Rather Than Say This Myself...

It's generally been my policy to avoid posting things on this blog that relate to my personal matters outside of the world of philosophy. And I'd like to keep things that way. But recently, I wrote a critique of Stefan Molyneux's book, Univerally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, which was met with a response that I can only call unbecoming of a group of people who claim to be interested in participating in philosophical discourse. Airing my personal grievances would be an uncomfortable use of this space, and so I will not do that. I will instead acknowledge the feelings of another person, YouTube user LibertyIsNotGiven (Eugene on Freedomain Radio), as discussed in his video, "Freedomain Radio - This Train is Bound for Bullshit" (the embedding feature on YouTube has been disabled for the video, so you'll need to click on the link to see it). I think that Eugene's comments should more than suffice to give you a basic idea of what I think about all of this.

My Apparently Vicious Work Covered on YouTube

Maverick YouTube channel-haver ReIgNoFrAdNeSs ("Reign of Radness" for those who refuse to read Alternatingcapsese) has released a video entitled "UPB's Recent Testicalectomy" in a transparent attempt to have me labeled as a depraved murderer...of Stefan Molyneux's ethical theory. Thanks are due for the press! Here's the video:



And here's a link to the critique.

A Critique of Stefan Molyneux's Ethical Theory of Universally Preferable Behaviour

So in case anyone (or everyone) has forgotten, in the early days of this blog I went through Stefan Molyneux's book, Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics. My goal was to figure out whether there was really anything to all the fuss that had been made about Stefan and his site, Freedomain Radio, but also to win a bet that I had made with Stefan about the claims that he made about the book. After wrestling with the project for a while, I concluded that Stefan's ideas were troublesome for a rather large number of reasons, and tossed out a rather slipshod overview of some of the things that were wrong with the book. By that time, Stefan had lost interest in continuing to speak with me about the subject, and I was sort of bored with the whole thing anyway, so I was mostly glad to just be done with it.

Recently, however, and for reasons that are not known to me, Stefan's ideas have re-entered the limelight. Perhaps most significant in my world has been Alex "Brainpolice" Strekal's recent involvement in a recorded debate with Stefan that was subsequently plastered all over the internet. But in any case, I thought it might finally be time to actually finish what I started in the form of a systematic critique of the book. So here's that effort.

I. Introduction

Stefan's project is an audacious undertaking. He describes his task as a battle against the "beast" of folk morality -- a view that he defines as "...the superstition that, without the tirades of parents, the bullying of gods or the guns of government, we cannot be both rational and good" (7) -- and contends that "Of course, if I have failed, I have at least failed spectacularly, which itself can be both edifying and entertaining!" (10). In this critique, it will become clear that I believe that Stefan has failed. But I am somewhat inclined to agree that his failure was rather spectacular.

In his book, Stefan boldly attempted to address a wide swath of philosophical disciplines, ranging from metaphysics to the philosophy of science to ethics -- all in less than 150 pages and without a single footnote. So it should surprise no one that he may have left a little bit to be desired in his handling of each subject. But because Stefan's discussion is so wide ranging, and because I don't have the time, energy, or interest to dissect Stefan's metaphysical or scientific views, I will limit my critique to Stefan's handling of ethics. After all, this book is supposed to be a rational proof of secular ethics, and if it fails at that, then the other problems with the book will be irrelevant.

In this analysis, I will rely on a certain interpretation of Stefan's approach in the book which suggests that there are actually at least two separate kinds of arguments that are being used. I proceed this way because there are elements of Stefan's approach that don't necessarily work together and which can be isolated into coherent and separate arguments. I will defend this interpretation with extensive reference to the text of the book, but there will nevertheless remain the possibility that I have misunderstood Stefan's intentions at some point along the way. So keep in mind that while I do think that my accounts of Stefan's arguments are accurate and that my critiques effectively demonstrate what is wrong with Stefan's arguments, it is still true that I am only attacking one interpretation of the text, and that interpretation may be wrong.

This critique will involve three steps. First, I will show that Stefan's terminological choices don't work, and that the first line of argumentation (which is built on this terminology) is non-functional. Second, I will show how Stefan's second line of argument works. And finally, I will explain what's wrong with this second line of argument.

II. Preferable...For What?

The first strain of Stefan's argument is the one that gives the book its title, and deals with the idea that certain behavior can be "universally preferable." The meaning of this term is likely not immediately clear, so it will be necessary to spell out what Stefan means by it.

[Added later: Some people have expressed frustration at the following paragraphs, calling them "nitpicky" as a way of dismissing them as unimportant. But what could be more important to a theory of universally preferable behavior than the definition of universally preferable behavior? In what follows, you will see that I think that the examples which Stefan uses to illustrate his definition contain some errors. These errors may seem small -- indeed, I think they are small -- but nevertheless, they are errors in illustrating the definition of the concept upon which the entire theory is based. I think that I would be doing a disservice to the reader if I simply allowed them to stand without explaining why the examples that Stefan uses are not examples of universally preferable behavior. So I hope that you will bear with me through a tiny bit of nitpicking, since at the other end will hopefully be a clearer understanding of what Stefan's theory looks like than is conveyed by his own examples.]

On page 30, Stefan writes:

When I speak of a universal preference, I am really defining what is objectively required, or necessary, assuming a particular goal. If I want to live, I do not have to like jazz, but I must eat. "Eating" remains a preference - I do not have to eat, in the same way that I have to obey gravity - but "eating" is a universal, objective, and binding requirement for staying alive, since it relies on biological facts that cannot be wished away.

It should be immediately clear that "eating" is not the best example, because you could stay alive by drinking smoothies, injecting yourself with nutrients intravenously, or whatever. But it shouldn't be too difficult to understand what Stefan means; here's another statement from the same page:

If I say that it is preferable for human beings to exercise and eat well...What I am saying is that if you want to be healthy, you should exercise and eat well.

Again this is potentially a bad example, but that's beside the point. What we need to get from this is that the word "preferable" means "required in order to achieve some end." We also need to acknowledge that the claim that something is preferable demands that we identify the end for which the preferable act is required. It isn't enough to simply say "it is preferable to eat"; we need to say, "it is preferable to eat because you want to live." And Stefan acknowledges this, writing:

Naturally, preferential behaviour can only be binding if the goal is desired.

The term "universally preferable behavior," then, could coherently be used in two senses. The first sense, which I will call the "weak" sense, would be to identify something that is required for all people to achieve some end, without claiming that it's actually going to be preferable for everyone. So, for example, you could say that "not killing yourself" is universally preferable for "living," in the sense that anyone who wants to live must not kill herself. But you could allow the possibility that some people wouldn't want to live, and so it wouldn't be preferable for them to not kill themselves. The second sense, which I will call the "strong" sense, would be to identify something that is required for all people to achieve some end that they all actually want to achieve. So if it were true that everyone on Earth actually did want to live, you could say that it is universally preferable that they all not kill themselves, because that would be incompatible with their ends.

So let's see this in action. On page 34, Stefan says:

...if a man wants to cure an infection, he should take antibiotics rather than perform an Aztec rain dance. The preference for taking antibiotics rather than doing a rain dance is universal, since dancing cannot cure infections. Thus, although there is the occasional madman who will try to cure himself through dancing, it is still universally preferable that if a man wants to cure himself, he must take antibiotics.

Here (again in spite of the bad example -- there might be other ways to cure an infection) we can directly see the weak sense of the term being used. It's not necessarily true that everyone actually wants to cure their infections, but if they did, then Stefan is identifying what would be required for them to achieve their ends: taking antibiotics. I hope that this will be sufficient for establishing that this is how Stefan is using the term; if not, I can find some other examples.

But now it's time for the first bit of that spectacular and entertaining failure that I promised at the beginning. On page 33, Stefan writes:

When I say that some preferences may be objective, I do not mean that all people follow these preferences at all times. If I were to argue that breathing is an objective preference, I could be easily countered by the example of those who commit suicide by hanging themselves.

What do we make of this? Let's try running it through our two senses of the term "universally preferable." According to the strong sense, arguing that breathing is objectively preferable would mean that breathing is required for some end that everyone shares, and since he gives suicide as the example, we might presume that the end in question is something like "living without the aid of life-support machinery." But I would imagine that someone who commits suicide probably does not want to live (with or without life-support machinery), and so it simply wouldn't be true that breathing is universally preferable in the strong sense.

In the weak sense of the term, we can say that breathing is universally preferable for living without life-support, since anyone wanting to do that would need to breathe. And since we're only using the weak sense of the term, we acknowledge that if the suicidal person doesn't want to live, it won't be necessary for her to breathe: it's only preferable to breathe in order to achieve the end in question, and she doesn't want to achieve it. So this makes sense.

But in the next paragraph, Stefan writes:

Thus when I talk about universal preferences, I am talking about what people should prefer, not what they always do prefer.

Now if we were using the strong sense of the term "universally preferable," this would make sense: because everyone shares the end in question, we can say that everyone should do what is universally preferable. But in this example, we're forced to use the weak sense, since it's not the case that everyone shares the end in question. Accordingly, it simply isn't true that by this line of thinking, we would arrive at the conclusion that the suicidal person should breathe. In fact, the suicidal person's goal is to suffocate: for people with that end, it is actually universally preferable (in the weak sense) not to breathe.

