Decision-Making, Love, And The Limits Of Autonomy

This week in my Moral Issues class we're talking about assisted suicide and euthanasia. I think the issues related to these topics are complex and multifaceted. On the one hand, I want to be able to choose to die, and I support other people's right to make that decision for themselves. On the other hand, 1) I think the way we respond to such requests can't help but reflect what lives we think are worth living and 2) once new options are on the table, we ask ourselves different questions.

If you wade a bit into thinking about these issues, you come quickly into the nature of autonomy -- or self-directedness. With big decisions like this, we tend to think autonomy is really important. If you choose it for yourself, that's one thing, but if you're pressured or coerced into it, that's something else.  

In a way, this is completely intuitive. If a person said they were choosing medical aid in dying, and it was because their children had threatened them with harm for not choosing it, obviously that is not OK, and it seems right to say that the reason it's not OK is that the choice is coerced. It's not free, informed consent.

But as we've written about before, the further you go in thinking about the difference between free and coerced choices, the more confusing things can get. On the one hand, social context can influence choices in problematic ways. If girls don't study math, even though they like it, because of social pressure, or if boys act all tough and mean because they feel like masculine gender norms require it, those choices may not seem autonomous, because they are being influenced.

On the other hand, every choice takes place in social context. How would you begin to disentangle the ones that make you "not yourself"? What would that mean, to be yourself in the absence of a social context?

Even relational theories of autonomy -- theories designed to fit the idea that a person's self can be a socially connected self -- have this problem. Imagine a society in which women are socialized to be deferential, or prioritize the concerns of others. Do deferential preferences and judgments reflect full autonomy on their part? Some theorists -- proceduralists -- say that as long as the process of decision-making is properly reflective, then sure. That's who they are. Other theorists -- substantivists -- say no: if you're socialized to be deferential because of sexist social norms, that is a way of not being fully yourself.

All of this was on my mind recently when one of my graduate students shared with me this very interesting news story about a couple deciding to request medical aid in dying. They were married for 55 years, and wanted to die together, but their request was denied, on grounds that acting together created the possibility that one person was influencing the other. And these decisions must be fully autonomous.

A spokesperson for the Canadian Medical Protective Association said "The legislation is quite clear that the request has to be voluntary and they are not under any influence. … It may well be that one member of the couple is being influenced by the other member of the couple and the reason why they’re agreeing to the pact is not entirely without influence. .. Out of an abundance of caution, it is our advice that you can’t be sure that one member of the couple isn’t under influence, even if both members qualify."

Whatever you think about this decision, the case shows how murky things get when you talk about being autonomous and acting in the absence of "influence" when you're talking about relationships. In one way, of course the two people are influencing one another's decisions. As they should. Imagine two people. The first one says, "I want medical aid in dying. I talked it over with my spouse, and they think it's the right decision too." The second one says, "I want medical aid in dying. Even though we are very close, I haven't talked it over with my spouse, so I don't know what they think -- whether they think it's the right decision." Wouldn't you think it's the second person who has a problem with decision-making?

And yet, clearly the people closest to use can influence us in problematic ways. If a person said, "I want medical aid in dying. I talked it over with my spouse, and they think it's the right decision too. After all, they're going to have their hands full taking care of our children and finding a new spouse and all. So we agreed that the sooner we get my death over with, the better it is for them. And making them happy is my main goal in life." Well -- wouldn't you want to at least talk this over further? It does sound like problematic influence.

Love should make autonomy complicated. Love often means interdependence, and it should. It's hardly surprising that interdependence on others and "being yourself" are hard to tease apart.

I think there are no easy answers. But I also think part of the problem is trying to shoehorn every complex ethical decision into the framework of personal freedom. Yes, freedom is important. But trying to treat each process as ethically neutral, grounded in some unattainable ideal of "personal autonomy," isn't really workable or desirable.

