Chapter 5: Why Chapter 2 Is A Pack of Lies

The Is/Ought Gap: Take Two

The problem of the is/ought gap was that in order to argue for any ethical point, we needed to already know something about ethics. So where do we know the first thing about ethics? We will see that with correct-ism, the is/ought gap will no longer be a problem.

Suppose we are making a syllogism not about what ought to be, but rather about what is. There is no mention of morality in it. Our argument will look like: "A is true. Whenever A is true then B is true. Therefore, B is true." Notice how both the conclusion and the second premise has a "B" in it. In order to prove anything about B, we need to already know something about B. Suppose we argue "Matt is a philosopher. All philosophers are bald. Therefore Matt is bald." To prove something about me we need to know something about me to begin with: that I am a philosopher. We see that there is a "B gap" just like the is/ought gap.

But we do not worry too much about the B gap. We do have ways to learn the first fact about B.[7]  We can use our senses to learn things. And we can know things about ourselves automatically. I do not need a syllogism to know when I am tired, for instance. I can just tell.

In the same way, we automatically know what we want and don’t want. I do not need any syllogisms to prove that I want to have friends. I know this is something I desire all of the time, and not a sudden urge that will soon be gone. Correct-ism tells us, then, that friendship is good. I just know it is. Since morals are defined by what we want in the long term, and we can consult our own minds to tell us what we want in the long term, we can know about morality by intuition. This fact is why sixth-sense-ism seemed to make sense. We feel like we can just sense when things are right or wrong, and in fact we can.

Of course, we may be mistaken about our moral views. In the same way, we may be mistaken in thinking we see a moving picture on a television. In fact, it is a series of still images. But how did we learn that TV is really still images? In the same way we can correct our moral views. We talk to others and share knowledge. By learning more and more, we can correct the mistakes our senses make. We can never know if we know the truth, but through learning we can get closer to it.

Sociobiology and Monkey Justice: Take Two

If you recall, sociobiologists say that people behave morally because it is a survival advantage to do so. So why should we behave a certain way just because we evolved to think that way?

Well, suppose an evil thief taught you that 1+1=2. You shouldn’t trust the thief, right? So 1+1 must not be 2, right? Wrong! 1+1 is 2, no matter who tells you. Whether a fact is true or not does not depend on how you learned about the fact.

So no matter how we came to believe that helping the poor is good, helping the poor is good. It is a fact. I may have been caused to believe this fact by some combination of evolution, schooling, talking with other people, or many other ways. But no story of how I came to value helping the poor is itself an argument against doing so.

The argument in Chapter 2 seems convincing because of a trick in the wording I chose. We can restate the argument like this: "Since evolution made you be an ethical creature, you do not need to be ethical." But what exactly does it mean to "not need to be ethical?" An ethical creature is one that makes decisions among different desires that vary in strength. So someone who agrees with the argument is deciding not to make decisions. But wait! In deciding not to make decisions, they have made a decision! They have broken their plan to be immoral before even beginning it.

How do we understand this paradox? Because the second "ethical" means something different than the first. We have again confused the what-is-ethical meaning of "good" with the doing-ethical one. The phrase "you do not need to be ethical" does seem to make sense, but it does not mean "you do not need to make decisions". It can mean "you do not need to give to charity and be nice to people and help end world hunger," and still make sense. It may turn out to be true (although I do not expect it) that is not good to give to charity, be nice, or end hunger. These are facts we can argue about. However, we do make decisions. We evolved to be able to make decisions. We cannot stop if we try, because by trying we have already made a decision!

So let us look at the argument again: "Since evolution made you be ethical, you do not need to be ethical." When this sentence makes sense to us, we are using the word "ethical" to mean two different things. We are making the same sort of confusion as we saw in the last chapter when discussing Question #2. The first time, we mean "a decision-maker." The second time we mean something else by "ethical": "giving and nice and generous." This second definition is a list of examples of how to be "good." But in this book we are not talking about examples of being good, but rather what "good" really means: the decision of a decision-maker. We can substitute these two definitions into the argument from Chapter 2 to see what I was really arguing for in that chapter: "Since evolution made you be a decision-maker, you do not need to be nice and kind and generous." This clearly is a silly argument.

So the truth is that evolution probably did create us to be nice to other people. But should we stop being nice just because we know how we came to be this way? No! No story about how I came to want to help people will ever change the fact that I do want to help people.

