Ethics

Skepticism in Ethics

In the previous chapters, we presented skeptical epistemology. In this chapter, we present skeptical ethics.

We follow the same approach adopted in the previous chapters.

Philosophers concerned with ethics have traditionally studied the following questions:

ι. What renders a moral judgment valid moral knowledge - namely, certain or at least plausible?

2. What should we do to acquire new valid moral judgments?

We endorse the skeptical answers to these questions, which are as follows:

ι. No moral judgment is certain or plausible; there is no moral knowledge; no moral judgment can be fully justified. (Again, conditional justifications are available, but they beg the ques­tion of validity of the outcome.)

2. No method can fully guarantee the validity of any moral judg­ment. (Again, conditional guarantees are available, and most of them are poor.)

Skepticism was always unpopular - in epistemology and ethics alike.

The arguments against skepticism in ethics run parallel to those against skepticism in epistemology that we reviewed in previous chap­ters.

1. There are no moral rules; nihilism is true and valid.

2. Rational settlement of moral disagreements is impossible.

3. Punishment is immoral.

We now consider these assertions and show that they are not corol­laries of skepticism, thereby diffusing traditional objections.

Two semantic remarks: First, convention suggests that “ethics” and “morals” (or “morality”) be distinguished, ethics being the criteria for the morals that are rules for morality - namely, proper conduct. This distinction is not always rigorously maintained. We do not make much use of it. In particular, when discussing criteria for proper conduct rather than proper conduct itself, we say so explicitly. Second, conven­tion suggests that we may speak of the truth of statements only if they constitute descriptions, notjudgments (e.g., rules, prescriptions, rec­ommendations, and evaluations). Instead of speaking of judgments as true or untrue, philosophers usually prefer to speak of them as valid or invalid, as the case may be. Yet, here we face an ambiguity to which as skeptics we are rather sensitive: the claim that a descriptive statement is valid is often taken as the claim that it is justified. Now, although we say that descriptions are never justifiable, we nevertheless think that they are sometimes true; in parallel to this, although we say that prescriptions are never justifiable, we do think that they are some­times true or proper or right - valid in the sense also often received within current philosophy. So we choose to be strict here and speak of the truth or falsity of descriptions and of rightness and wrongness of prescriptions.

We return to the objections to moral skepticism.

ι. No moral judgment is certain or plausible.

Nevertheless,

2. Some moral judgments are right, valid, correct, happy, and so forth.

To see that an uncertain moral judgment can be right, consider genuine moral disagreement among serious reasonable individuals,^{[45] [46]} such as one concerning lying to prevent murder or stealing food to feed the hungry. In such cases, the disagreement may be rational. Therefore, each of the conflicting possible judgments is reasonable and uncertain; yet, because the dissenting parties reject each other’s view, they cannot both be right.

The second of these objections to skepticism in ethics rests on the view that it blocks all rational resolutions of moral disagreements or disputes. The skeptical answer to this is the same as the answer to the parallel objection in epistemology: the objection rests on the assumption that moral judgments are freely chosen.^[47] They are not. Our moral judgments are given; they are the result of psychological processes. This raises the question: What are these psychological pro­cesses and how much can they be influenced by rational means? We address this question shortly.

The third objection to skepticism is that it leads to the absurd conclusion that all punishment is - if not immoral - then amoral.

We have no wish to justify ethics or morality because we find it always better to improve than to justify. And, indeed, the main bur­den of any system of ethics that is worth the effort is to render moral improvements possible and even to facilitate such improvements, pro­pose the outline of some new improvements, and pave the way to their implementation.

Toward a Psychological Theory OfMoralJudgments

One of the main objections to skepticism in ethics that we have encountered rests on the view that it blocks the rational resolution of moral disputes. The skeptical answer to this, we say, is parallel to the parallel objection in epistemology: it rests on the false assumption that moral judgments are chosen although they result largely from some given psychological factors.

This is an ontological question that few psychologists and no philosophers have studied. Philosophers are concerned with the justi­fication of moral judgments; traditionally, they came up with only two options: the ethics of intentions and the ethics of consequences. It is clear that, as the famous saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Nevertheless, consequences are seldom due to mere deliberation, moral or otherwise. As we noted previously, conduct is questioned if it has led to disasters despite the good intentions that presumably stand behind it and usually while questioning the degree of responsibility of the actors who are officially responsible. We take note at this juncture that ethics should concern itself less with moral motives and more with moral inhibition: it was the loss of moral inhi­bition that led to the worst disasters in human history in the twentieth century. And, because the concern of traditional studies of ethics is concerned with justification, the studies are understandably lacking. We take it that here skepticism can make an important contribution by merely drawing the attention of students of ethics and morality to this serious lacuna in their studies (even if they reject our diagnosis of it as rooted in the desire to justify).

Developmental psychologists, especially Piaget and Kohlberg, stud­ied this question ontogenetically (i.e., relating to the growth of a child) without discussing it phylogenetically (i.e., relating to the growth of the species): they reported that the morality of children develops in stages.

