Alonzo Fyfe

Pixnaps

In the realm of moral epistemology, we need to distinguish two levels of moral knowledge. First-level moral knowledge we get by direct appeal to our moral sentiments. Second-level moral knowledge asks whether the sentiments that give us our first-level moral knowledge are good or bad.

I believe that one of the things that a theory has to be able to account for is that moral truth is difficult to determine. It's not just a matter of opening up an answer book and reading "the truth". It needs to be discovered, through detailed and pain-staking investigation.

That is why we are still getting our moral facts wrong, centuries after we learned about gravity, atoms, and evoltuion.

So, Adrian Selby is right in claiming that, if desire utilitarianism is true, then moral facts are not easily known.

But the method for determining moral facts is clearly outlined in the theory.

We take a "desire that P", and ask what would likely happen if everybody had this desire. We look at all of the propositions {Q1, Q2, Q3, . . . Qn} that are true of P, consequent to P, and on which P is dependent, and determine if these fulfill or thwart desires.

For some desires (e.g., an aversion to killing an innocent person, an aversion to non-consentual sex acts as well as a preference for obtaining consent in all acts that require the participation of others, an aversion to taking things that belong to others, a desire for truth), we can fairly easily determine that they will tend to fulfill desires if universalized.

Note: The fact that a desire will not fulfill other desires if universalized does not mean it is bad. Morality, recall, uses a three-part distinction: obligatory, permissible, and prohibited. A desire that will not fulfill other desires if universalized can still be permissible, as long as it does not thwart other desires.

For example, homosexuality may have bad consequences of universalized (as might abstinence), but the response in this case is "Don't universalize it.". Put it, and heterosexuality, in the category of "Permissible". What is "prohibited" then? It is an act which a person with good desires would not perform. A good person would have a strong aversion to killing an innocent person, but may or may not have an aversion to sex with somebody of the same gender.

For other desires (and even for the same list of desires given above as we tighten our demand for precision), the truth is more difficult to determine.

Yet, in all cases, we can determine truth through scientific research. The more we know about the desires that exist, the states of affairs that exist, and the relationships between them, the better we will become at answering moral questions.

There is one more caveat to this: Morality (according to desire utilitarianism) concerns the promotion of good desires and the inhibition of bad desires through praise, blame, reward, and punishment. A child is punished for taking things that do not belong to her, or for lying. Consequently, as an adult, she has an aversion to taking things that do not belong to her, and to lying.

It is not the case that she tells the truth because, each time she is faced with a chance to tell a lie, she goes through this detailed desire-utilitarian chain of reasoning to determine the value of a desire to tell the truth relative to all other desires that exist. When faced with an opportunity to lie, she tells the truth because she does not like to lie.

I don't want to go to work today. I would really like to call in sick and spend the day at home. What drives me to work? Certainly, it's not some complex calculation about the effects that an aversion to breaking promises has on the fulfillment of other desires regardless of who has them. It is the aversion to breaking promises itself (the 'sense of responsibility') that drives me to go to work.

We all have desires and aversions that were shaped by our moral upbringing, and in any case where we need to make an immediate moral decision we refer immediately to these sentiments. We gain our first-order moral knowledge directly through appeal to these sentiments.

Yet, the second-order moral question still remains: Is it a good thing that we have these sentiments?

The bigot, who condemns interracial marriage (or intragender marriage), does so on the basis of his sentiments. Is it a good thing that people have such sentiments? Ultimately, no. These bigoted sentiments are ultimately desire-thwarting and ought to be inhibited. To inhibit them, we condemn (and, in extreme cases, punish) those who exhibit these sentiments.

An aversion to lying or breaking promises is good because it is ultimately desire-fulfilling; an aversion to interracial or intragender marriage is not good because it is ultimately desire-thwarting.

So, we gain our second-order moral knowledge through evaluating the ability of these sentiments to fulfill or thwart other desires regardless of who has them.

Alonzo Fyfe

Adrian Selby:

Yes, I fully understand your objection that we cannot have moral knowledge. In response to this, I offer the same points that I have made before:

We cannot know the mass of the Milky Way Gallaxy with precision (or even how many stars it contains), but we can make observations that allow us to make an estimate.

Through this process, we have very good reason to believe that such things as an aversion to killing innocent people, an aversion to lying, an aversion to taking things that belong to others, a very strong preference for obtaining consent, are all good desires.

In addition, there are some relationships that are difficult to determine, such as the sentiment we should have regarding the unborn fetus.

Between these, there is a broad continuum where we have different degrees of knowledge with different degrees of precision and certainty.

