Responses 003 (May 2013)

The third question in this semester's list is:

"The possession of knowledge carries an ethical responsibility." Evaluate this claim.

It's a rather interesting question, this one.

Why is it interesting? For a start, you'd have to define the area of knowledge known as ethics before you decided how and why possession of knowledge might carry an ethical responsibility.

Ethics can reasonably be defined as the knowledge of moral decision-making carried out by individuals within a defined group. For example, medical ethics deals with people who handle medical issues, but excludes people who are not 'medical'. An ethical responsibility is a responsibility that you bear because you are a member of the group to whom a particular kind of ethics is related.

This has direct bearing on the basic argument to be evaluated. If you possess knowledge, you are a member of the group 'possessors of knowledge'. If knowledge is considered to be a good thing (like food or air or any other useful resource) then to some extent you have a duty to share it. If you don't share it, you ought to have a reason, and that reason would also be a matter of ethics.

For example, if you know how to kill a lot of people in a short amount of time with readily-available resources, you have the general duty to share knowledge (maybe it will save people from you or people like you, but with fewer moral scruples) but you might not want to share it in case somebody else uses this knowledge to kill others.

Well, that's the basic stuff. Now go and work on it.

Family Fortunes

Wealth does not redistribute itself naturally. It behaves like water (hence Newton referring to it as 'currency') and it can be transferred within tight groups that make more of it by rent-seeking and bulk-gambling behaviours. The only things that really redistribute wealth are onerous taxation, mass death, and bloody revolution.

These are the lessons of history.

It's therefore very hard to see how much redistribution will occur as a result of NOT doing any of these things. But modern ethical thinking is such that these things are unthinkable. Hence, modern ethical thought supports (although it does not condone) continued inequity and inequality in terms of wealth distribution.

There are other mostly-theoretical redistributors with limited historical validity, of course.

One such is a strong moral reform campaign premised on individual desire to give away one's wealth to those who are poor. It can happen. But there are few who will succumb to this admirable lust.

This is why Jesus said, "The poor you will have with you always."

Of late, I've seen many atheists or anti-religionists tell off theists and religionists for not practising their own preaching and solving the problems of the world. Well, two thoughts here. One: 'practise what you preach' cuts both ways. Two: what prevents the former class of discussants from nicking the loot of the latter? If they stand to profit from it, that's a clear conflict of interest — and if they want to, this won't stop them either.

Here are some old thoughts on inequality.

Morality, Ethics and Law (Simplified)

Morality is the product of individual choices of action concerning other people, synthesized into a whole that is endorsed (either in practice or in breach) by a larger group. Where these individual choices of action come from, and how they are synthesized into a whole, and how they are endorsed, and by what groups — these are all important questions.

Ethics is the other way around: a group with a commonality decides to set out a common code of how they ought to behave collectively in view of that commonality. This commonality can be as general as 'we are all human, hence we base our ethics on human rights, howsoever defined' — or as specific as 'we are all doctors, hence we base our ethics on our commonly agreed view of our profession'.

Law is when a code is a) converted into explicitly worded formulae with penalties for breach (and rarely, rewards for observance) of the rules expressed by these formulae; b) the formulation is based on some form of jurisprudence; and c) special authority is created for the interpretation and execution of these formulae.

There you go...

Utilitarianism is not an 'Ethical Theory'

Utilitarianism, to me, has always been a slipshod application of pseudo-mathematics to human behaviour. The basic premise is simple: "the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation," as one of its founders, Jeremy Bentham said.

However, the question of computing happiness, let alone 'greatest' happiness, has always been a problem — not to mention the problem of linking happiness to morals and legislation. This has always been the main failure of utilitarianism as a positive force.

It turns out that the story is worse than that. Daniel Bartels and David Pizarro, in their 2011 paper The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas, published in this summer's Cognition, conclude that utilitarians are mostly (and largely) immoral people.

Here's the latter part of their abstract of the paper:

Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral.

It is a chilling conclusion. Whither morality then? Or at least, computational morality.