Okay; back to business. Now that we have an understanding of what Stefan means by "universally preferable," we can turn to his theory of ethics. First, we need to get a bit of confusion out of the way. On page 30, Stefan writes:

Ethics as a discipline can be defined as any theory regarding preferable human behaviour that is universal, objective, consistent - and binding.

But later in the book, Stefan uses a much more restricted definition of the discipline of ethics. On page 48, for example, he writes:

In general, we will use the term aesthetics to refer to non-enforceable preferences - universal or personal - while ethics or morality will refer to enforceable preferences.

And he continues:

Ethics is the subset of UPB which deals with inflicted behaviour, or the use of violence.

Throughout the book, Stefan uses this second, more restricted sense, and not the first sense, to talk about morality. For example, on page 76 he writes, "...morality is defined as an enforceable subset of UPB...," and in Appendix A on page 125, he writes, "The subset of UPB that examines enforceable behaviour is called "morality." He explains this shift on page 48 by explaining that "Although we first focused on UPB in the realm of ethics, UPB can now be seen as an "umbrella term"..." Fair enough; it just seems like it should be explicitly acknowledged here.

So, then, how would we use the concept of universally preferable behavior to think about "inflicted" or violent behaviors? To use the strong sense of "universally preferable behavior," we'd need to think about a kind of situation where all people need to use violence in order to achieve their ends. But given the vast diversity of ends, it would seem sort of odd to suggest that everyone is going to be required to do a particular sort of violent action in order to achieve a particular end that they all share. I mean, maybe there's a way to make that work, but I'd be sort of surprised.

What about the weak sense of the term? It seems rather clear that there are at least some ends that would require the use of violence, no matter who was trying to achieve them, and in these cases we'd want to say that it was universally preferable to use violence in order to achieve those ends.

But notice that so far, we're not talking about morality at all. We're pretty much talking about prudence -- that is, what you should do in order to achieve your goals. And this makes sense, because as Stefan said, "Naturally, preferential behaviour can only be binding if the goal is desired."

So, then, it's interesting to see where Stefan goes next. He writes:

Any theory that justifies or denies the use of violence is a moral theory, and is subject to the requirements of logical consistency and empirical evidence.

But what does he mean by "justifies" and "denies"? The idea of "justification" usually has to do with the idea that someone ought to be able to provide certain defenses of the choices he or she makes. But if we're just talking about ways of achieving our goals, the only justification we would need would be to a) identify what our goals are, and b) show how our chosen behaviors are consistent with achieving our goals.

It's this feature of the meaning of "universally preferable" that proves to be the fatal flaw in this line of argumentation. As long as we understand "universal preferability" in the terms that Stefan outlined in the beginning of the book, we will never be able to use the term to establish anything beyond the fact that something is necessary in order to achieve certain ends. So, then, it cannot be on the basis of universal preferability that we condemn the rapist, the murderer, or the thief -- that is, unless we somehow want to argue that rape, murder, or theft are somehow incompatible with the desires of the rapist, the murderer, or the thief, and our condemnation is simply one of taking exception to their stupid and ignorant choices. But Stefan doesn't argue this way, and that's good, because if he did it would be disastrous.

To illustrate this point, let's run the example of rape through our two senses of the term "universally preferable." The strong sense of universal preferability relies on the idea that everyone shares a certain end, and that there is something that is universally required in order to achieve this end. But it should be uncontroversial that neither raping nor non-raping is necessary for any end that everyone shares (after all, there are rapists, and presumably it will help them achieve their goals if they rape). So it simply would not be true that in the strong sense of "universally preferable," it is universally preferable for people to either rape or not rape.

And in the weak sense of "universally preferable," we can surely imagine that there are some ends that would require rape to achieve. For example, we might imagine that someone wants to achieve the end of "Having sex with someone who doesn't want to have sex with them, and who won't be amenable to being convinced or bargained with." In order to achieve this end, it would seem that rape would be required, no matter who was trying to achieve the end. So in the weak sense, rape would be universally preferable for anyone trying to achieve this end. And the same sort of thinking would apply in the cases of murder and theft.

So the concept of "universally preferable" behavior is simply not going to get Stefan to where he wants to go. He's just defined it in a way that makes it incompatible with the kinds of things he wants to establish -- among them that rape, murder, and theft are (thankfully) not moral. Accordingly, we'll turn to the next kind of argument that Stefan offers in his book.

III. A Maxim-Based Approach

Stefan's second line of argument is also built on the vocabulary of "universally preferable behavior," but seems to use the term in a way that's very different from the way that it is defined at the beginning of the book. In this other sense, "universally preferable" no longer means "required in order to achieve certain ends," but instead takes on a role in what I will call a "maxim-based" approach to ethical reasoning.

Because Stefan's words are tied up in the flawed terminology of "universally preferable behaviors," it will be necessary to find another way to interpret what Stefan is talking about. As we saw in the previous section, Stefan tells us that moral theories identify inflicted behaviors that are either justified or unjustified. We saw that when we think about this in terms of a behavior's being "universally preferable," this doesn't make sense. But it seems to me that we can proceed if we just cut out the "universally preferable" terminology altogether and just use terms like "morally required" or "morally unjustified" in their stead.

So for example, when Stefan is talking about the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) on page 54, he says:

The NAP is basically the proposition that "the initiation of the use of force is morally wrong." Or, to put it more in the terms of our conversation: "The non-initiation of force is universally preferable."

As we saw in the last section, calling the non-initiation of force "universally preferable" doesn't actually mean what Stefan seems to want it to mean. But if we just ignore the term "universally preferable" and substitute "morally required" in its place, then the statement is basically a tautology (which is what we want). It would now say:

The NAP is basically the proposition that "the initiation of the use of force is morally wrong." Or to put it more in the terms of our conversation: "The non-initiation of force is [morally required]."

Now that we have figured out a way to interpret Stefan's ideas without being hindered by his terminology, we can turn to the question of how he's using the term in order to build a moral framework. I said that the way he goes about doing this is through a "maxim-based" approach. So what is a maxim-based approach, and how does it work? The fundamental building block of such an approach is -- unsurprisingly -- a "maxim," which is a principle on which a person bases her decisions. The form of a maxim is as follows:

"In circumstances C, I will do X."

The role of C is to tell the actor when the rule is supposed to apply by describing the sorts of situations in which the action is to take place, and the role of the X is to describe the action that this person is supposed to be doing. So for example, we might offer the maxim, "When I am outside in the rain, I will cover myself with an umbrella." The C in this case would be any set of circumstances in which I am outside in the rain, and the X would be the action of covering myself with an umbrella. Clearly, when it is not raining or when I am inside, the maxim will have nothing to say; it only applies when the situation I face matches the circumstances set out in C. But we can say that I am always following this maxim if whenever I'm outside in the rain, I cover myself with an umbrella.

Stefan's approach to moral theorizing looks at maxims in order to determine whether they can be morally legitimate as guides for action. We can see the maxim-based approach most clearly on page 44, when Stefan is considering whether a soldier could ever be justified in killing. After first dismissing the possibility that murder is always morally required (a bold stance!), he introduces another possibility by saying:

If, to save the virtue of soldiers, I alter my theory to argue that it is moral for people to murder if someone else tells them to...

We can translate this proposed maxim as saying, "In circumstances where I am told to murder, I will do so." Stefan goes on to dismiss this maxim, and for reasons I will discuss in the next paragraph. But for right now, the thing to understand is how Stefan's approach can be understood as being based on evaluating maxims. The question of whether the soldier's killing is morally justified is answered by first figuring out what maxim the soldier would be following in deciding to kill, and then considering whether or not that maxim is an acceptable guide for the soldier's action.

So how does Stefan determine whether or not a maxim is acceptable? The first step that he takes is to suggest that we ought to consider what would happen if everyone followed the maxim in question. Stefan uses this approach to dismiss the maxim we just discussed:

If Politician A can order a soldier to murder an Iraqi, then the Iraqi must also be able to order the soldier to murder Politician A, and the soldier can also order Politician A to murder the Iraqi. The application of this theory results in a general and amoral paralysis, and is thus proven invalid.

If we generalize this idea, we can arrive at the following rule, which I think is foundational to Stefan's argument:

Claim 1: If it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow a particular maxim all the time, then that maxim is not morally legitimate as a guide for action.

How does this fit in? It seems clear that the problem that Stefan is identifying with the maxim in question -- "In circumstances where I am told to murder, I will do so" -- is that it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow it as a "rule to live by." It is on this basis that Stefan is claiming that it is defective as a guide for action.

But why should we accept Claim 1? Stefan offers the following explanation on page 43:

...the first test of any scientific theory is universality. Just as a theory of physics must apply to all matter, a moral theory that claims to describe the preferable actions of mankind must apply to all mankind. No moral theory can be valid if it argues that a certain action is right in Syria, but wrong in San Francisco. It cannot say that Person A must do X, but that Person B must never do X. It cannot say that what was wrong yesterday is right today - or vice versa. If it does, it is false and must be refined or discarded.

