Against Moral Duties

TheHedoMinimalist

I have an argument against the existence of moral duties. The argument has 4 fundamental claims:

C1. Not all discourse that relates to the question of what we ought to do is moral discourse. There is also discourse about the more casual sorts of ought claims that fall under the category of what is commonly called “self-help” philosophy. This might relate to questions regarding what kinds of relationships you should form in your life or what kind of diet you should have or how should you manage your finances.

C2. The existence of moral duties implies the existence of a “special” sort of reason that overrides self-help type of considerations.

C3. The existence of “special” moral reasons implies the superiority of moral philosophy over self-help philosophy. This superiority makes the notion of a decision failing to be bound by duty for being too demanding on your personal life seem implausible and repugnant.

C4. We should reject certain moral duty claims because they are too demanding.

I think C1 is pretty uncontroversial as C1 being false would imply that we have no reason to have a healthy diet or to save money for our retirement unless it is somehow moral to do so. I think C2 is intuitive to most philosophers but I suppose some people have a softer understanding of what moral duties are. I tend to think that any kind of moral duty that doesn’t override self-help considerations is not really a moral duty but just a plain sort of moral reason that can be counterbalanced by other reasons. It seems to me that there is supposed to be some kind of extra special authority
that comes with moral duties that doesn’t just come from plain sorts of normative reasoning. I think C3 and C4 are the most controversial claims here. I will defend them simultaneously with an example. A philosopher named Peter Singer has argued that we have a duty to donate as much money as we can to help save the lives of children in Africa. He derived that duty from a well-accepted duty claim of us having a duty to rescue a child drowning in a shallow pond if it involves us only sacrificing something like our $50 pair of shoes. He argued that if you believe in the latter duty to rescue the child from the pond then you should believe in the former duty to rescue children in Africa from malaria as it seems that it costs even less money. It’s also worth noting that proximity is usually rejected as a factor here by moral philosophers for a variety of reasons. For example, the proximity requirement seems to allow privileged individuals to avoid duties by simply choosing to live away from areas where children would likely die without their intervention. I think it would be strange to think that a person who chooses to live on an isolated island to avoid moral duties is any better than someone that just chooses to walk past dying children.

The most popular response to Singer’s argument seems to be to claim that his moral duty claims are too demanding. I think it could reasonably be argued that if we lived in a world where we see a child drowning in a shallow pond almost every day then we wouldn’t think that we would have a duty to continuously make a personal sacrifice every time to rescue every one of those children. It’s intuitive to think that morality shouldn’t be overbearing like that. After all, doesn’t taking care of yourself also matter to a large degree?

At the same time, it seems really strange to argue that the “duty status” of something is somehow dependent on self-help considerations. After all, aren’t duties supposed to be these authoritative things that go beyond normal sorts of interests and considerations? I think it would make more sense to classify something as a non-duty sort of moral reason if it can be dismissed for being too demanding. I think this would allow us to seamlessly evaluate the decisions that we make in life on both self-help and moral criteria(though, I’m actually more convinced by a more straightforward purely self-help egoism approach as I tend to think moral reasons are probably solely based on emotion). Either way, I think it would make the evaluation of decisions more similar to the methods we might use to evaluate other things like the goodness of a particular piece of evidence for a particular philosophical theory or the competence of a particular engineer and how she should be compensated for that competence by her workplace. I tend to think that those other evaluations actually seem more objective and maybe we should strive to model that approach for judging our life decisions as well.

On a last note, I also want to point out that negative duty claims are also often as demanding as Singer’s positive duty claims. For example, suppose that a slave owner in the South during the 1800s gets told that he has a duty to free all his slaves immediately. That slave owner already chose to marry his wife who wants to continue having slaves and he chose to marry her before he even thought that there was anything problematic about slavery. He has several children with her that also want to have the slaves. If he decides to free all his slaves on an impulse, as the concept of moral duties seems to suggest that he should, then he could literally lose the love of his family as he would be blamed for severely financially hurting them and they would just think that he had gotten crazy or befallen to “evil anti-slavery propaganda”. Basically, I don’t think we can reasonably claim that just because a duty requires you to avoid doing something like enslaving people that it is somehow outside concerns regarding duty claims being too demanding. Anyways, I’d love to hear if anyone has a challenge to the argument that I have presented.

Leghorn

@TheHedoMinimalist

“Self-help philosophy” literally admits that it is not about morality—if morals has anything to do with our interactions with OTHERS. Questions of how I should eat, or how I should arrange my finances, or what kinds of relationships I should form always assume, “so that I might be most benefited”, which are not moral “oughts”, for they presuppose personal benefit, while truly moral “oughts” sometimes imply what is to my personal disadvantage.

Bartricks

↪TheHedoMinimalist

C1. Not all discourse that relates to the question of what we ought to do is moral discourse. There is also discourse about the more casual sorts of ought claims that fall under the category of what is commonly called “self-help” philosophy. This might relate to questions regarding what kinds of relationships you should form in your life or what kind of diet you should have or how should you manage your finances. — TheHedoMinimalist

There are different senses of the word 'ought', but in moral discourse the 'ought' is the normative ought. That's the same as in self-help books. The difference is that self-help books are appealing to 'instrumental' normative reasons, whereas in moral discourse we are appealing to 'moral' normative reasons. But both kinds generate normative oughts.

What is taken to be distinctive of moral oughts - and it's in dispute whether this really is what makes them distinctive - is that they override others. In other words, moral reasons have more oomph than instrumental reasons, and thus if Xing is maximally in my interests, but Xing is wrong, then I have overall normative reason 'not' to X.

C2. The existence of moral duties implies the existence of a “special” sort of reason that overrides self-help type of considerations. — TheHedoMinimalist

I take it that what you say here simply expresses what I have said above, namely that moral normative reasons trump other kinds of normative reason. It is more important - that is, we have more reason - to do the right thing, than anything else.

So far that sounds correct. It seems like a conceptual truth that whatever it is morally right to do in a situation is that which we have most reason to do. ("I can see that Xing in these circumstances is what it is morally right to do; but what do I have most reason to do?" sounds confused).

C3. The existence of “special” moral reasons implies the superiority of moral philosophy over self-help philosophy. This superiority makes the notion of a decision failing to be bound by duty for being too demanding on your personal life seem implausible and repugnant. — TheHedoMinimalist

I don't understand how you get to the second claim from the first. The fact that moral reasons are not instrumental reasons means that it is always going to be possible that the moral life and the life it is maximally in your best interests to lead will not be the same. Sometimes we may be morally required to do something that it is not in our interests to do.

But you're making the much stronger claim that this entails that morality will be too demanding. I don't see how that follows. For instance, that instrumental reasons and moral reasons are not the same does not prevent instrumental reasons affecting what we have moral reason to do. If Xing would not frustrate too many of my ends, then I may have an obligation to do X. But if Xing would frustrate many of my ends, then it may be that I do not have an obligation to do X. For instance, it seems to me that I am entitled to do pretty much anything if my life is at stake and I am not responsible for it being so. If an innocent person is about to explode and kill me and the only way I can prevent them from exploding is to shoot them dead, then I am entitled to do so. And if there are ten such people I am entitled to shoot the lot of them. Normally, of course, one is not entitled to shoot innocent people for the sake of one's own interests. But under these circumstances one is. So these sorts of cases are ones in which instrumental reasons are radically affecting what one is morally entitled to do.

Anyway, those are matters of some dispute, no doubt. But the point is that you've fallaciously inferred that as moral reasons are 'special', they cannot be informed by and responsive to our instrumental reasons.