French Islamophobia, Fashion, And Freedom

From Tommy Hilfiger's Ramadan Collection

Here at TKIN we usually avoid the low-hanging fruit. I figure, if something is just really obviously stupid and wrong, you don't really need a whole blog post about it. But we're making an exception today -- because I can't help myself from saying something about this article that appeared in the New York Times in April, describing French reactions to the introduction of modest clothing from various clothing lines.

What started it all is that big name fashion brands, like Dolce and Gabana, H&M, and DKNY put out modest clothing lines -- long skirts, long sleeved tops, a swimming outfit that covers up -- with the implicit suggestion that they were hoping to attract Muslim consumers. Tommy Hilfiger had a "Ramadan collection," and Dolce and Gabana offered abayas and hijabs. Marks and Spencer offered a "burkini."

Some people in France are very upset. The minister for women's rights said the clothing represented "social control over women's bodies" and should not exist. The co-founder of Yves Saint-Laurent said the designers were exploiting a misogynist system and should "have some principles." Philosopher and influential feminist scholar Elisabeth Badinter called for a boycott of the brands that sell "Islamic fashion."

I'm sorry but -- has everyone gone completely insane?  I mean, we are talking about modest clothing. Has it really come to this? That the mere existence of modest clothing for women is some kind of radical problem?

Just a few decades ago, women were shamed and assaulted for not wearing modest clothing that was not modest enough. And today, even though the lines are drawn differently, women are still shamed and assaulted for wearing clothing that is not modest enough. You're telling me a world in which people say "she asked for it" because a woman wore a miniskirt to a party is also a world in which long skirts and covering clothing are banned? FFS.

In the most "reader recommended" comments at the Times, there are two ideas floating around, both of which seem to me ridiculous. One is that the clothing in question is misogynistic because it reflects a cultural double-standard -- in which women have to cover and men do not. The other is that the clothing in question is misogynistic on grounds that women wear it because they're "forced" to.

The commenters at the Times like to think they're very clever, but both of these are a logic fail. The clothing itself isn't anything. Selling modest clothing just gives people the option of modest clothing -- an option anyone I would think anyone has a right to.

To deny this entails saying that the world would be a better place if women didn't have the option of long skirts and covering clothing. So, what -- now we all have to show some tits and ass to save the United Federation of Planets?

From a philosophical point of view, the whole thing recapitulates the essential problem that Francophone culture has with the idea of banning clothing as religious symbols. Because things -- and especially clothing things -- are symbols only in virtue of how they are interpreted. As articles of clothing, they are also just articles of clothing.

As a million people have said before me, how can you say something is wrong when some people do it but "fashion" when Jackie O. does it?

More abstractly, I think there's a tendency to think about cases like this in terms that pit one absolute against another. Like: either you're for radical freedom of the individual in all cases because that's Truth, Justice, and the American Way, OR, you think society and social reality impact on people in complicated ways so that "individual freedom" is just a code for "we'll leave you alone to sort out your own damn problems."

But these things are highly contextual. At this point in my life, I believe that clothing, like food, has entered the category of appropriate radical individualism. That is: let people wear what they want, for the reasons they have, and don't have a lot of opinions and judgments about other people. Let people eat what they want, for the reasons they have, and don't have a lot of opinions or judgments about other people.

For me, it's not that these things follow from some abstract universal truth about things always go best when you leave people alone to do what they want and never judge. I don't think that's true. Instead, it has to do with the contextual space that food and clothing now occupy. They're both intensely personal, uncomfortably politicized, domains where someone always thinks they know better than someone else. As, indeed, all of these French fashion people seem to think they know what's best for a whole bunch of other people.

But above all, modest and covering clothing for women should always be an option. How is that not obvious? And I say all of this as someone who loves to wear sexy, revealing, and flashy outfits. Because in addition to all the reasons already mentioned, there's this: how can I freely choose to wear the clothing I love, when there's no option to choose otherwise? Without any other options, I'd be essentially forced into it! Talk about "social control over women's bodies."

Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean They're Not Out To Get You: Revealed Preference Edition

Giacinto Gimignani, An Angel and a Devil Fighting for the Soul of a Child, via Wikimedia Commons

Maybe you've had an inchoate sense that dark forces are aligning against you. Maybe you're scared. Maybe you're too bored to think about it for more than five minutes. Well you're in luck, because to preferred clients of TKIN like yourself, we are proud to offer our premium service: we think it through so you don't have to.

This week, how advertising and cost-benefit analysis bond in unholy matrimony, spawning The Policy Methodology From Hell.

As we all know, if you're wondering how to make policy decisions, one popular answer is "cost-benefit analysis." And as we all know, if you're wondering what to count as a cost and what to count as a benefit, one popular answer is an "economic" one. What a person prefers is what is a benefit to them; giving up what is preferred is a cost; where for a preference set to be rational just means that it obeys formal consistency axioms like transitivity.

Maybe less well-known is that if you're wondering how to tell what preferences a person has, one popular answer is that the preferences to count are "revealed preferences." If you chose x over y, you manifested a preference for x; if you paid good money for that future-item-in-a-landfill tchotchke, you showed that you revealed a tchotchke-related preference.

It's obviously not news that there's something shady about the use of revealed preferences to reason about what is good and bad. What people choose is shaped by what options they have. And in classic "sour grapes" fashion, people who have no access to a given option sometimes come not to prefer it -- their preferences are "adaptive." Also, people might choose on the basis of false information. No one thinks the person who mistakenly ingests pesticide in food has some kind of latent preference for death.

But one another interesting fact about revealed preferences doesn't come up as often, overshadowed as it is by all these other things. That has to do with weakness of will. It's evidently a problem, because if you thought choosing y was for the best, but you caved to pressure/cravings/madness for x, then your choosing x plausibly does not plausibly reflect a way that x is good for you, and so counting your revealed preference as a preference would be a mistake.

It's easy to get lost in the philosophical thickets of weakness of will, meandering around like a drunk person, trying to figure out what could possibly determine the difference between "I chose it even though I thought it best not to" and "I chose it because I changed my mind" and other important distinctions. But perhaps we can say this: there is sufficient agreement on the concept to allow for a robust research program in the social sciences. Roy Baumeister and his colleagues have conducted study after study measuring the effects various things have on weakness of will.

One conclusion they came to will surprise no one who has lived a human existence, and that is that the will is a thing that can be worn down.

Ask people to exercise their will -- eating radishes instead of chocolate, keeping a straight face when something is funny, etc. etc. -- and they'll become less and less able to effectively exercise their will. They call this "ego depletion." The "active self" is a "limited resource."

Among other weird things, this means that they more you have to resist temptations, the more you deplete your ego. The more you deplete your ego, the less you're able to resist temptations. So the more environmental factors there are requiring resistance -- the more bakeries you have to walk past, the more click-bait you have to ignore, the more advertised consumer items you have to not buy, the more likely you'll exhibit the weakness of will.

And this is where it gets interesting. Because when you put "the preference taken into account in cost-benefit reasoning fail to track your good when there's weakness of will" together with "the more you have to resist, the less you can resist," what you get is that the massive forces always present in a consumer society, urging you to BUY EAT DRINK ENTERTAIN YOURSELF YOU DESERVE IT, are actually making your revealed preferences less likely to be for your actual preferences.

Let's do an example. In one of their Freakonomics books, Levitt and Dubner said that fighting climate change through change in behavior was pointless because "It's not that we don't know how to stop polluting the atmosphere. We don't want to stop, or aren't willing to pay the price."

Their evidence for the implicit claim about preferences is our behavior: our behavior reveals preferences for convenience and fun over environmental goals. Plausibly, our actual preferences are sometimes for clean air and a world inhabitable by our children even when immediate forces make it hard to resist the temptations of climate damaging behavior. So basing judgments about our good based on our revealed preferences is a planning FAIL.

