid ourselves of entities and facts that offend our ontological sensibilities. In roughly this spirit I will suggest a new theory of the logical form of moral sentences, though I doubt that it has the liberating ontological significance boasted by other theories; I am concerned more with semantic accuracy than metaphysical purity.[1]

The theory can be simply stated: A moral proposition is a statement about what should be done in certain circumstances. To say that stealing is wrong, for example, is to say that if an occasion for stealing arises you should not take it. To say that generosity is right (or good) is to say that if an occasion for generosity arises you should so act. The idea is that if an opportunity to do a certain something arises you should act in a certain way and not in other ways. Life presents us with occasions of possible action (to steal or not to steal, to be generous or not to be) and morality directs us to act in one way rather than another. Thus the theory is a counterfactual theory in roughly the sense in which we have counterfactual theories of causation: to say that a causes b is to say that if an event like a were to occur an event like b would occur.[2] Causal statements look like simple categorical statements, but logically they have a counterfactual form—they are conditionals of a certain sort. There is no more to them than what such conditionals assert—nothing over and above the meaning of the counterfactual itself. Similarly, we say nothing more in saying that stealing is wrong than that you should not steal in situations in which stealing is an option. When a mother is instructing her child in the wrongness of stealing she is saying that stealing should not be done when the opportunity to steal arises. We might put it by saying that certain actions should not be performed when one might be tempted to perform the actions in question. If you feel like stealing and you think you can get away with it, don’t do it! Or better, you shouldn’t do it—it would be wrong. Likewise, if an opportunity to be kind presents itself, you should take that opportunity and act kindly. The logical form of a moral utterance is thus conditional: it says what should be done if certain possible conditions obtain. If no such conditions could ever arise, the statement would be pointless (ought implying can); the point of morality is to regulate possible action.

We can note three things about this analysis. First, it is irreducibly normative: it says what should be done in certain circumstances, not what is done or could be done or would be done. So it is not intended as a theory that attempts to leverage the normative from the non-normative, still less a theory that rejects the normative on metaphysical grounds. The normative is present there in full force. Second, the theory directly relates morality to action: morality is all about regulating actions—not about emotions or desires or Platonic forms or aggregates of happiness. It is also about actions as they might occur in the real world—situations an agent might actually confront. It is practical in that sense. It says that you should do this and you shouldn’t do that if such and such a predictable situation should arise. Third, it discourages overly fanciful metaphysical ideas—the Form of the Good, indefinable non-natural moral qualities, some heavy-duty forms of moral realism. It doesn’t, however, endorse forms of moral anti-realism or reductionism, since it explicitly builds in a normative condition in the shape of “should”; it merely advises against taking moral sentences as logically analogous to such sentences as “Gravity is proportional to mass” or “London is populous”, which are not logically conditional. To say that stealing is wrong is not to categorically ascribe a property to an object, as those sentences do, but to make a statement about what should be done in certain circumstances. Moral propositions are thus like dispositional propositions (e.g. “salt is soluble in water”): superficially they seem like simple categorical statements, but deep down they are conditional in form. They function to abbreviate a more complex-looking counterfactual conditional. That didactic mother might pedantically remark, “Stealing is wrong, i.e. you shouldn’t steal if an occasion arises where you might be tempted to”. She is not attempting to dispense with the moral concept of wrongness—indeed, she invokes it when employing the word “should”—but merely spelling out the formal content of the original sentence. She might even try to avoid all possible confusion by saying explicitly, “You morally shouldn’t do it”. She isn’t attempting to get outside the moral circle, just to articulate the thrust of a moral affirmation—it’s about what should and shouldn’t be done in certain possible circumstances.

