Ethical Math And Sex With Random Strangers

When I was a frosh in college in the 80s, a guy friend tried to talk me into having sex with him by pointing out that the benefit to him would be much greater than the cost to me. That is, he argued that even if I wasn’t attracted to him — which I wasn’t — I should agree to have sex with him just on principle, the way you’d do any other thing to be nice, kind, or generous to a friend.

I declined to have sex with him. It’s not that a disagreed with his premises. He was a young guy, and didn’t know many people socially; I wouldn’t be surprised that he’d want to have sex, that having sex would not only be pleasurable but would also add a lot to his medium-term, overall happiness with his life. While I wasn’t attracted to him, I’ve always been a bit of a free spirit sex-wise and he was, after all, a friend, a nice person etc. etc.

I didn’t have the philosophical sophistication to explain what was wrong with his point of view; I think I just said “that’s not how that works” — which I still think is basically the right answer. While I believe there can be good reasons to decide to have sex even if you’re not exactly feeling it in the moment, and that even altruism is not always misplaced as a sexual motive, there’s no obligation to have sex with someone just because the happiness numbers add up higher on the one side than they do on the other.

Years later, in philosophy graduate school, I encountered the theory of ethical utilitarianism, which says that you should do that act that will bring about the most happiness or well-being overall. It’s the greatest good for the greatest number, which means you have to do the ethical math -- which action will bring about the most well-being or pleasure overall, where everyone counts the same amount? -- and do the one on top of your spreadsheet. And I started to wonder: if ethical utilitarianism were true, would I be ethically obligated to have sex with my friend — and, really, any other random stranger who would really enjoy it?

If so, that strikes me like a bizarre conclusion. I am not a utilitarian, so I am not worried about the implications for my life. But I am curious about whether other people share my sense that if the theory entails these obligations, the theory must be wrong in some way.

My understanding of the general relationship of utilitarianism and sexual ethics is that an important component is sexual liberty — or open-minded free choice. In the late 19th century, the British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham advocated for gay rights at a time when gay sex was illegal in Britain. In contemporary theory, utilitarians may argue that generally speaking, the most pleasure and happiness are produced when each person chooses what sexual activity they want and prefer, which aligns with many modern western views about sexual ethics. It’s your choice, so do what you want.

As a general principle, that does seem to follow from the utilitarian calculations. But if you think the right action in specific circumstances is the specific one that brings about the most happiness, that seems to imply that there can be occasions when one person is obligated to have sex with another even when they don’t really want to — at least, assuming the suffering or pain of doing so is less than the happiness or pleasure on the other side. That wouldn’t be a violation of the consent framework, it would be saying “here is a situation when you should (are obligated to) consent.”

Again, this conclusion doesn’t fit with my sense of sexual ethics. You could choose to have sex to be nice, but the pleasure calculations shouldn’t entail that you’re required to.

A utilitarian might want to deny that the numbers could ever shake out like this. Maybe they would say that choosing to have sex when you don’t want to, out of a sense of duty, would be psychologically bad for a person, so that the benefits of doing so could never outweigh the relevant costs. Like, in the case of my friend, they may say maybe I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal to me to say yes despite not wanting to, but I was wrong: saying yes would lead to damage of my sexual identity or well-being.

But that’s not how I experience my psychology. I can have sex with people even if I am not really attracted to them, and it doesn’t feel like that big of a deal. Like I said at the start, I think my friend’s premises were sound — it’s the reasoning that doesn’t work.

In any case, I know these kinds of objections to utilitarianism are a dime-a-dozen: the theory says X, but people believe not-X. Many of those Xs have to do with values like justice, fairness, and equity. But the sex context seems to me to be differently interesting, because sexual ethics is usually understood in such a personalized way — and the utilitarian calculations are obviously anything but personal.

When it comes to why the utilitarianism answer is the wrong answer to the sexual consent question, I still think “that’s not how that works” is roughly correct — even if people don’t agree, and even if they can’t explain, why it is correct.