As Freud’s theories are no longer upheld even by the psychoanalytic association we need not criticize it; yet we should remember what his aim was. He intended his theory to explain moral development onto- genetically and phylogenetically alike. To resolve the oedipal conflict, he said, children identify with their fathers and thereby adopt their moral norms. The very existence of conflict, he rightly observed, is the source of all morality. (In the absence thereof, we may act sponta­neously with no need for moral considerations.) Yet, his view that all initial conflicts are the same is false. Taken as empirical, it does not hold for societies with family structures that Freud could not envis­age (Bronislaw Malinowski); otherwise, it is inborn and not due to experience (Jacques Lacan).

Students of evolution deal with a different aspect of the question: they ignore the origins of any mode of conduct and the question of whether they are right or wrong because they wish to explain the sur­vival of any mode of conduct (of humans as well as lower animals) that has survived as its positive contribution to the survival of that species once it appeared and won popularity. This is explaining the survival of a mode of conduct as preferred by natural selection. As ethological studies (i.e., studies of animal behavior, especially as it occurs in natural environments) turn to morality, then, they become searches for Darwinian models that explain how certain given moral norms have survived by being reinforced by natural selection. Pre­sumably, the models present given norms as having survived because the societies that sustain them survive and the ability of these soci­eties to survive as due (at least, in part) to the contribution of these norms. This last assumption is highly questionable: traits that impede prospects of survival are known to have survived because, evidently, they do not impede them too much. Thus, many received codes also are clearly immoral and harmful but not to destruction. Perhaps some tribes have venerated tigers, as the Hindus venerate cows, but were devoured by tigers. We do not know, but we do know that some societies are extinct despite their high morals and some survive despite their faith in certain atrocities.

Our interest here is in a different aspect of the matter. We wish to explain neither the origins of moral codes nor their survival, much less their survival value - namely, their contributions to the survival of the species or groups that practice them. Rather, we seek the psychological processes that accompany extant moral judgments, be they right or wrong - the psychological processes that to some measure are possibly responsible for these judgments: Under what conditions do people endorse a given moral judgment?^{style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua",serif;color:black'>[50]}

As our tentative answer to this question, we suggest the following general psychological theory:

ι. People tend to sympathize with the suffering of others and to consider immoral any act that increases suffering (Hume’s prin­ciple).

Such acts may be necessary; they are well known as necessary evils. Now, committing a necessary evil may be excusable, and even imper­ative, but it still is evil, which is our point.

2. People are normally ready to consider (as best they can) which rules they might legislate if they were rulers of the world aiming at maximization of the welfare of humanity as a whole.

This second assumption is hypothetical. One might think that it is therefore not amenable to any empirical considerations. We hope that it is because it refers to people’s dispositions, which - as many researches have illustrated - may at times be easily open to empirical investigations.^[51]

Maximizing the Welfare of Humanity

What is the proper way to measure the welfare of humanity as a whole? This is a difficult question with which many students of ethics have dealt, as well as many economists, sociologists, and politicologists. It is too difficult; therefore, we can seek out easier versions thereof or strive to break down the question into smaller questions. Consider, then, the partial question for a given specific move: Can we judge whether it will increase or decrease the welfare of humanity as a whole? This question is easier but still too difficult. We may assume that we can judge with ease whether any given move will increase or decrease the welfare of any single individual. (This is questionable, too, but we will let this ride.) We may then ignore as unproblematic also the cases in which the welfare of one individual increases with no decrease of the wel­fare of any other individual, or vice versa, and concentrate instead on conflict situations, in which one event increases the welfare of one individual and decreases the welfare of another. Is there a rule that would determine for us which of these cases is morally commend­able and which is morally reprehensible? Unfortunately, researchers are stuck even with this very preliminary question; they cannot even release the unproblematic cases because they seekjustifiable rules that explain their unproblematic character. This may be reasonable, but then they also want the rules to do so with finality. Researchers nat­urally have to cover normal situations of this sort first: unreasonable assumptions lead them to futile search.

Some cases of conflict are unproblematic. Normally, we all deem theft clearly reprehensible and charity clearly commendable. This is not enough of a guide in such matters, however, because there are exceptions to this judgment; anyway, as long as we cannot explain it, we should not relax our search. As for exceptions, common sense tells us that it is right to take just a little money from the very rich to save a child starving under our eyes. Most researchers seek rules of this kind that are comprehensive. This drives them to the search for the ultimate rule that provides sound criteria for deciding how far the welfare state can and should go in this direction and what would be going too far; they want the rule to do all this and more, and with finality. We see here, incidentally, how close the search for finality is to the hope to do away with all debates, including rational debates and democratic parliamentary debates - and, thus, with democracy as such.^[52] In what follows, we present different conflict situations that, we argue, are easy to judge as better eliminated. But these pertain to legislation, whereas the literature we have thus far discussed altogether ignores legislation. For this, we have to say a word on the welfare state because on this, paradoxically perhaps, the literature proliferates.

We consider it obvious that with all the possible merit of consider­ations of welfare and the welfare state, as long as they do not seem clearly relevant to the psychological theory that we advocate here, we should postpone comments as long as possible. For the time being, we speak of one possible way to improve human welfare and in the abstract rather than in diverse concrete cases. We return to this point and endeavor to cover wider considerations later.

A semantic note: We use the word welfare rather than the word utility. Although the latter is more frequent in the studies of ethics and welfare economics, we find it too technical and pretentious, as can be seen from the inadequacy of its translations into some foreign languages. We use welfare in its common, rather vague, sense because this serves us well enough in this initial stage of discussion (without objection to replacement of the vague concept with the precise one used in the economic literature, even though we think that there are other, more adequate ways to render it precise).

