Utilitarianism is for pandemics

It's hard to make decisions right now. Different sources are saying different things; one minute you read about people hoarding toilet paper and laugh, the next you read about how close the closest case is to you and your chest gets tight with panic.

Or maybe that's just me.

But emotion, of course, isn't a good guide for action. It's almost impossible to choose to be exactly as scared as a situation warrants, instead of falling prey either to panic or to normalcy bias. (That would be the one where you think, whenever I get scared it always ends up being nothing, I'm going to sit tight and not worry while everyone else runs around panicking....as the room fills with smoke.) And even if you could choose to be the right amount of scared, adrenaline doesn't actually tell you what to do. It just makes you want to do something, and sometimes you pick something wildly unhelpful like stealing masks from a doctor's office.

So we need moral reasoning to get us through. Deontology asks: is there a moral prohibition against ever spreading illness? No, there is not; while it's generally wise to wash your hands often and to stay home if you're sick, none of us is used to cancel whole conferences because of one sick attendee. So deontology would have us carry on as usual, following usual rules. Unless your usual rule is "listen to public health organizations," which is probably a good one unless your government is so corrupt you can't trust it.

Catholic moral reasoning would ask if you intended to infect anyone. Could you know with reasonable certainly that going to work would kill someone? If not then it's probably not a mortal sin, which is all some people care about. (Meanwhile some aren't even worrying about that, because after all death isn't so bad. Which is odd if you're also het up about murder and abortion and so on. Death comes for all, but one doesn't want to be the vehicle delivering it ahead of schedule.)

Honestly, utilitarianism is the most sensible moral philosophy right now. Simply ask whether your behavior will cause or prevent deaths, and what number.

Now some are going to think that means we should never go anywhere or do anything, since there is always a risk of death. But that would ignore the risks of canceling things. School is where a lot of kids get lunch. If stores close, it will be hard to get food to people. In general, economic damage slows down the economy, which means layoffs and poverty. Poverty causes deaths.

This situation, though, may be worth the cost. Between coronavirus' virulence and its death rate, millions may die if it is allowed to spread freely. Already Italy is dealing with another kind of utilitarianism, more immediate and painful: who gets the limited ventilators. If you're very old and sick, you don't get one because they don't have high hopes for you anyway. My grandpa said this morning that, because of his age and cancer, they'd only send him home to die.

That's awful, and yet I'm not going to blame utilitarianism for it. They have to allocate those ventilators somehow, and it beats having people bid cash or something. Instead, I'd say it's utilitarianism coming into the equation too late. It should have been used to shut down towns sooner. It should have been used to stop people from leaving the virus area in China. It should have been used by Patient 31, who had a fever and yet went to church exposing thousands of people.

Use utilitarianism when you're weighing lives against things other than lives. Lives against how bored you are at home, how much you wanted to go to that conference, how much money you'll waste on those vacation tickets. And use it when you're not aware you're weighing lives against lives: do we close the soup kitchen, do we go into work at a hospital today, do we pass a bill to provide sick leave or a bill to bail out businesses for lost profits.

To practice utilitarianism, you need information. Even if it makes you nervous, it's good to read the news and check for up to date recommendations. Try, as much as possible, to think with your head.

Here are a few links I found useful.

Cancel Everything - The Atlantic


Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now - Medium

Natural law and the state

I promised reader Ficino that I would write this post.  It came up because of an exchange that I've heard a few different times, on different subjects.  It goes like this:

Atheist: You shouldn't try to enforce your religion by law!
Catholic: Ah, but that's not my religion I'm enforcing by law!  It's my Thomistic philosophy.  Since philosophy is rationally provable, that makes it nonreligious and therefore okay to enshrine in the law.

Most non-Catholics find this argument completely ridiculous because Thomistic philosophy isn't something they're familiar with in the first place, and it sounds suspiciously like a religion.  I would argue that Thomistic philosophy is, in fact, indistinguishable from a religion.

For instance, the claim that this philosophy is rationally provable is something that many religions also claim.  Catholics especially.  They believe that is it possible for unaided reason to know the existence of God.  From there, I am not sure belief in the Catholic Church itself is supposed to be rationally provable, but it's at any rate assumed to be likely.

Like a religion, Thomistic philosophy is not actually provable.  I've gone back and forth with Thomists and what it usually comes down to is something like this: "We can prove xyz from first principles, but the first principles themselves you just have to accept.  But you have to accept something without any proof, something to base later beliefs on, and we think our first principles are reasonable to accept."

The trouble is, this argument could be used for almost anything.  You have to accept something without proof, to base later beliefs on . . . so why couldn't this first belief be that the bible is divinely inspired?  Or that Joseph Smith found golden tablets?  Or that Muhammad was visited by an angel?  What makes "all things have a final cause" any different from these premises?

Now it's true that we have to make moral judgments in order to decide what should be enshrined in law.  To some degree, it doesn't make sense to criticize "legislating morality," because that's what we all do.  Yet there are some versions of morality we don't want to legislate.  Some people believe that polygamy or child marriage are moral.  And the rest of us say, "We don't want that, because it's strictly part of your religion."  But is that really why we don't want it?  I'd say we don't want it because it's against our own morals.

Personally, I believe in an Enlightenment morality based on rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  And this is the moral code enshrined in our country's founding documents.  Can I prove this morality is better than natural law?  Perhaps not.  Especially not to people who have an attachment to natural law which stems from religion.  (Because people normally come to a belief in natural law because they are already Catholic.  It's pretty rare for it to happen the other way around.)  But neither can you prove to me, or to a majority of voters, that natural law is better.  You can say your system is provable, but that doesn't make it so.  To me the claim that "if you read this long book by Ed Feser, you'll understand and accept the proofs" is no different from "if you read the Book of Mormon, you'll feel a burning in the bosom and know that it's true."  It's a big claim, and yet in both cases you can find people who have read the books and not been convinced at all.  So it's possible that there is an error in the proofs.  In any event, the jury is out on whether your metaphysics is actually rational and provable. 

The real issue is that the dichotomy between "Catholic morality that comes from natural law" and "Catholic morality that comes from Scripture" is artificial.  Catholics don't actually see them as different (all are obligatory) and non-Catholics don't see them as different (all are religious).  And Aquinas himself, working this stuff out, ruled out any conclusions of natural law that might be opposed to Scripture or Catholic teaching of his time. 

And Catholic teaching itself never says that those moral laws that are known by faith shouldn't be enforced by law, while those known by reason should be.  The traditional teaching of the Church is that the existence of God is known by reason.  Therefore it would follow that it could be a crime to fail to worship God.  The modern Church has come out in favor of freedom of conscience, but as little as a hundred and fifty years ago, it taught that error has no rights and that it is legitimate to establish a religion or criminalize heresy.  And honesty, this view is more consistent with the inital assumption that anything a Catholic thinks is provable by reason can be legislated.  Yet I doubt the people arguing that it's valid to (for example) ban homosexuality on natural-law grounds would like to come out and say that what they want is a Catholic theocracy.  It's likely that they don't want that, but according to their arguments, I can't see why not.

Those of us who aren't Catholic may do better to simply say that unless a law can be defended from the first principles in our founding documents, it isn't valid.  As a nation, we already have a basic moral philosophy.  It might be very general, so that complex arguments may be required to lead from there to any specific law, but it has the advantage of having already been accepted by the nation at large.

A small, religious minority who feels they have a better answer, who would like to legislate not based on life, liberty, and happiness, but on beliefs that are not general to non-members, should in my opinion stick to making rules for their own members.  I think that Catholics would acknowledge this if we were talking about, say, Muslims.  And they wouldn't at all buy the notion that a certain rule wasn't from the Quran, but rather worked out by Averroes from pure reason.  If it's really reasonable, the argument will have to be made by appealing to life, liberty, and happiness.  If it can't be--perhaps it's reasonable only based on first principles the rest of the country doesn't accept.  And in that case, it's indistinguishable from a religious argument.

Is it right to walk away from Omelas?

This post is about this story by Ursula LeGuin. You should go and read it, and come back. It's not long.

Okay, so you get the gist: a city where everyone is happy, but by some mysterious mechanism, this is all caused by a little child being locked in a dirty closet and mistreated. Everyone in the city knows it, but if they show the child any comfort, the city's happiness will be destroyed.

Some people, the "ones who walk away from Omelas," leave the city when they find out. They don't want the happiness that comes from torturing a child. And of course that's the course we are expected to agree is moral.

But when I read the story, I wondered why they just left. Why didn't they save the child? Is it really enough to refuse to participate, when there is a child you know is in utter misery?

I guess the question that raises is, do you have the right to take away the happiness of everyone in the city? And how much happiness would you be taking away? If the child is rescued, does the whole city devolve to that level of misery, or simply become a more average city?

Or would the people just grab another child and put it in the closet?

Would you still rescue the child even if you knew they would? Just because you had to do what you could?

There was a Doctor Who episode to this effect. The city was powered by torturing a starwhale, and each citizen had the choice to vote against it, or forget it was happening. Most people chose to forget, and at first it seemed that that was that. Not enough people wanted to release the starwhale. And it was pretty fair, because it seemed the city might not survive at all if they let the starwhale go.

But the Doctor, of course, does not accept moral dichotomies. If presented with a trolley problem, he'd find a way that everyone lives. So naturally it occurs to him that he doesn't have to abide by the people's vote, he can singlehandedly free the starwhale. But is that right? What if the starwhale destroys a city full of children?