Does this theory avoid moral “queerness”? There are all sorts of metaphysical assumptions about that question that I would dispute, but we can quickly respond as follows: no in one way, but yes in another. No, in that we are still invoking an irreducibly normative notion in the shape of “should”; but yes, in that we are not postulating something that transcends constraints on action—as arguably Plato’s Form the Good does (as it might be interpreted anyway). We are not invoking an entity that is fit to be gazed at and adulated, like some sort of radiant god, but rather enunciating principles governing human action. There are metaphysical extravagances that might be discouraged by the down-to-earth proposal to paraphrase moral statements in the manner suggested, but theorists looking for naturalistic reduction or elimination will be disappointed. The proposal is metaphysically modest, being merely an attempt to get the semantics straight. The proper form of objection to the theory would be that it fails to capture the entailments of moral sentences, or generates unacceptable entailments, but no such objection has hitherto been offered; and the theory seems on solid ground in that respect. Of course, we can go on to ask what justifies such a conditional should-statement—that is, what makes such a statement true—and here we may expect the usual array of theories to offer themselves, e.g. divine command theory, moral relativism, utilitarianism, deontology, social contract theory, etc. But that is to go beyond what the theory set out to accomplish, namely an account of logical form. If the child asks her mother why she shouldn’t do such-and-such, the mother might reply by sketching her favored moral theory; or she might loftily respond by observing that she is merely informing her child of what moral statements mean. If her daughter is precocious enough, she might further comment, “Moral propositions are logically analogous to causal propositions according to the counterfactual theory”. Here we can imagine the clever child replying, “If that’s all you are saying I quite agree, though there is still much work in moral theory to be done once questions of logical form are out of the way”.

An intuitive way to put the theory is as follows: morality is fundamentally about making the correct moral decisions as the occasion arises. Decisions are made in concrete circumstances. Abstract moral propositions don’t always make this clear (“Humility is a virtue”, “Cleanliness is next to godliness”), but it is close to the surface of moral discourse. We may say grandly that stealing is wrong and generosity is right, but what we mean is that you shouldn’t decide to steal something when it is in front of your nose and you fancy having it, and you should decide to act generously to someone who needs help even if you have other things to do. Moral propositions are essentially about what decisions to make in what circumstances—hence conditionals about what should and shouldn’t be done when certain situations arise. We might call this theory the “normative hypothetical” theory: “if it is the case that p, you should/shouldn’t do X”—a conditional with a descriptive antecedent and a normative consequent.[3]

 

C

[1] I say “new” but it is entirely possible that the theory has been enunciated elsewhere; it is certainly commonsensical. Still, it is far from orthodox.

[2] I won’t fuss with exact formulation, types and tokens, etc. I am merely making a comparison. (I am also not endorsing counterfactual theories of causation.)

[3] The same kind of account is attractive for statements of prudence, e.g. “Eating in moderation is good”. What this says is that when you are presented with food you should not stuff yourself—if food is placed in front of you, you should consume it in moderation. The prudent person is one who does what he (prudentially) should when negotiating the conditions if life.

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Monogamy

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Monogamy

 

 

Monogamy is defined by the OED as “the practice of being married to or having a sexual relationship with only one person at a time” (from Greek words meaning “single” and “marriage”). A certain type of human relationship (marriage, sexual involvement) is restricted by this practice to a single person at a given time: you must not enter into this relationship with several people simultaneously.[1] The restriction is not typical of human relationships: other social relationships are permitted to have multiple simultaneous instances—friendship, parenthood, pedagogy, teammate, coworker, etc. People don’t enter into these relationships with the express stipulation that no one else may be permitted to be in the same relationship with the person in question—for example, you don’t expect a new friend to cut off all other friendships for your sake, keeping only unto you. These relationships are not deemed mono-relationships; indeed, it would seem preposterous to most people if someone were to take this attitude (“You are teaching someone else!”). A question must then arise as to whether the practice of monogamy is rational and desirable. What if a tribe inverted our practices and regarded friendship as mono and marriage as poly? That would seem arbitrary and unmotivated—are we so sure that our practices are not similarly benighted?