Let us then discuss the patterns of rules that, according to our tentative psychological theory, people are willing to legislate as means for the maximization of the welfare of humanity.

The minimal requirement is that such legislation should aim at the prevention of situations in which a rational selfish action lowers the welfare of humanity.

Some situations are usually presented by way of the example or set of examples known as “the prisoners’ dilemma,” and we make do with discussing those. The example is the outcome of the following observa­tions. Everyone knows how to make decisions when they affect no one but oneself. (This is not true or else psychotherapy would be unnec­essary, but because it is a prevalent supposition, let us allow it here.) It is also easy to make decisions in concert because this is the heart of the democratic process. (This is also not true or else we would have no crises in democracies and no tyrannies, but let us allow this here too.) What remains is the case of two individuals whose decisions affect each other but who cannot act in concert. For our discussion, let us make them two criminals in different cells so that they cannot com­municate. (They are ordinary citizens in ordinary situations, really; we allow this story because it is standard and it is a mere flourish anyway.) We want their interests to be in concert. Let us assume that there is questionable evidence against them; therefore, it is in their common interest to be faithful to each other and keep their mouth shut. The story then must have a happy ending. So let us bring in the authorities to alter the situation in the hope of making each betray the other by making the possible outcome of their conduct depend on their surmise of each other’s conduct. The authorities make rules, then, as follows. (The rules, as is the whole story, are idealizations of common circumstances: they render a vague situation more distinct.) If one prisoner keeps silent and the other becomes a state witness, the silent partner is severely punished and the state witness walks. If both talk, then they may expect a somewhat reduced sentence. If both are silent, however, they both suffer light punishment. Assuming (as usual in the literature in question) that both act rationally in accord with their self-interest, then it is obvious that if they trust and care for each other, they should both keep silent. Many dramas rest on the tension that the demand for trust raises. In these dramas, the prisoners elicit our sympathy, so they are seldom criminals - they are often made into spies or captive soldiers. The tension increases as the captors test the mutual trust by raising stakes. One prisoner may suggest intent to betray, yet the other must know that this is deception and that trust must prevail. When trust does prevail, the result is that, in the end, they both walk out of a tight trap with a slight punishment at most. Other dramas rest on trust and betrayal, showing that trust was mis­placed. The present deliberation is not concerned with the rights and wrongs of trust or distrust; we take these as given. So, we conclude, with not much trust or caring between the two prisoners, that both should decide to talk because this decision will make each better off independent of the other’s decision.

The prisoners’ dilemma, to repeat, is an exaggerated distinct model for real-world moral conflicts with interdependent decisions, as the following considerations illustrate. Consider a world with no punitive measures and no conscience. Consider theft on the (realistic) suppo­sition that stolen goods depreciate in value. For every individual taken separately, then, theft is advantageous, yet for the public, it is not. Hence, this is a version of the prisoners’-dilemma situation. Thus, it is reasonable to legislate for effective severe punitive measures and instill strict moral consciousness so as to render theft scarce. This is an exam­ple of the theory we tentatively advocate here as the psychological root of morality.

To generalize this and bring it closer to reality, let us take for granted that, to some extent, we are all both rational and selfish. A legislator who wishes to take care of the welfare of humanity at large should therefore try to prevent situations that give rise to prisoners’- dilemma situations - as much as is reasonably possible, of course. The best known means to this end are punishment, social pressures, indoctrination, and education^[53] because we wish to reduce the attrac­tion of whatever one can achieve by the means of selfish conduct in prisoners’-dilemma situations in a manner that we deem injurious to human welfare in general. And it is realistic to suppose that punish­ment, the sense of shame, a guilty conscience, and humiliation - or, alternatively, moral autonomy - are the means for achieving this goal. In other words, we should make prisoners’ conditions such that the option of mutual betrayal would be reasonably unattractive.

Almost all countries legislate and implement such measures. Why, then, is theft not very rare? Why are so many of us thieves? These are difficult questions because we do not know how to assess the tolerable level of theft. The standard view is that when theft is so prevalent that it begins to threaten the economy or the legal system, then people in charge of the situation - legislators, bureaucrats, or educators - make some effort to reduce the level of theft. For example, self-service stores depend on a low level of shoplifting: when it exceeds a given level, it renders self-service stores less economical than those with attendants. In some countries, stores tolerate shoplifting; in other countries, they cannot afford to: the people in charge of self-service stores must seek new means to curb shoplifting (e.g., the employment of detectives or conspicuous surveillance cameras) as long as it is cheaper than the employment of store attendants and security guards.

This consideration is fairly simple. Different cases of theft are much more problematic, for example, than those related to drug abuse (and most petty thefts in the modern world are). So let us ask instead: How many decide to be professional thieves, and what is the level of incidental theft? And what determines these two kinds of socially harmful activity?

Obviously, existing penalties are insufficient deterrents: thieves dis­miss the common views about the risk of penalty. They care little about the social stigma of shame or guilt, do not mind overmuch the hardship of short periods in jail, and consider the risk of punitive measures a fair bet. Theft undertaken by ordinary citizens is less fre­quent because the penalty they may suffer is higher because they shun stigma; the risk they undertake is thus considerably higher, particularly because they are inexpert and the risk includes the loss of a job. (This is well illustrated in the familiar process in which the state machinery turns young offenders into hardened criminals.)