It seems to me, then, that all you're entitled to conclude is that what we have moral reason to do is to some extent responsive to what we have instrumental reason to do. I don't see how you get to the conclusion that we have no moral duties or that all moral duties are such as to be over-demanding due to their being distinctive and overriding.

TheHedoMinimalist

↪Leghorn

I’m not sure what portion of my OP you were responding to here. I agree with your post for the most part. The only thing I would add is that technically any kind of decision that you make could be moralized and be framed as being “other regarding”. For example, a man could believe that he has a duty towards his wife and kids to learn to manage his finances better because they are financially dependent on him. Normally, managing your finances is seen as a self-help concern. Nonetheless, I think one can usually insert a moral agenda into any sort of life decision that one makes. Sometimes, moral agendas get introduced in even the most personal and purely self-impacting of decisions that people make. For example, an Indian mother and father might tell their daughter that she has a moral duty to marry some guy that the family wants her to marry. Of course, most western moral philosophers would find this moral claim disgusting and repugnant. This is why westerners tend to think about such decisions mostly through a self-help lens and we use self-help type discourse to discuss it.

I think what this Indian family case is supposed to demonstrate is that perhaps the best way to understand the distinction between morality and self-help is by looking at the rhetoric and choice of words that are being used. It seems that we usually discuss our life decisions with others through a casual and down to earth self-help type speech. That speech just coming off as advice meant to be taken as a helpful suggestion rather than an authoritative command. Occasionally, it seems that our decisions might deeply offend others and that’s when I think they change their tone towards us and they start “moralizing” what we do. They start labeling us as evil if we don’t do as they think we should do and maybe they’ll go as far as saying that we are violating our duties. Basically, I think there isn’t anything coherent or intellectual that separates the notion of evil from a more casual self-help type notion of someone being irresponsible or unwise. Rather, I think it just says something about the heightened emotional feeling that the speaker of the moralizing words has about a particular subject matter.

Kenosha Kid

↪Bartricks

:up: Regarding C3, yes, that would be my answer too. In addition:

The most popular response to Singer’s argument seems to be to claim that his moral duty claims are too demanding. — TheHedoMinimalist

Yes, but that's not the end of it. There are so many opportunities to go out of your way to help others that, if you started now, you wouldn't make a dent if you lived to be 100. You can treat it as an infinite reservoir of opportunities to help others, and what they have in common is that few people are better placed than anybody else to offer that help. Hotlines and websites to donate money to children in Africa are targeting the entire world's population, and succeed because, statistically, enough people will respond to make those appeals worthwhile. If you don't respond, someone else will.

However, a child drowning in a pond is an immediate problem that only those nearby can resolve. The responsibility to assess whether to do so falls to a few people out of everyone on the planet. If the only way to save the child was to dial the same telephone number that the rest of the world was somehow simultaneously privy to, that personal responsibility would not be present, even though first-hand sight of the problem still would be.

That personal responsibility to assess one's own involvement is actually seen to diminish with the number of people who have it. The phenomenon is called the bystander effect: the more people who are present in an emergency requiring human assistance, the less likely a given present human is to assist. We evaluate that, statistically, it is likely that someone who is not us is more likely to be the one to give it a punt.

The bystander effect is like a bug in our moral reasoning. It allows 100 people to watch a child drown and do nothing, when any one of them alone would have saved the child. (The 21st century equivalent is you'd get 100 videos of a child drowning uploaded to the internet.)

tim wood

I have an argument against the existence of moral duties. — TheHedoMinimalist

And were you to prove no moral duties exist, do you think for a moment you would be free of them? Moral duties and the questions surrounding them seem intrinsic. That is, not a question of if they are, but rather what they are and what kinds of things are they.

TheHedoMinimalist

And were you to prove no moral duties exist, do you think for a moment you would be free of them? — tim wood

Yes, I think moral duties have to exist in order for someone to not be free of them.

Moral duties and the questions surrounding them seem intrinsic. That is, not a question of if they are, but rather what they are and what kinds of things are they. — tim wood

I would disagree. There are plenty of philosophers that don’t think moral duties exist and so they don’t really seem so “intrinsic”(which I guess is supposed to be a synonym for obvious in your post but correct me if I’m wrong) to many people. The point of my OP was to illuminate why the concept of moral duty seems absurd to many philosophers and why maybe a different sort of paradigm makes more sense like a paradigm where some actions are just morally bad in like a supererogatory sort of way. This actually still gives us reason to criticize people for being immoral but it would just come with the acknowledgement that immorally is one bad trait that a person could have among many rather than seeing morality as superimposing on any sort of self-help concern.

TheHedoMinimalist

However, a child drowning in a pond is an immediate problem that only those nearby can resolve. The responsibility to assess whether to do so falls to a few people out of everyone on the planet. If the only way to save the child was to dial the same telephone number that the rest of the world was somehow simultaneously privy to, that personal responsibility would not be present, even though first-hand sight of the problem still would be. — Kenosha Kid

I think that this argument here potentially allows for duty dodging though. I mentioned in the OP about how a privileged person could choose to live in a place where he is extremely unlikely to encounter drowning children and thus he could avoid having to make personal sacrifices while it seems that others would arbitrarily have to make those sacrifices to avoid violating duties. If this is indeed an implication of your reasoning then many people like myself think it makes more sense to think that duties just don’t exist rather than asserting that duties can be dodged by seemingly arbitrary factors like the location where one chooses to live.

The bystander effect is like a bug in our moral reasoning. It allows 100 people to watch a child drown and do nothing, when any one of them alone would have saved the child. (The 21st century equivalent is you'd get 100 videos of a child drowning uploaded to the internet.) — Kenosha Kid

I’m confused. If you say that the bystander effect is a bug then I presume that you think it is bad. Yet, earlier in the post you seem to imply that the presence of bystanders eliminates your moral responsibility. So, I’m not exactly sure of what to make on your thoughts on the bystander effect. I tend to think that if something as seemingly silly as the presence of bystanders could eliminate moral responsibility then that makes the notion of moral responsibility so counter-intuitive that it would just make more sense to argue that moral duties don’t exist and that there are only plain sorts of moral reasons where some decisions are morally bad in a non-duty sort of way.

Kenosha Kid

I mentioned in the OP about how a privileged person could choose to live in a place where he is extremely unlikely to encounter drowning children and thus he could avoid having to make personal sacrifices while it seems that others would arbitrarily have to make those sacrifices to avoid violating duties. — TheHedoMinimalist

Yes, I was going to touch on this but went a different route for concision.

Morality is practical. Practically, the decision is never going to be whether to live in an area with drowning children or not. People do isolate themselves, have done for centuries, in stately homes, secure mansions, penthouse suites, or as hermits. This is really the only way to avoid living in the world, and living in the world involves opportunities for selfishness and callousness that are also opportunities for kindness.

I'd say that the penthouse dwellers and secure facility habitators are pretty much as you say, not because they are hiding from particular opportunities to help others (that's not practical) but because they are hiding from any opportunities to help others. They are at least antisocial. Whether you classify them as immoral -- not for avoiding a particular action but any moral action -- is more a linguistic problem. One could equally say that morality doesn't apply to people not in the world.

I’m confused. If you say that the bystander effect is a bug then I presume that you think it is bad. Yet, earlier in the post you seem to imply that the presence of bystanders eliminates your moral responsibility. — TheHedoMinimalist

It is bad, but it's a feature of a group not an individual. The fact that it's systematic and predictable suggests we don't have much choice in it, it's part of being human, and you can't blame people for being human, that would be illogical (since morality only concerns humans). Not everything bad is a moral agent. Tsunamis are bad but they're no one's fault (except maybe property developers in areas prone to tsunamis :D ).