I'm curious what you guys would do.  Walk away? Free the child? What facts would affect your choice? What would you do if you were ignorant of what might happen?

How to eat if animals matter

So after that rather mean post about vegans, I feel like I should say something a bit more positive.  I actually think considering animal welfare when you eat is an admirable thing to do.  I just think there are a lot of ways to do that besides cutting out all animal foods forever and shaming everyone who doesn't.

My personal view is to assign animals moral value, but less than people have.  So if I'm doing some kind of moral action, like donating to a charity, I pick human charities because there is so much need there.  Yet it's not really zero-sum; you can care about animals without taking away anything from humans.

Going vegan is one way to do that.  Now being vegan does not mean that your food choices harm no animals.  Animal habitats are destroyed to make farms.  Insects and other predators are poisoned to protect your food supply.  It's a fact of nature that everything is in competition with everything else; for humans to eat we have to take resources that animals want to use.  Perhaps at some future date we'll reach a situation where that isn't the case, but for now, perfect moral purity toward animals is not a reachable goal and I have lots of side-eye for people who think they've met it simply because they're vegan.

That said, a vegan diet causes a lot less animal death and suffering than an omnivorous diet, so that is a good choice if you think you can.

The trouble is, most people don't feel like they could be vegan.  There are an awful lot of delicious animal foods out there, and life is hard, and sometimes you just want a pint of ice cream or a Big Mac.  And I think rather than sit with the idea that we are less than perfect, we prefer to define perfection such that we're not violating it: "animals don't even matter."  Isn't it easier to eat that Big Mac if you assume they don't?

I prefer to carve a middle way where I accept that my moral actions aren't perfect, that there is always more I could be doing, but that I'm doing small things in what ways I can.  Some years ago, my big thing was to avoid cruelty to humans in what I buy, which meant no Hershey's or Nestle products and as few new clothes as I could buy.  The chocolate situation was easily solved when I discovered Aldi sources its chocolate ethically, but I'm less certain about clothes.  I am not sure which clothing companies are more ethical than others.  If I stick to used clothes as I usually do, am I sure I'm helping, or am I just preventing my few measley dollars from going to a third world country where they could do some tiny amount of good, if not as much good as if the workers were paid fairly?  I don't have the bandwidth to unpick this dilemma right now, so I'm putting it on the back burner for the moment, to pick back up later.

Where food is concerned, I've been wanting for a few years to cut back on animal products, but I've been stymied by my own exhaustion and my family's needs.  Marko badly needed to put on weight, so I was sneaking eggs and butter into everything I could.  (And then Marko wasn't eating it, so I was eating it, and that's why my gut looks like this.)  But things are getting a little easier: Marko has hit the ninth percentile in weight, which is considered healthy.  Marko and Michael have both been requesting meatless meals, because neither one likes meat, and the thought of making dinners they wouldn't whine about is a plus.  And John is in the process of converting to Orthodoxy, which means he isn't going to be eating animal products on Wednesdays and Fridays.  So it seems like a good time to try a little occasional veganism!

All right, so what sort of things might a person do, if you wanted to prevent some harm to animals but weren't interested in going completely vegan?  Here are a few ideas:
1.  Try to find cruelty-free animal products.  It can be hard to be sure of how animals are treated when you're buying something at the store (for instance, "cage free" doesn't mean the chickens are better treated at all) but often it's possible to buy things from local farms.  Eggs are the easiest thing to find this way; kids often sell them as a hobby.  The price will be higher, but you can combine this with eating less of them overall.
2.  Try one meatless or vegan meal a week.  Or make all your breakfasts vegan (avocado toast, anyone?) or all your lunches.
3.  Reduce the amount of meat on your plate at a meal--take more vegetables or serve a second vegetable dish.  Or make tacos with two cans of beans and only half a pound of beef.
4.  Give up one single animal product, like eggs or beef.  Apparently giving up beef alone would almost solve our climate problem, if everyone did it.  If animal misery is what you worry about most, I'd give up eggs.  Dairy cows are treated comparatively well, so if there's one thing you keep, I vote milk.
5.  Stop making whole meals out of animal products (e.g. a burger) but keep using eggs in recipes, chicken broth in soup, or cheese as a garnish.


For most of my life I've eaten vegetarian (not vegan) at breakfast and lunch because I don't like meat enough to go through the trouble of cooking it more than once a day.  And now that John is becoming Orthodox, I'm working in some vegan dinners to serve on Wednesdays and Fridays.

It happens that I love vegan dishes.  Only thing is, they're often not very satisfying.  I don't feel like I've eaten a meal.  However, I don't tend to have tofu or almonds or non-dairy milk around to replace animal products.  So I've been trying out different recipes looking for things that actually seem like a meal.

What I've found is that you need to replace meat with more than just protein.  Protein is only one of the things meat provides a meal.  Meat also provides
-fat
-umami flavor
-variety
-interesting textures

So when I'm looking to make a meal without meat, I can't just make my usual casserole and leave the meat out.  Instead, it's a more satisfying meal if I replace the meat with a number of different things, to make sure there is variety, umami, and fat in the finished meal.

For instance, I've started to make meatless chili, but just leaving the meat out makes it very dull.  So I make a more complicated chili with sweet potatoes, two kinds of beans, onions browned in oil, and bell peppers.  To ramp up the flavor, I make sure to put in plenty of cumin and a splash of lime juice.

Here are some things that I think are really good in vegan meals:
-mushrooms
-soy sauce
-tomato paste
-fermented foods -- miso and marmite are two I'd like to try, but even sauerkraut is a nice addition
-squash of all kinds
-bread on the side -- I feel it helps round out a meal.  Foccaccia is a yummy vegan bread.
-seeds or nuts -- sunflower seeds are great on a salad, or sesame seeds on a stir-fry
-avocados.  Yum.  Like if butter were a fruit.
-anything browned, caramelized, or smoked -- that adds a lot of deliciously complex flavor
-vegetable stock.  I got some Better Than Bouillon vegetable stock the other day and it is very tasty.  Don't cook in water if you can cook in stock!

To reward you if you've come this far, a recipe!

Black Bean Soup

1/2 cup dry rice
1 can black beans
1 can diced tomatoes
1-2 bell peppers, any color
1 onion
1/2 cup frozen corn
1 quart water or stock
2-3 Tbs oil (olive is fine)
salt, garlic powder, cumin, chili powder, all to taste
splash lime juice


Cook up the onions in the oil till they're starting to brown.  Add all the other ingredients except the corn and seasonings and cook about 20 minutes, till the rice is done.  Add the corn and season to taste.  Serve with crackers or bread.

Nobody likes vegans and prolifers

 

You know that joke?  "How can you tell if someone's a vegan?  Don't worry, they'll tell you."

It's kind of true.  I briefly followed a vegan online and the vegan posts were unending.  You know the kind of stuff: rude assumptions about meat eaters, references to people "forcing their children to eat rotting corpses," pictures of slaughterhouses, adorable pictures of pigs, Holocaust references.  I got tired of it and unfollowed.  It just felt extreme.

It occurred to me that this is the same kind of thing I'm used to seeing from the prolife movement: constant posts, graphic pictures, attributing evil to prochoicers, and Holocaust comparisons.  Nobody likes it; it makes them uncomfortable, but the prolifers, like vegans, just can't stop.

And it makes sense, really.  Prolifers and vegans both believe that they are witnessing a moral disaster, worse than a nuclear bomb or a genocide.  It's pretty hard to stay moderate and appealing when you legitimately think thousands or millions of morally significant beings are being murdered every day.  But the backlash comes from the same place: nobody likes to feel they are being accused of supporting a moral catastrophe.  That's why people sneer at vegans, mock their food choices, or start arguments about the health of their diet.  It's why a prolifer I know got egged outside a clinic.  It's downright offensive to accuse people of being okay with something deeply morally wrong.

The trouble is, the rights of animals and embryos are on the fringes of morality.  I've said before that basic morality is provable through reason, but the actual foundation you choose to underlay it all is a bit arbitrary -- you have to choose who to include in your circle of morally significant beings, and you have to choose whether to value life, liberty, or happiness most.  The result is that we'll all agree on the morality of some things, like slavery or murder, but in fringe cases like animal rights or abortion, we will diverge -- all while considering ourselves to be reasonably moral people.

Unfortunately arguments about these things tend to miss the point.  We assume people share our moral foundations, so we attribute evil motives to them ("they hate babies"/"they don't care about suffering") while failing to address the real differences in morality.

The difference here is mainly the circle of morally significant beings.  A prolifer puts the boundary at "members of the human species."  If it's a human, and it's alive, it's equivalent to any other living human.  An eight-cell zygote is exactly as significant as you are.  A vegan, on the other hand, tends to place it at "beings that can experience happiness or suffering."  So they will find it absurd to value the zygote more than a chicken, because the zygote has no awareness we know of, nor any brain to be aware with, while the chicken clearly suffers when locked in a battery cage.  Sometimes they accuse the prolifer of lying about their motives, and simply wanting to oppress women.  (And some prolifers really do seem to want that; but most, I think, are completely honest.)

Given that the decision which to value is mainly arbitrary, or else handed down from a religion, it's unlikely to be fruitful to argue about these principles.  Instead, I think both groups might benefit from selling a milder form: Okay, say an embryo isn't exactly as valuable as a toddler.  Or a chicken isn't exactly as valuable as you are.  That doesn't mean these beings have no moral value.  If you could preserve these lives without sacrificing the life, liberty, or happiness of adult humans, wouldn't you want to do that?  I don't think a chicken is equal to a human, but all things being equal, of course I'd prefer it if chickens weren't debeaked and locked in battery cages.