How monogamous are we really? We might distinguish strong monogamy and weak monogamy: the weak kind requires only that there be no sexual contact with another person, while the strong kind prohibits all affection and physical contact with others. The super-strong kind bans even affectionate thoughts about others, or being in the same room. We don’t normally insist on the strong kind, but it is a conceivable form of social exclusiveness. We make room for affection that extends beyond the marriage or romantic partner, though we grow uneasy when the affection crosses certain lines. Hugs and kisses are acceptable, but not kisses on the lips or prolonged hugs. We are not all that strict about passing infidelity of the heart, though that is close to dangerous territory for many people. The lines are blurry and the trespasses contestable, yet we continue to insist on the essential rightness of the practice. Is this rational? Is it good for us? Let’s chip away at it a bit. Suppose people distinguished different types or levels of infidelity: there exists a strict hierarchy of infractions, from hugging to handholding to kissing to genital contact. Each level has its own set of rules and laws with varying punishments that might be formalized in the marriage contract: say, fantasizing and hugging are acceptable but nothing more intimate. Not all offences are treated alike. Are these people monogamous? It is not a binary question: they are monogamous to a certain degree, in a certain respect, quasi-monogamous, monogamous-ish. “How monogamous are you?” “Pretty monogamous, but not, like, absolutely monogamous.” This is not so far removed from current human practices. But there might be difficult cases: suppose that a glance from a stranger at a distance of thirty paces could trigger orgasm if the stranger possesses a certain appeal. That might lead to a prohibition against looking at strangers in public places–and might be taken to be grounds for divorce, even though no bodily contact took place. A person who went around doing this habitually might be deemed hopeless marriage material. Special glasses might be recommended for the weak of will who can’t seem to keep their eyes down. On the other hand, the difficulty of policing such interpersonal stimulation might encourage a more tolerant attitude—after all, it never leads to marital desertion. A person might be partly monogamous and partly not—having a weakness for strolling around the mall on a Saturday afternoon but otherwise strictly mono.

There are more extreme possible scenarios. What if you are married to a person who has recently undergone brain bisection—aren’t you now married to two people? What if each self emerged on alternate days of the week so that you are actually having sex with distinct persons on successive days? Should you divorce one of them and decline to have sex on the days that person is in the ascendant? That seems an extreme response, though it is quite true that you now have two sexual partners if you carry on as before. Or suppose that brain fission occurs and the two halves of the brain end up in different bodies: you now have two individuals in the house where before you had only one. Should you choose one and reject the other? What if they are qualitatively identical? It would be unfair to deprive one of them just because of a pedantic insistence on monogamy. What if you underwent brain fission too, so that four people now roam around the same house? What marital practices should apply? It would surely be prim to limit marital relations so as to guarantee monogamy; a more fluid approach would seem more practical and not morally objectionable. But if that is so, there is the question of the number of selves inhabiting a typical human psyche: what if considerations of personal identity favored the view that we contain multitudes, or at least two or three distinct selves? Aren’t we then already in a non-monogamous relationship? If people began to accept that the self is not the unitary entity of traditional metaphysics, their attitudes towards monogamy might change correspondingly. You might prefer this kind of personal fluctuation as affording a degree of variety in your romantic life. No guilt need accrue; no jealousy need arise (as in “You like my other self more than you like me!”).

Let’s take it a stage further now that we are considering logical possibilities. Suppose an intelligent and sensitive life form to have the body of a snake or worm with segmentation; on each segment a distinct set of genitals are to be found, let’s say 10 in all. Imagine that the sets vary in their impressiveness (by some measure, say potency or pulchritude) with the better sets located nearer the head. Marriage exists for these creatures and rules about extra-marital relations are in force. The main rule is that one may only use the very best genitals for a designated partner, while the others may be used for extra-marital relations. It might be thought a serious violation to break this rule, meriting divorce or worse, while a tolerant attitude is taken towards lesser forms of genital wandering. This seems like a conceivable set-up and the attitudes described reasonable attitudes given the facts (maybe there is some variation in attitudes within this society). The notion of a binary practice of monogamy is alien to these aliens. There is a spectrum not an all-or-nothing choice. Things might be different for us if we displayed this kind of anatomical complexity: there would exist different categories of departure from strict monogamy.