I do not see the problem with this because, ultimately, it seems to reflect reality. There are certain moral principles that seem beyond question (at least, until one starts asking for too much precision that the subject allows), some that are clearly unknowable (in which case we have reason to condemn those who claim to know the answer because they read it in an old book somewhere), and a range of issues in between for which we have a range of knowledge and precision.

Still, desire-utilitarianism allows us somewhat more precision than we get in reality. It at least tells us where we should be looking to find answers to some of these other questions, and which arguments should be thrown out. For example, I believe that the desire-utilitarian case with respect to homosexuality, and with respect to aborting a fetus prior to the state where it has desires is clear (there is nothing wrong with these).

Ultimately, I think that a criticism such as this, leveled against desire-utilitarianism, really does not make any sense unless one can identify a system that is founded on true premises that can deliver more precision than desire-utilitarianism does. Until such a theory comes along, it is reasonable to go with the best theory we have available. There is nothing in your argument that even hints at what a challenger to the title of 'best theory available' might be.

Pixnaps

sorry, i didn't state that very clearly. I meant that it is possible for something to exist, and for us to know it exists, without us having any reliable way of gaining knowledge of its other details.

For example, we may know this distant planet exists (from astronomical observations or whatever), but be totally unable to gain any further knowledge about it, such as its mass. That is not to say that the planet has no mass... obviously it does, and to deny this is nonsensical... but we may have no way of working out exactly what this mass is.

To bring this back to morality: We KNOW desires exist. We know objects of evaluation exist. We know that relationships exist between these previous 2 sets of entities.

That is the ontology of Desire Utilitarianism, and as I said in the 'ontology' section of my previous post, it is quite undeniable that all these things exist.

Yet you seem to be trying to deny this somehow?
Everything is always changing... if I eat a meal, my own mass will increase slightly. If a few molecules from atmospheric gases solidify (or even liquify, as in rain) and fall to the ground, then this may increase the mass of the planet by some (infinitessimally small) degree.

None of this changes the fact that for any moment frozen in time, there will be some objective fact of the matter. Change does not nullify truth, it merely alters it. This is no problem for Desire Utilitarianism, which is quite flexible in this regard - it has no need for absolutism, "timeless truths", or any such nonsense. It is quite possible that the "good desires" of prehistoric peoples were different from what is now good for modern humanity. No doubt the future will see yet more changes to come.

I do not see how anything in your argument suggests that there is no fact of the matter.


Alonzo - thanks for the reply, it was much what I expected, but does actually cover a fair bit of ground, so perhaps my assessment of DU's epistemological 'weakness' was overly harsh.

Indeed, as I wrote the question "What sort of evidence would justify holding a particular moral belief?" I was thinking that DU was pretty clear in its answer, and your reply has further reinforced this.

However, the central practical problem still remains: "Is there a reliable method which can be employed to help us attain accurate moral knowledge?"

hmm, yes, but...
I agree that DU is quite clear about what you describe above. But that sort of thing is only really answering what I mean by my "what sort of evidence..." question. This is answered very well, I must agree. But I'm still left wondering how we're supposed to gather this evidence.

You say we should "ask what would happen if everyone had this desire"... but how are we to answer such a question? How are we to decide with any confidence which propositions {Q1, Q2, ... Qn} would in fact result from P? And how are we to gain enough knowledge of everyone's desires (including relative strengths, etc) to determine whether this resultant state of affairs is generally desire fulfilling or thwarting?

It is a very big ask, as you have already recognised.

I should clarify one thing here though: I think such problems are not really in any way a problem with the theory. As you say, no-one is offering any better alternatives. It's more a problem with reality - the difficulty we have in gathering the knowledge which this theory makes possible.

But then, this problem is in no way unique to morality. For example, I imagine that molecular biologists must also sometimes fret about the difficulty of fully understanding our genetic code. There is a great deal of hope there though, and accepted technologies and methodologies which are helping to expand our genomic knowledge base.

You express a similar hope below:
But we don't yet seem to have any appropriate technologies or methodologies to allow us to make scientific progress in the field of ethics?

Several future scientific breakthoughs will likely be required. Until that time, it seems important to bear this problem in mind. Not as a problem with the theory, for it is not (imo anyway). But rather, as a problem for reality... a problem which someone, someday, will hopefully find a way to overcome.

Adrian Selby

I don't have a position, I'm just a critic. However, I think desire act utilitarianism does a better job, as far as its been mentioned here. I've not seen a criticism that does for it.

But it's meant to suggest that the desire we call good is the desire that will fulfil desires regardless of who's they are, or, would tend to fulfil more desires than it thwarts if generalised.