Parrot Island

Parrot Island is a former protectorate of West Iberia. According to the morris-man, it is characterised by extreme conflict-avoiding and self-protective behaviour when it comes to providing information to educational researchers. This, he puts down to Sinical tendencies, that curious oriental blend of the sinister and the cynical.

It is an interesting case-study and factor analysis he carried out nigh on five years ago. It is quite applicable to the case of Atlantis, and he would find the same things — on a tiny island, everyone knows everyone or everyone's everyone. This makes it impractical to hew to the ethical ideals of anonymity, untraceability and confidentiality. Sooner or later, if X is doing research in Y, it will be figured out exactly what X is doing and how dangerous it is to the institutions involved.

To prevent all hell from breaking loose, it is therefore necessary for all to indulge in face-saving, face-hiding, and face-gaining behaviours. And likewise, the interrogator or researcher should allow for these behaviours when doing legitimate research. It is all very interesting, although it is also a great pain.

Man Is Born To Trouble

Given that every one of us experiences life in a different way, is it not strange that there are strong commonalities between us all? We can discuss so much, having experienced so little of it in common.

It is the same with states and cities, countries and domains. We think there are bases for comparison, and that what works for the goose will work for the gander. And yet each place has its own history; what is acceptable in one place might not work at all somewhere else.

Still, humans hanker after what they never had, strive to obtain things that others have, make comparisons which seem in abstract useful but in practice are not at all. They do this regardless of historical or social or geographical context?

In the last few days, people have compared Atlantis to Cuba — after all, both are islands, are they not? — and to New York — both are cities, are they not? — and to Cambridge — both were once small swampy places, no?

Crazy, this urge to compare what cannot be compared. And yet, do we not assume there must be universal standards? For example, from a moral perspective, we think killing is bad. Yet, for many reasons, every society will kill given the right conditions. Individuals might protest this, but there is always some line; perhaps only the Jains will try their best not to kill anything at all.

The countries that protest the death penalty the most seem to have the fewest scruples when it comes to gratuitously unleashing engines of death on other nations. Perhaps only the Scandinavians seem virtuous in this regard, in recent history. And yet, they too were once feared — we get 'berserker' and 'viking' from those northern lands after all.

The idea is that humanity has left its long adolescence and now rises towards moral adulthood. Many people have said this, in many places. Yet, is this possible at all? Or is it only something that we believe because it is more pleasant to believe it?

These questions trouble me. I know I can kill. I exterminate insects without qualms, and rub my hands in alcoholic gels to kill germs. In a world where otherwise sane people relegate humans to just another link in the natural order, why should there be special dispensation for complex brains? They too will pickle well in alcohol, after all.

Perhaps it is all human vanity. For who knows whether the spirit of man rises upward or that of the animal sinks downward to the earth?

These questions trouble me, but not as much as they should. And that too troubles me.

Responses 010 (2011-2012)

Well, after being more cryptic than usual for this round of responses to the latest list, I am happy to be at the end of yet another season of Fun With Epistemology. Kidding... but I will still leave a complete link-list at the end of this post for everyone's greater ease-of-use.

Here's Question 10, the last of the season: " 'Through different methods of justification, we can reach conclusions in ethics that are as well-supported as those provided in mathematics.' To what extent would you agree?"

Ah, this one is a tricky one, make no mistake. Note the phrase 'different methods of justification'. Immediately, this centres the question around the issues of how one supports conclusions in different areas of knowledge, supports them in different ways, and yet is able to claim that they are conclusions that are equally well-supported.

First, we need to define 'ethics', something which is vaguely and variously defined no matter how you look at it. The problem with defining 'ethics' is that we speak English, but 'ethics' came from the Greeks. Roman culture produced 'morals' as a sort of synonym, but the two are not the same. A simple test shows this to be true: we speak of medical ethics, but not medical morals nor medical morality; we speak of legal ethics, but not legal morals nor legal morality.