People as Machines: Take Two

In chapter 2 we worried about how people do not seem to have any free will. We seem to be machines that just do what we are built to do, without any ability to choose. Without the freedom to choose, why should it matter if I act right or wrong? Free will is an area of major philosophical discussion. I do not have room in this book to say as much as I would like about it. However, we will make a start, since correct-ism is so closely related.

I think one helpful way to think about people is that there is a view from the inside and a view from the outside. From the outside, we look at a person in the same way that we look at anything else in the world. A person has a body made of different parts, and acts according to certain rules. From the outside, people are complicated machines.

But I cannot look at myself from outside without missing something. I know that I have the same body parts as everyone else, and that my brain is processing information that controls my muscles. However, I can act. I can make decisions. I can choose to turn right or left. Try it! See? You do have the free will to do things.

Correct-ism fits very well with this picture of free will. From the outside, people have rules encoded in their brains that control their behavior. In a moral dilemma, they apply certain rules of behavior to judge other rules of behavior. People, like the robots, progress towards a goal by executing a program that can reprogram itself. On the inside, however, you and I have certain wants. I, for example, want some food right now. I know that I will be eating a big meal later, so I also want to hold off. I know that if I ate too much now, I would regret it later. I have to make a choice. The good thing to do is to recognize that my hunger is a short-lived motivation that comes and goes, and that I would regret eating anything now.

Somebody who didn’t believe in free will would not be able to make this good decision. Suppose Bob is deciding whether or not to cheat on a test: "Since all I can do is act how I’m programmed to act, I really can’t control what I do. I might as well cheat then." Bob is kidding himself. He has still made a choice – the choice to cheat. Although he thinks he does not have the power to make decisions, has just decided something! Bob-Right-Now knows that Bob-In-Five-Minutes will regret cheating, but instead Bob-Right-Now makes a bad decision to ignore this fact. If Bob decided to suppress his desire to cheat, he would be happier for knowing that he had nothing to regret.

A person’s inside and outside views are separate, but still related. For example, I can try as hard as I like to lift things with my mind, but I will never be able to. There is no physical way that my brain could affect an object without my touching it. However, how fast can I really run? I am certainly not able to run 100 miles per hour, since my body cannot physically move that fast. In the past I have fun as fast as 11 or 12 miles per hour. But "can" I run 15 miles per hour? If I try but fail, is that because my will was not strong enough, or because I was physically unable to? Whoa! Cool question, huh? But if I am otherwise healthy and I "can’t" run 8 miles per hour, then clearly I am not trying hard enough. If I decided to speed up, there is no physical reason why I would not be able to. In this last case, the "outside" view is not important; from the inside, I have made a weak choice.

So even though people look like machines from the outside, we cannot just say that we don’t make decisions. We obviously do, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just trying to come up with an excuse for bad choices. Since we do make decisions, we can make good or bad ones. A good choice is one that we will not regret later, and one that effectively get us the things that we want at a most basic level.

The Lazy Moralist

We have now tackled the three big problems with ethics that disturbed us back in chapter 2. However, some people might not yet be satisfied. Correct-ism is not simple and easy to understand. We will now look at a few ways that someone might argue against correct-ism in particular. To argue against correct-ism, I would like to introduce you to the Lazy Moralist, who tries to weasel his way out of being good.

Let us look at the Lazy Moralist’s first argument. When I "revealed the answer" in chapter 4, he was disappointed: "So morals aren’t anything real in the world. ’Good’ just means whatever I want. Why should I be a good person then? I can just decide not to want to share things, and then POOF! It becomes good to be greedy. It sure is a let down that happy-ism and sixth-sense-ism are wrong. I used to think that morals were real." Does correct-ism mean they are not? Do I really need to be good if ethics is just something in our heads?

Let me begin my rebuttal with another paradox. The Lazy Moralist is basically saying, "If morals are just our attitudes, then we shouldn’t have to follow them." But wait a second- the Lazy Moralist used the word "should" in that sentence. While arguing that we do not need to be good, he was also saying how we should be good. He is saying it is not good to be deluded into acting ethically because we do not really need to. So should we be ethical creatures or not? On the one hand he says no, but he also says yes! He has cut off the tree branch he was sitting on.