This leads to a practical suggestion.href="#_ftn54" name="_ftnref54" title="">^[54] Rather than increase pun­ishment, it is better to make use of the very difference between the social environments of criminals and law-abiding citizens. Obviously, in their own subsocieties or social environments, criminals are not deviants. Assume that criminals live in subcommunities that do not respect the law, so that they meet no social pressure to behave morally. Assume also that they can receive help to join some more law-abiding subcommunities. We can then reduce crime levels by helping enough members of the two subcommunities to change places. (This is the abolition of ghettos.) This is not news, so the question is: Why do we not use this technique more often? The answer is more complex, but at least it explains why more educated societies employ softer means of law enforcement with better results than less educated societies, where laws are stiff and ineffective. It is not only that the law-abiding societies can afford less forceful measures; it is also that the gentler measures are so often far more effective. This is especially true regard­ing drug abuse because, clearly, it is already quite adverse in conse­quence without threatened legal penalties. Instead, all such vice has social roots that we should study and alter accordingly. Increasing the level of punitive measures (and its certain failure) may paradoxically bring about this improvement in public attitudes toward recreational narcotics.

To reiterate, the selfish conduct in prisoners’-dilemma situations is that of betrayal of partners, and legislation should help render such betrayal unpalatable. However, this is not always the case. When only a few individuals in a given society are involved in a prisoners’- dilemma situation, betrayal might be highly commendable and legis­lation should encourage it. The paradigm case here is whistle-blowing. Peers view the whistle-blower as a traitor; only the upholding of broader standards than those shared by peers help one to decide to blow the whistle. This, in turn, explains why so much stress on loyalty is prevalent in all criminal subcommunities. This is but one case of unde­sirable cooperation. A more sophisticated case is monopoly designed to curb competition among entrepreneurs. In that case, too, betrayal is right. Becausejoining a monopoly is obviously wrong, having joined it is no moral objection to betraying it. The rule is this: legislation should preclude those cases of prisoners’-dilemma situations where the partners are all members of a given society. Specifically, legisla­tion should preclude theft and similar crimes, in which everybody can deviate to the detriment of the whole society. For, by our tentative hypothesis, legislation should render that conduct unpalatable that reduces public welfare. As long as the individuals involved compose only a small portion of society, constraining their options may benefit everyone else. These two examples, whistle-blowing and monopoly, are extreme cases so they are easy to handle. Other cases may be more complex and, hence, too problematic for us to consider. Sometimes they serve as material for semifictional stories of the crime world, which are popular because they avoid polarization and show that most of us are neither saints nor sinners. This is very commendable but only up to a point, the point being the blurring of the difference between those who are more on the side of the saints and those of the sinners. When popular taste finds ever greater appeal in such moral ambiguity, wise legislators should institute a study of the situation.

It is surprising how many norms that we generally recognize as suf­ficiently simple to be incontestably morally commendable are often easily explicable as cases in which the norm makes betrayal too unpalat­able. One example is the public response to theft on the beach: it is seen as a disturbing betrayal of trust and invites violent response from passersby. The willingness of the London police to be unarmed is another example: when it works, it does so because London crimi­nals have a negative attitude toward cop-killers: they consider them traitors.

These cases are unusual. Most other cases are regulated by the law. This, in turn, is explicable due to legislation aimed at making betrayal in prisoners’-dilemma situations too unpalatable. This is so, even though the analysis of such situations is new and legislators are still not familiar with it. To this more common category of reasonably efficient crime prevention through legislation belongs the popular hostility to many crimes, such as deceit, theft, and murder - and, at times, even wars between countries under normal situations. More­over, the permissibility of many situations is likewise explicable as not being at the risk of creating prisoner’s-dilemma situations too often, or at least not as a matter of course. Notice that by its very nature, a prisoners’-dilemma situation has to be fairly obvious to those whom it involves. Thus, when the public becomes aware of the prevalence of such situations, pressure on legislators mounts to render them less common or else the public ceases to view them as criminal. This holds for traffic violations and for drug abuse - and even to drug abuse while driving. This is a very difficult situation because it is hard to restore trust. This difficulty, needless to say, is the prisoner’s-dilemma situation as initially described herein.