To get here, people have to discard the "you're a moral monster" part of the argument.  Instead they should try to stay positive about small changes people could make that wouldn't throw any other moral value (the liberty of women; feeding the hungry) under the bus.  For instance, donating to a pregnancy center that supports women who want to keep their pregnancies but can't afford to.  Or supporting laws that make insurers cover the cost of pregnancy and birth.  Or eating a vegan meal one night a week.  Or buying cruelty-free meat.

Would a prolifer or vegan really be satisfied if people made these choices and didn't go the whole way?  Of course not.  The prolifer won't be happy till embryos have the same exact rights an adult human has; and the vegan won't be happy until everyone gives up meat.  But these are goals they won't actually be able to achieve, not in our lifetimes at least.  So I'm just suggesting that in their outward messaging, they focus on these goals.  Think about it: what are the odds of converting one person to a vegan?  Pretty low.  But you might have better luck converting seven people to once-a-week vegans, and that saves the exact same number of cows.  Likewise, we're not making abortion illegal right now (and if we could, people would still get them) but there are lots of interventions which lower the abortion rate.

I don't know how many vegans or prolifers read this blog, but if you are one, I highly recommend dropping the language about how horrified you are and how terrible people not on your team are.  They aren't terrible, they're working their morality from completely different assumptions.  Now they're doing a great deal of harm, by your standards, but they need to be convinced, not condemned.  And the gentle, positive, incremental way is going to work a lot better for your goals.

Questions about ethics

It's been two years since I stopped believing in God, but most people in my life still don't know.  When I do tell someone, invariably the first question they ask is some permutation of this: "How can you be moral without God?"

I find this strange, because at the tail end of my time as a believer, my main worry was, "How can I be moral while being religious?"  After all, religion constrains your choices; sometimes you might have to abandon something your conscience wants you to do because your religion forbids it.

But I do try to answer the question, because it's important.  Even if the asker never leaves religion, I want them at least to be thinking about which of their moral choices would still make sense in a godless universe.  Call it the Reverse Pascal's Wager -- act in such a way that, even if there isn't a God, you still haven't done anything horrible.  Believe in God without the Inquisition, is what I'm saying.  And the only way to do that is to know what would be moral if God didn't exist.

I've talked about this a lot before, so you can read all my posts on the topic if you haven't already.  Today I want to talk about a few other moral questions which I've untangled lately.

Question 1: But don't you need objective morality?

I really am not sure what people are asking for here.  Morality is mainly about being objective -- to stop being stuck in your own wants and needs, and consider what is best for humanity as a whole.  Imagine you could pop out of your own body and float above the earth, looking down.  Don't ask "what's best for me" or even "what's best for my friends" but "what's best for everyone?"  The answer that you get from that is a moral answer.  If what is best for everyone is for your nation to, say, allow refugees in -- because the risk to your nation is small but the benefit to the refugees is vast -- then that is the moral thing to do.

Ah, my interlocutor would say, but why should I care what's best for everyone?  You have to give me an objective reason to care.

Well, there is no such thing as an objective reason to care, because caring is a bit subjective, isn't it?  I could tell you there is an omnipotent being who cares, but that is a statement of fact, not a reason for you to care.  I could tell you you'll go to hell if  you don't care, but even that doesn't bring you to an "ought" -- you could claim that you don't mind going to hell.  So no, there is nothing I could say that could universally make you care about this.  It is an observable fact, though, that most people do care.  They don't actually want to make the world a worse place.  And if you really go over it with them, they might admit that they do, in fact, want to have positive relationships with other people, and you get that by being good to people.  The specific arguments against all the various evils people might attempt would be a longer conversation, but I think the arguments could be made.  It won't be an objective proof, though.  It will depend on what the person actually wants, and what their ethical concerns are so far.

Question 2: But why is it moral to care for all people, rather than just some people?

Here's a question that has troubled me for awhile.  A person who's not endowed with much empathy or conscientiousness might be talked into some basic decency because they want to have friends.  They might want to be loyal to their friends; most people at least like to think they are.  But why should they be decent to people who aren't in their tribe?  They might define their tribe as "people they regularly interact with" or "people of their religion" or "people of their race," but that still gives them plenty of people to have positive relationships and engage in trade with, without having to be moral toward strangers.  And human nature doesn't really give us much to combat this tendency with, because it naturally is suspicious of strangers.  This is why there's so much racism and ethnic cleansing and so on -- because neither our reason nor our instincts put the brakes on this tendency very much.

But it occurs to me that the basic game-theory motive for moral action still works on this level.  I am kind to the cashier who scans my groceries because we are both better off if we are both kind, while we will both be worse off if we aren't.  I could be mean, hoping she is still kind, so that I get what I want without being moral, but that doesn't work, because if I'm mean once, she'll be mean in the future.  And this is true of groups as well.  My group can practice reciprocal morality with other groups, just like I can with individuals.  It is better for the US to get along with Canada than for us to fight with Canada, so Americans should be nice to Canadians.

Of course, Machiavelli might say this only holds true if some group, in the future, might have power to hurt us.  If we wipe them out entirely, they can never get revenge on us, so we'll be better off.  And all I can say is that history does not bear this out.  Wiping out an entire race and everyone that cared about that race is virtually impossible.  It didn't work for Hitler, it didn't work for Milosevic, it's not going to work for you.  Keeping them as a powerless subclass doesn't work forever, either.  Haiti is an example of this.

Now the best way to solve tribalism is probably to increase inter-tribal interaction and relationships.  If you have several black friends, and they're actually close, odds are good you won't want to join the KKK.  If you have a Syrian friend on Facebook, you might stop suggesting "bomb the whole region from space" as a solution to the unrest there.  Basically, once you realize that the stranger is not all that different from you, that they have feelings, hopes, aspirations, and loved ones like you have, you will want to be kind.

Still, even if you're a heartless xenophobe, if you really think about it, you should be able to see that a world where people interact positively with one another is better for you to live in than a world where all nations are constantly at war and you're always watching your back in case one of your slaves shanks you.

Question 3: What is a person?

That's a brief way of asking, "How do you define the class of beings that are morally significant?" or "Who has rights?" or possibly, "But who is my neighbor?"

I was brought up keeping it simple: humans.  Humans are morally significant; no other life form is morally significant.  But that sort of leaves out aliens.  If we were to discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, I would argue that we should treat them ethically, for all the reasons discussed in question 2.  They would be able to participate with us in reciprocal morality -- perhaps they might share their technology with us, for instance.  Whereas if we tried to wipe them out, we'd probably get a reputation throughout the galaxy of "these people are mass murderers, kill on sight" long before we managed to wipe them out.  So on that ground, even if we're completely selfish, we should try to be nice to aliens.

Further, just as we can empathize with a fellow human from a different country, with different experiences, because we have many things in common with him ... so too would we have things in common with intelligent aliens.  Their culture and minds would be vastly different from ours, but their experience must have some commonality with us if they're rational like we are.  We might find they make interesting friends.  And our instinct not to kill a being that has hopes and dreams and friends will likely kick in, once we get over our squeamishness over their different appearance and start communicating with them.

But of course once you draw the circle larger than "the human race" you open a massive can of worms.  Are animals morally significant as well?  Should we respect the lives, liberty, and happiness of animals?  How are we to know whether or not we should?

This is a really, really thorny problem and it isn't something I'm going to be able to hash out in its entirety here.  I do think that, to some degree, intelligence matters.  A pig or a dog, which can be trained, read a human's intentions, and solve problems seems a lot more likely to be morally significant than a shrimp or a snail, if only because the "higher" animal will experience longer, more complex kinds of suffering if it's mistreated, while the snail doesn't seem to be capable of it.  (It may be impossible to say for sure.)

My general feeling is that it is good for animals to exist and not suffer.  However, for them to die is not such a big thing.  I know this sounds odd, but animals generally do not seem to comprehend death, and so they aren't upset by being in a situation where they will die, unless they are otherwise afraid or in pain.  Most domesticated animals don't mind a lack of liberty, either, so I don't consider them to have a "right to liberty" the way humans do.

Of course the reason this is so thorny is that humans like to eat animals.  So I feel like I should be able to justify, morally, why I eat meat, or else stop doing it.  My current reason is this: either we farm domesticated animals like cows and chickens, or these animals, with a few lucky exceptions, cease to exist.  If people stopped eating meat, farmers would probably kill their breeding stock, sell them for dog meat, and go out of business.  If there is no money in cows, there is no reason for cows.  They eat a lot, and humans cannot afford such a huge drain on the world's food resources unless we're going to eat the cows.  (We also kill an awful lot of mice and birds to keep them away from our crops, but that's a whole other problem.)  Cows and chickens cannot survive in the wild; they are too thoroughly domesticated.  Pigs can, but pigs are environmentally devastating if you let them run wild, so humans would probably end up having to cull them anyway.

Given that the cow is not distressed, per se, by being kept in captivity and then painlessly killed, it seems that if it had the capacity to choose, it would prefer to live a short time than not at all.  This might change if its life were guaranteed to be full of suffering, as the lives of many farm animals are.  But if you take farming in the abstract, if it were perfectly done, I don't see a problem with eating any animal that cannot visualize and be upset by the prospect of its future death.  It's going to die at some point, anyway, and Temple Grandin pointed out that, if she were a cow, she'd rather get knocked on the head than eaten by a lion.  "Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be," is a catchphrase of hers.