Book273

↪TheHedoMinimalist

The concept of moral duty, I find, is dependent on the point of the observer to that moral duty. For example, I have a moral duty (or at least a societal expectation) to save, or attempt to save, a child from drowning. I also have a moral duty, or expectation, to provide safety and security for my family. If by attempting to save the child, I place myself at risk, thereby also risking the safety and security of my family, as both of these would be substantially diminished in the event of my death, I also have a moral duty to not save the drowning child. Therefore an assessment of risk would be required prior to the commencement of either course of action.

An additional factor is personal values and core beliefs. Perhaps I am an individual that believes at a fundamental level that for the betterment of the species only the strong should survive. If that were the case then the drowning child could be interpreted as weak, and I would be duty bound to enhance the strength of the species by not saving the drowning child.

TheHedoMinimalist

Morality is practical. Practically, the decision is never going to be whether to live in an area with drowning children or not. People do isolate themselves, have done for centuries, in stately homes, secure mansions, penthouse suites, or as hermits. This is really the only way to avoid living in the world, and living in the world involves opportunities for selfishness and callousness that are also opportunities for kindness. — Kenosha Kid

I think there can some practical cases where someone could be motivated to choose to live in a particular location to avoid duties. It probably wouldn’t be a full blown hermit situation but let me give you a more modest example...

Suppose that there are 2 doctors. One doctor chose to live in a village in Africa and the other doctor chose to live in New York. Both doctors make the same amount of money and have similar luxurious lifestyles. The doctor who lives in New York really wanted to live in the village in Africa where the other doctor lives but he heard that there are lots of children there who have a super rare deadly condition. As it so happens to be, him and the doctor working in the village in the Africa are the only ones that are competent enough to treat this condition and save the lives of the children. The doctor from Africa is willing to treat the condition but he wants to get paid his normal hourly rate. The problem is that the families of lots of children that come to his hospital do not have any money. The African doctor only works 30 hours a week but he would have to work an additional 10 hours a week to treat any child that can’t pay for the treatment. That would be 10 hours a week of unpaid labor. That’s a pretty a significant sacrifice but probably not overly demanding by most people’s standards. The doctor from New York feels that he would be morally obligated to help the children with the rare condition if he decided to work in Africa and that would significantly lower his quality of life. But, he also accepts that because he is far away from the children with that condition that need free treatment and because the other doctor also refuses to help them that he isn’t responsible for not helping those children. He also knows that the doctor in Africa hates him for some reason and will transfer out of the hospital if transferred to his hospital. This means that he cannot rely on the bystander effect as he would literally be the only doctor that could have helped the dying children with the rare condition.

While this scenario is obviously fictional, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. That is to say, this scenario could actually happen in this world in the future(even if the probability of it happening is low). Nonetheless, I think it would be strange to argue that the doctor from New York avoids violating a duty just because he chose to distance himself from the children with the rare condition that can’t pay. Nonetheless, avoiding duty violations seems to understandably be his primary reason for choosing New York as his residence.

TheHedoMinimalist

I take it that what you say here simply expresses what I have said above, namely that moral normative reasons trump other kinds of normative reason. It is more important - that is, we have more reason - to do the right thing, than anything else.

So far that sounds correct. It seems like a conceptual truth that whatever it is morally right to do in a situation is that which we have most reason to do. ("I can see that Xing in these circumstances is what it is morally right to do; but what do I have most reason to do?" sounds confused). — Bartricks

No, that’s actually not what I meant in C2. C2 talks about moral duties rather than moral reasons. I don’t think that moral reasons trump over self-help reasons as a conceptual truth. Rather, I think there are more plausible ways to distinguish moral reasons from self-help reasons. I personally think the distinction is probably purely emotional rather than intellectual. I think it’s more about the rhetoric and the choice of words used by a speaker when talking about a particular subject matter. But, there is another theory about how to distinguish moral reasons from self-help reasons that I’m also sympathetic towards. That has to do with the fact that it could be argued that moral reasons are always about others rather yourself. This view has some objections as someone might use the example of someone thinking that homosexuality is immoral as an example of morality not being purely about others. But, I tend to think that the reasons why most people are anti-gay primarily has to do with their belief that homosexuality wrongs or harms someone other than the homosexual himself. The religious folks would probably think that it wrongs God for example. So, I think it’s extremely rare for someone to actually think that something is morally wrong without also claiming that this thing harms or wrongs someone besides the agent. So, I think this way of distinguishing moral reasons from self-help reasons also seems to be decently plausible.

But you're making the much stronger claim that this entails that morality will be too demanding. I don't see how that follows. For instance, that instrumental reasons and moral reasons are not the same does not prevent instrumental reasons affecting what we have moral reason to do. If Xing would not frustrate too many of my ends, then I may have an obligation to do X. But if Xing would frustrate many of my ends, then it may be that I do not have an obligation to do X. For instance, it seems to me that I am entitled to do pretty much anything if my life is at stake and I am not responsible for it being so. If an innocent person is about to explode and kill me and the only way I can prevent them from exploding is to shoot them dead, then I am entitled to do so. And if there are ten such people I am entitled to shoot the lot of them. Normally, of course, one is not entitled to shoot innocent people for the sake of one's own interests. But under these circumstances one is. So these sorts of cases are ones in which instrumental reasons are radically affecting what one is morally entitled to do. — Bartricks

I wasn’t trying to make a claim that morality will be too demanding actually. Rather, I was trying to argue that in order for moral duties to exist, there has to a legitimate difference between something being a moral duty and something being a thing that we ought to do because the moral benefits of the action outweigh the self-help harms of that action. For example, there is supposedly a difference between claiming that someone has a moral duty to rescue a child from a shallow pond and claiming that someone ought for supererogatory moral reasons to rescue that child from a shallow pond despite it not being a moral requirement. I think there’s something extra about claiming that doing something is a requirement(which is often used as a synonym for duty) as opposed to a mere wise decision based on moral considerations. Yet there doesn’t actually seem to be a meaningful difference between those 2 things unless one were to argue that duties have a special property of completely dominating self-help concerns. I think this is the only thing that would properly separate the concept of moral duties from mere supererogatory moral reasons.

Under my view, because moral duties don’t exist, all moral reasons are supererogatory reasons just as self-help reasons are. But, moral duties, if they actually existed, should go beyond those plain sorts of reasons. I think this is evident by the fact they are also called moral requirements. It seems really strange to me to think that something could stop being a requirement just because it inconveniences someone enough. That seems to be the kind of considerations that only plain ol supererogatory moral reasons would be constrained by. If the moral duty status of an action can be altered just in case the action is too demanding, then wouldn’t it just make more sense to acknowledge that our understanding of moral duties actually ironically makes them seem incredibly permissive and supererogatory. Hence why I think there is something paradoxical about saying that something can’t be a duty because it’s too demanding and also thinking of duties as strong and authoritative requirements. I think the paradox is best resolved by the abandonment of the concept of duties.

Kenosha Kid

This means that he cannot rely on the bystander effect as he would literally be the only doctor that could have helped the dying children with the rare condition. — TheHedoMinimalist

Yes, that's not an example of the bystander effect. However it's worth noting that the difference between them is not that one person is saving children and the other standing by, but rather that one person made the decision to get on a plane to Africa to help hypothetical persons and the other did not (i.e. we can't infer that the doctor in NY wouldn't help a child in need). At this point, I think we're well out of moral duty territory and into moral praiseworthiness.