On either count there might be a fact of the matter for a while, insofar as we actually try to identify an instantiation of this principle, i.e. a particular desire, eg. the desire to abort. But given that we can't approach a solution because there are conflicting sets of desires, that do change even within a society's contemporaries, let alone between prehistoric 'citizens' and contemporary ones, I can't see how we can expect to assert that it's possible we can instantiate or find evidence for a particular desire that is good. If we can't, and we're only saying that desires that are good are those that fulfil other desires, I can't see how we're saying anything of any practical benefit if we can't then attempt to instantiate this. I've argued that generalising desires according to their tendencies is not as effective as taking into account the particular consequences of any given desire toward the goal of fulfilling more desires overall.

spacer1

Relating to Adrian's latest post, I wish to know what determines whether one desire is stronger than another under Desire Utilitarianism.

Pixnaps

this is nothing more than the epistemic problem which I wax about in my previous post's comments to Alonzo.

None of that casts the least bit of doubt on the reality of Desire Utilitarianism's ontology, if that is still what you are trying to do.

But even if speaking only epistemologically, I think your assessment is still overly pessimistic, for whilst there is no current way to reliably discern moral truths (our current science simply isn't advanced enough, as I described in my previous post), I see no reason to deny the possibility of future advances in this respect.

It is surely (theoretically) possible to "find evidence for a particular desire that is good"; I find your denial of this most puzzling. Just a few posts ago Alonzo described precisely what this evidence would consist of.

You say we "can't approach a solution" because of a) the existence of conflicting desires and b) the dynamic nature of the general desire set.

I do not see why either of these is a problem. (a) in particular seems trivial: even in a set with conflicting desires, there is some corresponding set of real-life propositions which would maximise the fulfilment of the desire set overall. Not EVERY individual desire within the set need be fulfilled - such would be asking the impossible.

With regard to (b), i simply repeat my earlier point that all of reality is changing, and this does not negate the possibility of truths being found for any particular moment or period in time.

Perhaps you could argue that we have no way of knowing what future desires will exist, so we therefore cannot know what present desires (as being evaluated) would tend to maximise future desire fulfilment.

But it simply isn't true that we have no idea what future desires will obtain. Sure, we don't know ALL the specifics, but there is a fundamental human nature which is fairly consistent across all times and cultures.

but your suggestion (desire-fulfilling Act utilitarianism) ignores the very purpose morality serves in a society.

Alonzo has spoken of this many times before: how society can influence the desires of its individuals (for the common good of all) through the mechanisms of praise, blame, reward and punishment. This is the ultimate concern of morality.

We (society) want to know what desires we should be instilling in our citizens; what sort of "characters" we want to develop; what sort of "moral upbringing" parents should impart to their children.

Desire Utilitarianism is geared towards answering that question. It is of the utmost necessity that it gives universal answers, for society is asking a universal question (i.e. "what values should we try to instill in everyone?")

Within this context, do you really believe that it is not "possible" for us to reach any reliable answer? Do you really deny that honesty, compassion, an aversion to killing, etc etc, are all useful ("good") values/desires to be instilling in the general population?

Surely not!

The Act-utilitarian system you describe is no help at all for this. It offers no universal answers, so it cannot help us to know what desires/values to try to spread universally. It is quite useless in this regard. It also falls victim to the same problems as normal Act Utilitarianism, eg the doctor with 5 transplant patients, and one healthy passer-by he could murder (for organs) to save the other 5. Should he do it? Your system seems to answer yes (since doing so in this one case would fulfill more desires). Few people would find such an answer credible.

Alonzo Fyfe

Adrian Selby:

It might be useful to revisit the distinction between 'desire-as-means' and 'desire-as-end'. Our language uses 'desire' in both senses, making it easy to slip from one to another.

I bring this up because you talk about a 'desire to abort' -- and I do not think there is such a desire (at least in the desire-as-ends sense). In other words, I do not think anybody ever chooses abortion for its own sake. Rather, abortion is selected as a means of fulfilling other desires, such as an aversion to the health-effects of pregnancy, and the cost of a child in terms of time, money, and opportunity costs. If there is any 'desire to abort' it is a desire-as-means, not desire-as-end.

Desire-as-means identifies things according to their usefulness. If I should say, "I need a pound of 16-penny nails," it is not because I simply have a craving to be the owner of a bag of 16-penny nails. I want to use them for something.

On the other hand, examples of a desire-as-end was my desire for the bagel coated in butter that I just finished eating. I did not want it because it was useful. In fact, eating the bagel thwarts certain desires of mine, such as maintaining good health. I desired to eat the bagel 'for its own sake'.