Rationality Bros, Expected Value (EV) Calculations, and The Real Woo-Woo

There’s a certain type of person who considers it “objective rationality” if they can enter measurable quantities into a formula and just “vibes” or even “stupidity” when decisions are made using other methods. The implication is that we’re out here, doing woo-woo and getting the world into trouble, while they’re in there, heroically calculating.

But in reality, even the most rationality-lover’s rationality theory says you should base decisions on what you want and care about. Those  “measurable quantities” is where the real woo-woo is actually happening.

My most recent encounter with magical rationality thinking was reading about Sam Bankman-Fried in Zeke Faux’s cryptomania romp Number Go Up. Like a lot of people, I got obsessed with SBF while he was in the news. It had never occurred to me that I would see the ins and outs of utilitarian ethical theory debated in the popular press, but right there in the middle the trial, his ex-girlfriend said “he believed that the ways that people tried to justify rules like ‘don’t lie’ and ‘don’t steal’ within utilitarianism didn’t work.” 

Ha, because me too! But I decided utilitarian ethical theory is wrong, while I guess SBF went more in the pro- lying and stealing direction.

To extract more entertainment from the trial, I read Number Go Up. Toward the end, Faux spends some quality time with SBF and they talk about decision-making. SBF invokes the concept of “Expected Value” or “EV”. EV is like a weighted average: in a bet, it reflects the average amount you’d expect to win or lose if you played the same game over and over. SBF likes to make decisions that are EV+ — that is, the expected value is positive.

There are contexts where this is straightforward. If you’re trying to decide whether to take a bet where you put up a dollar and 50-50 odds you lose and 50-50 odds you win three dollars, the expected value for the bet is (-1)(.5)+3(.5) = +1 dollar. On average, you’ll gain a dollar each time you play. Since this is positive, it’s a good bet. If your only goal is to maximize your dollars, you should go ahead and take it.

But there are difficulties applying EV to life, because the V in EV — “value” — represents outcomes, and is not the same as the U in utility, which represents how desirable or good outcomes are. And it’s the U you need when you’re trying to make decisions. That’s why the standard decision-theory concept is called “expected UTILITY theory.”  

U and V are not the same, because how good things are is a judgment call and varies from one situation to another. Suppose you have a million dollars and someone offers you a bet with 50-50 odds where if you win, you get two million more dollars, but if you lose, you lose all you have. If the “V” is measured in money, this bet is strongly EV+: in the average weighted outcome, you are up (-1,000,000)*.5+(2,00,000)*.5= $500,000.

But utility-wise, taking the bet could be wildly irrational. If that million is all your money, and it’s earmarked for your family’s well-being, you’d care way more about keeping it than about failing to gain more. Your personal utility of losing $1,000,000 is that it is destitution and disaster, something you’d do anything to avoid. Your utility of failing to gain another $2,000,000 is that it is too bad not to have more, but not even comparable to the badness of the difference between having your $1,000,000 and having nothing. If your U is what matters, it’s a terrible bet.

You don’t have to take my word for it. “The Expected Utility Hypothesis is that rational agents maximize utility, meaning the subjective desirability of their actions.” Desirability — i. e., how much you want or care about a thing. Bernoulli argued in 1738 that different bets are rational for rich people and poor people. 

At one point, SBV tells Faux that when starting up his business, he estimated an 80 percent chance of financial failure. But the magnitude of the potential financial gain was so great,  he said, that even with the smallish 20 percent chance of success, the decision overall was “EV positive.” He describes this perspective as “risk neutral,” which I guess means each dollar counts for the same amount, whether it is lost or gained.