Liberalism as the Default Option

Legislation should suffice as a means to exclude most prisoners’- dilemma situations. This thesis is not the commonly received view of the matter. We do not know if it is true, but we consider it the default option, to deviate from it only when legislation fails. The more popular thesis is that positive rules that increase human welfare are superior to the mere removal of obstacles - that in addition to rules that prevent conduct that obviously reduces human welfare, we also need rules that encourage the increase of human welfare. This thesis is usually asserted on general grounds, and supportive cases are not hard to find. Thus, we know that it is not enough to claim, as Marx­ists do, that the abolition of private property suffices as a means to increase human welfare. The rule that Marxists support is irrelevant to the prisoners’ dilemma, however, and we reject it without fear of inconsistency. At least as the default option, we prefer negative leg­islation, leaving the positive to individual initiative. This comes close to the views of classical liberal political philosophers and to the clas­sical economists, including the neoclassical (i.e., Chicago) school of economics - which is not limited to economics at all because it is political - yet without the dogma that a free-market economy is the best solution to all problems. That school has no criterion for legisla­tion even though, like its predecessors, it demanded some legislation to protect the freedom of the market. This has led to quite a few problems. Consider this one: Is there a need for legislating truth in advertising? The view of the neoclassical school was negative: the mar­ket, it said, would impose truthfulness on advertisers more efficiently than the law, and it would require no additional law enforcement agency and no bureaucracy to run it. But there is the need, it agreed, to enforce contracts. Why does the neoclassical school of thought demand laws against dishonest commitment but not against dishon­est advertisement? It has no satisfactory answer to this question. We have argued that we do need such laws on the supposition to make betrayal too unpalatable to allow criminals to disrupt the system. An example would be the need to prevent fly-by-night deception but not deception by a trader who has invested a big sum in entry to the local market. (This observation is commonsensical even though it looks morally cowardly, thus dividing the local population between the young and the experienced. It is in accord with trivial arguments from games theory, which should make the young stop and rethink.) The question, then, is: How effective is competition as a means for the prevention of harmful advertising? Because viewing the situation as a prisoners’-dilemma situation, we see that laws imposing truth in adver­tising may help maintain the effectiveness of competition. Our view thus rests on a hopefully testable tentative hypothesis. It helps differ­entiate between advertisements that require control and those that do not; if the differentiation is erroneous, then our tentative hypothesis can be modified.

To summarize, the dispute over the proper range of legislation required to maximize human welfare thus overlaps with the gen­eral dispute concerning liberalism. Advocates of classical liberalism go too far even by their own definition. Classical as well as neoclassical economists propose to limit legislation to the necessary protection of the market, but they have no criterion for this necessity and they cannot link it to the liberal demand (i.e., Spinoza, Hume, and Smith) that the law should render rational self-interest sufficient incentive for abiding by the law. Our tentative hypothesis leads us to prefer to limit legislation whenever possible and suggest that the aim of legislation should be to render unpalatable betrayal in prisoners'-dilemma situa­tions. Non-liberals would add other rules. We prefer adding classical liberalism, but we consider it our default option: we propose addi­tional rules that alter the interests of people who find themselves in a prisoners'-dilemma situation to make them less eager to betray their partners unless the betrayal is obviously in the public interest.

The prisoners’ dilemma entered the literature in 1950 as part of game theory, as part of a search for counter-examples to the theory (of Adam Smith) that (in a free-market economy) private and public interests coincide, the theory that is the foundation of neoclassical ide­ology. Since then, the prisoner's dilemma has engaged not only game theorists but also psychologists, biologists, and later, also economists (who should first have renounced their unqualified faith in the neo­classical version of economic theory). This increased interest is due to a simple discovery: if two people play the game more than once, they tend to cooperate many times. Moreover, strategies for playing the game served software programs and enabled tournaments of games among programmers. The results were surprising. In one of the first tournaments, Anatol Rapoport’s program won first place. His pro­gram obeyed the following strategy: start by choosing the cooperative option (i.e., do not betray) and then repeat your opponent’s choice (i.e., betray in response to betrayal only). Later, a more sophisticated program won first place. Its Strategywas to select in response to betrayal the cooperative option randomly in about one-third of the cases. A still different winning program was the recommendation to players to repeat their last move if and only if it was successful.

The winning programs were robustly cooperative, which is a hint at a very optimistic morality.¹¹ Does it suggest that rational selfish human beings should always select cooperative options? We do not think so. None of the winning programs was sufficiently cooperative; in this sense, they all disprove the idea that rational selfish considerations suffice for making us cooperative (not to say moral). Alas, private and public interests do not harmonize all by themselves; nor is sympathy sufficient as a regulator. Legislation is required to help make the mar­ket mechanism work. And, as all sorts of liberal political philosophers and neoclassical economists rightly keep reminding us, legislation can be messy and, at best, it is quite imperfect.

Utilitarian versus Kantian Ethics

The literature that centers on the analysis of prisoners’-dilemma situ­ations comes to serve both the ethics of intentions, because its intent is to base the proscription of crime on selfish motives, and the ethics of consequences, because it explains the immorality of immoral con­duct as criminal conduct and the criminality of criminal conduct by the inability of society to function without adopting general rules that proscribe them, which are usually taken to be punitive. Yet, the pur­pose of this prolonged discussion is also to examine the validity of the hybrid system of the two classical systems of ethics. We observe the frequency of the prisoners’-dilemma situations and those akin to it, the frequency of situations in which selfish conduct pays the cost of harm to the public interest at the cost of causing instability. This obser­vation tests, and does refute, the idea that moral conduct is reducible to selfish rational conduct. Inasmuch as the classical moral theories, utilitarianism and Kantianism,^{[55] [56]} imply that ethics is rational, we find here as much of a refutation of them as possible. But perhaps this is redundant: being that it is, indeed, common knowledge that all too often crime does pay and that, to a certain limit, society tolerates it and still functions well enough to be stable. This is why the young who are sensitive to justice hate the worship of stability that they find so common among their elders. So, we think our version of liberal philosophy is a possible tool for bridging the generation gap.¹³ But we discuss the applicability of our views later.