Any desires-as-means statement is actually a short way of lumbing a whole mess of 'belief' and 'desires-as-ends' statements into one quick proposition. 'I want a pound of 16-penny nails' is just shorthand for saying 'I want to build a nice house because I want to impress other people and I want to be warm in winter and I want security while I sleep and I want a place to keep my things where they will not get ruined and I believe that 16-penny nails will be good for holding the walls together.'

Whereas 'I want to eat a bagel with lots of butter on it' cannot be broken down in this way.

Desire-utilitarianism can be more precisely identified as desire-as-ends utilitarianism. Since desire-as-means can always be reduced to a collection of belief and desire-as-end statements, and beliefs are motivationally neutral, we only need to be concerned with the desire-as-end statements. And there is no 'desire-as-end' to have an abortion. Which means, we do not need to worry about computing the utility of such a desire.

The abortion debate is ultimately concerned with applying other desire-as-ends to any given act of abortion. There is the 'aversion-as-end' to kill an innocent person. There is also the 'aversion-as-end' to one person using another person's body without her consent (namely, by treating a woman as a state-owned or church-owned incubator). I do not think it takes much argument to show that both of these aversions are good. The problem is, in the case of abortion, they appear to conflict.


The problem with act utilitarianism

The problem with act-utilitarianism is that it is metaphysically impossible.

According to BDI-Theory, an individual always acts so as to best fulfill his own desires-as-ends given his beliefs.

So, if you want a person to always act so as to fulfill the most desires, then that person himself must have only one desire-as-end; a desire-as-end to fulfill all desires. There can be no aversion to pain, no desire for bagels with butter, no desire for sex, no love for one's own child, no fondness for laying under the sun on a summer day watching clouds go by. None of these other desires-as-ends can exist.
Because, if any other desire-as-end exists, and the agent seeks to fulfill his own desires-as-ends given his beliefs, then these other desires will, on certain occasions, weigh against the act to fulfill all desires. They will all cause the person to act immorally, as the desire-act-utilitarian describes it -- from time to time.

Desire-utilitarianism is consistent with the fact that there is only one way to get a person to act differently, and that is to change his desires. If he is always going to act so as to fulfill his desires-as-ends, then the thing to do is to make sure that he has those desires-as-ends that fulfill the desires of others, and not those desires-as-ends that thwart the desires of others.

Which means finding out what desires have this quality (e.g., an aversion to harming innocent people, a desire to tell the truth, a desire to help others), and then using the tools of praise, blame, reward, and punishment to promote good desires and inhibit bad ones.

Any theory that talks about what a person should do, that is not consistent with the fact that a person will do only those things that fulfills his desires (given his beliefs), has as much application in the real world as a theory that demands that a person have the capacity to repeal the law of gravity at will.

[Note: It is this fact which underlies all of the popular act-utilitarian counter examples, such as the doctor who can kill a healthy patient to save five others, the sheriff who can prevent a riot by framing an innocent man, or the South American adventurer who is told that if he murders one innocent person the evil dictator will spare the lives of 20 others. These counter-examples exist because act-utilitarianism ignores the link between action and desire.]

Alonzo Fyfe

Adrian Selby

Pixnaps:

Regarding (a), how would you know which propositions would maximise the fulfilment of the desire set overall, where these are desires both now and in the future, and not directly related to the desires that we can clearly ascertain to be affected.

Either Alonzo modifies his definition, or it remains, in my view, an unworkable fantasy.

Also, I'm clearly not suggesting that every desire be fulfilled. This makes no difference to the problems we have when we take into account that while desires conflict, we cannot weigh them, and that they may change over time within individuals as well. Better to address the consequences we believe are knowable, and not pretend that what constitutes 'good' is anything more than this. We can say that what is good is more than this, but if we can't know what that good is, because of these problems, then I'd say the theory was not useful, indeed, it was less perspicuous than other theories that outline what good is in less universal ways.

Regarding point (b) I'm not conceding that something isn't possible, only that this doesn't support your argument.

You think so? Anyway, I'm not saying we have no idea either, when it comes to guessing and extrapolating from what we do know, but insofar as 'good' in this theory derives from ability to fulfil desires generally regardless of whose they are, ascertaining this is directly dependent on how good our guess is. I'm saying you can't call your guesses good ones, and that it makes more sense to accept that guesses pertaining to desires that may or may not occur in the future can never be good ones. You say there is a fundamental human nature, but the instances outlined, such as stealing and killing are there as much as societies are there condemning them, which I think is your point. However, quite what societies choose to deem innocence in relation to killing means that killing itself has not been generally scorned, the desire to kill has been promoted for all kinds of reasons. I shall address desires as means shortly. Even if we know there is an aversion to killing innocents, and that this is general, are we saying that the desire to avoid killing innocents is good? If we are, we're ignoring the desire fulfilling act utilitarianism that advocates that in terms of desire fulfilment, we address each case. In the pedophile example, where it is not someone general to save the 5 patients but a pedophile, they are innocent of whatever made the patients terminally ill, but nevertheless we are thwarting less desires than fulfilling if we do not kill the pedophile, it seems to me.