What about jealousy—isn’t this an obvious problem for non-monogamous relationships? Yes it is, but so is it a problem for nearly all of human relationships. We all want to be number 1 not number 2 or number 23. We all want to be the one loved the most: the most-loved child, the most-loved friend, the most-loved pupil, the most-loved lover—or at least we are prone to such wishes. We tend to get jealous if we are not at the top of the list. We learn how to control this emotion to some degree, or we claim to, not sinking into despair when we find out that a cherished friend has better friends than us, or that we are not the most prized student in the class. We fear the loss or demotion of important relationships; we can be wracked with insecurity. This is, as they say, human nature: it is not unique to our romantic relationships. For some people, jealousy is easily triggered and hard to manage, in romance as elsewhere; for others it is less of a problem. But its possibility should not be used to insist on a strict and unrealistic ban on any forms of departure from monogamy. To do so is like saying that possible disappointment is a reason not to strive to succeed: it is true that disappointment often accompanies striving, but that is not a sufficient reason not to make the effort. Similarly, jealousy is natural in intimate relations, but it shouldn’t be taken as a decisive reason not to engage in non-monogamous relations or to prohibit them. It may even be a good thing in keeping us on our toes. As always, tact and good sense should regulate potentially jealousy-producing situations, but it is too much to demand that nothing jealousy-producing should ever be ventured. When you meet your dear friend’s best friend you must handle it with due humility and decorum, and your friend should take care not to rub in the disparity. So there is nothing special about the romantic case so far as jealousy is concerned. Maybe if mores changed the dangers of jealousy might be mitigated, especially if no loss of relationship were threatened. We frown on jealousy in non-romantic situations and try to get beyond it; we might come to feel the same way where romance is concerned.

Ask yourself if the idea of mono-hatred makes sense: the requirement that you can only hate one person at a time. Isn’t it possible, and not morally objectionable, to hate several people at the same time? Of course it is, so it would be silly to prohibit poly-hatred. It would be pointless and unrealistic. So why should romantic love be such that it is only permitted in the singular? It seems possible in the plural, like other kinds of love, so we must ask what rational grounds there might be for restricting such love to a single individual. Is it perhaps just a relic of outdated marriage laws, or a clumsy protection against disease, or a holdover from a preference for monotheism over polytheism, or a way to control women? Suppose a society had a particularly stringent code of monogamy—only one romantic love object per lifetime. Finding a new beloved upon the loss of an old one is deemed infidelity to the old. Serial monogamy isn’t enough; the monogamy must be temporally absolute. Surely that is a far too rigid and life-denying standard, despite its simplicity and purity. So why isn’t the prohibition on simultaneous romantic partners similarly draconian and life denying? Besides, it is not really empirically accurate, since monogamy as we have it is really a matter of degree and variation, with no sharp lines.[2] It is a kind of abstract ideal not a practical compromise fit for the messy realities of life.[3]

 

[1] What is intended here is not sameness of instant, which suggests threesomes, but overlapping of relationships. This allows for some flexibility, as when a relationship starts up again after going dormant and another person is meanwhile involved—you will not be convicted of infidelity in the interim. This makes the concept of monogamy more elastic than is often supposed, depending as it does on the question of when a romantic relationship exists.

[2] You might say that sexual intercourse provides a sharp line–either it occurs or it doesn’t. But (a) this is far too permissive for most people’s tastes and (b) we can manufacture possible cases that make it blurry (what if inter-genital stimulation is mediated by a suitable force field that operates over several centimeters?). The concept of “having sex” is actually not very well defined.

[3] A case can be made for stricter standards of monogamy during the early stages of a relationship, but as time wears on a more relaxed attitude may be considered reasonable.