When I first read this, I was a little confused, since this isn't obviously how all theories in physics actually work. That is, the theory of gravity may apply to all matter, but other theories (e.g., theories about black holes) clearly don't apply to all matter (though they presumably apply to all black holes). What physical theories do follow is something like a principle that things that are identical in all relevant properties must be treated in the same way by a theory -- so a theory of matter would apply to anything that is matter, and a theory of black holes would apply to anything that is a black hole.

But are people identical in the senses that would be relevant for ethical theorizing? I think that's a sort of complicated question, and an overly simplistic attempt to answer it sets up for the next episode of "Stefan's spectacular and entertaining failure" (this time from page 44):

Since all human beings share common physical properties and requirements, proposing one rule for one person and the opposite rule for another is invalid - it is like proposing a physics theory that says that some rocks fall down, while others fall up. Not only is it illogical, it contradicts an observable fact of reality, which is that human beings as a species share common characteristics, and so cannot be subjected to opposing rules.

Really, Stefan? So do you pee sitting down, or does your wife pee standing up? Or do you both pee in your diapers (holler back, baby Molyneux)? *Rimshot!* But I don't actually want to object to Claim 1, so we can move on while leaving it intact. I personally think it's sort of reasonable (though perhaps not as solid as Stefan seems to think), and there are much bigger fish to fry. [Added later: For those interested in thinking more about the moral equality of humans, a classic piece is Bernard Williams' essay, "The Idea of Equality." Taking the discussion a step further to ask how humans can be morally equal and morally unequal from animals is Bonnie Steinbock's excellent piece, "Speciesism and the Idea of Equality."]

The next step in Stefan's ethical theory is a bit more troubling, but ultimately can be repaired to make sense. On page 66, Stefan writes:

The opposite of "virtue" must be "vice" - the opposite of "good" must be "evil." If I propose the moral rule "thou shalt not steal," then stealing must be evil, and not stealing must be good.

It should immediately be recognized that "not stealing" is not the opposite of stealing, but is rather the negation of stealing. To illustrate this point: Most people would say that the opposite of "black" is "white." But "not black" is not the same thing as "white." "Green" is "not black," but it isn't "white."

Unfortunately, if we try to repair Stefan's point by changing the word "opposite" to "negation," then the point becomes false. The negation of "virtue" isn't "vice," and nor is the negation of "good" "evil." A person can lack virtue without displaying vice, and a person can be not good without being evil.

But Stefan does not recognize this problem, and so adopts something like the following:

Claim 2: If adopting a particular maxim would be virtuous or morally good, then failing to adopt that maxim would be evil. Likewise, if adopting a particular maxim would be evil, then failing to adopt that maxim would be virtuous or morally good.

This is embodied rather clearly on page 66 when Stefan writes:

If "rape" is a moral good, then "not raping" must be a moral evil - thus it is impossible for two men in a single room to both be moral at the same time, since only one of them can be a rapist at any given moment - and he can only be a rapist if the other man becomes his victim.

It should be uncontroversial that rape is not actually a moral good, but for our purposes this is beside the point. I use this example only to demonstrate how Claim 2 is being used in Stefan's theory. Presumably, the maxim that Stefan is discussing here is something along the lines of "In all circumstances, I will rape," and the question appears to be what would follow if we said that adopting the maxim is morally good. Applying Claim 2, Stefan arrives at the conclusion that failing to adopt the maxim would be morally evil.

But where Stefan has introduced Claim 2 as if it were simply a logical truth, the disconnection between the concept of an "opposite" and a "negation" eliminates this defense of the claim. Accordingly, Claim 2 is a rule in search of a justification, and as far as I can tell, Stefan doesn't offer another argument for it.

So what do we think of Claim 2? Personally, I think it depends on what we mean by "morally good" or "virtuous" When we normally talk about morally good or virtuous actions, we mean things that speak highly to a person's character, but which it would not necessarily be evil for me not to do. Charity is a great example of something which most people find to be morally good, and helping my sister with her homework is seemingly virtuous. But I wouldn't obviously be evil if I didn't do those things. If this is how we mean "morally good," then Claim 2 is clearly going to be false. We can only save Claim 2 if by "morally good," we mean something like "morally required." Rephrased this way, we get:

Claim 2': If adopting a particular maxim would be morally required, then failing to adopt that maxim would be evil. Likewise, if adopting a particular maxim would be evil, then failing to adopt that maxim would be morally required.

And Claim 2' seems obviously true. If we interpret Stefan's example with this altered terminology, we can see that things make a little more sense: If rape were morally required, then not raping would be evil, and Stefan's concerns would seem to apply.

So to summarize, we thus far have two more-or-less plausible claims underpinning Stefan's maxim-based approach:

Claim 1: If it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow a particular maxim all the time, then that maxim is not morally legitimate as a guide for action.
Claim 2': If adopting a particular maxim would be morally required, then failing to adopt that maxim would be evil. Likewise, if adopting a particular maxim would be evil, then failing to adopt that maxim would be morally required.

The third step in Stefan's theory is even more troubling, and will ultimately lead to the objections that we will see in the next section. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Recall that on page 48, Stefan defined "ethics" as "the subset of UPB which deals with inflicted behaviour, or the use of violence," and said that "Any theory that justifies or denies the use of violence is a moral theory, and is subject to the requirements of logical consistency and empirical evidence."

This realm of "ethics" is distinguished by the presence of violence, and is contrasted by Stefan against the realm of aesthetics, which involves behaviors that are not "inflicted" on others (for our purposes, we can ignore the potential difficulties of distinguishing between behaviors that are "inflicted" and those that are not). The distinction is illustrated on page 50:

If I accept your invitation to a dinner party, but find the conversation highly offensive, I can decide to get up and leave - and I can also choose to never accept another invitation from you. This capacity for escape and/or avoidance is an essential characteristic differentiating aesthetics from ethics.

If, however, when I decide to leave your dinner party, you leap up and chain me to my chair, clearly I no longer have the free choice to leave. This is the moment at which your rudeness becomes overt aggression, and crosses the line from aesthetics to ethics.

We see, then, that when we're trying to determine whether something is a moral question or not, we need only establish that there is violence involved, or that something is being inflicted on someone else.

So then let's jump forward to page 69, where Stefan is trying to determine whether we can think of rape in terms of personal preference. He writes:

If we propose the moral rule: "personal preferences must be violently inflicted upon other people," how does that stand up to the framework of UPB? (Note that I cannot propose that personal preferences may be violently inflicted upon other people, since that is a violation of UPB, which states that moral rules must be absolute and universal - if they are not, they fall into APA [aesthetically positive action] territory, and so cannot be inflicted on others.)

There's a lot wrong with this statement, particularly since Stefan seems to be confused about his own distinction between ethics and aesthetics -- he now seems to think that it would be wrong to impose aesthetic matters on people, but any imposed behavior has already been defined as falling within the realm of ethics, and not aesthetics.

However, what I want to focus on for the moment is another idea captured in this statement: that moral rules can't be optional. What Stefan seems to be saying is that we must accept either that "personal preferences must be violently inflicted upon other people" or that "personal preferences must not be violently inflicted upon other people." Otherwise, we would need to say that "personal preferences may be violently inflicted upon other people, or they may not be," and Stefan has ruled out this possibility. To more explicitly phrase this issue in terms of the maxim-based language, Stefan is posing a choice between "In all circumstances, I will violently inflict my personal preferences upon other people" and "In all circumstances, I will not violently inflict my personal preferences upon other people."

If this is how Stefan wants to structure his theory, then we get a third claim:

Claim 3: For any maxim that involves an inflicted behavior, it is either the case that everyone is morally required to follow that maxim all the time, or that everyone is morally prohibited from ever following that maxim.

And we can see this claim at work, for example, on pages 79-81 where Stefan uses an illustration involving the theft of a lighter in order to argue that stealing must be universally prohibited, since it would be ridiculous to think that everyone could possibly be morally required to steal all the time.

At this point I think we have a pretty clear understanding of the substance of Stefan's second line of argument. The argument is based on a maxim-based approach, and involves at least three central claims:

Claim 1: If it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow a particular maxim all the time, then that maxim is not morally legitimate as a guide for action.
Claim 2': If adopting a particular maxim would be morally required, then failing to adopt that maxim would be evil. Likewise, if adopting a particular maxim would be evil, then failing to adopt that maxim would be morally required.
Claim 3: For any maxim that involves an inflicted behavior, it is either the case that everyone is morally required to follow that maxim all the time, or that everyone is morally prohibited from ever following that maxim.

Now there's a fourth claim that is implied in Stefan's argument that I want to eliminate right away for being too dumb to even consider. The claim is this:

Claim 4: For any maxim that involves an inflicted behavior, the set of circumstances to which the maxim applies must be "where the action in question will be inflicted upon a human being."

Stefan introduces this idea on page 73 when he considers the maxim "I can shoot a man anytime I want" (or to use the more precise form we've been using, "In circumstances where my shooting will be inflicted upon a person who is asleep, and I want to engage in the shooting, I will shoot the person"):

The problem here is not only the sleep that Bob will lose based on his universal premise, but also the logical impossibility of reversing moral propositions based on the differences in the states of sleeping and waking. Biologically speaking, a man does not become the opposite of a man when he falls asleep, any more than gravity reverses when he blinks.