DU is not geared towards answering the question you pose, because Alonzo states that societies may be wrong about what sort of 'characters' they want to develop.

DU as I understood it is a description of what people are doing when they moralise. The only value it can propose is that people should desire whatever fulfils the most desires, regardless of who's they are. It has not proved useful in trying to identify what values people should have, for there has not been a successful particularisation of a desire, nor a calculus for weighting how much we ought value any given desire. I have asked for both, and received neither. DU proclaims only that one ought to value good desires, where these desires fulfil other desires.

In my view, in practise, what parents want to see instilled in their children are their own set of moral predilections and desires, they don't appear, to me anyway, to be involved in the identification of sets of desires that are 'good', and this is no surprise when it is hard to know what constitutes a good desire in DU terms.

Your comment on the doctor killing the healthy patient to save 5 sick ones isn't effective. On desire fulfilment act utilitarianism, the doctor will clearly not desire to kill indiscriminately (the best candidate for DU I can think of as far as a particularisation of a good desire goes), as well as desire to save as many patient's lives as he can. Nevertheless, if he is weighing up the consequences of this act fully, with all the persistent general desires he has, he will be behaving consistently as a desire fulfilling act utilitarian, while also, in my view, be considering more closely the goal of fulfilling more desires than thwarting.

If he did not kill a pedophile to save 5 people, then while he is good insofar as he acts according to the good desire that one must not kill 'innocent' people, this does not guarantee that in fact, more desires will be fulfilled than thwarted, especially as, even in the immediate circle of desires here, the pedophile goes on to impede the desires of parents and their children, and the 5 patients die, with the attendant desire thwarting of their families. Where we can't know the future and all desires regardless of who's they are, I'm suggesting we stick with what we do know, because the rest is beyond our knowing, making it pointless considering it.

Quite a few more people would find killing a pedophile to save other lives more credible than you think.

Alonzo:

I see no clear distinction between desires as means and desires as ends. In every example you gave, it is clear, say with the abortion one, that the desire is a means, but then it isn't clear that the 'ends' are in fact 'ends' and not further means. Ultimately I don't think it's helpful to distinguish this way, because there are no desires as ends that I can think of. Not everyone desires to be happy for example. This is because some equate happiness with complacency, and do not desire to be happy in case it makes them complacent, they do not desire complacency. It can then be responded that not being complacent makes them happy, but all we're opening up here is a big bag of redefinitions. In desiring the bagel, I might desire its taste, but that is because I desire that my senses be delighted. I desire that they be delighted because life's too short for them not to be, and I do not desire a long life without bagels if that is the price. We can go round and round with this, I still don't see how it addresses my concern.

Trying to identify what desires should be computed remains a problem for you. It may help me if I redefine desire to abort to be 'desire to be the final arbiter in what goes on with my body'. The desire to abort is a subcategory of that. The desire to abort, where we're talking about a moral principle is really talk of the desire to be in control of one's own body, not the desire to HAVE an abortion.

The rest of your post does not address desire fulfilling act utilitarianism. What is good is whatever fulfils the most desires. If it is not the case that a general desire is good, because always to act according to a general desire might ultimately not lead to a maximisation of desire fulfilment, therefore said general desire would not, in DU terms be good, it follows that the best approach is to consider the desires that tend to promote desire fulfilment, but weigh them up in individual situations.

It might actually be 'good' to override these in a given situation. What should therefore be taught is this, not that general desires can be 'good' merely because they tend to fulfil desires (which itself is open to debate). Thus, consideration of the relevant desires affected on an act by act basis will more usefully lead humanity to the overall maximal fulfilment of desires.

See my pedophile example. We might say that the desire to kill the pedophile, driven by the desire to fulfil more desires than thwart them, is either in your view a means desire, and thus not worth computing, in which case the ultimate good end desire appears to be to desire fulfilment of all desires, or we do not accept the means end distinction and say, insofar as the desire to kill the pedophile may lead to fulfilment of more desires than thwarting, it is a good desire to kill a pedophile, even though they're not guilty of any crime directly related to the 5 people who are terminally ill and in need of bodyparts.