I do think that any animal that can suffer, should be treated humanely so that it doesn't suffer.  We shouldn't scare dogs on purpose, or keep pigs in tiny crates, or cut off chickens' beaks.  It's not my life's crusade or anything, because there are still so many humans being mistreated all over the earth, but ideally, we would be humane to all feeling creatures because we too are feeling creatures and can understand that no one wants to suffer.

This isn't something I am able to prove, per se.  There is a great deal of argument on either side of the question of animal rights.  But for the moment, I'm not vegan and have no real intention to be.  I am hoping to buy some pastured beef soon, though, because the more I find out about conventional meat, the less I want to eat it.

Question 4:  Is there any limit to how selfless you're supposed to be?

I've been bothered by "utilitarian guilt" for some time.  I mean, I've rationally worked out that I'm no more important than anyone else.  Then how can it possibly be justified for me to spend more effort on myself than on anyone else?  I just ate some ice cream.  Someone elsewhere in the world died of malaria.  Why did I buy the ice cream instead of a bed net?  Am I a monster?

I was going to call this scrupulosity, but I think if I were really all that scrupulous I would have bought the bed net.  Nah, I'm as selfish as the next person, but it does kind of bother me how selfish I am.  I mean, I could always be doing more.

And the answer, which I got from John -- whose lack of angst on this topic is refreshing -- is this: if you make the world a worse place, you're a bad person.  If you leave it the same, you're an okay person.  And if you make it better, you're a good person.  Instead of trying to divide it between "stuff I do for me" and "stuff I do for other people," why not take it as given that I, as a human being, am going to take care of myself, because that's what we do.  If I eat ice cream, and I pay the person who made it, I'm breaking even.  I didn't do anything good, but I didn't do anything bad either.  I'm still at the neutral place between good and bad.

But if once a week I skip the ice cream and give a buck to the Clean Water Fund, then I'm edging into positive territory.  I haven't done anything that great, but I did a thing and I don't have to weigh it against all the things I did for myself.  Taking care of myself isn't an ethical negative, it's a zero.

I do feel every person has an obligation to do good and not simply avoid evil, but perhaps there is no minimum amount of good you have to do before you count.  If you do something, that's good, and if you do more, that's better.

I am not sure if thinking about it this way helps anyone else, but I'm throwing it out there.


Does anyone have any other questions about morals -- either in the abstract, or my moral reasoning specifically?  Don't be bashful, I like talking about it .... to the point that I often mistake idle questions on the topic for Serious Curiosity and take up hours of somebody's time. 

(If anyone is wondering why I have been posting so rarely .... it took me a solid week to write this post.  That is how little time I have these days.)

Three consequentialist goals

I've talked before about consequentialism, but at the time I put to the side what consequences one should be striving for.  It's no small consideration: not only will a person make very different moral choices based on what consequences they are aiming for, but choosing the wrong consequences can seem to refute consequentialism altogether.

I mean, consider the basic utilitarian formulation: "the greatest happiness for the greatest number."  In that case ought we to euthanize unhappy people, to increase the sum of happiness in the people who are left?  If we get the technology to put wires in people's heads that make them feel happy all the time without changing any of the realities of their lives (say, they are still hungry and filthy and sick, but they just don't mind anymore), should we impose that on everyone?

That's where preference utilitarianism comes in -- rather than say "the goal is to make everyone happy," we could say, "the goal is to give everyone, so much as possible, what they want out of life."  So we shouldn't wirehead people unless that's truly what they want.  But that raises more problems: does that mean that, rather than taking a suicidal person to the hospital, we should give them a big bottle of sleeping pills because that's what they want?  Yet, of course, the second we edit it to "what a person of sound mind would want" or "what a well-informed person would want" we run the risk of invalidating everyone's preferences because, after all, that isn't what they really would want if only they were as mentally healthy or well informed as us.

Existence is the third possibility.  Rather than preserve happiness even at the cost of ending some people's existence, we should preserve life above all.  I'm a fan of this, for sure.  After all, when considering whether a public-health proposal is a good one, we ask not "will people like it?" but "how many lives will it save?"  If saving lives is one's end goal, it seems like it wouldn't wind up with anything really monstrous.  Except .... well, we don't actually force medical interventions on people, even if they're really helpful ones.  Take the extreme case: a very elderly person, someone who has a short time to live in any case, and who has begged not to be rescucitated again and again, but to die naturally?  Is it right to overrule their preference because preserving life trumps everything else?

Another consideration is how we are to rate existence for those who do not yet exist.  Is it morally equivalent to save a life and to bring a new life into existence?  Well, not really -- a person who currently exists has rights, responsibilities, preferences, loved ones, and so on, while a person who doesn't isn't tied into the present reality in any way.  To choose not to beget them is no injustice to them, because they don't exist.  But if we really were taking existence alone as the only consequence of importance, we would consider saving a life equal to creating a life, because both result in an equal amount of existence.  I do think creating a life has value -- that is part of why I've done it so many times!  Sociologists may remind us that becoming a parent is likely to reduce our happiness (and I think they're right, in at least one sense) but that doesn't really matter all that much to most people.  On the one hand, we have preferences beyond happiness, and on the other, the child you have will have infinitely increased happiness once they exist.  But I feel odd about saying, "I'm having this child because he will increase the sum of happiness in the world."  I'd rather simply say, "I'm having this child because it is a good thing for him to exist."

In the end, my choice has been to balance all three of these considerations: existence, preference, and happiness -- which could also be stated, "life, liberty, and happiness."  To pursue any one of these completely without reference to the other two has the potential to be drawn out to morally repellant conclusions.  I think in most cases that doesn't even come up because the three are interconnected.  You can't be happy if you are dead; most people prefer to be alive; most people are made unhappy by not being free to pursue their wishes.  But in case it should come up, I think it's appropriate to balance them.  If, for instance, a person desires to die, one might simply overrule that because life has value apart from your preference, and because the person has an opportunity they don't recognize for future happiness.  And yet, when my grandmother chose to forego cancer treatment, her wish was respected because it was a clear, sane, adamant preference being weighed against a very short increase in lifespan anyway.  I can save the threatened suicide victim but not kidnap my grandmother to force treatment on her, without being a hypocrite, because I see in one case a weak preference (because it may be compromised by poor mental health) weighed against a great deal of potential life and happiness, while in the other I see a strong preference weighed against very little life and no increase in happiness (because death would have been slower and more painful).

How much weight ought to be put on each one?  It's not really possible to say.  I tend to rate life the most highly; I think each person is an irreplaceable individual with much to offer the world, so that even if they do not seem very happy, they still have value.  I know others who care more about liberty -- they were not exaggerating when they said, "Give me liberty or give me death!"  Many have died rather than endure what they perceived as slavery.  And some people care more about happiness; they feel their life is better spent bringing joy to others' lives than curing diseases.  I don't think any of these weightings is wrong, though I do think it would be wrong to consider only one while entirely neglecting the others.  To pursue a course of action which serves one of these ends while destroying another -- for instance, wiping out life on earth because people aren't happy enough, or having twenty children and neglecting them all because at least they would exist, or wireheading everyone against their will because it would make them happier -- would be a morally repugnant thing to do.

Why I don't believe in natural law

Andrea has promised to come back and argue in favor of natural law, but it occurs to me that the comment thread we were on has gotten very long and unwieldy, so I thought I'd write a new post to continue the discussion.  I'll include a more complete explanation of the problems I see in "natural law" arguments against, for instance, birth control and homosexuality.

First, I have to clarify, because "natural law" is not a clearly defined term.  When some people say it, they simply mean "those ethical rules we can derive through reason alone," or "the moral intuitions everyone agrees on."  Of course I have no objection at all to this idea.  I've written a number of things on the emotional and rational grounding of morality.  Simple rules of thumb for moral action include things like, "Would I like it if someone did this to me?" "Does this action harm anyone, either inherently or through some distant side effect?" or "Would I like to live in a world where everyone acted like this?"  These rules are reasonable -- I can demonstrate that it is to everyone's benefit if we all follow them -- and they are universally applicable.

The sort of "natural law" talked about in these arguments, though, is much more specific.  The natural-law argument that underlies Catholic sexual ethics is as follows: Human faculties possess a teleology, a purpose or end.  For instance, the sexual faculty exists to create children.  The pleasure we get from using it is meant as a spur to get us to beget children, and to seek out the pleasure while frustrating the primary end, reproduction, is a perversion of the sexual faculty.

The first simple objection I can make to this is that teleology implies a creator.  That is, nothing has an end unless someone creates it for that end.  If I create a car, a fork, or a chair, I create them the way I do because I have a purpose in mind for that thing.  To comb my hair with a fork or to stand on a chair would be misusing that thing, and if it's my item you're misusing, I might object.  However, from a human perspective there is no "proper use" of a tree.  It simply is, because we didn't make it for any particular purpose.  We can turn it to any purpose we like -- we can make it into chairs or into paper or we can sit underneath it.  It might be better for some of those purposes than others, but no one will object to how we use it if it's our own tree.

If God created us, it's reasonable to say he built in our different functions and desires for his own purposes, and he might have an opinion about how we use them.  If, however, we came into being through the blind process of evolution, nobody actually cares what we do besides other humans.  Evolution is a terrible source for morality, because it doesn't care about human concerns like happiness, love, or beauty.  If we took evolution as a guide, we should probably give up things like art and music, each of us should have the maximum number of children we possibly can -- celibacy or late marriage would be sinful -- and we should euthanize our grandparents because they're a waste of resources.  That, need I point out, would be terrible, so I vote for "kick evolution in the face and do things it never intended."