Since a man remains a man when he falls asleep, it cannot be the case that opposite moral rules apply to him in this state. Thus to say that it is immoral to murder a man when he is awake, but it is moral to murder a him [sic] when he is asleep, is to create a logical contradiction unsupported by any objective biological facts. A physicist may say that a rock falls down, but a helium balloon rises up - but that is because a rock and a helium balloon have fundamentally different properties. No credible physicist can say that one rock falls down, but that another rock with almost exactly the same qualities falls up. The same is for moral theories - no credible philosopher can say that morality reverses itself when a man is asleep, since a man's nature does not fundamentally alter when he naps.

The number of things wrong with this argument is utterly astonishing; I won't even begin to address them all, since to do so would require an analysis all its own. But what's important to pay attention to is the last sentence, where Stefan says that we can't draw moral distinctions that make reference to the fact that a man is asleep because a man's nature does not fundamentally alter when he naps. To see why this is dumb, consider the following: In the game of hockey, a goal is scored when a puck goes into the net during a legal play. A goal is not scored when a puck does not go into the net under such circumstances. What Stefan is suggesting basically amounts to saying that we logically can't differentiate a goal from a non-goal because a puck's nature does not reverse itself when it goes into the net. This is dumb, and I don't even want to try to think about what kind of nonsensical ethical theory we would get from accepting it.

[Added later: It occurs to me that the hockey example is a rhetorically weak one, regardless of whether or not it captures the conceptual point well. To see why this sort of claim is a problem for Stefan's theory, consider the case of self-defense. When we are put in a position where we must defend ourselves, most of us think that we are justified in taking measures against our attackers which would be unjustified under other sorts of circumstances. So, for example, it would be okay for me to punch Albert in the face if he were assaulting me, even though it would normally not be okay to punch Albert in the face. However, notice that Albert's nature as a man does not fundamentally change when he attacks me. Thus if we accept what Stefan says here, then I should not be able to justify treating Albert differently when he is assaulting me than when he is leaving me alone. This seems silly to me. Of course it would not take a fundamental change in Albert's nature as a man to justify treating him in ways that are normally unacceptable. We could justify different treatment for far less.]

Accordingly, I will do my best go on as if Stefan never said this. It will come up again a little later on, but I'll do my best to minimize the importance of this error. So setting aside Claim 4, we can now proceed to the critique.

IV. What's Wrong With This Structure?

I want to argue two things about the structure I discussed in the previous section (ignoring Claim 4). First, I will show that even if we accept the maxim-based approach and the three claims, we will not be able to generate satisfying conclusions for moral problems. And second, I will contend that it leaves out an important component of ethical thinking that makes the resulting structure very awkward to work with.

My argument that Stefan's theory will not generate satisfying conclusions focuses mainly on Claim 3. The first thing to notice about the Claim is that Stefan applies it in such broad strokes that it seems to be rather implausible; the example on pages 79-81 (where Stefan attempts to show that theft must always be evil because it couldn't possibly be morally obligatory to steal all the time) illustrates this point well.

In order to see why this is an implausible way to apply the Claim, we must remember that Stefan's approach is based on evaluating maxims, and not actions directly. Claim 1 was "If it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow a particular maxim all the time, then that maxim is not morally legitimate as a guide for action." Accordingly, the fact that "In all circumstances, I will steal" is unacceptable as a maxim does not demonstrate that stealing is wrong, as Stefan seems to think it does. It only demonstrates that the moral rule, "In all circumstances, I will steal," is unacceptable.

In order to use Claim 3 coherently, we would need to focus on the C term in the maxim-based framework (remember, the form of a maxim is "In circumstances C, I will do X"). Stefan's discussion focuses on maxims where the C term covers all possible circumstances, so that the maxim is prescribing a particular action all the time. But if we changed the C term to say, for example, "When I will die if I don't steal an object, and I can be reasonably certain that the victim will not miss what I took very much, and I want to live" we would seemingly be able to avoid the problems that Stefan presents. Phrased this way, the maxim would be, "In circumstances where I will die if I don't steal an object, and I can be reasonably certain that the victim will not miss what I took very much, and I want to live, I will steal the object." And it seems rather clear to me that everyone could follow this rule all the time without any horrible problems arising (even though it would only prescribe that the follower take a particular action in a very limited set of circumstances). Accordingly, this maxim would be able to get past Claim 1 intact.

Stefan seems to think that this is not acceptable because of Claim 4. But remember, we're not going to pay any attention to Claim 4, because it's dumb.

It is important, though, to see how this works with Claim 1, which we are paying attention to. Remember, Claim 1 was that "If it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow a particular maxim all the time, then that maxim is not morally legitimate as a guide for action." This claim was not built on the idea that maxims must prescribe actions that must be carried out by all people at all times; it was built on the idea that it must be possible for all people to follow the maxims at all times. And in fact, he actually provided an example in the same place where he introduced the universality requirement with such a limitation: "In circumstances where I am told to murder, I will do so." Clearly, this maxim would not instruct someone to murder in circumstances where no one told them to murder, but Stefan doesn't raise any objections to this feature of the maxim in his discussion. Remember, we got Claim 1 from his objection that it would be ridiculous for everyone to follow this maxim all the time, not from any claim that it would be ridiculous for everyone to murder all the time -- that was an objection raised to a different maxim.

What implications does this have for the theory's capacity to generate satisfying conclusions? Remember, Claim 3 says, "For any maxim that involves an inflicted behavior, it is either the case that everyone is morally required to follow that maxim all the time, or that everyone is morally prohibited from ever following that maxim." So Stefan's approach rules out maxims, and not actually the action prescribed by the maxim (remember, the X component). Accordingly, we can see that what Stefan's system requires us to do is to figure out ways to justify our inflicted behaviors so that the maxims we follow could be morally obligatory for all people to follow all the time (this is not true if we accept Claim 4, which essentially rules out adjustment for circumstances, but remember, Claim 4 is dumb).

This would still mean that "In all circumstances, I will steal," would be problematic (because of Claim 1), but we might be able to make something out of "In circumstances where I will die if I don't steal an object, and I can be reasonably certain that the victim will not miss what I took very much, and I want to live, I will steal the object." It will at least be true that if we want to object to this latter maxim, we won't be able to effectively do so on the basis of the three Claims that I offered without begging the question. Again, they were:

Claim 1: If it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow a particular maxim all the time, then that maxim is not morally legitimate as a guide for action.
Claim 2': If adopting a particular maxim would be morally required, then failing to adopt that maxim would be evil. Likewise, if adopting a particular maxim would be evil, then failing to adopt that maxim would be morally required.
Claim 3: For any maxim that involves an inflicted behavior, it is either the case that everyone is morally required to follow that maxim all the time, or that everyone is morally prohibited from ever following that maxim.

Subjecting our maxim to Claim 1, it doesn't seem like we would be able to mount any conclusive attack on the basis of it being impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow it all the time. Claim 2' wouldn't be a problem for our maxim, since it's just sort of a formal requirement for how we think of morally required behaviors and evil behaviors. And Claim 3 would just say that either people are morally required to follow the maxim all the time (since it involves an inflicted behavior), or they're prohibited from ever following it. But there's nothing about the maxim itself that makes it clearly true that either one of these would be true and the other false; to rule in favor of one side over the other would simply beg the question. This, I think, is very unsatisfying.

The second thing I wanted to establish about this system is that it leaves out an important component of ethical thinking, and that this makes the whole theory a bit awkward. The component I have in mind is the idea of a behavior that is morally permissible, but not morally required. In most moral theories, there are three kinds of actions (even ones that involve violence): things you must do, things you may do if you want, and things that you may not do. Stefan rules out the second category with Claim 3, which claims that moral behaviors must either be obligatory or prohibited. But this would seem to mean that you could never have a choice about whether to act violently where you wouldn't be evil for choosing one of the alternatives. Surely this would be implausible.

In order to save the theory from being dismissed out of hand, the personal choice has to be snuck back in through the C component of the maxim. So for our maxim, "In circumstances where I will die if I don't steal an object, and I can be reasonably certain that the victim will not miss what I took very much, and I want to live, I will steal the object," we should immediately notice that "and I want to live" is a critical part of the idea. Without it, we would need to be saying that it would be evil for the person in question to choose to simply die rather than steal. And surely someone who thinks that stealing in such situations would be okay would not want to imply that not stealing in that situation would be evil if the person didn't want to do it. This, I think, makes the theory very awkward to work with. You end up saying that people must do things in circumstances where they want to do them (and, presumably, that they must not do things in circumstances where they don't).

V. Conclusion

In this critique, I have attempted to establish three things. First, I have argued that Stefan's choice of the term "universally preferable behavior" simply doesn't work with the rest of his theory; the way he defines the term makes it completely incompatible with the sorts of things he wants to argue for. Second, I have attempted to build a coherent way of evaluating moral propositions based on a maxim-based approach to ethical reasoning that involves three central claims about maxims. And third, I have tried to show that (without the ridiculous and implausible Claim 4) the resulting theory is incapable of generating satisfying answers to moral questions, and is awkward to work with. The system is unsatisfying because it does not offer us a way to determine definitively whether certain actions are morally required or not as long as the maxims being followed are sufficiently specific. And it is awkward because it requires us to twist ourselves into weird shapes in order to accommodate the idea of morally permissible behaviors.