Bartricks

↪TheHedoMinimalist

I am not sure I see a problem. There are normative reasons - moral and instrumental being the kind we are concerned with here - and there's what we have overall reason to do (which will be a function of the force the different reasons present have).

We can call what we have overall reason to do, 'rational'.

I think moral reasons do trump others and that's partly what is distinctive about them. They can conflict with each other, but they override other reasons.

When what we have overall reason to do has been determined by moral reasons, the rational requirement is a moral one.

Failure to do what is rational is simply irrational. Failure to do what is morally required is immoral and makes one blameworthy and deserving of harm.

When it comes to self interest, sometimes the fact that doing x would compromise your interests can operate to prevent other facts from generating moral reasons. So we do not have moral reasons being overcome by instrumental reasons, rather we have some facts preventing other facts from generating moral reasons.

As for the supererogatory - well, these are acts that are not morally required but have features that make them good and thus praiseworthy. I don't yet see a problem with them. They possess good making features, and it is those that make them praiseworthy. (Though failure to perform them does not make one blameworthy).

Perhaps there is a problem explaining their rationality. For it seems correct to say that such acts are rational. Yet it seems odd to say that their rationality is due to us having instrumental reason to perform them. But to deal with this we can say that there are some acts that one has no moral reason to perform until one performs them - that is, they rationalize themselves.

Leghorn

...technically any kind of decision that you make could be moralized and be framed as being “other regarding”. For example, a man could believe that he has a duty towards his wife and kids to learn to manage his finances better because they are financially dependent on him. Normally, managing your finances is seen as a self-help concern. Nonetheless, I think one can usually insert a moral agenda into any sort of life decision that one makes. — TheHedoMinimalist

Your ingenuous words here, “technically”, “moralized”, “framed”, “insert”, “agenda”, betray that you perceive no distinction between the true impulse in a man’s soul that causes him to make a moral decision or action, and a false one that can be “technically” “framed” or “moralized” as pure...

...my sister-in-law had an old piano she played occasionally as a pastime. As time passed, it became ever more unplayable, and she occasionally complained to her husband, my brother, about it. Christmas was approaching, and he bought her a new electronic piano as her present that year, but within a month he had signed up for piano lessons and was playing it everyday, far more than she ever played the old one...

...technically my brother had his wife’s interest in mind when he bought that piano; one could moralize his action and say so; you could call it “other regarding”, for it was technically a gift to her; we could certainly frame it that way, based on appearances (and ignoring certain other details), and I don’t doubt that he inserted this moral agenda into the decision he made.

As for the man who manages his finances well for the sake of his family—presumably he’d rather blow his paycheck at the races—this seems a rather antiquated and misogynistic scenario: doesn’t his wife work also? How does she manage her money? Do they combine their incomes, or keep their monies separate? If the former, who has the final say?

TheHedoMinimalist

However it's worth noting that the difference between them is not that one person is saving children and the other standing by, but rather that one person made the decision to get on a plane to Africa to help hypothetical persons and the other did not (i.e. we can't infer that the doctor in NY wouldn't help a child in need). — Kenosha Kid

Unless I mis-wrote something in my last post, I recall mentioning that the doctor from Africa refuses to help the children who have the condition if they can’t pay for it. My point was that this doesn’t make him a more blameworthy person than the person that chose to be a doctor in NY because he would feel obligated to help the children for free if he was in Africa. But, it seems that the refusal to provide free treatment is the equivalent to refusing to rescue a child from a shallow pond. Hence why I reject the proximity requirement for something to be a duty.

TheHedoMinimalist

I am not sure I see a problem. There are normative reasons - moral and instrumental being the kind we are concerned with here - and there's what we have overall reason to do (which will be a function of the force the different reasons present have).

We can call what we have overall reason to do, 'rational'. — Bartricks

I wasn’t trying to dispute the existence of moral reasons in my OP. I was actually trying to argue against the existence of moral duties which I think is like a particular sub-category of moral reasons.

When it comes to self interest, sometimes the fact that doing x would compromise your interests can operate to prevent other facts from generating moral reasons. So we do not have moral reasons being overcome by instrumental reasons, rather we have some facts preventing other facts from generating moral reasons. — Bartricks

If instrumental reasons have the power to prevent the generation of moral reasons then I think this would be an example of instrumental reasons trumping morality(even if they aren’t trumping moral reasons per se). My argument was that it is highly counterintuitive to think that there are some moral reasons(namely moral duties) that can trump any other kind of reason and yet other kinds of reasons somehow have the power to prevent the generation of moral duties. Don’t you think that this is kinda strange and weirdly paradoxical? I think that it is and I suspect that at least some people would see what I’m getting at here. Nonetheless, I can’t expect my argument to appeal to everyone’s intuitions and I understand if you don’t find your perceived relationship between moral and instrumental reasons to be counterintuitive. But, I just find the idea of moral duties trumping instrumental reasons despite also relying on a lack of big instrumental reasons against the duty for the said duty’s existence to be very confusing and absurd.

TheHedoMinimalist

...technically my brother had his wife’s interest in mind when he bought that piano; one could moralize his action and say so; you could call it “other regarding”, for it was technically a gift to her; we could certainly frame it that way, based on appearances (and ignoring certain other details), and I don’t doubt that he inserted this moral agenda into the decision he made. — Leghorn

I think this is an example of something that wouldn’t actually be moralized in our modern western culture even if it was other regarding. Even if his sole motivation was to make his sister in law happy, we probably wouldn’t give him that much moral praise. But, if he refused to give any present to a family member that he was spending Christmas with then I think that tends to be moralized as many people in our culture have a pretty strong attachment to the tradition of gift giving. Usually, it doesn’t even matter that much what the gifts are. I think it’s just seen as a courtesy expected of you.

this seems a rather antiquated and misogynistic scenario: doesn’t his wife work also? How does she manage her money? Do they combine their incomes, or keep their monies separate? If the former, who has the final say? — Leghorn

Yes it is seen by modern westerners to be an antiquated and misogynistic scenario. I’m sure the folks in the Middle East would have less problems moralizing the husband for not being able to support his family while his wife sits at home. I think those people in the Middle East are wrong about this. Though, the moral reaction that I have towards their practices seems to be purely emotive. I think I could maybe point out that their cultural practices are not beneficial from a pure utilitarian sort of way. If they introduced women into their workforces then their productivity would greatly increase. I could argue that it’s preferable to live in a society with more productivity or that it is better to be married to a more productive wife all things being equal. I’m not sure if I could argue that what they were is immoral nonetheless because I think our colloquial understanding of what morality is about has a strong emotive element to it.

It seems to me that emotions are not intellectual entities that you necessarily could argue about. Perhaps you can argue about what emotions would be most beneficial for you to display towards certain actions. But, I think that would be framing morality in a self-help context. We can also talk about the most beneficial emotional reactions people should have towards certain actions for the benefit to the world or society, but that seems to ignore a very large number of people that don’t understand morality to be about benefiting the world or society. So, I still think it’s more plausible and eloquent to understand the distinction between self-help and morality by analyzing the words and rhetoric used by those to proclaim to give a moral message as opposed to a self-help message.

Kenosha Kid

↪TheHedoMinimalist

Yeah, sorry, my answer was rather incomplete. The bystander effect has no standing in either evaluation by design, but I'm not sure what you see is important in this: the bystander effect is not everything, it's just one of many considerations about how humans behave.

I'm not sure we can gain any insight from what the NY doctor would have done had he moved to Africa. The insight we get from him ends with his not moving there, which is fine: as I said, moving to Africa is morally praiseworthy not morally obligatory, assuming the intent is to help more vulnerable children.