I first said something about ethics in the context of such discussions here. The last paragraph of that post talks about how the grounds for an ethical basis arise. A better place to look is this post, in which I clearly outline the difference with support from an empirical (frequency-of-usage) approach.

Once we can define ethics, we can start thinking about how we reach conclusions about ethics. One of the most straightforward ways is some form of Kantian argument, in which we ask the question, "What if everyone in the world saw action X as a morally good thing compared to action not-X?" and figure out the consequences. This would make murder an unethical thing because if everyone committed murder, there wouldn't be enough of a society left to have any ethics. This is also true of many things, but it leads to logical consequences like thinking of contraceptive technology as morally evil — and also things like eating Big Macs. I'm sure you can see what else could be problematic.

However, if we don't say 'everyone', the problem goes away and is replaced by another one called 'relativism', in which we might have to argue that anything can be good if done in the right context, or that there are no such things as good or evil — merely optimal and suboptimal solutions. This was where utilitarianism led us, to the idea that something called a 'moral calculus' exists — a kind of situational mathematical solution for the determination of what the most moral action should be.

Lines of reasoning like this are not necessarily supported by mathematical approaches such as statistics, algebra, or formal logic. However, they can be treated (by philosophers especially) as equivalent in support to some areas of mathematics; just as math can have conjectures, so too can ethics.

One interesting way of comparing math to something related to ethics can be found here. In a way, that post suggests the possibility of treating areas in the two domains the same way.

I would conclude that conclusions in ethics can (not 'will') be as well-supported as some conclusions in mathematics. I'm not sure that this is extensively true; ethics is a less closed system than mathematics is, and it is hard to consider ethics without metaphysics.

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Here's the list of links:

Question List for 2011-2012

Response to Question 1
Response to Question 2
Response to Question 3
Response to Question 4
Response to Question 5
Response to Question 6
Response to Question 7
Response to Question 8
Response to Question 9

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Again, I have to remind everyone that these posts are just my personal responses, somewhat off the cuff and sometimes with loopholes I've overlooked. If you are going to quote any of my elegant prose (haha), please ensure you cite the material appropriately and check its validity by your own research. Thanks!

Research Engines, Morality and Ethics

What pains me, a child of the 1960s, is that this age of humanity provides so many more resources than the age of my birth — but people don't seem to use them as much as they should. Take for example this choice paragraph that an acquaintance of mine (to my thinly disguised horror) produced in the course of a discussion:

You say there is 'medical ethics' and 'legal ethics' but no 'medical morality' and 'legal morality' but I say we use 'medically moral' and 'legally moral'. I raise the possibility that this may be that due to Zipfian distributions in English, leading to the words being used interchangeably in when sentences are constructed differently.

The discussion was about the distinction between morality and ethics. I asserted that there were clear empirical distinctions; that is, humans in general have a sense that the terms are not completely interchangeable. Behind my assertion is my belief, on empirical grounds, that the two terms have nuances that are sufficiently different that they overlap somewhat but far from completely.

Now, anyone can check our claims using Google as a measure of modern usage. If the terms used receive roughly the same order of magnitude of hits, you can assume that they are roughly as frequently used. Furthermore, Zipf's law is an empirical finding that the frequency rank of popularity is inversely proportionate to the number of hits in a sample. With this information, anyone can carry out a crude test of his own or someone else's assertion very easily.

Obviously, my interlocutor didn't think of doing this. Here is what I found with Google alone:

• medical ethics (1.84 m hits)
• legal ethics (1.44 m hits)
• medically moral (103 hits)
• medical morality (27.4 k hits)
• legally moral (575 hits)
• legal morality (11.3 k hits)

Clearly, ethics and morality are not interchangeable in terms of frequency of use. But what about Zipfian distribution? Perhaps what he was trying to say was that 'morality' was the 2nd or 3rd ranked term (in order of preference) after 'ethics' in this context. That is, it should appear with 1/2 the frequency or 1/3 the frequency.