If these arguments hold, it would mean that Stefan has not only failed to "slay the beast" and deliver us with the salvation that he promises in the beginning of the book, but that he has also failed to even provide us with a coherent ethical theory. This is an important "if," I will admit: the amount of conceptual reconstruction that I've had to do in order to put together this critique almost ensures that the resulting structure is about as much Stefan's as it is my own. And if Stefan rejects that his argument is based on maxims, or that the three claims I've offered are actually indicative of his arguments, then I may have attacked a straw man.

It should be noted that I justified each step of my interpretation with direct evidence from Stefan's book, and so in order to reject my interpretation, Stefan would need to explain how my interpretation doesn't actually capture what's being said in the passages I cited. But I don't dismiss the possibility that this can be done.

With this, I think we can finally consider The Molyneux Project to be a success, though it will not be truly complete until all objectors are satisfied. I hope that this has been instructive for any of you who have been keeping up, and that those who are interested in Stefan's ideas will take seriously the need to respond to what's been said here.

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P.S. Yes, I know that my critique can be answered by insisting that Claim 4 is true. But Claim 4 is so obviously ridiculous that this would be a pretty troubling defense to offer. Advance it at your own risk.

P.P.S. I've added a few clarifications. The first is at the beginning of section II where I discuss the definition of universally preferable behavior. Some people had focused their responses to this critique on that discussion, and so I added a note giving it a little bit more context. Hopefully that will address the criticisms. The second clarification is in my discussion of Claim 1 in section III, pointing to some further reading on the issues raised there. I added the note because I sort of made light of Stefan's discussion of Claim 1, but then just moved on without really offering any other explanation for why it makes sense. While I don't think that hurt the critique, I do think it was a bit unhelpful for people who might have been reading through it and who might have wanted more. The third clarification was in my discussion of Claim 4 in section III. I think that it adds an important element that was absent before, so hopefully others find it a worthwhile addition.

On Moral Absolutes and the Axiology of UPB: A Reply to Jad

I want to thank Jad for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully! Anyone reading this post should check out his earlier post, to which this is a response. And Jad, I wish you the best of luck with your new blog! I have a few things to say about Jad's response, and hopefully we can work towards clearing up some of the confusion we've been trying to slog through together.

I first wanted to discuss the idea that theft is not, by definition, always wrong, contrary to what Jad suggested in his comments. In moral philosophy we draw a distinction between things that are wrong and things that are prima facie wrong (or "wrong at first glace"). Basically the application of the idea is this: As we've already discussed, the concept of theft comes from a moral framework which recognizes that people can have a moral claim to certain property holdings. Within this framework, to steal something is, by the nature of the system we're considering, prima facie wrong: that is, it's wrong at first glance. To put that another way, a system which recognizes rights to property is, I think necessarily, built on the idea that it's wrong to steal capriciously, or under circumstances which could be thought of as more or less "normal."

But a number of perspectives on property rights stop short of saying that it's never permissible to steal. For example (and this example is undoubtedly a complete bastardization of medical fact; I'm sure it couldn't actually happen this way), let's say you felt chest pains while walking down the street, and knew (somehow) that you were starting to have a heart attack. You happened to be passing by the open window of a house where some aspirin was sitting on the table, but no one was home. Now, let's say (probably falsely--I don't know) that if you took the aspirin, it would increase your chances of surviving the heart attack significantly. Would it be wrong to steal it? I don't think that the answer is clearly yes, or that by saying no we would be denying any form of property rights. We would just need to say that property rights aren't absolute like that; they don't tell us what we always must do or must refrain from doing.

If we accept the moral legitimacy of property rights of some form, then we would say that you're normally prohibited from stealing; to do so would be prima facie wrong. But in some circumstances, like where your life is in danger, the normal rules might not apply. That's not necessarily because the rules are bad ones, but rather because the rules were never meant to apply in all situations and contexts.

That's a big part of ethics that Stefan seems to completely ignore, and I noted it as my second objection to his book. He seems to believe that ethical rules need to be rigid and absolute in order to be legitimate. But not only does this not need to be the case; it's generally acknowledged to not be the case. I think that most people, including those in the philosophical community, don't think that you should be obligated to let yourself die in order to avoid taking someone else's asprin. So it seems like we would want to be skeptical of a system which would tell us that property rights commit us to saying that it would be wrong to do that, or otherwise that we must accept the position that it would be morally obligatory to constantly go around looking for aspirin to steal. But that's precisely the sort of thing Stefan needs to say in order to make his system work, and look at all the trouble he had trying to twist himself into plausible positions on "lifeboat scenarios." The reality is: rigid and absolute rules don't usually work, and when they do, it's because they've defined themselves in circles.

But your other question, which I think is important, is how we can decide what kinds of circumstances are morally significant, and which ones are simply irrelevant to determining what would be right or wrong. You suggest that the mere fact that someone has an FBI badge shouldn't matter in determining what's right and wrong in a certain scenario, and I don't want to dispute that outright (though there are important reasons why that might be problematic, and we can discuss those later if you want to). What I do want to point out is that you've now moved into the realm of axiology (that is, the study of value, or more specifically for our purposes, the study of what kinds of things have moral weight and why). Once we enter into this area of thinking, consensus among philosophers breaks down extremely quickly, and so I'm not particularly eager to critique Stefan's views through an axiological alternative of my own (of course, we can discuss my own views on the grounding principles of ethics later if you want). But I will note that Stefan doesn't actually provide a rigorous axiology in his book (this was my final objection in the other post), except to say that we should come to an understanding of ethical principles through the scientific method.

That brings us to Jad's final line of questioning, which concerns whether the scientific method is useful in determining what moral code is the correct one. Jad writes:

...is it not reasonable to begin with a system isomorphic to the scientific method? I find it appealing on every level (I know that's not relevant to its validity). The amount of human suffering that is let pass by ethical systems which weigh intangible concepts (usually concepts that favor the powerful and the aggressive) is staggering. Is it only coincidental that an ethical framework grounded in reason and evidence favors instead voluntary relationships and non-aggression? Is it coincidental that civil society, as a matter of course, follows the single maxim of a framework so grounded? Is it coincidence that the only violators are those that interact with strangers by killing or threatening to imprison/kill them?

But there's a problem with this line of reasoning that I think Jad picked up on a little bit when he noted that "...the validity of the statement isn't determined by the appeal of the outcome." The problem can be understood in two parts: First, there is no such thing as "The scientific method." Science is done through testing hypotheses, through clarifying the meanings of concepts and exploring their entailments, through abstracting from data sets, and probably through a number of other means I'm leaving out. With each approach to science, there is undoubtedly a different idea of what it would mean to try to learn about morality through the scientific method, and evaluating the possibilities available through each method would require that we at least specify which one we're talking about. So simply saying that morality might be aided by the scientific method doesn't mean anything. You need to point to a kind of scientific inquiry you're hoping to use, and look for some way that it could be used to learn about morality.

But the second problem with the line of reasoning is that you need to figure out what sort of thing you're looking for in reality which would lead you to some conclusion about morality. Jad is absolutely right to point out that the examples he cited are outcomes, but further, they're not outcomes of morality, as such, but rather of individuals performing certain actions. So in order to learn anything about morality, he'd need to postulate some connection between morality and real world events which is not already clearly defined.

The idea he seems to be leaning on is that an acceptible moral framework should lead individuals to do things which will produce beneficial outcomes. This idea is not new to moral philosophy, and is most closely tied to utilitarian and consequentialist schools of thought. But it need not be solely those schools which can lay claim to those notions. Most moral philosophers these days acknowledge that there must be some place for consequences in our evaluation of a moral theory; if a moral theory leads to horrible social outcomes, that might very well be seen as evidence for rejecting it, or at least for accepting an alternative view with equal plausibility (see, for example, Schmidtz in Elements of Justice). So if consequences are a factor by which we judge moral theories, and we can predict what consequences we will likely observe if we follow this moral theory or the other one, then we can compare them somehow and perhaps move towards a better understanding of what our position ought to end up being. In that sense, various approaches to science might prove very useful.

But Stefan cuts himself off from this avenue of reasoning when he seems to repeatedly argue that consequences don't have anything to do with what's right. Perhaps things that are right happen to produce good consequences, but part of his position seems to be that if this were not the case, it wouldn't matter in determining the correct moral framework. So hence my confusion about Stefan's invocation of the scientific method as the sole hint to his axiology. Most of the evidence I would expect someone to use in favor of their theory won't work for Stefan, because he's thrown it out. He can't appeal to what people generally think or what consequences would be produced through acceptance of his view. And he's seemingly ruled out the idea that morality is a social or psychological phenomenon by attempting to prove a realist ethics. So I guess I'm just not sure what he wants science to tell us.

Hopefully some of that is helpful. As always, keep the questions coming!