So what is going on in this paradox? I think there is confusion again about the two meanings of "good." When the Lazy Moralist says we do not need to be good, he is talking about helping the poor and being nice and sharing. But if we mean "good" as in "how to satisfy the wants that we usually have," this is something different. It is stupid not to be aware of the wants we usually have, because otherwise we will make decisions we regret. The Lazy Moralist is not saying that morality as a whole is silly, only the parts about helping people and being nice and sharing. He just wants to weasel out of some of his duties.

So let us look at the argument again, but this time substituting in each meaning of "good".

#1) If morals are just our attitudes, then we shouldn’t help the poor and be nice to people and share

This is silly! The first part of the sentence is about what-is-ethics, while the last part is about doing-ethics. If I want to argue against sharing, I would use other doing-ethical arguments like, "My giving to the poor would deprive them of the sense of accomplishment that comes from work." I do not necessarily agree with this particular idea, but at least it is the kind of argument that fits.

Now, let’s substitute in the second meaning of "good":

#2: If morals are just our attitudes, then we shouldn’t be aware of the motivations we usually have

Again, this idea is stupid because the two parts of the sentence have nothing to do with each other, and because it would have us make decisions we would regret.

The Lazy Moralist thinks he can jump outside of ethics and just stop making choices. But we cannot help but be moral. We are decision-making creatures, and we regret making decisions from sudden "bad" urges. Really, all the Lazy Moralist is doing is looking for an excuse to be selfish.

The Business of Living

"Well, I suppose," concedes the Lazy Moralist. "So thinking about ethics means checking your behavior rules against other behavior rules to make sure they all agree and that we are satisfying out basic motivations as much as possible. But why not just stop worrying about morality then? My desires determine what is good, and I certainly desire to never have to think about ethics. It takes too much time. I’ll be happy in my blissful ignorance, not being ‘the fastest robot.’"

Why should we care if our beliefs are more consistent with each other or not? Think of life as like running a business. We want food, shelter, companionship, etc., while the business has one goal of making money. Most of the time, the people in the business spend their time making a product. But some people in the company are there to look at how the company is run. They make sure everything is running efficiently, so that the company is making as much money as possible. How many people should the business have making the product, and how many should be checking for efficiency? Well, unless most of the people were making the product, the business would not do well at all. Just a bit of efficiency checking is important to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Now, think of "checking for efficiency" as thinking about morality, and "making the product" as everything else we do. The Lazy Moralist has a point. We do not want to spend all of our lives thinking about morality, any more than the company would want to set all of its employees checking for efficiency. We want just a bit of moral steering in our lives to keep us pointed in the right direction. Having some moral reflection is essential. Having a lot is rather silly, because it takes time away from all the basic human things that we want to do.

The Evils of Vanilla Ice Cream

We have beaten the Lazy Moralist once more, but he is not yet down for the count. He has one more argument against correct-ism up his sleeve: "So being moral means thinking about the future and not acting out of sudden desires," he begins. "But it’s so much more fun to be spontaneous and ‘bad’! Being a very good person means acting the same all the time, always thinking about what you want on the average instead of right now – what fun is that? I’d much rather have variety and surprise in my life."

Just as with his last objection, I think the Lazy Moralist has taken a good point too far. Having variety in life is great, but that certainly does not mean that we should not work for some consistency. Right now, I feel like vanilla ice cream, but tomorrow I might prefer strawberry. Even though I know that I will prefer strawberry later, there is no problem with having vanilla now. I won’t care tomorrow which kind of ice cream I ate today. My choice now doesn’t affect anything in my future. We have every right to make this kind of choice spontaneously.

But if I lose my temper and want to punch somebody, should I just do it because I feel like it now? Of course not! I would regret it as soon as I cooled off enough to think about what I had done. Punching somebody will probably get me in trouble, or ruin any chance of having a pleasant relationship with the victim. Matt-right-now can screw up Matt-from-now-on’s life. In a case such as this one, it is dumb not to consider the consequences and consider how you will think when your passing desire calms down.

So the Lazy Moralist is right in that variety is important, and that we can listen to our changing preferences when the consequences will not haunt us in the future. But when they do, it is smart to think about what we really want.

[7] I am actually making things seem simpler than they really are. How do I know I can trust my eyes? Can I trust my own feelings about what I like, or could my own mind deceive me? There is a whole division of philosophy, called "epistemology", that is devoted to how we come to know things.

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