Well, a quick look at the data shows that the relative frequency is 1/100 or so, which is clearly a) of a different order of magnitude, and b) would rank the terms as somewhere roughly between 64 and 128 positions apart. In other words, his assertion is probably false at a high level of confidence — morality cannot be substituted for ethics in such cases.

So why do people conflate morality and ethics? It boils down to a lack of historical context. The Romans translated the Greek ethikos as Latin mores without realising that to the Greeks, ethikos implied the customary conduct of a person within a polis as imposed by a city-state's sociocultural milieu. That is where the confusion came from, because to a Roman, mores/moralis was more about individual character and self-moderated behaviour towards society.

That is why 'morality' should refer to attitudes and behaviours towards society, arising from the basis of personal choice — the term is aesthetic or 1st person in nature, whereas 'ethics' should refer to the behaviours and conduct that a group of people consider normally acceptable (whether or not individuals might have reservations). It is as easy as that, and while etymologists and philosophers still have some hairs to split, the point remains that these distinctions are validated by extremely widespread usage.

Atlantean Educational Ethics

Sometimes, I peer back into that small and narrow, yet sometimes sinister and pervasive, world of Atlantean education. I see all kinds of things. There are flashes of the teaching spirit and all that is noble in that; most often, a kind of pearly grey shimmer suffuses the landscape, obviously expensive and not at all typical of the rest of the world, but not subject to analysis nor inspiring of further efforts. But sometimes, you see horrors which man was not meant to see.

For some years now, I've wondered how it is that a teacher in the system can end the day's work (or the week's work) and then make money in his spare time training the rivals to his school team. If he were merely teaching the students of rival schools, it would be odd, a bit like a lawyer deciding to do paid work for some other firm's clients but a lot less unethical (since education is a universal good, while legal consultation — as opposed to justice — is not).

Let's look at the career of one particular teacher. This is a gestalt apparition, a construct that many teachers in Atlantis would swear exists in reality.

This guy is pretty good. He recklessly scans or photocopies notes from other institutions, puts them together, and makes sure his name is printed at the bottom. He is renowned for 'his' notes. He is good at drilling into students that which will make their foundations appear strong, and they will do well. It's not education, but it teaches to the test, and is therefore successful in the short run. Since parents and students like short-term successes and scorn the long-term (especially in Atlantis), this is considered a very good thing.

He has a tuition centre that operates from behind an MRT station or (as he makes more money) a room in his own house. This doubles his monthly salary at the very least. At some point, even the cachet of working for a premier school in the Atlantean system will pall, and he will go completely into the private sector. Long before that, the school will think it needs him more than he thinks he needs the school.

How would you identify that particular point? The signs are clear: he is no longer concerned with the welfare of individual students, he doesn't take time to sit down with and nurture colleagues, he takes long holidays independent of the school's needs.

You will notice that I use 'he' exclusively: in general, this kind of person is seldom a 'she' because women tend to be more conscientious and maternal; even if they do 'go private' and set up a tuition centre, they continue to be 'caring and sharing' towards their charges. And if they are 'part-time', they seldom fall into ethics violations; they are not often the ones who copy the work of others and pass it of as their own.

What's interesting is that this kind of free enterprise is tacitly condoned by the priesthood. There are even rules governing such behaviour, thus condoning the behaviour but limiting it. This is like the rules governing prostitution in Atlantis; it's not legal, and thus not ethical by virtue of extralegality, but there is sufficient space provided within the machine for it to continue.

So which part of our gestalt teacher's career is the worst? I think it boils down to one thing, the lack of integrity that is shown by plagiarism and also in the lack of dedication to the craft of teaching. Sadly, this gestalt teacher draws upon many for his gestalt existence — for such are the underpinnings of a large sector of the Atlantean educational system.

Responses 001 (2010-2011)

This is the first planned expansion to... no, not some MMORPG. Rather, it's the first follow-up to this post about the questions that plague some people.

In that list, Q1 reads, "Consider the extent to which knowledge issues in ethics are similar to those in at least one other area of knowledge."

What knowledge issues are these? The big one is, of course, "How do we know what is right?"

