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.

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.

The World is Not Flat

No, contrary to what many learned men have said, and others have frequently parroted, the world is not flat. With inequity and inequality of all kinds everywhere you look; with barriers to information, capital, services, and materials; the world is only flat looking down from Olympus. As Chesterton said so well, "One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."

It is tempting to use the quote blandly as it is, without context. But the amazing story from which it comes, one of the finest detective tales of the entire English canon, was Chesterton's 'Hammer of God', in the collection The Innocence of Father Brown. It is a tale that bears reading, that demands you take the time to have a look.

The lesson in it is clear. Moral forces are as much part of the universe as physical forces. One may be tempered by conscience or thrown awry by the lack of it; the other seems immutable but may be misperceived. Both are incredible miracles when closely examined. But one is more of a miracle than the other.

The world is not flat. It is capable of both rotation and revolution as an oblate spheroid that moves in space. And this is true both morally and physically.

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.