What's crazy about this whole thing is that the more other stupid temptations we have to resist -- the more we're subjected to BUY EAT DRINK ENTERTAIN YOURSELF YOU DESERVE IT -- the more likely we'll fail to act in accordance with our judgments, and thus the more likely that cost-benefit analysis will track our preferences for stupid consumer goods instead of, you know, clean air and water.

Remember the old picture of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other? This is like the devil has two kinds of minions: those shouting at you to listen and obey, and those who watch you obey and conclude: Well, we know what will make that person better off, nudge nudge wink wink.

You see why I called it an unholy alliance, eh?

How Is It A Free Country, If All Your Options Suck?

The infamous "McDonald's memo."

I was drawing up the syllabus for my fall course on introduction to ethics and values, and I found myself wanting to confront a weird situation my students find themselves in: while in one sense we live in one of the freest places in the world, their path through life feels, to them, extremely constrained.

In some senses, North America in 2013 is a free place. You can, to a large extent, choose what you want to wear, what bands to listen to, what tattoo to get on your butt, and whether you want to get plastered this Saturday. You have a choice about whether or not to major in Engineering, whether or not to join Facebook, and how nice you want to be to your parents.

But as is well known, just because you have choices doesn't mean you're free. If someone holds a gun to your head and says "Your money or your life!" you're not being given a choice. You're being coerced. There are options, and you have to choose, but the latter option isn't an option in any meaningful sense.

By this same logic, it would seem that -- even if there's no robber -- if you make a choice for something you hate because the other options are worse, then in some sense you're not really free in making this choice. You have a low degree of a special kind of freedom I think of as "choice autonomy."

In certain ways, people today have way less choice autonomy than they did when I was young. When I was in my twenties, I worked for a while as a waitress and bookstore clerk, lived in cheap crappy apartments, and didn't have a car, TV or any other expensive stuff.

This was not a bad option. I had enough pocket money for breakfast out, and evenings in bars with friends. I took the bus. Because there were no cell phones and computers and internet, my not having those things was a non-issue. Sure, I had some annoying bosses, but for the most part I worked for small independent restaurants without vast corporate strategies and crap like that.

A life like this now is so much crappier. Of course part of that is economical: the fact that you can barely live on a waitress-like salary these days has a lot to do with relative incomes and rising inequality and so on.

But it's way more complicated than money, because changes in our society have made the life of the non-well-off much worse than they used to be in so many ways. Working a low-paying job now often means working for a giant corporation which has typically worked out in excruciating detail how to get what they want out of workers without considering -- even while benefiting from -- the conditions that make those workers' lives a pain in the ass.

Low-pay workers now often have to deal with unpredictable schedules, no guarantees of full-time work in a given week, absurd and ineffectual policies involving sales targets and quotas for foisting on the public stupid things they don't need. They often have to be on-call, so not only do they need a phone, they can't turn that phone off. Since employers check on social networking presence, and even regard non-presence as a red-flag, workers have to constantly curate their online persona. Naturally, they have to do all this with a huge smile, a friendly hello, and a team-player mentality. It's revolting.

Complex changes in society mean even living on moderate middle class salaries can be challenging. During the burst of the housing bubble there was this surreal situation of cheering for rising house prices and moaning about their falling. I get the reasons -- mortgages, debt, saving, blah blah blah. Still, wasn't it odd not to see anyone spare one thought for the people who might want to buy an affordable house? Or just rent a little apartment for some reasonable rate?

All of this means that even if you win the early life lottery of good parents and money that can fund your education and all that jazz, the crappiness of low-pay work means you pretty much have to choose to fight the zillion other people trying for the brass rings. You don't have much of a choice. Of course, if you didn't win that lottery, forget it. You'll have little access to any good options at all.

Because of these facts, there's a sense of freedom in which people have less freedom, because their choices are not free but rather constrained. This use of the concept is related, I think, to the idea of "positive liberty," but it's not quite the same: I'm not talking about enabling self-determination and realization. I'm talking about having to choose X because all the things that involve not-X are awful -- not because one person made them awful for you in a moment, the way the robber did -- but because the world you live in made them awful for complex interconnected reasons.