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Sentience and Morality

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Sentience and Morality

 

 

It is often said these days that morality applies when and only when sentience is present, but the exact connection between the two is not often spelled out. The thought is that the states of insentient objects impose no obligations on us while the states of sentient beings do. Obviously it is not intended that the merely physical states of sentient beings impose such obligations; the idea is that it is in virtue of the mental states of sentient beings that moral obligations apply. That is, it is states of consciousness that form the necessary and sufficient conditions for morality to apply. But what is it about consciousness that confers value on it? Not merely its subjectivity or its intentionality or its rationality or its innerness, since many conscious states have these features but have nothing particularly to do with morality—for instance, seeing yellow or thinking about the moon. There is nothing good or bad about having such mental states considered in themselves: they impose no moral obligations on moral beings (we are not obliged to increase the incidence of seeing yellow). Rather, there is a subclass of mental states that are morally relevant—the class that includes desire, happiness and unhappiness, agreeableness and its opposite, good experiences and bad. Pain and suffering are paramount in this class: from physical injury to bad smells to romantic pangs to boredom, lassitude, and despair. All the things that we don’t like, that turn us off, that bring us down, that ruin our day: thwarted desires, nasty sensations, unpleasant forebodings. These are the mental states that create obligation and trigger moral action, along with their positive counterparts. Thus “Pain is bad” is the prime example of a moral proposition, because it leads directly to ought-statements such as “You ought to do something about that person’s pain”. It is this type of state of sentient beings that is deemed morally significant.

But this doesn’t settle the question of the connection between sentience and morality, because we have yet to explain what sentience as such has to do with morality. Why does the property of consciousness have such a central role in moral thinking? What about unconscious pain and unconscious desire? Suppose for a moment that these are possible (the supposition is not absurd): would such states also ground moral obligation? The answer is unclear: one feels that they would count to some degree but not as much as fully conscious pain and desire. It is worse to feel a conscious pain than to have one that is outside of consciousness, but surely one ought to do something about someone’s pain even if he or she is not conscious of it. Similarly, it is good to satisfy a person’s conscious desires, but is it equally good to satisfy someone’s unconscious desires? Utilitarianism exhorts us to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number, but does that extend to unconscious happiness? The fact of being conscious makes a moral difference, though not the same difference as that between (say) being square and being in pain—the former having no moral significance at all. What if a tribe was equally attentive to the unconscious minds of its members as to their conscious minds—wouldn’t that make them more morally sensitive than us? Is the emphasis on conscious mental states a moral prejudice? Or is it just that we don’t tend to believe in the unconscious mind but would change our moral tune if we did?

The question of other minds is instructive: here there can be genuine doubt about the scope of morality. Suppose that half the people you are acquainted with are conscious and half or not—but you don’t know which is which. The distribution of sentience is opaque to you. Then you will be placed in a moral quandary, since you can’t apply the sentience-morality connection with any confidence. You agree that obligation requires sentience, but you don’t know who has it. It would be different if morality had nothing to do with sentience and everything to do with outer behavior, since then your obligations would be equal for all the individuals you encounter. But as things are, the scope of moral obligation is indeterminate so far as you are concerned, so you don’t know how to be moral in this world. Should you treat everyone as if they are sentient just to be on the safe side (but think what a waste of resources for the false positives), or should you put half your effort into each individual (but that may result in neglecting a deserving case)? The sentience criterion runs into the problem of other minds and in unfavorable cases can render it unworkable as a basis for morality. You always know what is due to you morally, since you know your own consciousness directly, but you can be genuinely uncertain what you owe to others. And this theoretical problem has a real-life counterpart when it comes to other species and people with abnormalities (such as paralysis or coma). If you got really serious about the problem of other minds, you might wonder whether you had any moral obligations to others at all—and likewise with the problem of not recognizing sentience when it is present (worms, trees?). The sentience test makes morality epistemologically problematic.