So if you are already Catholic, it is quite reasonable for you to believe in natural law.  However, the church claims that natural law is available to everyone, regardless of their religion, through the unaided light of reason alone, and it just does not appear that this is true.  You have to have a prior belief in God, and it's pretty evident that reason alone does not bring everyone to a belief in God -- particularly not a specific version of God that has specific expectations for what we are to do with our bodies.

The second problem with natural law is that it doesn't really distinguish between things that are perversions of a bodily function and things that aren't intended by our body but are just fine.  For instance, if the purpose of the sexual faculty is to beget children, you would think that we are all bound to beget children since we all have a reproductive system, but the church says no to that -- you can forego using the sexual faculty altogether, provided you don't use it in a way that frustrates procreation.  That seems a distinction without a difference -- as though the point was to make sure those who don't have children suffer for it, rather than to get everyone to have children.

And, while natural-law proponents make a huge deal over the difference between sex between naturally infertile people and artificially infertile people, it does not appear to me that there is a real difference.  In both cases, the effects are the same; and the intentions of the people may be the same too.  (For instance, a couple that only has intercourse when one of them is infertile is deliberately avoiding procreation.)  Only the means varies, and what is the justification for making the means matter?  What is intrinsically bad about the means?

Another issue, when you bring homosexuality into the equation, is that a gay couple is not deliberately frustrating procreation.  They might want to procreate, like an infertile couple might, they just can't.  Like the infertile couple, they experience the other ends of sex, like pleasure and bonding.  Like the infertile couple, they don't experience the procreative end, but that's not intentional.  It's a massive stretch to me to imagine that there is a teleology of the body that exists to encourage procreation, but it cares about things irrelevant to whether a couple procreates.

And then, of course, we can point out that sex is the only faculty of the body that is treated this way.  The digestive system can be frustrated in similar ways, but no one makes a fuss about it.  You can drink a zero-calorie soda.  You can chew gum, which gets your stomach growling as it expects food, but which will never nourish you.  You can do all this purely to get the pleasure of food while not nourishing your body -- even though the only reason it is pleasurable to eat is to get you to nourish your body.  That doesn't matter; no one thinks this is immoral.  And if you're sick, it's okay to nourish the body without eating -- with a feeding tube or an IV.  That's perfectly fine, even though begetting children without sex is not okay.  The rules for sex are different, and I don't think there is a rationally-explicable reason why this should be.

It's a general medical principle -- accepted by the Church -- that you can damage one part of the body to save the whole.  You can take out a diseased kidney.  You can irradiate the body to kill a tumor even if it makes the rest of you sick.  You can do a gastric bypass which hinders the digestive system in order to help a person lose weight.  All of this is okay!  But sterilizing a person because pregnancy will risk their life is not okay.  I can't see a clear rule which you could figure out ahead of time that would allow you to draw these conclusions.  Instead, it seems like people had the conclusions in their minds in advance and tried to come up with an argument that would justify them.

And you know what?  That's totally fine.  It's okay to say, "We think God created us with a purpose, and through revelation, we know a lot about what that purpose is.  Let's spend some time and see if we can figure out what the logical rules are that made God draw the lines where he did."  That's a part of religion, but it's not a bad thing.  The bad thing is when you claim that non-Catholics could come to the same conclusions without first knowing the rules, and then claim that this means they are bound to your rules despite not sharing your beliefs.

We all know that virtually no non-Catholics ever are convinced by natural-law arguments.  The few who are generally wind up converting to Catholicism, because apparently they already believed many of the same first principles.  I think it's uncharitable the way that some Catholics put this down to self-deception or outright lying -- that is, "you would be convinced by this argument if you weren't so selfish/lying about not being convinced/morally twisted by your sinfulness."  Is it so hard to imagine that people might simply disagree?  I myself was ready and willing to be convinced by natural-law arguments in college, and I studied them quite a bit, but I simply felt that without the basic premise that God wanted certain things of us and had revealed what they were, the arguments would never be convincing.

For more on this topic, I recommend this post by Melinda Selmys, as well as the comments.  I also agreed with many of the counterarguments in the comments on this post.

Contraceptive misconceptions

The last post reminded me of other misconceptions I frequently see thrown around in Catholic circles.  I'm sure Bat would like me to remind you that not all Catholics believe or spread these errors.  Today I want to talk about a few things I've learned about birth control in the past few years that I found very surprising -- considering the things I have been told in my Catholic education.

Myth #1: 50% of abortions are in women using birth control, which proves birth control contributes to abortion.

I see this one often, and the first half is right: half of women who have abortions were using some kind of birth control in the month they got pregnant.  Most of these were using it inconsistently or incorrectly, true, but they were using it.  So did it give them a false sense of security?  Let's take a look at the numbers.

If 50% of women who were sexually active but did not want to get pregnant were on birth control, while 50% were not, that 50/50 split would mean that birth control had no effect on a woman's odds of getting an abortion.  However, we all know most sexually-active women of reproductive age are on birth control.  This very informative link  suggests that "at-risk" women -- women who could get pregnant and don't want to -- use birth control at a rate of 90%.  So already we're seeing that birth control is having an effect, because if 90% of women use it and get abortions at the same rate, they would be having 90% of the abortions, not 50%.

I am not sure what the correlation is between believing in birth control and believing in abortion.  Presumably there is some correlation, because the very religious don't believe in either.  We can then assume the subgroup that is on birth control is also a subgroup that also is more strongly in favor of abortion.  They're also, I would assume, more likely to have access to it -- they have money and nearby Planned Parenthood clinics.  But I can't say what the numbers might be here.

But I have the unplanned pregnancy numbers: 54% are among women who don't use birth control, 41% among women who use it, but inconsistently, and 5% among women who use it consistently.

I understand the assumption is that if women weren't using birth control, they would be less likely to have sex, but it doesn't appear so.  Over half of the women who are getting pregnant aren't using birth control at all.  I'm not sure what they expect to happen.  Maybe, as has been the case throughout human history, they don't have a whole lot of self-control.  Fornication wasn't invented in the Sixties.

But, you might say, birth control fueled the sexual revolution, and if only we didn't have that, we wouldn't have so much abortion.  Well, that might be true, sure.  But the numbers show that you can't put that genie back in the bottle simply by taking everyone's birth control away.  People who don't have access to it -- because it's expensive, because insurance won't cover it, whatever -- are still having sex.  And the odds of getting pregnant when you are fertile, sexually active, and not using any form of birth control are 85% over the course of one year.

And keep in mind that promiscuity isn't the only cause of abortion.  Women who are married still get abortions.  So even if no one had sex outside of marriage, abortion would still happen, because of the married women who feel unable to have another child right now.  Married women are much more likely to consistently use birth control, which is surely part of the reason why they are less likely to have abortions than single women.  What if women were more willing to have babies?  Well, most women who have abortions already have at least one child.  It looks like they like children fine; it's that they don't feel that they can care for more.  Attempting to convince women that having a baby every year for their entire marriage is okay, especially in an economy which makes having children very expensive, would be a much tougher change to make.

The abortion rate has dropped significantly in the past few years, and it's pretty clear from the statistics that the reason is more people using birth control.  It's not more people choosing to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, because it tracks along with a decreased unintended pregnancy rate.  And it's not more people wanting babies either, because the intended pregnancy rate has gone up only slightly.  Why are more women using birth control?  Because their insurance is now required to cover it.

So it really puzzles me that Catholics are putting so much of their energy toward getting rid of that law.  I understand, they feel it's cooperation with evil (and, in my opinion, they're wrong about that -- cooperating involuntarily, because you are legally required to, is not sinful) but still, do they realize they would be indirectly causing many abortions if they got their way?

Myth #2: But surely, on a cultural level, accepting contraception means encouraging abortion.

Then there's the question of whether, on a national or cultural level, widespread contraception use increases fornication and promotes a culture of death, thus driving the abortion rate up.  I want to just drop this link on you and tell you to read it, because it seems to put that theory to rest pretty definitively.  But instead I'll pull out a few facts for you:

*In Russia, at the time abortion was legalized (since illegal abortions were already rampant) an average married woman had ten abortions in her life.  In the eighties, contraception started to become available and abortions started to drop.  Between 1988 and 2001, contraceptive use rose 74% and the abortion rate declined 61%.

*In a region of Bangladesh which was provided with family-planning services, abortion rates dropped to one-third of the rates in the rest of Bangladesh.

*Studies like this one show that providing birth control did not increase sexual activity.  (In fairness, this one showed a very slight difference -- though much smaller than the reduction birth control causes in the unplanned pregnancy and abortion rates.)

So, no, it does not appear that the availability of birth control increases the abortion rate by encouraging people to have more sex.  It seems that the amount of sex people have and the number of children they want are both pretty independent of whether they have birth control available.  The difference is in what methods they have to achieve what they want.  When birth control isn't available, many people are going to turn to abortion.

Myth #3: The Pill causes abortion

That leads me to the third myth, which surely is a lot of people's reason for opposing birth control availability.  The theory is that the Pill causes zygotes to fail to implant after fertilization, thus causing an "invisible" abortion.  And I can't blame anyone for believing this, it's on the insert for the Pill: first, it claims, it suppresses ovulation; second, it thickens cervical fluid so that sperm can't reach the egg; and third, it makes the uterine lining thin and inhospitable to an embryo.  That third method would amount to a very early abortion, though legally it isn't considered one.  (In America "pregnancy" is defined as beginning with implantation, probably to avoid debates like this.)