It is amusing that philosophers should observe that sometimes crime does not pay and sometimes honesty is the best policy even in terms of selfishness. Yet we should observe this because the two traditional systems of ethics - the Kantian ethics of intentions and the utilitarian ethics of consequences - both declare the rules of ethics absolute.¹⁴ (Remember, Kant forbade lying even in order to save a life!¹⁵ Jeremy Bentham was more commonsensical in his judgments, but not too much so.¹⁶) They are both at odds with the apparent truth from repeatable observation that the advantage due to trust or betrayal depends on their frequency. This already well-supported hypothesis,

Kant’s justification of laws and law enforcement fails. (All demand for justification suffers from this kind of fault.)

¹³        The first philosopher to have spoken against the view of social stability as a supreme desideratum was Karl Popper. Because stability depends on social and political con­trols, he observed, these come first, especially when democratically maintained. The classical view of controls, especially checks and balances, comes as ancillary. He viewed them as central conditions for democracy. It is now mainstream. Unfortu­nately, he declared himself Kantian, even though the mode of Kant’s proof that any unacceptable act is immoral concerns stability, not survival. Thus, because he denounced lies as not universally admissible, he disallowed exceptions as threats to stability. Concern for survival instead of stability allows for them and renders ethics flexible and commonsensical.

¹⁴        The rigidity of Kant’s decrees makes them obsessive and seemingly very logical. There is no rule as to when an imperative is categorical or conditional. These terms belong to formal logic, but their use here with no criterion is not. Why is it better to forbid lies than to forbid them except to save a life? The categorical value of life shows Kant’s view inconsistent or, at least, undetermined in principle.

¹⁵        The austere, hyper-systematic character of Kant’s writings makes them seem logical. His realization that compulsory education is illiberal and his determination to impose discipline on children made him declare them subhuman. (Do they become human as they leave school?) He said that their lack of discipline makes ethics inapplicable to them. This makes many adults subhuman too; this he did not notice.

¹⁶        Bentham had a major contribution that is famous and that counts most both morally and politically. It is his demand thatjails should be institutions for re-education. Yet, his panopticon is a design for a jail in which every prisoner is always watched. obvious as it is, underwent tests by computer simulations (mentioned at the end of the previous section). The tests agree with common wisdom. The tests may be not sufficiently severe, and researchers may seek more severe tests. For our part, we have no need for them because we have no intention to advocate these ethical systems. Rather, we wish to improve them.

Utilitarianism is the theory (of Hume) that individuals (ι) do act in their own self-interest as best they know how, (2) know best that interest, and (3) are to be trusted best to take care of it. The last component of this theory is not as psychological as it seems because it belongs to liberal political theory. Moreover, one of the tacit assump­tions of utilitarianism is the idea that competition benefits all on the mere condition that participants conduct it in a civilized manner. This tacit assumption is the core of the prevalent enthusiasm for the neo­classical (i.e., Chicago) economic theory. We argue that if and to the extent that we all understand this tacit assumption in one and the same way, and if and to the extent that this tacit assumption holds one way or another to this or that extent, then it does deserve the enthusiasm it evokes. Nevertheless, we say, even then, civilized conduct cannot hold down the fort all by itself, so we have to try to extend the domain of its applicability by wise liberal legislation and by the addition of whatever is necessary for robust stability. This is a core message of the current chapter; it is nothing new - Popper spelled it out in much detail,^[57] and staunch adherents to the neoclassical version of economic theory admit it, no matter how reluctantly. Their debate with the Keynesians is not about the need for government intervention but rather about its best form - namely, the one that is the necessary minimum. The former say that minimal monetary interventions should do; the latter say that at times the intervention should be fiscal (i.e., government spending money for some kind of public benefit when the market is too sluggish) and generous (even to the point of wasting public funds on projects that are a luxury). This issue is beyond the scope of the present study especially because, in practical terms, new techniques of intervention were invented (by members of both schools) that initially neither party envisaged.^[58]

Let us move, then, to the first two components of utilitarianism, the assumptions that individuals (1lang=EN-US>) act in their self-interest as best they know how, and (2) know best what their best self-interest is. That these assumptions are empirically amply refuted scarcely needs mention. Philosophers of the utilitarian persuasion, therefore, qualify their view when they are under pressure and say that it holds only for enlightened rational individuals. Even then they are in trouble because they do not mean to dismiss self-sacrifice as irrational.^[59] Let us ignore this as exceptional. We may limit the utilitarian theory to normal cases, whatever these are; let us agree that individuals are enlightened and rational if and to the extent that they know (1) what their best interest is, and (2) what best advances it. Let us further agree that they (3) act on this knowledge as is best possible. With these qualifications, it is easy to endorse the utilitarian theory because in this version, the theory is vacuously true. (It still may be useful on the empirically testable assumption that small deviations from the conditions of the ideal lead to small deviations of its consequences. Alas, this too is hardly ever tested and, we suspect, because it is hardly ever the case.)