If I'm right about choice autonomy it's a concept that can apply to anything. But on Labor Day it seems particularly appropriate to point out implications for worker conditions. If those conditions suck, that's a problem not just for well-being, not just for collective welfare, but for freedom and autonomy as well.

You sometimes hear arguments against rules and regulation justified on grounds that they would be coercive, would unjustly decrease the freedom of people and institutions to do as they see fit. My proposal is that "freedom" cuts the other way as well: when some options are awful, the choice for alternatives also isn't really free.

The Ethical Complexity Of Being Judgey

Hieronymus Bosch - Last Judgment (fragment of Hell), via Wikimedia Commons.

Should people judge one another's choices?

Certainly there's a powerful contingent out there who thinks the answer is No.  They say:  "Don't judge me!" "Don't be judgey!" and, as I just learned from the Google, "Don't be a judgey McJudgerson!"

I get this sentiment, I really do.  It's got a very appealing kind of "live and let live" aspect.  And many reasons people are judgmental really are stupid.  Sometimes the just world fallacy makes people judgmental:  Oh, she got cancer?  She must have eaten meat/used cosmetics/stressed herself out/not been careful about BPAs.  Some people are so careless!  Thank heaven I would never do such a thing."  Moronic.

But some of the reasons we're judgmental are complicated, because they stem from the following important fact:  other people's choices structure your cultural environment.

For a simple example, suppose you have -- bushy eyebrows, like the guys in this article, and suppose you like them.  In our world, you have two choices.  You can shape/pluck/wax etc, and look normal.  Or you can refrain, and be considered a freak/weirdo/non-conformist.  Notable not on your list of options is the combination of doing nothing and having nobody care.

Sure this is partly because "THEY" decided bushy eyebrows were bad or something.  But all it takes is everyone else doing it to make not doing it make you a freak.  Wearing a robe around outside isn't "bad" in our world but you can't do it and not be a freak.  You don't have that option.  And the reason you don't have that option is because other people's choices structure your cultural environment.

Considered alone this social aspect of choices might not be such a big deal:  we live in a social world, etc etc blah blah blah. 

But it can't be considered alone.  Because we live in a world of arms races.  And in a world of arms races, the social aspects of choices make everyone's business everyone else's business.

A couple of weeks ago The New York Times ran this article about the increasing use of Aderall among high school students who want to study more effectively.  It had all the predictable New York Times-y elements:  anecdotes about ivy-league aspirants, interviews with child psychologists, a vivid description of a kid snorting crushed Adderall just before the SAT.

You don't have to read the article to see the obvious.  If everyone in your school takes Adderall, and if Adderall improves school performance, and if getting into a well-regarded university is hyper-competitive, well ... you'd better find a way to take it too, no?

The US, always a world leader when it comes to trends for what is awful, is already a winner-take-all society, with haves and have-nots, no one in between, and the life of the have-nots an increasing hell.  In this atmosphere, academic achievement is an arms race:  it's rational to "spend" whatever you need to.  So if everyone else is taking drugs, the price you'd better be willing to pay is clear:  you'd better take the Adderall.

Maybe you're thinking, Well, sure, of course it's appropriate to judge drug-takers.  They're taking drugs! They're pretending to have symptoms; they're buying from other students; it's ethically dubious in any case.

But there's lots of cases where the innocuous choices of other people structure our choices in ways we don't want.  People are always talking about work-life balance, and about the needs of parents to have flexible work time, and about the disproportionate way the burdens of parenting fall on women, to their career detriment.

These are all serious and important problems.  But they're often talked about through the vague idea of "norms" and "attitudes."  Like, we need to shift norms and attitudes so it is "OK" to take time for your family, to go home for dinner, to leave work for the kids' soccer games or whatever.

But the fact that other people's choices structure your cultural environment means that the problem goes far deeper than norms and attitudes.  Even if the managerial classes of America were to have a sudden conversion experience all at the same time -- and here I picture maybe some ESP rays starting at a TED talk and emanating through the bluetooth connections of the world -- a conversion experience of believing in the power and importance of Dinner Together and Piano Lessons at Four, sure that would help, but would it solve the problem?