The thing is, there isn't actually any evidence that this third method ever happens.  We do know that the pill makes the uterine lining thin.  However, that's when it actually works and prevents ovulation.  When a breakthrough ovulation does take place, a woman's hormonal profile is quite different.  Isn't it possible that in this case the uterine lining also manages to mature?

That's the argument made by these pro-life doctors.  I share this article often because I think it's important for people to know that not only is there no evidence that the Pill causes abortions, the evidence leans toward showing that it does not.  To sum up (because I admit the article is long and difficult; it took me a long time to read), the rate of breakthrough ovulation is (corrected for the normal early miscarriage rate) the same as the Pill's failure rate -- the rate of unintended pregnancy while on the Pill.  (The evidence is even stronger, surprisingly enough, for the morning-after pill.  The morning-after pill has a very high failure rate precisely because it can't prevent implantation.)

Now I mentioned "the normal early miscarriage rate" because a very large proportion of fertilized eggs never implant as it is.  This is probably because of DNA errors and it appears there is no helping it.  That means that if you are a sexually active woman who is not on birth control or pregnant, you have almost certainly lost many zygotes.  This post points out that out of 100 women who aren't on birth control for a year, 85 zygotes will be lost.  (And a further 85 will implant, which is why 85% of women will get pregnant in one year.)  But if they are all on the Pill, they will only lose (using the worst possible estimate in case the Pill does cause zygotes to be lost) only two.  Of course this is a utilitarian argument; I understand if your feeling is that it's better for 85 zygotes to die through no human cause than for two to die because of something a person did.  But you aren't actually saving any lives by trying to prevent people from using oral contraceptives.

What is my point, with this post?  Am I suggesting you should get on birth control?  No.  You should do what you want.  Your own behavior is entirely in your control: you can choose to abstain, choose to accept many children, whatever you like.  But influencing other people's behavior is another ball of wax.  In public health, they don't talk about what it would be nice if people did.  They talk about what interventions we can do, and what the actual results of those interventions will be.  And it seems clear that intervening to keep people from getting birth control doesn't change their hearts, it doesn't stop them from having sex, and it doesn't make them want more children.  It makes them get pregnant when they don't want to, and many of them will go on to have abortions.

So if you want to reduce abortions, trying to stop people from getting birth control when they want it is the most counterproductive thing you could possibly do.  That's all I'm saying.  I think it's important to shoot down these three misconceptions so that people know exactly what the results of their actions will be.  I don't think, as many pro-choice activists do, that the pro-life movement is dishonest, or that it's just trying to control women rather than to save lives.  I think people just don't know this information, and pro-life activity will be much more effective if it uses the most accurate information.

The illusion of control, and the illusion of non-control

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is how control is an illusion.  We like to believe that we've got a handle on life, that if we work hard we'll succeed, and if we are careful nothing bad will happen.  People do a lot of dumb things to preserve that illusion, like obsessing over details or blaming other people for bad things that happen.

Of course we're not really that much in control.  Crap happens and sometimes it isn't anybody's fault.  Or it's someone's fault, but not yours, so that no matter how good or hardworking or careful you are, you wind up in trouble.  Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.  Life isn't fair.

Simcha Fisher wrote a good article about this today.  So let's set it aside: control is an illusion.  Much of what happens in life, happens despite your plans and carefulness.

But I have been thinking as well that non-control is also an illusion, and one that's much more tempting to me.  I like to walk through life assuming things will just work out, or if they don't, I probably couldn't have made them work out anyway so it's not my fault.  I prefer to believe that the hour of my death is already somehow decided and doesn't rely on small decisions I make; that getting and keeping a good job is mostly a matter of luck and the economy and doesn't rely a whole lot on me being superlative.

Of course one ought to be responsible, in a general sense, but there's a certain basic level of responsibility that is all anybody could expect.  If you do your due diligence, if you watch your kids as well as most parents do and you work hard at your job and you look both ways before you cross the street .... you're responsible enough and anything bad that happens isn't your fault.

However, this too is an illusion.  Sometimes it's the germaphobe that avoids catching the plague.  Sometimes staying home instead of going out might save your life. Sometimes you forward-face your toddler at two because that is what everyone does and they break their neck in a crash.  Sure, you might not be blamed because everyone knows you did your basic diligence, but it will still be a reality that if you had been more careful, results would have been different.

And I know the illusion of non-control can be dangerous.  There was a time when I felt no sense of responsibility at all for how many kids I brought into the world because it was out of my hands.  It was wonderfully freeing, but was it responsible?  Maybe not.  Certainly there are cases where it would be terribly irresponsible to take this attitude -- if I had a serious illness and could die, if my children were all disabled and needed extra care.  I don't have a job, but if I did have one and was willing to work more-or-less hard and blame any layoffs on the economy -- well, sooner or later I might be jobless when I really needed to have a job!

However, giving up the illusion of non-control might be even more terrifying than giving up the illusion of control.  The latter means accepting that you could be perfect and crap could still happen to you.  The former means accepting that despite that, you still have to try to be perfect because if you don't, even more crap will happen to you and it will be all your fault.  Then you have to take both of these tough realities and work out a balance that you can live with, that will have you working hard at your job but still sleeping at night, looking both ways before you cross the street but not afraid to leave the house.  And you have to accept that the balance you worked out might not be the "right" balance, and in fact there's no way to know, but you still have to live with it.

Life is hard without these two comforting illusions.  But as they are illusions, and as you can't navigate the world in a moral way without reference to the truth, it's good to remember (at least once in awhile) that illusion is exactly what they are.

Voting and moral theory

I've said before than in most cases, different moral theories have similar results.  In fact, most of us aren't very conscious about what moral theory we're using to make our decisions -- we just feel our moral choices to be obvious, and will draw from a variety of different arguments if we have to defend them.

The differences in people's moral reasoning are never so obvious as when they vote and when they talk about voting.  Different moral theories result in different frameworks for reasoning about how to vote, and ultimately in different votes. 

Let me describe what I mean by a few examples.

Deontologist voter: There are a few non-negotiables.  Whichever candidate passes a basic threshold of agreement on these gets his vote.  For instance, this was how I voted in 2004.  I didn't research the candidates at all.  I simply knew that one of them said he was pro-life, and the other did not, so I picked the one that did.

Virtue ethics voter: This person says that his vote has little effect on the course of the nation (because it's only one vote) but a huge effect on his own morality.  If he votes for someone who supports torture, for instance, it might make him more prone to excuse torture.  So he will generally vote for a perfectly pure candidate who has no chance at winning.  Mark Shea recommends this approach.  I did it in 2012, voting for Gary Johnson because I found both major candidates morally unacceptable.

Group loyalty voter: This person chooses a person who seems like "one of us" -- someone who signals that they care about the same moral issues and belong to the same tribe as the voter.  Candidates are well aware of this method of voting, so they will gather endorsements from churches, drop dogwhistles to their key constituencies, and signal group membership any way they can.  The reasoning is that it doesn't matter what the candidate's individual positions are, because anyone might be lying -- what they want is a person they can trust to make the right decisions once they get there.  To do that, the candidate should share, as closely as possible, the moral assumptions of the voter.

Nihilist voter: They feel discouraged because their vote doesn't count much, or because they are unimpressed by all available candidates, so they stay home.  I did this in 2008, in part because I had moved and not re-registered in time, but partly just because I felt disillusioned with politics in general and didn't see anyone I could get excited about voting for.

Consequentialist voter: This person does not care about whether the candidate is personally likeable, and doesn't need to agree with the candidate on any one issue.  Instead, they consider, of all the possible consequences of the election, which would be best.  Sometimes they call this the "lesser of two evils" approach, to emphasize that they're not voting for who they are because they actually like them.  But it is possible that consequentialism might lead one to vote for a worse candidate in order to discredit that party or punish the other party.  Or they might vote third party in order to send a message to the two parties that there is a rise in libertarianism or socialism or whatever and the parties should trend that way to win more votes next time.  This was certainly a part of my thinking in 2012 as well.  Consequentialism is the entirety of my rationale this time.

You've probably heard that Cruz is out and therefore it will probably be Trump vs. Clinton (unless Sanders has a massive surge).  So it's a much simpler consideration than it used to be.  I'd have seriously considered voting for Cruz, but I no longer have to weigh potential consequences of that now.

I can't know what all the consequences of either result will be.  But my assessment is that the world will be significantly worse under Trump, while Clinton is more likely to preserve the status quo or make things slightly worse.  Of the two possibilities, a Clinton win is better.

In past years I probably would have voted third party while harboring a secret hope that Trump would lose.  But at this point, being more strongly consequentialist than I used to be, I'll vote for the result I want, regardless of any personal animus or rational disapproval of the candidate.  Because my moral duty is to make things the best I can, rather than to preserve my own sense of moral purity by voting third party.

If your moral theory is different, you'll likely come up with different answers.  Whatever you do, I hope we're all still friends come this December.  This country probably can't be saved, not in the way I might hope, but good friendships can.  And when you realize that those who disagree with you on voting aren't evil, but simply making their moral choices according to a slightly different framework, it may be easier to respect them even when they vote differently from you.

The unit of mattering

Most of us think of ourselves as individuals.  After all, only individual humans have consciousness, per se -- groups of humans and parts of humans don't.  But as I've written before, we are organized in levels of complexity, and so groups of humans also exist.  In many ways they behave like sentient creatures, even though strictly speaking they are not.