Is it still morally praiseworthy if the Africa doctor could easily do more but does not? Is it morally obligatory for him to do more?

This is actually touching on my own views of morality. Why it would seem morally obligatory to save one child if you could and only you could, but not to save one more having saved 20 already, has to do with what morality is, how it has developed, and how ill-fitting it is for the world we find ourselves in.

Brief version is that we evolved the social biology that underlies our morality in small social groups in which most individuals would know most of the people they ever met very well, making reciprocal altruism an advantage and helping others feasible. We are the inheritors of this genetic predisposition to help others, but we now live in very large groups wherein we mostly encounter strangers and there are more opportunities for altruism than we could ever possibly satisfy. We must choose, and there's no obvious cutoff point. There's no compelling argument to help anyone, so long as you do not permit yourself to be helped under any circumstance (otherwise you're a hypocrite and a freeloader). Moral existentialism: determine your own moral magnitude.

In this schema, it would still be morally praiseworthy to choose to move to Africa (assuming the intent is altruistic) and save some but not all children (a la the ending of Schindler's List). To not save the drowning child would be antisocial and, in a small social group, the person would not be fed, protected, or the object of altruism which, projected onto a moralistic framework, is equivalent to saying that there's a moral obligation to save the child (insofar as moral obligations are really about reciprocal altruism, and the correct response would be ostracisation).

TheHedoMinimalist

In this schema, it would still be morally praiseworthy to choose to move to Africa (assuming the intent is altruistic) and save some but not all children (a la the ending of Schindler's List). To not save the drowning child would be antisocial and, in a small social group, the person would not be fed, protected, or the object of altruism which, projected onto a moralistic framework, is equivalent to saying that there's a moral obligation to save the child (insofar as moral obligations are really about reciprocal altruism, and the correct response would be ostracisation). — Kenosha Kid

Wouldn’t reciprocal altruism be in the realm of self-help philosophy though? After all, I could imagine a self-help philosopher telling people that you do nice things for others and not harm them because that will effect how they treat you. I don’t see a moral philosopher appealing to reciprocal altruism much though. It has been argued plenty of times that reciprocal altruism and kinship ties were the evolutionary explanations for why the notion of morality was created. That actually seems like an argument to give against the existence of moral duties though. After all, if moral duties are nothing more than evolved mechanisms to ensure that others treat you well, then why should we assume that they have some sort of real ontological existence.

Leghorn

@TheHedoMinimalist

I think you read my anecdote too quickly, negligently and thoughtlessly:

Even if his sole motivation was to make his sister in law happy — TheHedoMinimalist

If you reread my post, you should realize that she is MY sister-in-law, HIS wife.

The rest of what you have to say regarding the anecdote tells me you entirely missed its point. In it, I related certain particular details of what happened, but left it to the reader to draw the conclusions without explicitly stating them myself:

he bought her a new electronic piano as her present that year, but within a month he had signed up for piano lessons and was playing it everyday, far more than she ever played the old one... — Leghorn

What does my brother’s behavior after Christmas suggest about his motivations for giving the gift?

Bartricks

↪TheHedoMinimalist

I wasn’t trying to dispute the existence of moral reasons in my OP. I was actually trying to argue against the existence of moral duties which I think is like a particular sub-category of moral reasons. — TheHedoMinimalist

That's a category error. What you have a moral duty to do is what you have overall moral reason to do. It is not itself a moral reason - moral reasons are what create your duties.

I mean, if you accept that there are moral reasons, then you must accept that there is, in any situation in which moral reasons are present, what you have overall moral reason to do. What are you going to call that, if not your moral duty?

I don't, then, see any coherent way of arguing that moral reasons exist but moral duties do not. That's like arguing that storeys exist, but buildings do not.

TheHedoMinimalist

The rest of what you have to say regarding the anecdote tells me you entirely missed its point. In it, I related certain particular details of what happened, but left it to the reader to draw the conclusions without explicitly stating them myself: — Leghorn

I read the anecdote again for the third time and I’m not sure what point you think that I missed about your anecdote. You mentioned that you think your brother probably had a moral agenda but I saw no clear indication of that from your anecdote. Your brother didn’t talk about his decision to buy the keyboard using moral language or rhetoric for example(at least it seems your anecdote didn’t state as much).

What does my brother’s behavior after Christmas suggest about his motivations for giving the gift? — Leghorn

I don’t think his behavior suggests any motivation as we cannot rule out the possibility of it being a coincidence that he got interested in playing the keyboard. Maybe he thought he would only occasionally play it but surprisingly got really into it. Either way, I actually don’t think that his motivations matter in the context of our discussion regarding how to distinguish morality from self-help considerations. I think that distinction is more about what narrative one wants to express regarding a particular action or behavior. Your brother didn’t express any narrative as far as I can tell so I’m not sure why you think he might have had a moral agenda if agendas seem intuitively to be verbal expressions or narratives.

Kenosha Kid

Wouldn’t reciprocal altruism be in the realm of self-help philosophy though? After all, I could imagine a self-help philosopher telling people that you do nice things for others and not harm them because that will effect how they treat you. — TheHedoMinimalist

Not quite, since nature can select for altruistic impulses because of reciprocal altruism, but it can't select for reciprocal altruism itself. Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting reciprocal altruism as a moral philosophy; I'm saying you're born an altruist: it's biological, not philosophical. (Though there's lots of ways of getting around that.) My suggestion is rather moral existentialism: acknowledge that the existence of moral impulses precedes our moral philosophies, and work out our own moral philosophies for ourselves.

Saving the drowning child essentially becomes morally obligatory only insofar as, if you do not, you are not in the morality game at all (psychopath, sociopath, individualist, isolationist). But saving the 2nd is not obligatory, merely weird.

That's actually an interesting variant. A man sees two children drowning in a pond. He saves one and has plenty of time to save the second. Must he?

After all, if moral duties are nothing more than evolved mechanisms to ensure that others treat you well, then why should we assume that they have some sort of real ontological existence. — TheHedoMinimalist

I'd say the opposite: if moral duties are just arbitrary things we get to decide through philosophy, then they don't have any ontic value at all. An evolved characteristic for moral behaviour is objectively real.

TheHedoMinimalist

I mean, if you accept that there are moral reasons, then you must accept that there is, in any situation in which moral reasons are present, what you have overall moral reason to do. What are you going to call that, if not your moral duty? — Bartricks

I would call that an instance of supererogatory moral reasons that come with choosing to make a particular decision outweighing the self-help reasons and other supererogatory moral reasons that comes with not choosing to make a particular decision. I think this is a more intuitive classification because I don’t think it makes sense to say that you are required to do what you have overall reason to do. It might be better to do what you have overall reason to do but I’m not seeing where you are getting the requirement aspect of duties from. Why should I think that I’m required to abide by those alleged moral duties rather than just see them as helpful suggestions(which would intuitively make them seem to not be very duty-like and hence my point about them probably not existing).

TheHedoMinimalist

I'm saying you're born an altruist: it's biological, not philosophical. — Kenosha Kid

If someone is born an altruist then wouldn’t being altruistic make that person feel good? If that’s so, then wouldn’t this give them a purely selfish self-help sort of reason to be altruistic?