Is it just a primitive fact that sentience matters? What if we came across aliens that invert our normal sense of moral obligation, treating insentient objects as deserving moral respect while disregarding sentient beings? They go around making sure that every object is polished and made straight, holding this to be their prime moral obligation, while treating suffering and unfulfilled desire as morally insignificant. Could we persuade them of the error of their ways? Would we be reduced to saying, “Can’t you see that pain is bad and roundness is value-neutral?” When they ask us why we can only reply, “Because pain is a conscious state”. They might wonder whybeing a conscious state makes all the difference: what is it about consciousness that makes it the sine qua non of morality?[1] Is it the mere fact that to be conscious is for there to be something it is like for the organism? But why does what it’s like have this special relationship to morality? Why is this kind of subjectivity a condition for moral obligation to get a grip? And if it is a condition, why do moral theories not generally recognize it to be so?

For not all substantive moral theories put sentience at the heart of morality. Utilitarianism does because it expressly speaks of maximizing a certain type of mental state, assumed to be conscious; but deontological theories have no such direct connection to consciousness. The duty to tell the truth, keep your promises, not to steal, not to commit adultery, etc., say nothing about states of consciousness: they could apply in a robot world. There might be lying, stealing, promise-breaking adulterous robots—that is, beings that do all these immoral things. Does morality apply to them? One might say that such duties can only apply against a suitable psychological background, but that is not part of the official deontological story and threatens to reduce it to a utilitarian theory. The connection between morality and sentience is certainly looser according to deontological ethics, and less subject to some of the uncertainties of the sentience criterion. It may be true that in the actual world morality and sentience are coterminous, more or less, but it is a question whether the connection goes any deeper—whether the existence of moral obligation can be explained by the nature of sentience. That is, it is a question why being conscious should be the touchstone of morality, as a matter of conceptual necessity. There is certainly a feeling—an “intuition”—that this is so, but articulating it is less easy than one might have expected. Maybe one part of morality—the part concerned with pain and suffering—necessarily involves consciousness, but it may not be essential to other parts, such as those emphasized by deontological theories. Would an eliminative view of consciousness put an end to morality? Would a takeover of the conscious mind by the unconscious mind make the idea of moral obligation nugatory? What if a condition analogous to blindsight were to invade the entire human mind—would that mean that morality no longer applies? Kant took personhood to define the scope and limits of morality, thus excluding animals and some humans; the substitution of sentience for personhood was intended to enlarge the range of moral obligation. But perhaps we need a further enlargement to include beings whose consciousness is in question. Sentience may be too parochial (as well as too inclusive in some respects). Having interests seems to be the essence of morality, but that notion doesn’t seem necessarily tied to sentience, though having conscious desires may be the central case of having interests. Ecological ethics sometimes speaks of the interests of whole species or the biosphere or the planet, but these entities are not claimed to be conscious sentient beings. Sentience as such doesn’t seem to constitute the dividing line, given the moral neutrality of much sentience (e.g. seeing yellow), and unconscious mental states seem to have some moral weight, and not all moral rules have to do with promoting conscious happiness and avoiding conscious misery, and other minds can be elusive: so we do well to take the sentience criterion as just a rough rule of thumb rather than a definitive account of the scope of morality. Perhaps, indeed, it was always a bad idea to seek hard and fast limits to the scope of morality.[2]

 

[1] Should we say that pain can only hurt if it is conscious, and hurting is what makes pain morally significant? But then it is not consciousness as such that is morally significant but its power to make things hurt: an entity is morally considerable if and only if it can be made to hurt. This is (a) a rather narrow conception of morality and (b) not self-evident as a conceptual truth because of the possibility of unconscious pain. Here we get into debates about the metaphysics of pain, which render the sentience criterion contestable.

[2] Morality has been in a process of expansion over many centuries; it would be folly to suppose that it has reached its outer limit now. We tend to fashion theories to fit its actual scope at any given time. Now that we have acquired the power to destroy planets (our own at least) and might develop yet more destructive powers, we might have to consider our obligations to the universe as a whole; and this might prompt us to expand our notion of obligation beyond the realm of sentient beings. What if we encounter complex alien life forms to which our notion of sentience fails to apply—might we then contemplate extending the concept of moral obligation to include these insentient life forms? After all, it was only recently that the sentience criterion came to be accepted as a legitimate extension, mainly as a result of a greater awareness of animal ethics.

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