Any domain of human knowledge requires underpinnings, and a superficial look at the domain of ethics shows that people in general have a range of ideas about what constitutes the morally-correct response to any possible human situation. This in turn leads to the ugly spectre of relativism, in which it is claimed that there are no such things as absolute moral values.

The argument against absolute moral values points out that there are practices such as female circumcision and cannibalism that are sanctioned by some cultures and not by others. This is a daft argument for a simple reason: these are practices, but not values. They are indicative of values, but not descriptive or prescriptive.

Take female circumcision, for example. The point, from various perspectives, is to amend sexual behaviour in a way that a particular society prefers it. This is something every society does; it's just that it's not so extreme in most cases. I in no way condone the practice, but it should be understood as a purely cultural approach (barbaric though it is) to the idea of appropriate sexual constraint or restraint. Most mainstream cultures support the general moral idea of restricting sexual behaviour.

The example of cannibalism varies from culture to culture as well — in fact, Fernandez-Armesto lists it as the very first idea in his excellent survey, Ideas that Changed the World. In all cultures, eating your fellow men for nutritional purposes is a bad thing; in those cultures that practise cannibalism, the idea is either a) to honour the dead, or b) to conserve the life-force of the society. In all cases it is a ritual thing, much caricatured by societies that don't practise it. Note again, that the general ideas are unexceptional.

What all this means that the domain of ethics can be compared to something like mathematics, in that it has fixed axioms which require working out to give a consistent answer. (See, for example, my previous post on why mathematics and theology are similar.) It can also be compared to something like history, in that there is empirical evidence, but this evidence tends to be interpreted in some kind of context which may seem horribly alien from another frame of reference.

So to what extent are knowledge issues in ethics similar to those in other domains? Well, pretty much the same: "How do you know?" "How can you justify your beliefs in this domain?" "What is it necessary to know?" "How does it apply to your life?" and so on.

The danger here is that at the shallowest level, there is no difference between ethics and any other domain, especially if you confuse the domains by some philosophical paradigm such as utilitarianism or attempt to conflate economics (or law) with ethics. Perhaps the greatest threat to all such domains, anyway, is the attempt to apply a materialist paradigm — the so-called scientification of all things.

Well, that's my response. It is deliberately supposed not to be a guide to writing an answer to the question. It's meant to provoke some thought, and I hope it's done that.

Horticulture

Dorothy Parker once infamously quipped, "You can bring a horticulture but you can't make her think." It's interesting to hear stories from old uncles in the Family.

I've mentioned this before, but here it is again, because I keep hearing it. Apparently some people who didn't actually do an orchid cross got hold of samples of someone else's orchid cross and registered that with the Royal Horticultural Society. The aggrieved person keeps mentioning it, but he's too nice to do anything about it. He said he was a man, he'd just take it on the chin. My brother replied that this was what came of not checking.

Ah, the flagrant dishonesty. I'm sure there's something deeply unethical about a supposed orchid hybridisation programme which doesn't quite produce what it's meant to produce and has to fake the results. This same uncle said, "You know that one which they hastily named after the Wyverns? Well, the bugger won't flower, look I have a whole field of pots of the stuff and I can't get more than a few to bloom. Lousy thing."

Meanwhile, my parents' backyard is full of the stuff, which my brother decided to grow as a challenge. In the meantime, he's been successfully hybridising his own. He's got a few that look a lot more like Wyvern colours, and are a lot more profuse in their flowering. He hopes to produce one with my mother's initials.

Greenspanned

I read with interest recently of Alan Greenspan's recantation. He has finally admitted that the economic policies he presided over were some sort of pyramid-selling scheme in which the assets and worth of future generations were traded away under the assumption that wealth would never dissipate. This humans-conquer-the-cosmos thing has long been an SF trope: you can find the idea that man will run out of time before they run out of space and matter in most science fiction of the 1960s to 1980s.