Saving the drowning child essentially becomes morally obligatory only insofar as, if you do not, you are not in the morality game at all (psychopath, sociopath, individualist, isolationist). — Kenosha Kid

Wouldn’t making rules about what allows a person to be labeled as participating in the morality game going against the spirit of moral existentialism though? If people can rationally work out their moral philosophy for themselves then it seems that they can presumably create a moral philosophy without duties where actions can only be morally praiseworthy or morally blameworthy in a supererogatory sort of way. In addition, it seems to me that moral existentialism would suggest that anyone who claims to be part of the morality game is part of the morality game simply by virtue of asserting that they are part of the morality game. After all, the term “existentialism” doesn’t really hold a connotation of caring about what society thinks and it seems to have a hyper-individualistic ring to it(I think this holds true especially in regards to many classic existentialist philosophers like Nietzsche and Sartre. Though, I’m not sure how much in common your conception of moral existentialism has with the existentialist philosophers. Perhaps you are talking about something completely different).

That's actually an interesting variant. A man sees two children drowning in a pond. He saves one and has plenty of time to save the second. Must he? — Kenosha Kid

I’m not sure why anyone would think that the obligation is dependent on the number of children that need to be saved rather than the amount of effort that would be required of you.

I'd say the opposite: if moral duties are just arbitrary things we get to decide through philosophy, then they don't have any ontic value at all. An evolved characteristic for moral behaviour is objectively real. — Kenosha Kid

Well, I want to talk about another thing that we have probably evolved to believe in and care about and that is religion. I think there’s good evidence that a belief in the supernatural was somewhat beneficial to the survival and reproduction of our ancestors. It can bring people a great deal of hope and it might ward off pessimistic life attitudes that are probably bad for survival and procreation. Nonetheless, if I made a comment that religions are just arbitrary things that we get to decide through philosophy and they don’t have any ontic value then you probably would think that this invalidates religion. It probably wouldn’t matter to you that there is an evolved characteristic for religious behavior that is objectively real. Though, maybe you do think the same way about religion as you do morality. At the end of the day, it kinda feels like your non-ontological understanding of morality kinda already dismisses the idea of genuine moral duties(at least the kind of moral duties that I think most people care about).

Kenosha Kid

If someone is born an altruist then wouldn’t being altruistic make that person feel good? If that’s so, then wouldn’t this give them a purely selfish self-help sort of reason to be altruistic? — TheHedoMinimalist

Yes and no. People driven toward altruism instinctively are more likely to propagate their genes. It doesn't have to make someone feel good necessarily -- hunger, for instance, feels bad -- but in this case, yeah it feels good (the chemical involved, oxytocin, is also known as the "cuddle hormone"). But self-help is not the same as hedonism.

If people can rationally work out their moral philosophy for themselves then it seems that they can presumably create a moral philosophy without duties where actions can only be morally praiseworthy or morally blameworthy in a supererogatory sort of way. — TheHedoMinimalist

But then what would make it a moral philosophy? I mean, in the extreme where the philosophy is 'do nothing for anyone, accept nothing from anyone', what makes this a philosophy of morality as opposed to any other neutral politic? That's all I meant by "not in the morality game": since morality concerns particular ways we interact with each other, not interacting with each other isn't categorically a moral philosophy (in much the same way zero isn't categorically a positive integer).

In addition, it seems to me that moral existentialism would suggest that anyone who claims to be part of the morality game is part of the morality game simply by virtue of asserting that they are part of the morality game. — TheHedoMinimalist

I'm not sure what you mean. Sure, making the claim is a behaviour but it's not obviously a moral behaviour. I'm wondering if "morality game" has accidentally picked up connotations of "language game". Perhaps "morality business" is a better name. Someone who is struggling with the sorts of question you ask is in the morality business: they are actively concerned with how much good they have to do, under what circumstances they should do it, etc. As opposed to, say, a psychopath who... well they might be concerned with the same questions, but for different reasons having to do with appearance rather than any drive toward altruism.

I’m not sure why anyone would think that the obligation is dependent on the number of children that need to be saved rather than the amount of effort that would be required of you. — TheHedoMinimalist

Because saving a drowning child is a good act. Saving two drowning children is also a good act. How would the opportunity for the second negate the first? If it does, saving a child is not a good act. If it doesn't, not saving a child is also fine.

I think there’s good evidence that a belief in the supernatural was somewhat beneficial to the survival and reproduction of our ancestors. It can bring people a great deal of hope and it might ward off pessimistic life attitudes that are probably bad for survival and procreation. Nonetheless, if I made a comment that religions are just arbitrary things that we get to decide through philosophy and they don’t have any ontic value then you probably would think that this invalidates religion. It probably wouldn’t matter to you that there is an evolved characteristic for religious behavior that is objectively real. Though, maybe you do think the same way about religion as you do morality. — TheHedoMinimalist

I think the same about religion. It is weirdly easy to get people to convert, so we have that propensity. And I do think it was beneficial, and you don't need to believe in an overseeing deity to reap the benefits of the idea of one. I'm recalling a neat demonstration Derren Brown did many years ago (I'm sure it'll be a reproduction of a published experiment) in which two groups of four people played a game by themselves and were given every opportunity to cheat. 3/4 in one group cheated. 0/4 in the other group cheated. The only difference in the setup was that the second group were told that a chair in the room was part of a different show about haunted objects. None of the players believed in ghosts, but they still acted more ethically once the idea had been planted in their minds.

I'm not sure the hope aspects are particularly beneficial, but the notion of an overseeing, judgemental but forgiving father figure seems to yield more altruism even if you don't believe in it, and historically higher levels of altruism meant higher chance of survival.

At the end of the day, it kinda feels like your non-ontological understanding of morality kinda already dismisses the idea of genuine moral duties(at least the kind of moral duties that I think most people care about). — TheHedoMinimalist

It's curious isn't it! Morality has been physicalised, it's now biological, it's in your DNA. Yet somehow it feels less ontic than the idea of an out-there objective moral truth (e.g. commandment from God) which probably isn't real. I think this is true of a lot of things, like mind. The further something is from the original, traditional idea we have of it, often born of ignorance, the less like itself it seems when we can actually see it and do stuff with it.

What's morally obligatory has the character of a convention, often needing backing up with threats of violence or ostracizing. The conventions seem objective when you're in them because we share them, but seem relative when you're not. Real magic isn't real. Only fake magic is real. (Dennett)

I think a surer sign of objective morality is manifest in the way that, over the last few hundred years, against powerful concepts like religion, empire, colonialism, slavery, capitalism, neoliberalism, the very real, very ontic morality I speak of has gradually biased us towards something better, more human. Abolition, suffrage, civil rights, equal opportunities, LGBT rights, animal (!) rights, stewardship of the planet, equity. These have arisen against powerful vested interests simply by virtue of a global village of people having a united voice. Only a minority of people benefit from gay marriage rights, but the majority of us think it's important to fight for. Why? Because deep down, despite everything done to us, despite the great efforts to destroy every last vestige of community spirit -- the remainder of our traditional ways of living -- those drives that make us distinctly human, social, moral, reassert themselves ever more strongly. That's far more obviously objective than merely insisting that one convention is objective imo.

TheHedoMinimalist

But self-help is not the same as hedonism. — Kenosha Kid

I think that any form of egoistic hedonism firmly falls into the self-help category. For example, I could write a book that gives people advice on how to experience more pleasure in their life and one of the advice I might give is encouraging them to be more compassionate towards others as that would release the cuddle hormone. This hypothetical book that I am writing really seems to resemble other kinds of self-help books so it probably is a hedonistic self-help book. Either way, egoistic hedonism doesn’t seem to be a moral philosophy so I think my point from my last post still stands.