I don't think so.  In "merit-based" arms race competitive culture like ours, you often get ahead by being able to do more of what someone wants you to do.  If half the population is willing to have no life outside work so that they're going to do more of those things, in the nature of things they're going to get ahead.  It's partly their choices that determine what seems like "being available" and being "a team player" and being "committed to the job." 

This problem seems to me much harder than the changing norms and attitudes problem, difficult as that one is.

About a year ago (I think) The Times also reported a huge increase in women getting "blowouts" -- this is where you make time in your day, not to get your hair cut, but just to get it washed and styled.  I was appalled.  Not because I think people should have curly hair, and not because I'm against beauty treatments, but just because in the arms race what counts as proper, neat-looking, professional looking hair, this was a sudden ramping up.  A ramping up I do not need or want. 

It's just like the Adderall.  If a twice-weekly hair blowout becomes the new standard for looking properly put together, that is going to suck.

So yeah.  Of course:  your hair, your choice.  But also:  twice weekly blow-outs?  Give me a break. 

When you look at it this way, it's not surprising that we're all silently judging one another.

What Is Wrong With Girls Going Wild?

There's a lot of disagreement about women's sexuality.  But one thing tends to bring people together, and that is a belief that when young women take off their clothes, kiss one another, and go back to the Girls Gone Wild tour bus for further fun, something has gone wrong.

Men call them sluts; feminists call them manipulated by a sexist debauched culture.  The TV show Arrested Development calls them "Girls With Low Self-Esteem." 

But what exactly is it that is regrettable?  These women are choosing to participate, they seem to be having a good time, and they don't seem coerced.  Indeed, it's often noted how small any material rewards are:  they get a cap or a T-shirt or something.  

I think one standard thoughtful response to this question is something like this.  What's regrettable is that these women are "objectifying" themselves, or permitting themselves to be objectified.  Even though they are choosing to participate, they're being objectified because they're giving sexual pleasure to other people, via their bodies, and not getting any "authentic" sexual pleasure for themselves.

Insofar as it is "sexy" or "fun" for them, it must be because of the attention, and not because of something they're getting for themselves.  Whatever they are getting out of it is other-directed, rather than self-directed. 

But it seems to me there's something not quite right about this.

One part I really can't run with is that there's a problem with other-directedness.  Because when you move away from the sexual domain and into other domains, being other-directed is often a good thing not a bad thing.  Suppose I want to throw you a party, and I become really focused on wanting you to have a good time.  Imagine I feel like your having a good time will make me have a good time -- indeed, that I could not have a good time without your having a good time.

If this is just a party and not my whole way of life, there's obviously nothing weird about that.  My enjoyment follows from your enjoyment, my preference is not for some thing, but for you to have a certain set of feelings and experiences.  If anything, we'd say that's an excellent part of human interactions.  If we go out to dinner once a week and I can't really have fun unless you are having fun, that's a nice thing not a regrettable thing.

In the New York Times discussion of women's sexuality a couple of years ago, one of the researchers talks about how much she thinks women's desire is "narcissistic" in the sense that women desire to be desired.  I don't know if that's right, but if it is even a little, then the women who participate in GGW can certainly be acting on their own "authentic" desires -- those desires just happen to be desires about the desires of others.

But having other-directed desires is not narcissistic!  Why not say, "generous," or "other-directed" or any of the million other nice ways to describe people who are concerned with other people's feelings?

There definitely is something regrettable when women's desires are only other-directed, and social and cultural pressures tell women they ought to have other-directed sexual desires -- to be sexy, rather than to feel sexual desire and pleasure.  And this is true about our world, and it is bad.

Like, this Salon article about sex from the economic point of view basically makes an assumption that women's sexual desires don't even exist -- women just have sex to get other stuff.  Jeez, people.