Timothy Rutten, in the Los Angeles Times, has an interesting take which does not only address issues of time, space and matter. This is what he has to say:

No one begrudges a company about to go out of business the right to cut payroll, but now nobody blinks when a CEO throws people out of work for an uptick in the stock price or to ease the service of ill-considered debt. It's been a long time since anyone who analyzes the economy has been willing to say that it's immoral for a profitable firm to deprive families of their income and health insurance, to strip hardworking men and women of labor's dignity.

"I did not forecast a significant decline [in the housing market] because we had never had a significant decline in prices," Greenspan told the committee, adding that the Fed's record of economic foresight remains unequaled. "We can try to do better, but forecasting ... never gets to the point where it's 100% accurate."

Perhaps only an economic education prepares a man to draw as his conclusion from catastrophe the gnomic declaration that fallible human beings are not infallible. Some things, however, are true 100% of the time: Societies in which the few are allowed to fatten themselves without limit on the labor of many are not just; they aren't even particularly productive for very long. Countries -- like companies -- that cling to notions that allow some to pursue their own interests by behaving indecently toward others come to bad ends.

There is no recovery from moral bankruptcy.

The full article can be found here. It's just one of the many pieces now available in journals and newspapers around the world. Can we have only just woken up?

The answer is NO. Simply put, the voices championing rights for the employee and a fair deal have been drowned out by the voices of wealth, prosperity gospels, and the idea that wealth will always trickle down to the bottom (like the collector tray at the bottom of some vast hydroponic tank).

The operative word there was always 'trickle'. Wealth was associated for far too long with moral dominance. It was never supposed to be so; Jesus would have been the first to identify the need to keep the love of money away from the hearts of men, and to always tie responsibility to power. The Bible is full of it: the scholar, officer and gentleman are not to boast of wisdom, power and wealth — they are to boast (if they must) in terms of how well they know God and His ideals of mercy, justice and righteousness. And of course, to know Him is to do His will not according to the understanding of men, but according to the Word and the Spirit.

You who read this might not subscribe to that sort of theology or any kind of deicentric belief. But it does seem that, as Rutten puts it, some people actually can be found who believe that doing nasty things to your underlings makes the world a better place for everyone. That folly is now being exposed. Maybe altruism is indeed a survival trait after all, and the dinosaurs of this age will perish.

Four Kinds of Findings

I don't normally address political issues in this blog. Sometimes, however, something catches my eyes which may have greater applications beyond their mundane frame. In this case, it's the Branchflower Report (colloquially referred to as the 'Troopergate' Report).

Friday, 10 October 2008, will probably be remembered (if at all) as the day on which the Palindromic Crusade bit itself in the tail. Mrs Sarah Palin, Alaska's Governor and Republican Vice-Presidential Candidate in 2008, was under an ethics investigation. Branchflower and his Republican-heavy (8 to 4!) committee voted 12-0 to release the findings as planned. Overall, the consensus was that Palin had violated state ethics law by trying to have her brother-in-law fired as state trooper.

The interesting thing, to me, was the release of the report with four main findings, which I am summarising below:

1. Governor Palin abused her power as a public officer by exerting efforts to benefit her personal interest in firing the trooper.
2. However, the firing itself was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional authority. This is because it is the right of the Governor to hire and fire state employees.
3. The trooper received all his entitlements, so no wrongdoing was done after the fact.
4. The state Attorney-General's office failed to comply with Branchflower's request for information pertinent to the case.

It's the same in any political arena. Given the right to hire and fire, since the dawn of time, some people have taken this right to be an absolute and untrammelled power. With such an attitude, no justification or reason needs to be advanced. To the Palins of the world, findings 2 & 3 are full excuses for the abuses stated in findings 1 and 4.

But the point of the report is a simple one: it was an abuse of power, and hence a violation of ethics; it was not an abuse of authority. Some people must learn the difference between power or force (Greek dünamis or bia) and authority (Greek kratos). Whereas the latter can be taken mostly as granted by legal structure and terms of appointment, the former always requires moral checks and balances.

This is especially true in the education circles that are more familiar to me. But I've blogged about that before.