But then what would make it a moral philosophy? I mean, in the extreme where the philosophy is 'do nothing for anyone, accept nothing from anyone', what makes this a philosophy of morality as opposed to any other neutral politic? — Kenosha Kid

I think moral philosophy could reasonably be defined by the rhetoric and choice of words used by a person making a moral claim. For example, we can analyze how moral philosophers and theologians talk compared to how self-help authors and counselors talk. One obvious difference is related to how moral philosophers are more likely to describe certain things as evil or prohibited or obligatory or wrong(they don’t necessarily have to use all those terms though). By contrast, self-help philosophers usually just speak of more wise and less wise behavior without moralizing that behavior too much. Another difference seems to be that moral philosophers are more likely to speak on issues that are very emotionally charged like abortion, rape, and racism. In contrast, self-help philosophers usually speak about more tame topics like retirement planning, time management, and occasionally they might touch a more emotive topic like mental health issues. Basically, you can probably go to your local library and pick up a random book in the ethics section and quickly categorize that book as a moral philosophy book or a self-help book by just reading the cover or a few pages from the book. This is because you probably intuitively just notice the similarities regarding choice of words and style of rhetoric for each kind of book.

since morality concerns particular ways we interact with each other, not interacting with each other isn't categorically a moral philosophy (in much the same way zero isn't categorically a positive integer). — Kenosha Kid

I can provide you an example where something seems to be morality but it doesn’t involve people interacting with each other. Imagine a Jainist hermit who lives in a mountain home alone. He decided to become a hermit as he felt it was obligatory for him to do so as he sees society as an evil temptress that provoke him to
harm sentient creatures. As a Jainist, he has a strong religious moral conviction that he ought not to harm sentient creatures. He considers insects to be sentient creatures and thus he uses a broom every time he walks by to ensure that he doesn’t kill any of them by accident. He wouldn’t regard those insects as “others” though as he could not socialize with them in even simple ways that you might socialize with a cow for example. He also views them as inferior to other animals but he still thinks it’s pretty wrong to harm them. It seems to me that this Jainist hermit has legitimate moral convictions and he is playing the morality game by himself and with himself. After all, it’s hard to doubt the sincerity of his beliefs given the lengths he is willing to go because of them and his beliefs seem to resemble other kinds of moral beliefs. Thus, I don’t think morality necessarily has to be about us interacting with others.

I think a surer sign of objective morality is manifest in the way that, over the last few hundred years, against powerful concepts like religion, empire, colonialism, slavery, capitalism, neoliberalism, the very real, very ontic morality I speak of has gradually biased us towards something better, more human. Abolition, suffrage, civil rights, equal opportunities, LGBT rights, animal (!) rights, stewardship of the planet, equity. These have arisen against powerful vested interests simply by virtue of a global village of people having a united voice. Only a minority of people benefit from gay marriage rights, but the majority of us think it's important to fight for. Why? Because deep down, despite everything done to us, despite the great efforts to destroy every last vestige of community spirit -- the remainder of our traditional ways of living -- those drives that make us distinctly human, social, moral, reassert themselves ever more strongly. That's far more obviously objective than merely insisting that one convention is objective imo. — Kenosha Kid

I don’t think that the supposed moral progress that you speak of had been brought about by something like a global village of people having a united voice. For example, you mentioned how only a minority of people benefit from gay marriage but it should also be mentioned that it seems that almost nobody gets harmed by gay marriage either. So, I think we hardly had any incentive to be against gay marriage to begin with. I think the vast majority of people don’t care about gay marriage at all much less be willing to fight for it(outside of maybe lazy slacktivism where someone expresses their support for gay marriage on a social media site), I’m also confused regarding what issues like abolition, suffrage, and civil rights have to do with reciprocal altruism or morality being in our DNA. I don’t think that the Northern states that fought to abolish slavery in the past ever had the favor returned to them by the freed African slaves and the men who marched with MLK to give African Americans civil rights didn’t seem to get rewarded by African Americans in any way. If anything, it seems to me that we have biologically evolved to be very tribalistic and put our ethnicity above other ethnicities(after all, isn’t that what our pre-historic ancestors did). So, I’m not seeing where caring about the issues that you have mentioned has any sort of biological basis to it. I think cultural evolution is a more likely reason why we had abolition, suffrage, and civil rights happen. Culturally influenced morality doesn’t seem to have a legitimate ontic basis to it.

Kenosha Kid

I think that any form of egoistic hedonism firmly falls into the self-help category. — TheHedoMinimalist

I disagree. I don't think you'd find a book encouraging you to eat and drink with gay abandon in any self-help section. Self-help is an ethic of looking after and improving oneself. Making oneself happy is part of it, but not immediate gratification afaik.

Thus, I don’t think morality necessarily has to be about us interacting with others. — TheHedoMinimalist

True, one could also have a religion that says you cannot walk south, or eat green things, or hold anything in your left hand, or wear shoelaces. Even having some understanding of why we have a moral bent, people can always build a moral around anything.

I'm not sure this is an apt counterexample though. Presumably, being a Jainist, should they encounter someone needing help despite their aims to encounter no one at all, they would help them and, likewise, should he be found by another needing help he would accept that help. By absenting themselves from morality altogether, I had in mind more someone who simply would not help others or accept help, whether they harm animals or no.

I don’t think that the supposed moral progress that you speak of had been brought about by something like a global village of people having a united voice. For example, you mentioned how only a minority of people benefit from gay marriage but it should also be mentioned that it seems that almost nobody gets harmed by gay marriage either. So, I think we hardly had any incentive to be against gay marriage to begin with. — TheHedoMinimalist

And yet we were. And many still are, but the number of people in favour grow nonetheless.

I’m also confused regarding what issues like abolition, suffrage, and civil rights have to do with reciprocal altruism or morality being in our DNA. I don’t think that the Northern states that fought to abolish slavery in the past ever had the favor returned to them by the freed African slaves and the men who marched with MLK to give African Americans civil rights didn’t seem to get rewarded by African Americans in any way. — TheHedoMinimalist

I think you misunderstand. You can't have a biological capacity for reciprocal altruism. Reciprocity is an outcome, not a drive. You do have biological instincts for altruism, egalitarianism and empathy, but also for counter-empathetic responses.

Reciprocal altruism is why altruism was beneficial for survival. In individual selection, it doesn't make much sense to have a trait to help others at one's own cost. However if a group of such people have this trait, it does become beneficial to the individual.

Being able to stand by as vulnerable people are treated cruelly is a sure sign of a counter-empathetic response (such as racism). This is something you have to learn from experience or be taught. Socialisations used to be stricter, singular and localised. It's now much easier for, say, a Texan Christian to realise that a gay black atheist is as worthy as a straight white Christian. This has not always been the case. A lot of this has to do with the fact that people are exposed to difference and diversity a lot more now, and that conflicts with traditional intolerant mores. That exposure comes from more travel, more internationalism in education and employment, and more diversity in media and, more recently, social media, but also from people just being able to make the case more freely.

If anything, it seems to me that we have biologically evolved to be very tribalistic and put our ethnicity above other ethnicities(after all, isn’t that what our pre-historic ancestors did). — TheHedoMinimalist

No, they didn't. Immediate return hunter-gatherer groups were egalitarian, altruistic, and peaceful with other tribes until they met a tribe that was warlike. Animosity towards others is more like a cancer than a trait.