Why Does It Make Sense for Ethical Statements to Make Reference to Circumstances?: A Reply to Jad

I received a comment on my previous post from someone named Jad asking a few questions about my treatment of some of Stefan Molyneux's metaethical claims in his book, Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, and I thought it might be helpful to both Jad and myself to quickly walk through some of the fundamental ideas that seemed to be confusing him. This post will respond to his first question:

I understand, as you say, it is "emphatically not" a requirement that an ethical/moral structure (sorry about the loose terms) make the same claim about what people should do independent of circumstances. Can this not be pointed to as the major failure of the philosophy of ethics?

There are a number of ways to approach this question, and I'm not sure if I can think of a coherent route which would follow any tight linear pattern (I've said it before, and I'll say it again now: I'm no metaethicist; these won't be my most graceful arguments!). So I apologize for just throwing a bunch of ideas out there in a somewhat haphazard manner (I'll try to preserve some sense of coherence!), but hopefully once they're all out there, it'll make sense why I think what I do about this issue.

First of all, I would want to point out that there are some actions which are, by necessity, always immoral. Murder is the example I always use (there may be more like it; I can't think of any at the moment..."violating" someone seems like it might work), because it seems automatically true that murder is wrong. But there is a reason for this. Murder actually means "wrongful killing." So it's wrong because if it weren't, it wouldn't be murder. The idea I want to highlight is that there are certain ways of describing our actions which are inherently value-laden. And by using these terms, we can often create the impression that we have come up with a coherent moral theory when we have really only applied our terms. So "murder" is automatically always wrong, but perhaps "killing" - what murder is when separated from any normative content - is not.

"Theft," to pull from Objectivist literature (for example, see this piece), is a word which only makes sense in the context of an institution of property rights. And even under the weakest sense of what it means to have a right to something, it must at least be prima facie wrong to steal (prima facie means "at first glance"). So it is no surprise that we generally agree that stealing is wrong (though many people might think that stealing is not always wrong, just like they would think that it's not always wrong to do something to someone else which they have a right against; see here, for example).

But when we separate out the normative content, "stealing" becomes simply "taking." And taking is not always wrong. I may permissibly take my towel to the beach, or take a drink of water at a public water fountain. And I don't think that's just because I'm playing word games and switching meanings: taking is not wrong by itself. Where taking becomes wrong is when we take something that we should not take - something that is either rightfully someone else's, or that is for some reason worthy of not being disturbed or removed from its original environment. But here the problem isn't simply the taking: it's the fact that the object I'm taking belongs right where it is. And to say that it "belongs" there requires that we come up with some exogenous conception of where stuff belongs (property rights being an example of this).

That seems like a reasonable lead-in to my second point. Once we are committed to describing our actions in value free terms, it seems to me that we need to make reference to circumstances in order to determine the moral character of our actions. For example, take the act of "killing a person." If I'm sitting in a coffee shop, and I see a stranger walk in and order a coffee, it seems like it would be wrong of me to kill her. But if I'm sitting in that same coffee shop, and I see that same stranger walk in, except now she's pointing a gun at me and (seemingly) getting ready to pull the trigger, we might not judge me so harshly if I were to kill her [Note: I won't get into the question of mens rea here, but I beseech my audience to give me the benefit of the doubt here. For any philosophers reading this: you know what I'm trying to say, darn it]. The thing that I did is pretty much the same in both situations, but the difference in circumstances explain why we think of the scenarios as being morally distinct.

This basic idea is captured by the principle of Formal Equality, which basically says that in order to justify treating two different scenarios as being ethically different from each other, we must find a morally relevant difference between them. In the above example, our intuition seems to tell us that the stranger's aggressive action in the latter scenario constitutes a morally relevant difference from the first scenario, even though my action was the same. If that's true, then it must be the case that other factors besides my actual action itself can qualify as morally significant. And another way of saying that seems to be that we can evaluate different scenarios as different not only when the actor chose a different course of action in one as opposed to the other, but also when the situation in which the actor acted changed in a morally significant way. And that's basically the same as saying that circumstances can be morally relevant, and our ethical rules do not have to tell us what actions are right or wrong without any reference to circumstances.

And I don't think this should be disconcerting. It just seems like an inherent part of playing the game. Any theory of morality which made no reference to circumstances would seem like it would end up being overly rigid and extremely implausible.

Is that a weakness for ethical philosophy? I guess that depends on what you're looking for out of ethical philosophy. If you want a list of actions that you always must perform, or must never perform, with no normative content smuggled in through definitions, then I'm not sure you're going to find any luck. So yea, it would be a weakness if that's what you wanted. But personally, I'd be really suspicious of any theory that proposed to tell me anything like that. Ethical philosophy doesn't seem like it's meant to command us about what to do; rather, it should help us determine what to consider when deciding how to act, and what kinds of things we should care about. And so far as that's the goal of ethics, I see no problem with making reference to circumstances. In fact, so far as ethics should help us in making decisions, and so far as we face different decisions in different circumstances, I wouldn't want an ethical theory that didn't make reference to circumstances!

So hopefully that's helpful, if perhaps not as analytically rigorous as it might be. I'll get to your other questions later.

Universally Preferable Behavior: An Overview of a Critique of Stefan Molyneux's Theory

[Part of The Molyneux Project]

[If you came here looking for the final critique, click here for the real final critique]

So it appears that people are still keeping tabs on my Molyneux Project, which makes me feel sort of bad about not finishing it. To be honest, there's a reason that I didn't complete the project, and I feel like that should be put out into the open for the benefit of whoever still cares. Basically, the main problem is that I can't figure out any way to make Stefan's theory into a coherent ethical framework without directly contradicting some core things that Stefan says. And unfortunately, Stefan has basically broken off communication between himself and me, which makes it impossible for me to determine whether or not I've misinterpreted some of his arguments. But perhaps more tellingly, prior to the cessation of our contact, the conversations that I had with Stefan suggested to me that I had not misinterpreted him, but rather that he had simply built a theory that couldn't stand up to scrutiny.

Unfortunately, explaining exactly what's wrong with Stefan's theory in a charitable and fair way would require me to pour through the book again to build up each problematic facet of Stefan's arguments directly from the text, so that I could critique him on his own terms. But to be perfectly honest, I really don't feel like doing that, and I'm somewhat skeptical that I ever will. As one might gather from looking through my notes, the book is presented in a manner that makes it rather difficult to isolate individual themes and to lay out specific features of the theory's structure. So it would take quite a bit of effort to show conclusively that this theme or the other one is actually a core component of the theory. Further, the problems with Stefan's theory, as I understand it, are so foundational that I'm not sure I would really learn anything from the exercise, except maybe how to construct clear arguments from extremely convoluted texts.

Since being completely charitable and fair to Stefan would require me to demonstrate conclusively that he actually argues each of the positions I attack, and because I'm not sure I want to bother doing that, it seems I'm in a rather crummy position. I promised I'd offer a critique, and I've so far failed to uphold that promise. So here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to lay out my critique of Stefan's book without specifically citing any part of the text, with the full admission that I may have misunderstood certain elements of his arguments. I personally believe that what I'm going to say here is correct, but if anyone can go directly to the text and legitimately demonstrate that Stefan is not subject to the criticisms I offer here, then that will be that. I just personally don't think anyone will be able to. So without further ado...

The first major problem with Stefan's argument is that his theory is built in an extremely rigid way, such that any inflicted behavior is held to be either always morally wrong or always morally right, and yet Stefan thinks that there can be grey areas about whether or not a particular action is right or wrong. Further, it does not seem as though Stefan believes these grey areas to simply result from epistemological problems (circumstances where we cannot be sure whether something is morally wrong or morally right, but there is a truth to the matter going one way or the other); he seems to think that there really are grey areas in morality. But if you're working in a system which is explicitly black-and-white, that can't be the case. For example, if it's always morally wrong to invade others' property rights, then it's wrong to do so in the flagpole case, and anyone who "does it anyway" is immoral. Period. Otherwise, it's not always immoral. And if it's not always immoral, then Stefan's theory is wrong for other reasons. So no grey areas.

To be clear, I'm not rejecting the idea that there can be grey areas in morality. Plenty of other theories can accommodate them. But Stefan's can't, because it's built on black and white distinctions.

That brings me to the second major problem with Stefan's theory: it's built on black an white distinctions. Stefan treats morality as always being a matter of obligation. Either everyone is morally required to do certain things all the time, or they are morally prohibited from ever doing it. In designing his theory this way, Stefan leaves out an entire category of behaviors: the morally permissible. Morally permissible behaviors are those which we may engage in if we want to, but which we may choose not to engage in if we do not want to. Stefan's theory is built in such a way that the realm of the "permissible" is captured entirely within the category of "aesthetics", and the realm of the "obligatory" is captured entirely within the category of "morality." What differentiates them, Stefan seems to think, is that moral issues involve the initiation of force, coercion, or violence - they are "inflicted" - whereas aesthetic issues do not. The implication here is that if the initiation of force, coercion, or violence is involved in a particular behavior, it cannot be morally permissible: it must be obligatory for all people at all times to either do it or not do it.

It is a matter of common sense that there is no "positive" action (that is, an action you actually do, rather than an action which you avoid: murder is a "positive" action, while not murdering is a "negative" one; "not murdering" is not, one might note, an inflicted behavior at all) involving the initiation of the use of force which all people must be engaging in at all times. So if Stefan's distinction is allowed to stand, we will necessarily find that we end up advocating the non-aggression principle. It's simply a direct entailment of the distinction and our most basic intuitions about morality: we couldn't possibly all be morally required to be initiating force against each other all the time. It would be ridiculous.