Alternatively, we may read utilitarianism as the recommendation to acquire knowledge and use it in selfish action. This renders the theory much more agreeable, yet we will not share it unless we find that it does not force the private and public interests to be in so much conflict as to threaten the smooth running of society. It is a consistently repeatable observation that our moral sentiment moves us to act unselfishly, espe­cially in cases of such conflict. (Thus, although self-sacrifice is fairly rare, sacrifice is not.) Utilitarian philosophers repeatedly assert that people follow that sentiment because it is in their best self-interest to do so. These philosophers overlook the conflicts between the moral sentiment and selfish impulses proper. This too is not news: we know that selfish and generous people behave differently in difficult times. Advocates of utilitarianism hope that there will be enough generous people to counter-balance the misers. We do wish this to be true, but we observe that it is not always true and that it seldom comes nat­urally, as the utilitarian philosophy supposes. Here, we see that the more advanced a society is, or the more civilized and well off it is, the more it fits utilitarianism - and vice versa. This, however, makes utilitarianism not too far from the truth only when limited to soci­eties that have reached a high stage of civility and comfort. This raises the question: How should we bring any undeveloped society to this stage? This criticism is not new either. Kant voiced it when he spoke of bringing society to that state in the long and arduous process of “the education of humanity.” In the meantime, he said, people have to behave morally even if it does not seem to them to be in their own best self-interest.

And so we move to Kantianism, where we hit a snag: If Kantian ethics is only needed because we are uneducated, then what is its sta­tus among the educated? The only answer that Kant’s ethics permits is that, among the educated, the ethics of intentions and of conse­quences coincide. This is possible, of course, but only if all people possess the truth about every question that pertains to the conduct of their daily affairs. Kant’s argument for this strong claim was that every morally acceptable rule is capable of presentation as a universal law. Why? We propose that the rationale for this is that a rule is accept­able if its adoption has a stabilizing effect on any egalitarian society, whereas its rejection will be destructive. Can self-interest not destroy society? Not if the conduct it leads to is confined to the civilized and those endowed with sympathy. For this, humanity has to be educated, Kant observed: he admitted that utilitarianism has an edge over his view because it is the better option for the educated. He said that the basis of morality is goodwill and declared that this sentiment leads to the categorical imperative, to the imperative that holds under all conditions. Whether this is so depends on what he saw as categorical. It is thus no accident that he was unclear about which rule is con­ditional and which is categorical: this difference much depends on wording, and the preferred wording should be the one that ensures that goodwill can serve as a sufficient basis for all morality in all soci­eties. (Hence, to know how to word it, we should know what we want it to allow and to forbid. Therefore, the categorical imperative offers no guidance and is quite useless except as ajustification for whatever we already want to justify. Alas, however, the preceding seems to most philosophers as no criticism at all.)

How does goodwill lead to the endorsement of the categorical imperative? Any answer to this question must be psychological, and the simplest psychological theory is that we sympathize with sufferings and we seek ways to reduce it - which involves thinking, of course. We have already suggested a minimal mode of thinking that seems to us to answer this wish. Here, let us discuss sympathy; we argue that this is enough and that it is better to ignore the rest of Kant’s psychology. Because our view is psychological, we have to supplement it later with an ethics proper, but not with Kant’s ethics, being as it is far too simplistic and much too vague.

Sympathy

People tend to sympathize with the sufferings of others. This is a psychological tendency that almost all of us share to a degree. We deem defective those who lack this tendency, viewing their defect as psychopathology or sociopathology, and we consider them immoral or, preferably, amoral - unable to possess moral sentiment or judgment.

People sympathize not just with human beings but with animals as well. This tendency explains animal moral rights, which prove that both Kantianism and utilitarianism are limited because they ignore animal rights. One might think that this criticism is shaky because animal rights are in dispute. Not so: torturing animals for pleasure is indisputably immoral. This case is extreme, but it suffices to show the limitation of traditional application ofjustificationism to ethics. It also points to two other items: (1) people deem greater sensitivity to others to be better but not when it incapacitates, and the debate about animal rights often turns on the question: How incapacitating is the practice of vegetarianism?; and (2) that there is no hope to settle the question about what kind and degree of sympathy are advisable.

The disposition to sympathize has evolved slowly over eons. Con­sider a conspicuous example: until recently, most people allowed for slavery as a matter of course; significantly, this is no longer the case. We explain this as a result of the growth of our ability to sympathize: in the past, slave owners did not consider slaves to be human “like us”; they kept in check their ability to sympathize with slaves.

The theory is popular that the abolition of slavery could not occur as long as it significantly served the economy. This theory is full of holes. In the West, slavery survived legally well into the nineteenth century; in Saudi Arabia, until the late twentieth century, and it is still not extinct there. As to aspirations for the abolition of slavery, efforts in this direction appeared in Antiquity.^[60] Thus, sympathy has its own logic that is fairly independent of economic considerations. A more reasonable discussion should rest on a distinction between different forms of discrimination and exploitation and the recognition of the justice of anthropologists’ claim that slavery comes in a variety of guises.

This leads to another practical suggestion: efforts to raise the level of sympathy by the proper use of the media can and do occur. The ability to understand moral thinking (in contradistinction to the ability to obey orders or satisfy expectations of others) grows with the ability to put oneself in other people’s shoes - at an early age and throughout life.

Sympathywith others is varied. For example, in spectators’ sports and at public performances of pop music, fans and groupies express not only sympathy but also identification. Sympathy to the sufferings of others is often expressed as the readiness to make sacrifices to reduce them: few people are willing to relinquish all their assets to one such end; the only ones who may do so view the making of a sacrifice as a way to tackle all ills. Again, to some extent, people show sympathy to the suffering of other animals, mainly mammals, which even manifests in the reluctance to kill roaches even while doing so.