TheHedoMinimalist

I disagree. I don't think you'd find a book encouraging you to eat and drink with gay abandon in any self-help section. — Kenosha Kid

Egoistic hedonism is the view that one should make themselves feel as good as possible in the long run(at least if we’re talking about prudential egoistic hedonism rather than what’s known as folk hedonism which is the stereotypical form of hedonism. You can read about that distinction in philosophy encyclopedia entries on hedonism). This would typically involve finding ways to limit the hardships in your life as well. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about immediate gratification(and it almost never is). The most popular egoistic hedonist philosopher in history was Epicurus who would mostly advocate for you living a very modest life with the minimum amount of mental distress and physical pain.

Self-help is an ethic of looking after and improving oneself. — Kenosha Kid

What counts as looking after and improving oneself though? I would argue that serious egoistic hedonist philosophers were all about looking after and improving oneself. For example, I talked about how hedonists often focus on minimizing hardships in their life. The hedonist self-help philosopher could try to figure out the best methods for doing that. I think one good method is being really good at saving money and having a large emergency fund. Another thing you might want to do is eat healthy so you are less likely to develop chronic illnesses. Another thing you would want to be good at is spotting toxic people and learning to avoid them.

I think even a stereotypical folk hedonist that is only focused on immediate gratification can be a self-help philosopher. After all, couldn’t you improve yourself in the ways that you receive immediate gratification. I think you can. Some ways that I have found to increase pleasure in my life involve increasing the intensity of my orgasms through stimulation of the perineum and precise application of pressure on various parts of my genitals. This actually took me a lot of experimentation and practice to figure out and master. I think you can certainly put that stuff in a self-help book. Another pleasure maximizing technique that I use is what I call “pleasure meditation” where I concentrate on the taste of the food that I’m eating or drink that I’m drinking. I think a lot of what determines how pleasurable something will be to you is about the mindset that you have about and this is why I think training your mind to experience more pleasure is also very important and worth putting in a self-help. To tie this all together with our previous discussion about how cuddle hormones can give you a significant amount of pleasure and how the hedonist might want this pleasure. The hedonist self-help philosopher can explore what kinds of compassionate acts will bring them the most pleasure and what kinds of compassionate acts are most likely to minimize their hardship because it would help them earn allies that would help them avoid hard times.

I'm not sure this is an apt counterexample though. Presumably, being a Jainist, should they encounter someone needing help despite their aims to encounter no one at all, they would help them and, likewise, should he be found by another needing help he would accept that help. By absenting themselves from morality altogether, I had in mind more someone who simply would not help others or accept help, whether they harm animals or no. — Kenosha Kid

We can simply modify my previous example then and have the hermit be convinced by some Jainist-like cult religion where humans are seen as evil and not worth helping but you should avoid crushing bugs. I think it would still be intuitive to think that this weird hermit is still playing a morality game(even if it’s a weird one).

I think you misunderstand. You can't have a biological capacity for reciprocal altruism. Reciprocity is an outcome, not a drive. You do have biological instincts for altruism, egalitarianism and empathy, but also for counter-empathetic responses. — Kenosha Kid

Actually, many people like myself choose to help others sometimes only because we feel that this would result in getting more people to help us in the future. Of course, we might often disguise this as genuine altruism and it’s hard to distinguish between the two a lot of times. I think we have actually evolved to be altruistic in part because we expect reciprocation. Though, I do think some people are evolved to be directly altruistic. Still, I think there are definitely cases where someone is motivated to be altruistic for selfish reasons.

You do have biological instincts for altruism, egalitarianism and empathy, but also for counter-empathetic responses. — Kenosha Kid

I don’t think that having biological instincts for altruism, egalitarianism, and empathy necessarily would give you the kind of morality that requires you to rescue a child drowning in a shallow body of water. For example, I could imagine a highly pessimistic and suicidal person who has fair amount of empathy towards others choose to ignore a drowning child because he might envy the position that this child is in. He might think that the child is better off dead and might be planning his own demise as well. But, he wouldn’t be a psychopath or an isolationist who isn’t part of the morality game. I think he just has a weird morality game. In his morality game, survival is bad rather than good. Of course, being that kind of a pessimist isn’t necessarily good for survival but it could result from a genetic mutation or something. If his pre-disposition is still based in DNA and something biological then I don’t see why the lack of survivability of his traits makes them not part of morality if morality is about biological characteristics that enable you to care about others. After all, this person cares about the child but in a really weird sort of way which might have resulted from a rare mutation.

Kenosha Kid

Actually, many people like myself choose to help others sometimes only because we feel that this would result in getting more people to help us in the future. Of course, we might often disguise this as genuine altruism and it’s hard to distinguish between the two a lot of times. I think we have actually evolved to be altruistic in part because we expect reciprocation. Though, I do think some people are evolved to be directly altruistic. Still, I think there are definitely cases where someone is motivated to be altruistic for selfish reasons. — TheHedoMinimalist

You can rationally expect reciprocity, yes, and reciprocity was even the reason altruism was selected for, but you can't evolve a drive toward reciprocity in the same way to you can't evolve to have more children (an outcome) but you can evolve e.g. higher libido (a drive). Evolving an outcome doesn't make any sense.

Egoistic hedonism is the view that one should make themselves feel as good as possible in the long run(at least if we’re talking about prudential egoistic hedonism rather than what’s known as folk hedonism which is the stereotypical form of hedonism. You can read about that distinction in philosophy encyclopedia entries on hedonism). — TheHedoMinimalist

Okay, I don't know about prudential egoistic hedonism, that's a new one to me, but helping others for a hit of oxytocin is not prudent long-term in and of itself. Selflessness is costly. Taking the act in itself, it generally ought to incur more pain than pleasure. I give you my favourite bear because you have cancer. I get a nice hit of oxytocin for a short while, and am short a bear forever. I don't give you my favourite bear, and I feel guilt for a bit but enjoy the bear forever.

What makes reciprocal altruism work is closer to hedonistic utilitarianism (maximising happiness for all involved) but really is about perpetuating my genome (which is incapable of pleasure or pain, only continuing or dying out).

So yeah I can see that self-help is a subset of hedonism, but it doesn't follow that all hedonism is self-help (which I think addresses most of your post).

I don’t think that having biological instincts for altruism, egalitarianism, and empathy necessarily would give you the kind of morality that requires you to rescue a child drowning in a shallow body of water. For example, I could imagine a highly pessimistic and suicidal person who has fair amount of empathy towards others choose to ignore a drowning child because he might envy the position that this child is in. — TheHedoMinimalist

Sure, depression, stress, anxiety, fear, loneliness... There's lots of things that make us more selfish and less altruistic. Generally a social group on the brink of starvation ceases to be social, it's every individual for themselves. That doesn't counter the likelihood that our morality derives from our social biology, nor is it particularly useful to attempt to build a morality around edge cases, or one that admits every conceivable behaviour. Whatever your thoughts on what morality is, there's a bunch of people who aren't doing that, so that's a doomed exercise.

Humans are individuals. We make up a species because we have a bit more in common with each other than we do with chimpanzees, and a lot more than we do with ants, banana trees and slime mold. But each one of us has our capacities limited by our own DNA, our own characteristics, not the total or average characteristics of the species. Some people will naturally be more social than others.

Plus, as I've said, altruism is a drive, not an outcome, and it's one that's relatively easy to block. You teach a Texan boy to hate Mexicans, he's not going to feel the same pain and guilt watching his friends kick the crap out of a Mexican kid as one that isn't raised that way. Our biology can underlie our morality without it being the only thing that drives our behaviour. What makes us human is, in part, the huge amount of social biology we're packing, but we're still packing a lot of other biology too, including stuff inherited from our pre-social ancestors.

I didn't mean to derail your thread with all this evolution talk btw. I'm letting you dictate whether it's off-topic or not.

Against Moral Duties

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