So that leads to the next serious flaw in Stefan's theory: there is no good reason to believe that any action involving the initiation of force must either be morally obligatory for all people at all times or else morally prohibited for all people at all times. I don't even want to begin to try to get into the reasons Stefan offers in favor of this position - I discuss his various arguments in several places in my notes, and though those comments don't constitute thorough critiques, the amount of personal frustration that they represented makes me unwilling to refine them. I'll simply say that it is emphatically not a formal requirement of a moral theory that it make the same claim about what people should do regardless of the circumstances, nor is it a formal requirement of a moral theory that it must always either mandate or prohibit classes of actions.

My next set of objections to Stefan's theory focuses on the morality-aesthetics distinction itself. According to Stefan, moral issues are those which deal with "inflicted" behaviors, while aesthetic issues deal with "non-inflicted" behaviors. I've already pointed out that because of the way that Stefan's theory is built, it invariably ends up being the case that "inflicted" behaviors are deemed morally impermissible for all people at all times (because no positive inflicted behavior could possibly be morally required for all people at all times), and "non-inflicted" behaviors, by Stefan's strict system of delineation, are uniformly classified as morally permissible (though perhaps we might find them undesirable or negative in other ways).

But what exactly constitutes an "inflicted" behavior? Do inflicted behaviors need to be physically violent? Does blackmail count as something that's "inflicted"? Some people argue that certain kinds of verbal or expressive acts can be seriously damaging to people, often more so than some kinds of physical damage. I think this is perfectly reasonable. Does that mean that "expressive harms" (as they're often referred to in the philosophical literature) are "inflicted" behaviors? If so, then does that mean that it must either be morally obligatory for all people to verbally or expressively harm people at all times, or else it must be morally prohibited? If that's the case, then clearly it must be morally impermissible to cause harm to people through our words and expressions, no? What about offensive behavior?

Also, what about coming to the defense of others, or using force to secure restitution for a crime committed against someone else? Do those count as inflicted behaviors? I don't see how they could not, unless someone wanted to say that the aggressor's initial immorality provides some kind of justification for violence such that we wouldn't actually be inflicting anything on the aggressor but rather carrying out the "normal" consequences for immorality. And if one did say that, then I would have to challenge them to come up with some account of what kind of violence would be objectively justified, and under what conditions, because surely it's not the case that the mere fact of someone having committed an immoral action entitles us to do anything we want to them. In any case, it seems to me that the use of force on behalf of others is very clearly an inflicted behavior (though I would say it seems like an acceptable one in certain circumstances). But if we accept this, then we must ask if for all people at all times it's morally obligatory to come to the defense of others or morally unacceptable. But neither of these alternatives seems acceptable; I wouldn't want to say that a pacifist is objectively immoral to refrain from using force, but I also wouldn't want to say that people who come to the rescue of other people are objectively immoral.

And what about damage to property? Stefan seems to think that this clearly is "inflicted", but how does that make any sense? Inflicted on what, the property? Or on the owner? Is Stefan suggesting that we take the Lockean view of property as an extension of oneself so literally that to invade one's property rights would be to actually inflict violence on someone? Not only is that a highly contentious view of the nature of property rights which many philosophers now reject, but it also leads to some pretty odd conclusions. For example, let's imagine that your grandfather died and left you some money in his will, but you didn't know that he had done so. Now imagine that I came along and took that money and started planning my life around the idea that I would continue to have it in the future. But now you find out that I have done this, and come to demand your money. On what grounds, I might ask, should you have title to the money? There are literally no grounds for you saying that the money is an extension of you as a person, since you didn't know that the money had been left for you when I took it, and by Lockean standards, it's actually me who has the justification for keeping it because I made use of it first. Of course, you might try to argue that the money belonged to your grandfather, and my taking it was like stealing from him, but your grandfather is dead; it would seem pretty odd to me to find as ardent an atheist as Stefan arguing that your grandfather could have rights to money even though as a person, he no longer exists. So have I inflicted anything upon you? It's not clear. (Also, I should note that Stefan's argument in favor of some conception of property rights is largely addressed in a past article.)

Another similar problem arises from Stefan's discussion of animal rights. He suggests that animals can't have rights the way that people can, and just sort of chalks the issue up as a grey area. But I don't think he can get out of this one so easily. If we can inflict things on animals (and I think it's clear that we can), then we must seemingly come up with some conception of when we must do so, and when we must not. Nothing in between can suffice, because morally "optional" behaviors can't be moral issues at all: they're aesthetic.

Another issue with Stefan's theory is the maxim description problem, which I discussed in another post, and won't spend time with here. It occurs to me that many of my objections to Stefan's ethics-aesthetics distinction could be challenged by attempting to rephrase maxims, but as I try to show in the other post, that won't save Stefan's theory.

And the final, most fatal problem with Stefan's position is that he never seems to offer any coherent reason that we should do what is universally preferable. That is, he never connects morality with any fact about human existence in a way that's comprehensible to me. He doesn't seem to think that it corresponds with what people want, that it has anything to do with any spiritual feature of humanity, that it's necessary for people to follow it, or that it has to do with what people think. He seems to think that we should be able to make some kinds of observations about whether or not a particular moral theory is correct, as would be evidenced by his insistence on empirical observation and his chart discussing different features of socialism and capitalism. But as far as I'm aware, there really aren't any observable consequences of morality that can't be explained in terms of psychology, economics, and sociology. So the biggest problem with Stefan's morality is simply that it has nothing to do with morality. It doesn't give us any reason to do anything, except that our doing universally preferable things is in some sense "required" (though apparently not required for anything), whatever that means. It makes a bunch of really awkward distinctions, makes some claims about how philosophical paradigms need to work that don't seem to really be based on anything substantial, and basically rigs the deck so that we arrive at something that looks a lot like the familiar Non-Aggression Principle, but with all the constituent terms redefined so as to produce a result having nothing to do with the traditional Non-Aggression Principle. But it doesn't tell us anything about the way that we ought to live or how we ought to treat each other. So in pretty much every way I can think of, the theory has nothing to do with morality.

So I hate to leave it at that, but I sort of have to. To be as charitable as I really should would require an enormous amount of time and effort, and given my basic impression of the theory (which should be clear from the above), it doesn't seem like it would be particularly worthwhile to spend my time that way. Anyway, I'd like to extend an extremely heartfelt thank you to everyone who's been supporting me (or denigrating me) in this project. It's really been an honor to be made to feel so important in my own tiny little way, and I've really appreciated all of your kind words and helpful comments. I'd also like to thank Stefan Molyneux, even though I don't feel like he's always been completely fair or kind to me in our conversations, for graciously providing me with both an electronic and a print copy of his book, Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, free of charge (though if Stefan writes a rebuttal to the above which firmly establishes his theory and addresses my objections, I will gladly send him the money I bet him), and for at least not being explicitly uncivil towards me throughout this entire project. Without his generosity, none of this would have happened, and to be honest, I'm kind of glad it did.

So I guess that's all I have to say. Again, thank you all.

Universally Preferable Behavior and the Maxim Description Problem

[Part of The Molyneux Project; read the main critique here]

So now that I'm no longer going to be communicating with Stefan directly, I'm not sure if there are any real prospect of my actually understanding his book. Still, I think it might be worthwhile, if anyone's interested, to lay out a bit of criticism of some of the main themes that I actually found objectionable, and not just confusing. This post won't represent an attempt to completely tackle that task. Rather I'll focus on one idea which comes up several times in Stefan's book, and which represents a significant problem for any theory taking the form that Stefan's does.

A cursory examination of Stefan's book reveals that he's working in a distinctly Kantian framework, in the sense that he takes morality to be based on maxims which are evaluated for moral goodness or badness by universalizing them and determining whether they come into contradiction with themselves (Kant introduces this framework in his Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals).

Now, I have a long track record of being accused of misrepresenting Stefan's positions, and I'm very comfortable with the assumption that I'll be accused of doing this here in describing his methodology. Nevertheless, I believe that the proof is on the paper, and I will take great care to establish beyond what I think is a reasonable doubt that this is the approach that Stefan is using. I apologize in advance if this is tedious.

Stefan writes, on page 43:

...the first test of any scientific theory is universality. Just as a theory of physics must apply to all matter, a moral theory that claims to describe the preferable actions of mankind must apply to all mankind. No moral theory can be valid if it argues that a certain action is right in Syria, but wrong in San Francisco. It cannot say that Person A must do X, but Person B must never do X. It cannot say that what was wrong yesterday is right today - or vice versa. If it does, it is false and must be refined or discarded.

Then, on page 44, he writes:

If I say that gravity affects matter, it must affect all matter. If even one pebble proves immune to gravity, my theory is in trouble. If I propose a moral theory that argues that people should not murder, it must be applicable to all people. If certain people (such as soldiers) are exempt from that rule, then I have to either prove that soldiers are not people, or accept that my moral theory is false. There is no other possibility. On the other hand, if I propose a moral theory that argues that all people should murder, then I have saved certain soldiers, but condemned to evil all those not currently murdering someone (including those being murdered!) - which is surely incorrect.