Moral Disputes

To reiterate, we suggest the following psychological theories:

ι. The sympathy principle: People tend to sympathize with the suf­fering of others and to consider immoral any act that increases it needlessly (Hume’s principle).

2.      The welfare principle: People are ready to consider which rules they would legislate if they were the rulers of the world aiming for maximizing human welfare.

This theory relates to the following differences in moral intuitions:

1.      Different parties have different intuitions in regard to sympa­thizing with the suffering of others.

2.      Different parties have different views as to what means are best for increasing human welfare.

3.      People’s intuitions regarding sympathy may conflict with their own intuition regarding the means for increasing welfare.

As an example for the first case, consider disputes about the moral­ity of abortion. Putting aside deliberate obfuscation, in many cases the difference in moral intuitions regarding abortion concerns reli­gious dogma; however, sympathy for fetuses may also play a role: some sympathize with fetuses, viewing them as people, and others do not, viewing them as essentially no different from the brain-dead.

The dispute about the propriety of sexual freedom is an example for the second case, in which the moral intuition in its favor dismisses the view that sexual freedom threatens the survival of human society.

Finally, the dispute about the morality of globalization is an example for the third case. Like all reforms, globalization also has its victims, and many people sympathize with their suffering. This sympathy is expressed in moral intuitions that result in opposition to globaliza­tion. A different moral intuition yields support for globalization; it usually stems from the endorsement of the neoclassical economic the­ory that presents free trade as a promise of rapid benefit to all. But the globalization struggle may follow an ideological false dilemma, a contradiction amenable to more creative engineering.

These examples all lead to suggestions of the following ways to pursue moral disputes. A dispute that results from a disagreement about sympathy should lead the disputing parties to attempts to find arguments showing that the object of the contested sympathy does or does not resemble humans like themselves. For example, when discussing the morality of abortion, they may try to find how similar fetuses and humans are; indeed, this is what they sometimes do.

A dispute that results from a disagreement about a theory concern­ing human welfare should bring the involved parties to attempts to test that theory scientifically. For example, they can test the theory that free sex risks human survival or even find that it is already empirically refuted. It can be rescued from this refutation, of course, and this might be beneficial too: its advocates should seek scenarios in which different kinds of sexual codes are beneficial or detrimental to soci­ety or individuals. The same goes for propaganda for Uncontroversial cases such as those of child abuse and child pornography, in which the scenarios are mostly one-sided. To be effective, all scenarios should be specific, detailed, and honest.

Finally, a dispute that results from the use of competing intuitions - for example, one based on the sympathy principle and the other on a theory concerning human welfare - should lead the disputing parties to attempts to present their intuitions to others in a comprehensive manner in the hope to reach some agreement and compromise.

More Against Reductionism in Ethics

The chief reason for the irreducibility of ethics to psychology or soci­ology is that, at most, a reduced ethics will explain the sense of duty, not duty itself. For example, A. J. Ayer said (Language, Truth and Logic, 1936) that the commandment not to steal is the expression of the revulsion against theft. This is a dual assumption: first, our sense of duty is an emotional reaction akin to some aesthetic responses; and second, there is no ethics (or aesthetics) independent of some indi­viduals’ feelings. We do not discuss the psychology of Ayer’s assertion because it is marginal to his discussion. Rather, we should discuss his reductionism, his assertion that there is no ethics as such, no duty apart from a sense of duty, and so forth. If this is so, then those who suffer from kleptomania are exempt from any moral duty regarding theft. This is false. Ayer might respond that the victim of kleptomania suffers from ambivalence. So we can take as an example the case of the psychopath or sociopath who suffers no inner conflict. We assume that ethics applies to them too. To follow Ayer’s argument, we should admit that our demands from the psychopath are on a footing with the psychopath’s own indifference to morality. We normally think oth­erwise.

Note that our psychological theory in ethics presents a sufficient rather than a necessary condition for the endorsement of ethical judgments. There are duties that our psychological (and sociologi­cal) explanation does not cover, especially the duty to take care of ourselves. In part, it is well known that this duty is reducible to the responsibility to others - namely, not to be a public nuisance. Yet, we think it is also a duty to oneself to be kind to oneself. Tradition overlooks this duty on the (false) psychological supposition that most people are too selfish, they take care of themselves to excess, so that we need not encourage their bad trait by discussing the duty to take care of oneself. Quite a few errors hide behind this supposition, but the most relevant here is that the abuse of a duty leaves it a duty all the same. Suppressing consideration of it renders our ethics lopsided. Moreover, there are individuals, no matter how rare, who suffer from the disposition to torment themselves to excess (i.e., self-flagellism). They do deserve to learn that their conduct is immoral, especially because they are all too often encouraged in behaving cruelly toward themselves. Of course, self-flagellism is partly reducible to duties to others because it usually goes with some type of immoral conduct (e.g., xenophobia, self-righteousness). It is a general psychological observation that kindness to oneself goes well with kindness to oth­ers. Yet, we suggest that kindness to oneself is coupled with a sense of gratitude for our life and that this is morally commendable on its own.

Another no less important duty that is not discussed here and is neither reducible to psychology nor discussed sufficiently by psychol­ogists is the duty to be critically minded. We do not elaborate on this; suffice it to say that we preach the autonomy of the individual as a supreme value, and that covers the duty to be responsible and thus the duty to be critically minded.