The thing is, even though consciousness is always at the level of the individual, there's no requirement for this to be the level that matters most to us.  As an example, take ants.  Ants are individual animals, but their individual existence is not important to them.  The colony is what matters, and individual ants will suicide for the good of the nest without hesitation if they are injured.  So for ants, you could say that the "unit of mattering" -- the level of organization which the ant considers important -- is the colony.

But humans are not ants.  We are creatures of conflicting impulses.  We have selfish desires, where we value ourselves as individuals more highly than others; and we also have altruistic desires, where we wish to sacrifice for other individuals.  But it seems that this is still a very individualistic way of thinking of it -- natural in a modern American like myself, but perhaps not universal among humans.  It seems that plenty of people, whether consciously or not, put their main "unit of mattering" on a group level.  That is, they care more about their nation, tribe, religion, or family than they do about any individual within that group.

I would readily die for my family or possibly for my nation; but if I did so, it would be entirely because I cared about the individuals within these groups.  The existence of the group itself is not all that important to me.  I think I would prefer that my country cease to exist, for it to be taken over by Canada and its culture erased, than for a citizen of my country to die.  I care about individuals.  I don't care about groups very much.

But I'm unusually un-groupish, probably due to my history.  Even plenty of Americans, individualists though we tend to be, have stronger group loyalty than this.  They think it's okay for individuals in their groups to suffer at least a little bit, provided the group itself remain.  The more strongly they feel tied to their groups, the more they're going to do this.  For instance, the Deaf community is very tight-knit, and within it there's a lot of objection to curing deafness.  Sure, the lives of all the individuals within the group would be improved by being able to hear, but the group itself would die.  They don't want that, because they love their community.

And this isn't against the good of individuals, necessarily.  People like having groups, so when you have a good group where you feel at home, you would go through a lot of inconvenience to stay connected to it.  The group enriches your life.

But I think a big part of it is more instinctive.  The unit of evolutionary survival in humans isn't generally the individual, it's the group.  That's why so many things have been passed on that aren't individually beneficial -- from self-sacrifice to asexuality.  So, while our consciousness is individual, the life-form that's fought its way through the ages to survive against all competitors is not the individual human, but the human group.  You could call it a parasite in the minds of humans that forces us to serve its needs instead of our own.  (The cult survivor in me would like you to consider that possibility.)  Or you could say that it's a higher level of organization, like a body of which we are the cells, and since it's more advanced than us, it deserves our service.  But I think the best way to describe it is symbiosis.  We serve the group, and in return, it's there for us when we need it.

This ties in to the Two Boxes post -- I feel that Box Two, the liberal box, is full of things which promote happiness for individuals, while Box One, the conservative box, is full of things which are more geared toward groups.  I'm still thinking that possibility over and am curious what you think about this.  Certainly a liberal view of self-sacrifice is about helping individuals, including all humanity rather than people similar to oneself; while a conservative view is that one should sacrifice oneself for one's group.  I mean, take that famous poem, "Horatius at the Bridge":

"And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?"

Notice he doesn't say "for my friends and family," or "in order that humans everywhere should be better off."  What he dies for is Rome.  Rome, to Horatius, isn't a collection of people, it's an entity of itself, which he loves.  He loves it for a lot of reasons, I suppose -- love of a culture is a complicated thing -- but one of those reasons is because Rome has kept him safe up to this point.  It's a mutual relationship; he defends it and it defends him.  It is hard for a human being to actively care for thousands of people at once, so we care for a group which we think of as a single living thing -- symbolized by concrete things like temples.

And there's another advantage in putting one's "unit of mattering" in groups: it helps us cope with the inevitability of our own death.  When we worry that we'll die someday, and then what's the point of anything we've done, we can remind ourselves that we are part of something larger -- that after we die, our religion or nation or culture will continue.  So if we put our efforts toward the group rather than ourselves, we have the consolation that none of that effort will be wasted.

What do you think?  Do you care more for individuals or groups?  Is there a specific group you are in (nation, religion, class, club) which you feel identifies you most completely, which you would sacrifice for?

Death before sin?

I've written before about deontological and consequentialist morality, pointing out that in most cases the actual conclusions are the same.  The former might say "taking my friend's car is bad because it's stealing," while the latter says "taking the car is bad because it will harm my friend," but both agree that you shouldn't steal the car.

But there are edge cases in which there is a big difference, most notably, the question of whether it can ever be right to do something bad for a sufficiently good reason.  These cases don't come up all that often -- usually the conflict is between morality and some more selfish desire, rather than one morally-significant goal and another.  But they do arise from time to time, and it's important to have some idea what you would choose.

People's opinions on these dilemmas are not consistent.  Most of us, going based on intuition rather than systematic morality, would tell a lie to save a life or steal if we were starving, but we wouldn't be able to shoot a child to save five lives.

Different systematic moralities come up with different answers.  Catholic morality comes down very heavily on the side of doing no evil, regardless of the greater evil that may come to pass.  I was taught in moral theology that there is always a moral option, but sometimes the moral option is that you die, or that other innocent people will die.  The end goal is following the moral law and hopefully going to heaven -- not any earthly end.

Even in Catholic morality, though, there are some carefully-crafted exceptions.  First, some things that seem against the moral law aren't truly wrong.  Stealing to feed yourself when you are starving is not actually stealing at all.  Lying to save a life might not really be lying.  Second is the principle of double effect, which is difficult to explain, but which relies on distinguishing between an act that is wrong in itself and one that simply has evil effects which you didn't desire.  So to directly kill a person would be wrong, but to do something which indirectly results in their death might be all right for a sufficiently grave reason.

To a consequentialist, this all seems very nitpicky.  Can the moral quality of an action really be changed by whether you set the bomb or just allowed the bomb to go off?  If the same number of people died, to the consequentialist, there really is no difference.

Now I want to make a distinction here between consequentialism and utilitarianism.  Utilitarianism is a subcategory of consequentialism, but many conflate them.  A person whose end goal is "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" may wind up justifying some things that look bad to the rest of us -- eugenics, for instance.  But a consequentialist could have different, non-utilitarian end goals, like "the preservation of all human life possible."

At this point I am leaning more toward consequentialism, because it frustrates me to see human life put second to inflexible rules.  Today, in a discussion of the Vatican's new document, I invented a scenario which I imagine is probably not uncommon, at least in some parts of the world: A couple is in a second, invalid marriage.  They have kids and neither is religious.  But one spouse converts to Catholicism and is told that it is mortally sinful to continue sleeping with her invalidly-married husband.  She tells her husband, and he says, "Forget it.  Celibacy is your commitment, not mine; I didn't sign up for a sexless marriage.  If you're really set on this, I'm going to leave you."

Like I said, there are kids, and they live in a country where there isn't much available to help a single mother.  Her children's livelihood depends on her keeping her husband around.  So from a consequentialist perspective, the answer is obvious -- she should continue to sleep with her second husband.  If this choice is accepted by others, it may weaken society's belief in the indissolubility of marriage -- the Church's argument for condemning her -- but considering the situation it's probably an acceptable risk to take.  Yet from a deontologist perspective, she should stand her ground and not sleep with him, regardless of the consequences.  He might leave her and their children.  They might become homeless or starve.  That's not morally relevant to a deontologist because the moral quality of her action is decided by the action itself, not the effects.

And that's why some Catholics are upset at the Pope's suggestion that this might be "the most generous choice" or what God might call someone to.  It undermines the whole of Catholic morality, which is that moral laws are inviolable and it is never acceptable to break them, even if it can be predicted to result in disastrous consequences.  If there is no moral way to save a pregnant mother without an abortion, then she and her baby must both die, because one cannot do evil for any reason.  If one must deny Christ to save one's children, the children must die.  That's the way Catholic morality works, and for the Pope to imply there could be the smallest exception seems to undermine the whole thing.

I've started to be a little horrified by this.  Sure, I don't think I would kill an innocent person to save others, but I'd definitely tell a lie to save some else.  I'd cooperate with a rapist to save my life or someone else's.  I'd deny just about anything to save my kids.  I just think human life is more important than anything else.  Rules are great -- I have plenty of personal rules which I follow -- but rules exist to serve human life and dignity, not to be prioritized above them.

What do you think?  Are there any circumstances in which the ends justify the means, and what do you think those circumstances would be?

Two boxes of values

I know I haven't blogged much lately, but that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking.  I've been doing a lot of reading about morality, about politics, about tribes and how they work.  Here are three of the best things I've read on the topic, which may be good background for this post:

The Rise of American Authoritarianism - Trump supporters are more likely than others to say that it's more important to be obedient than curious.  Are they a different sort of people than the rest of us, or are they just more frightened?
Some people punch down when they get scared - Why does fear make people authoritarian anyway?
And my favorite, A Thrive/Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum - It's possible that the values of the left and right are each well-adapted for different circumstances -- conservative values for times of danger and liberal values when things are more secure.

And this has gotten me thinking about how I tend to subdivide people, politically, into two groups.  I've done it before with Catholics, but pretty much everyone can be subdivided in this way.  Of course as a division it's as arbitrary as any -- you can't fit everyone exactly into a box.  Rather, these are two general groups of values which people tend to prefer.  Some people select some values from each box, but there's a lot of commonality in the kinds of people who prefer one box or the other.