And so, insofar as things like GGW foster and promote this vision of women's sexuality, that is bad.

I think that is right, and I think it's important.  But it's not the same as saying that other-directed desires are second-rate, or bad, or inauthentic, or rooted in low self-esteem.  Ideally, in sex everyone would have a mix of other-directed desires and self-directed desires. 

No, I'm Sorry, Doing Moral Philosophy Is Not Like Falling Off A Log

Call it the Wikipedification of ideas.  The slogan is "Well, how hard can it be?"

I got nothing against Wikipedia, which I use all the time.  Using Wikipedia doesn't have to lead to the Wikipedification of ideas.  But some of the basic elements of Wikipedia ... well, let's just say that some people seem to get a little overly enthusiastic about them.  Like the idea that everyone has equally good "information" about a topic, that it's pointless to think we need "experts," that complex expressions of ideas are just obfuscation, that every question has either an uncontroversial answer or, at worst, an uncontroversial set of plausible answers.

This just isn't true.  Especially when it comes to abstract ideas and ideals.  Like thinking about right and wrong.  I work some in this area -- on moral philosophy -- and I can tell you:  it's hard.  How should we trade off the ending of one life against the preservation of others?  How do you know when inequalities are unfair?  How do you reason with people whose judgments are very different from your own?  Are moral judgments objective or are they just fancy kinds of emotions and tastes?  It's a difficult subject.

So it's infuriating to have it presented as if moral philosophy is actually easy.  Like, "Gee whiz, if everyone would just calm down and be nice -- and stop listening to those obfuscating philosophers! -- we'd be all set."

In the New York Times today Robert Frank talks about income inequality.  I'm roughly in agreement with his broad conclusion -- that income inequality is bad.  But the way he goes about explaining it is frustrating.

Focusing on fairness, as moral philosophers have done, he says, isn't getting us anywhere, because there's too much disagreement on how fairness should be understood and what it comes to in this context.

That's right:  moral philosophers don't agree about fairness and inequality.  One reason for that is that the issues are complex, there are several ways of seeing things all of which seem somewhat reasonable, and even the question of how to decide among competing views is a vexed one.

Frank says that instead of trying to sort these issues out, we can look at a cost-benefit analysis.  Like, we know high income inequality has costs, and we don't see any offsetting benefits, so clearly it's bad.

But there are reasons we don't just apply cost-benefit analysis to figure out the answers to complex problems.  The reasons are familiar from the known difficulties with "utilitarian" reasoning in moral thinking.

Utilitarianism says that you should do the thing that brings about the best consequences for all, where everyone counts for the same amount.  It sounds promising, but it leads to some surprising results.  Suppose five people are in need of five different organs to live -- one guy needs a liver, another a heart, and so on.  Should we kill one person and distribute his organs?  Save five lives, end one, cost-benefit-wise, sounds like the right thing to do.

But obviously no one thinks this is the right thing to do.  And the reason it's not the right thing to do has nothing to do with how high or low the "costs" are.  Imagine the guy you kill is really unhappy.  Imagine he has no friends.  The "cost" of killing him is now low.  Does that make it better?  No.  Plausibly, it makes it worse.

You can argue -- as moral philosophers do! -- about what the right explanation is.  One plausible answer goes something like this:  what's wrong with killing the guy has to do with something outside of costs and benefits, and has instead to do with his rights, his freedoms, his autonomy to live his life as he wants, even if it's an unhappy one.

At one point Frank says that the increased wealth of the rich hasn't made them very happy.  But as we've just seen, the happiness of the person isn't the only thing you have to think about.  People have the right to the pursuit of unhappiness as well as the pursuit of happiness.

The point is that even when the costs are low and the benefits high, you're don't have a simple answer about what to do.  There are other things to consider.  Because, well, moral philosophy is complicated and not simple.

The same problem arises in the new fad for explaining morals with science.  The new neuroscientists, like Sam Harris, want to tell us that science can tell us about morality, because science can tell us what makes us flourish and feel happy and what doesn't.