If, to save the virtue of the soldiers, I alter my theory to argue that it is moral for people to murder if someone else tells them to (a political leader, say), then I must deal with the problem of universality. If Politician A can order a soldier to murder an Iraqi, then the Iraqi must also be able to order the soldier to murder Politician A, and the soldier can also order Politician A to murder the Iraqi. The application of this theory results in a general and amoral paralysis, and thus is proven invalid.

It seems clear that Stefan is using a maxim-based approach here which is more or less identical to the one used by Kant. That approach states moral precepts in the following form: "In all circumstances C, I will do X," universalizes them, and searches for problems. It's worth pointing out that Kant discusses two different ways in which a universal law can come into contradiction with itself: it can be impossible to conceive of a world in which it is followed, or such a world could not be desired by any rational person. Stefan does not explicitly assent to this distinction, but I think that there is evidence that Stefan would accept both sorts of "contradictions" as sufficient reason for rejecting a maxim.

On page 66, Stefan writes:

Raping someone is a positive action that must be initiated, executed, and then completed. If "rape" is a moral good, then "not raping" must be a moral evil - thus it is impossible for two men in a single room to both be moral at the same time, since only one of them can be a rapist at any given moment - and he can only be a rapist if the other man becomes his victim.

He continues:

...two men in a room must be considered to be in the same situation. If only one of them can be good, because goodness is defined as rape, and only one of them can rape at any time, then we have a logical contradiction that cannot be resolved.

I take this to be pretty good evidence that Stefan accepts Kant's first sort of contradiction as a reason for rejecting a maxim. The maxim, "I will always rape," cannot be adopted as a universal law; it would be impossible to conceive of a world in which it was. Stefan also seems to accept that Kant's second sort of contradiction, that a reasonable person would be unable to will the universal adoption of the rule, would be problematic for a maxim. On page 80, Stefan writes:

...if stealing is good, then goodness becomes a state achievable only in the instant that Doug steals Bob's lighter. In that instant, only Doug can be moral, and Bob cannot be. After that, goodness becomes impossible to achieve for either party, unless Doug keeps giving Bob's lighter back and then snatching it away again.

Of course, it seems patently ridiculous to imagine that the ideal moral state is for one man to keep giving another back the property he has stolen, and then immediately stealing it again. Thus logic seems to validate our instinctual understanding of the foolishness of this as a moral ideal...

Stefan goes on to argue that a maxim advocating the practice of stealing would be contradictory for the reason discussed above (it would be impossible to conceive of a world in which everyone consistently advocated theft), but his statements here suggest that Kant's second variety of contradiction would also provide some grounds for rejecting a maxim.

It might have been noticed that I set up the phrasing of a maxim to explicitly include circumstances, and yet in many of the examples above, Stefan did not make any mention of circumstances. I would point out that in any situation in which circumstances are not explicitly set out, it is not unreasonable to think that the maxim could simply apply to all circumstances. Further, there are examples in which Stefan does make reference to circumstances as potentially providing basis for making moral distinctions. For example, returning to the soldier example on page 44, Stefan suggests that we could alter a moral theory to say that "...it is moral for people to murder if someone else tells them to (a political leader, say)..." Here we would need to make use of the maxim structure outlined earlier: "In circumstances in which another person tells me to murder, I will murder."

There is further reason to believe that circumstances should be relevant in the exposition of a moral theory: It could be that in some circumstances, an otherwise impermissible action would be perfectly acceptable. For example, it is generally impermissible to kill another person. But if that person is attacking you, then it seems that it would be acceptable to use lethal force in self-defense. The maxim, "I will kill people" seems obviously problematic; this is not so with the circumstance-dependent maxim, "In circumstances in which I am being attacked and can save myself only by killing my attacker, I will kill my attacker."

But none of this seems particularly problematic for Stefan's theory. So far, I haven't really done anything but clarify how I think the theory is supposed to work. So what's my problem? The objection is one that has been commonly raised against Kant; I'll call it the Maxim Description Problem (there's probably an "official" name for it somewhere, but I don't know what it is). The problem is this: Our evaluation of an action will depend on the maxim on which we are acting when we perform it. But any individual action can be justified by a number of different possible maxims. Accordingly, we could reach the conclusion that an act is permissible or impermissible depending on the maxim that is being used to justify it.

To invoke a classic example, we might imagine that a person has come to your door and is asking where your friend is. Unbeknownst to the person at the door, you know that the reason that she is asking is because she is a murderer who wants to kill your friend. You know where your friend is, and know that if you tell the murderer his location, she will certainly kill him. You also know that if you lie, nothing bad will happen to you, and that your friend will be able to escape with his life. What should you do?

On one hand, you can consider the maxim, "Whenever I can promote the outcomes I desire by lying, I will do so." We can imagine that if everyone adopted this maxim, no one would ever accept anyone's word for anything, and there would never be any occasion to lie in the first place. Such a maxim would simply make no sense as a universal law. On the other hand, as Christine Korsgaard points out in her essay, "The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil," it would not be absurd for everyone to adopt a maxim by which they would lie in order to keep a murderer from her victim. Here we might imagine the maxim to be "Whenever I can prevent someone from murdering a person by lying, and I know that no other negative consequences will occur on account of my actions, I will lie."

This brings into focus an important problem, however. The fact that a particular maxim is unacceptable for justifying a particular action does not mean that there is no acceptable maxim which could justify it. So it could be that an action is morally permissible, even if we can show how a number of maxims which could justify it are unacceptable. This becomes a problem for Stefan in a number of different places in his book, where he seems to try to argue that certain actions are morally impermissible by rejecting particular maxims on which they could be based.

For instance, returning to the soldier example, Stefan wrote:

If, to save the virtue of the soldiers, I alter my theory to argue that it is moral for people to murder if someone else tells them to (a political leader, say), then I must deal with the problem of universality. If Politician A can order a soldier to murder an Iraqi, then the Iraqi must also be able to order the soldier to murder Politician A, and the soldier can also order Politician A to murder the Iraqi. The application of this theory results in a general and amoral paralysis, and thus is proven invalid.

This is fine, but as I've noted before, it does not prove that soldiers are wrong in killing people (murder is a bad word to use here, because the definition of the word "murder" is "wrongful killing," and therefore it is conceptually impossible for murder to be permissible). It only proves that soldiers' killing people cannot be justified by the maxim in question. It is logically possible that there is some other maxim which would justify soldiers' actions.

And indeed, such a maxim is not too difficult to come up with. One example would be the maxim, "Whenever I have declared myself to be a combatant of a particular group in a universally recognized manner, and I can kill a recognized combatant of another group who has not surrendered in a universally recognized manner, I will do so." That maxim could be adopted as a universal law without any contradiction that I can think of. But if this is the case, then how is the maxim-based approach supposed to serve as a moral guide? It might seem like any time we come across an action that cannot be justified by a particular maxim, the most we would be able to say is that we simply aren't sure if it's permissible or not. In order to effectively put Stefan's methodology to work, we need a way to determine what the right maxim is.

This problem is brought into focus by another factor in the equation, known as the Principle of Formal Equality. This principle states that in order to treat two things as ethically different, there must be a ethically significant difference between them. We have already seen evidence that Stefan accepts this principle, when he wrote:

Just as a theory of physics must apply to all matter, a moral theory that claims to describe the preferable actions of mankind must apply to all mankind. No moral theory can be valid if it argues that a certain action is right in Syria, but wrong in San Francisco. It cannot say that Person A must do X, but Person B must never do X. It cannot say that what was wrong yesterday is right today - or vice versa. If it does, it is false and must be refined or discarded.

The implication here is that being located in Syria as opposed to San Francisco cannot represent an ethically significant difference between two scenarios; being Person A instead of Person B is not a morally relevant way to distinguish a circumstance; taking place today instead of tomorrow cannot matter to an ethical theory. For example, notice that the maxim, "Whenever it is May 6, 2008, and I am Danny Shahar, and I can steal a pen from the University Book Store without anyone ever noticing, I will do so," could be adopted as a universal law without coming into any sort of contradiction with anything. But surely that doesn't mean that it would be okay for me to steal the pen. The Principle of Formal Equality helps us explain why: the maxim I've offered is unacceptable because it only works because of distinctions that aren't morally relevant in any way.

However, as we have seen, maxims can coherently contain certain distinctions which allow them to apply only to actions which occur in specific circumstances. So, for example, I am justified in killing in self-defense when I'm being attacked, even though there are other scenarios in which I'm not justified in killing people. What is needed, then, is an account of what kinds of features of a set of circumstances are morally relevant. If we had such an account, we could conceivably come up with a proper description of the set of circumstances in which your action was taking place, and then determine whether the maxim based on that set of circumstances could be acceptably adopted as universal law.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Stefan doesn't provide any such account. And perhaps more unfortunately, no one else has either. Until someone does, it seems like any maxim-based approach to ethics is going to be hampered by the Maxim Description Problem. Annnnddd...that's part of the reason why I take a rights-based approach to ethics! [Added later: turns out rights-based approaches to ethics aren't that great either :-P]

So that's one problem with Stefan's view. When I get a chance, I'll try to touch on some more problems in future posts. But for now, I hope this was helpful!