Here is one box: Life is dangerous.  Your personal life satisfaction is not important.  Your survival is not guaranteed.  It's important to be tough; nobody cares about your feelings.  People who are not like us are probably enemies.  There isn't enough to go around -- if someone wins, someone else has to lose, so I want my side to win.  Bad guys exist, and we have to be ready to defend ourselves against them.  Those who do wrong should be punished.  Trying to be nice to bad guys is a mistake; they won't be nice to us so it's best to attack first.  The strength and cohesion of my group is crucial.  We take care of our own.  If you don't like the decisions the leaders make, suck it up because they only way to succeed is by following orders. Have faith in the things you believe and don't ask too many questions.

Here is the other box: Life is good right now, and it's going to keep getting better.  It's important to be happy.  Sacrificing for others is great, but it's important to take care of yourself too.  Be kind to people who are different.  There's no such thing as a bad guy -- there are only people just like us who we need to figure out how to get through to.  There's enough of everything to go around, we just have to share it and not be selfish.  If we work together, we all win; there are no losers.  When someone makes a mistake, we shouldn't punish them, we should help them get better.  Pursue your own individuality -- if a group is demanding a lot of you, it's probably a cult.  Question everything.  Everyone is equal.

To put it more empirically, Box One contains values like:

• strong ingroup loyalty and outgroup suspicion
• hierarchy
• higher aggression
• faith and certainty
• black-and-white thinking
• abstract justice/punishment
• concern with purity

Box Two contains values like:

• weak ingroup loyalty and more openness to strangers
• equality
• low aggression
• curiosity 
• shades-of-gray thinking
• mercy, rehabilitative justice
• openness to experimentation

Most of us like some of the values in one box, and some in the other.  Or we lean toward one, but not stated in such an extreme way.  Because hopefully we all realize that none  of these statements are 100% true 100% of the time.  For instance, I think people are basically good at heart and we should work together with them, but I don't actually think there's any chance of bringing ISIS to peace talks any time soon.

I realized, as I've mulled this over, that the first box is a set of values that are useful in zero-sum situations.  That is, in some contests there really are winners and losers, and so an adversarial outlook makes you more likely to succeed.  For instance, in an agrarian society, land is zero-sum -- if you have this farm, no one else has it.  You will have to defend it against anyone else who wants it, or you will starve.  No wonder these values were all pretty solidly appreciated in the agrarian Middle Ages.

The second box is full of values useful in positive-sum situations.  For instance, capitalism is positive-sum -- a successful trade results in two people who both feel they have "won," because they have improved their situation compared to before trading.  When your survival is based on positive-sum contests, you learn that friendliness toward strangers and generosity toward all are the values that will get you ahead.  You learn to find positive-sum solutions to problems, because these will promote peace and allow you to do more trading.  If you sell bread and your neighbor sells milk, you're not enemies -- you can afford to be friendly and you don't have to be on your guard all the time.  In fact, fear can destroy capitalism -- take bank runs, for example, or stock market crashes.

I can also just borrow the explanation from the blog post I cited above -- the first box is for situations perceived as dangerous, the second for situations perceived as secure.  Being loyal with your friends and suspicious of outsiders is a good plan when things are very dangerous.  There's no time to examine and test what you know; instead, you should rely on time-tested beliefs.  It's no surprise that people who pick a lot from the first box will describe our national situation as very perilous, at risk of collapse, or in a state of decline, while those who prefer the second will say that things have never been better.

Here's the trouble: morals and values are things you don't consciously decide to have.  You learn them from a young age and they're embedded in your gut.  When someone asks me, "Should we execute criminals?" I don't really think that much about it first.  I feel empathy for the criminal and then I try to find a way that it can be wise not to kill them.  And you could tell me till you're blue in the face, "Have faith, obey authority," and I would not be able to do those things.  I am not able to think those are good things, because it seems obvious to me that they are not.  I imagine people whose values come mostly out of the other box feel the same way about their own values.

Now, it's possible that this entire difference is genetic, some of us have "survive" genes and some have "thrive" genes, and the environment simply rewards those who are well-adjusted to the current climate, making one or the other more dominant in the thought of a certain time period.  However, despite a recent emphasis in scientific fields about genetic factors, I do believe that our early upbringing affects our brains.  In particular, we know that stress early in life can give us a more sensitive stress response for life.  Hormones in the brain -- cortisol especially -- change the actual structure of the brain of an infant or young child.  This makes great sense.  The genes that direct the growth of the brain don't have any way of knowing what sort of brain a person will need, whether they ought to be constantly on their guard or relaxed and creative.  But as soon as a child is born -- or even in the womb -- he gets exposed to his environment.  His brain sizes it up and decides how it's going to develop at this point -- for risk, or for safety.  It's similar to the way the metabolism can be set for scarcity early in life when a child goes through a famine.  It's as if the body said, "Well, we see how it's going to be, let's prepare for the worst."

We already know that extreme stress in childhood -- abuse, abandonment, neglect -- has devastating consequences.  But what about more mild stress like a strict upbringing?  Does that simply prepare a person to see the world more cautiously?  That isn't always a bad thing.

Then there's the effect of our parents' explicit teaching.  The stories we are told, the things we are and are not punished for doing.  A child who is expected to obey immediately grows into an adult who is more likely to accept the authority even of a bad government.  (This was a study done on the Nazis, showing that people who had grown up in homes where instant obedience was expected were more likely to collaborate with the Nazis than people who had grown up in homes where they were allowed to talk back.)  A child who is punished for exploring his environment becomes less curious.  One child is told stories about big battles in which good and evil are clearly delineated and the problems can be solved by courage; another is told stories about interpersonal conflict in which the solutions come from collaboration.  Relatively small parenting differences may help influence a child toward one box of values over another -- though I should mention that we aren't entirely sure how much of a person's development relies on genetics and how much on environment. 

There may be some adaptation possible in adulthood as well.  A generally non-authoritarian person may become more authoritarian when they feel threatened by an outside danger, while an authoritarian person might relax when they find out the world is not as risky as they previously thought.

But it seems to me that these adulthood changes aren't that common.  It seems much more likely that a person with a predisposition to a cautious, authoritarian approach will find danger to be afraid of.  Though I have been fed stories about the decline of civilization for much of my life, I never felt it was that close to home.  When I began to research history and found that life is actually pretty good right now compared to the rest of human history, it felt more satisfying than the opposite conclusion had been.  I can state the same facts that convinced me to an authoritarian, and they will either deny that the measures important to me (health, long lifespan, lack of violence) are important, or admit that things are okay at the moment but insist they are doomed to collapse very soon.

And so in adulthood you see people sort into the viewpoints that fit best with the way they see the world.  My husband was a traditionalist and monarchist when I met him, and by the end of college he was an outspoken advocate of democracy and even wrote an article praising the goals of the French Revolution.  But he never changed.  He simply found ideas that fit better with how he really was.  When people raised with very conservative religion abandon it or join a more liberal branch, you're watching the same process.  Likewise, there are liberal authoritarians who either become conservative or take a very authoritarian approach to their liberalism -- believing democracy is in grave danger, seeing conservatives as the enemy, and approaching conflict from a win-lose point of view rather than a collaborative one.

I enjoyed reading about the study on authoritarianism, but what I would really like is to take a peek at voters' brains.  Is there a difference visible on a brain scan between a liberal and a conservative?  Are their cortisol and testosterone levels different?  Can we follow people through time, from infancy to adulthood, and see if their authoritarian tendencies remain stable?  Can we see if twins have similar levels of authoritarianism?  This is so exciting.

But what's the takeaway?  If our viewpoints are so thoroughly informed by our genes and upbringing, how can we say they are rational?  Surely there is one right answer.  Either the world is safe, or it is dangerous.  Either we're engaged in zero-sum conflicts, or we're facing positive-sum problems.  So whoever feels drawn to the other answer is wrong and we need to figure out how to fix them.

Well, no.  Life is a heck of a lot more complex than that.  The world is safe in part because some people are constantly monitoring the dangers.  It can be just as bad to approach a zero-sum conflict with collaboration as to approach a positive-sum one with aggression.  And we're bound to experience both in a lifetime.  Yet how can we react appropriately given that we are in some way predisposed to one or the other?

Naturally my Box Two answer is to be less black-and-white about it.  I think it's good not to get too comfortable in your box and to consider the possible merits of some qualities of the other box, at least some of the time.  Even if you're very solidly in one box, you might find that people who like the other box are actually doing a lot of good in fields other than yours.  You might be the toughest, most aggressive cop in the precinct, and still respect that your soft-hearted, agreeable wife is doing important work when she encourages the kids to share their toys.  I think it would be great if every person looked for a positive-sum solution to problems first rather than jumping straight to conflict, but even after you've done so, it's possible there's no positive-sum solution to be found and you're going to have to fight.  You shouldn't be so attached to your own most comfortable set of tactics that you're unwilling to try others.

And most importantly, I think we should all attempt to be guided by the facts.  If you value nonviolence, as I do, you'll certainly feel more drawn to nonviolent solutions .... but you should also, as rigorously as possible, attempt to predict whether nonviolence will work in a given situation.  I think equality is important, but that's not a sufficient reason to jump into socialism -- I should first consider whether socialism actually produces equality, and whether it sacrifices other values to do so.  In short, though our values determine what our goals are, we have to use fact and reason to help us reach those goals.

Further reading:

Moral foundations of liberals and conservatives
A long scholarly article I just discovered but haven't finished reading. So far it seems to confirm what I've said.

Conservatives vs. liberals - Ethics Defined
A short post which seems to summarize the previous link.

Link-up of studies on liberal and conservative brains
The scientist in me is geeking out right now.