As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah points out in this excellent review, knowing what will increase well-being tells you little about what to do.  How should you weigh one person's well-being against another?  Is it average well-being or total well-being that matters?  What about the problems with cost-benefit analysis, already mentioned?

Furthermore, is it only conscious well-being that matters?  Does that mean that if your spouse is cheating on you it would be better not to know?  And if you know the truth will hurt someone or make them feel bad, should you lie?  Neuroscience can plausibly tell you how much less happy you'll be when you find out the truth about things, but I don't see how knowing the answer to that question is ever going to help you figure out what to do in life. Even if the truth sucks, even if it reduces your well-being and leaves you in tears, don't you sometimes want to know it anyway?

I guess when the philosophy departments all disappear because of funding cuts to the humanities, no one will have to worry about these problems any more.  We can just kill the guy, distribute the organs, and lie about it after.  Questions?  I hear the Wikipedia entry on "cost-benefit analysis" is excellent.

When Is A Choice "Yours"?

In my philosophy work I've been doing some reading and thinking about the notion of autonomy, which it turns out is a really hard concept to understand. Intuitively, the idea is supposed to be that if a choice is yours its autonomous, and if you're forced into it, it's not.

But it turns out to be harder than you think to make this idea precise. Consider the question of whether facts about your social environment can ever make your choice not fully your own. For example, maybe you're a teen girl who wants to dress as a tomboy but who goes to a school where no one does that and no one will date you if you do. Or maybe you're a student who doesn't want to take (non-prescribed) Ritalin but how knows that since half the other kids are taking it, your relative test score will seem lower if you don't.

Are these kinds of choices autonomous ones? Suppose we say "yes," on grounds that you're not being *forced* to do what others do, it's just pressure, and you still have choices. The tomboy can choose whether to dress femininely, or whether to dress as she wants and be more of a loner. The student can choose whether to take the Ritalin, or whether to refuse and take the consequences. In support of this view, we might say, Well, all choices in life are among a range of alternatives. Sometimes those alternatives are good; sometimes they all suck. But the mere fact that you're choosing among particular alternatives cannot itself render a choice non-autonomous. All choices are like that: the fact that a person has to choose whether to major in Engineering to make more money or major in English because they love it doesn't render their choice non-autonomous, no matter what they end up choosing.

But if this is right, it starts to look like all choices are autonomous. Because really, what happens when someone holds a gun to your head? They're giving you a new range of alternative to choose among, right? You can still choose: give him the money, or die. But to say this this choice is autonomous is nuts: the fact that you can choose among alternatives means nothing. The "gun to your head" is like a paradigm example of a non-autonomous choice.

Now, suppose we say "no," on grounds that the tomboy and Ritalin choices, like the one where you have a gun to your head, seem to have its origins not from inside you but from forces external to you. In both cases, someone or something is structuring your world for you, in ways you don't like.

But if this is right, it starts to look like all choices are non-autonomous. After all, every choice every one ever makes is made in an environment of some kind, an environment that structures their choices. Many of the choices you make in life you make because someone you love needs or wants something from you. Your love makes you do things you wouldn't do otherwise: save money, or quit smoking. Or lie to your friends, or to the cops, to protect them. These choices are all highly influenced by social forces external to you, but that doesn't make them non-autonomous. Sometimes they feel like the ultimate expression of self-hood: I do this for you because I love you.

So, I don't know what to say; it's very puzzling. Reading enough of the theories of autonomy and how different they are and how inconsistent they are with each other, I started to think maybe there is no such thing as autonomy, really, and no real distinction between autonomous and non-autonomous choices. But then I was talking with my friend about that weird parasite that makes ants climb to the top of grass so it'll get ingested by sheep, and I thought WOW, if there was a parasite like that for humans, OF COURSE their choices would be non-autonomous. That's like being made into a ZOMBIE for heaven's sake.

So, again, one of those moments where real life just comes outta nowhere, right at you. Real life 1; Philosophy 0.