Faux says that to a normal person, such calculations lead to decisions that “normal people” would find “insane.” “Normal people” find these decisions make no sense because most people do not value their millionth dollar as much as their first — the utility money brings varies from person to person and depends how much you have. SBF says the calculations make sense within “effective altruism” — that is, he is considering not his own personal utility but rather what utility it would hypothetically bring if he hypothetically gave it away to a cause that would hypothetically make the world a better place proportionally to the hypothetical dollar amount. There may be something to that, depending on how you interpret all those hypotheticals. But it doesn’t mean you’re being objective or rational if you just count up the dollars and ignore why the dollars matter.

Later, it gets weirder: SBF is quoted as saying he’d take a bet in which “51 percent you double the earth out somewhere else, forty-nine percent it all disappears.” Now instead of maximizing “dollars” you’re maximizing “earths.” Using standard decision theory, that is a rational perspective only if you have roughly as much positive feeling about having an extra earth as you do negative feelings about having no earths. How is that state of mind possible? I’m not even sure I want two earths.

My point is that rational decision making always rests on evaluation, either of your subjective utility or, if you’re someone who believes in objective value, of your assessment of that value. Yes, you can try to quantify your evaluations, and then you can use EV (or, rather, EU) theory to hone your decision-making if you are good at that kind of quantification. But putting in numbers that correspond to the desirability of the outcomes is the hard part. Just mapping the numbers over — “two earths is twice as good as one earth” — ignores the most important pieces of information. With respect to money, to say that your millionth dollar is as important as your first requires assuming that money has some fixed inherent value and thus denying basic economic principles like the law of diminishing marginal utility.

In a scientific approach to the world, it’s people who value things. Our valuing of them determines their worth. This is how all of contemporary economics operates. So acting like you can just count up the obvious numbers, and set aside your personal evaluations — that is magical rationality thinking and the real woo-woo. Underneath any calculation, it’s utility — desirability and goodness — that makes decisions rational or not.

Of course, people evaluate the desirability of outcomes in different ways, which makes different decisions rational from different points of view. This is one reason social and public decision-making is so fraught and complicated and living together is hard. But we’re not going to make it easier by being more hard-headed about numbers — especially if the numbers themselves don’t make any sense.

The Fictional Evil Utilitarian N.I.C.E. And The Actual Utilitarian U. K. N.I.C.E. WTF?

I was talking with my partner one morning about the vexing modern problem of putting numbers on amorphous things so you can measure the unmeasurable. And because I've been immersed in a research project on philosophical issues in Cost-Effectiveness Analysis, I brought up the example of quantification in health care resource allocation.

I said something like "They quantify health through QALYs, which evaluate the burdensomeness of health states on a scale from 0 to 1, to prioritize potential treatments according to how many QALYs they produce per dollar. Or sometimes they use a threshold: a specific cost-per-QALY value -- say, $30,000 per QALY. Treatments producing too few QALYs per dollar won't be funded." 

My partner, being an interesting person and not a philosopher, said "Hold on, who is 'they?'"

And I said, "Oh, well in the UK it's N.I.C.E." The National Institute for something something. Care and Excellence. Or something."

"Did you say "N.I.C.E"? Because N.I.C.E. is also the name of the dystopian evil utilitarian organization in C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength."

Wait. What? Are you telling me that an actual utilitarian U. K. organization founded in the late 20th century has the same acronymic name as a fiction evil utilitarian organization in a 1945 book by a famous U.K. author? How is that possible?

At the time we had this conversation, I had never read That Hideous Strength, but it had long figured in our family imaginary. For my partner and his daughter, it occupied a  space in the overlap zone between "brilliant" and "problematic" -- problematic because sexist, homophobic, and shot through with imperialism. Despite their warnings, of course I had to read the book immediately.


The author, C. S. Lewis, is the British Christian fantasy writer who also produced the Narnia chronicles. So when I say that N.I.C.E. in Lewis's book is "evil," that's not an exaggerating synonym for "committing bad acts." They're literally evil.

In the novel, N.I.C.E. -- "The National Institute of Coordinated Experiments" -- is publicly a scientific and social planning agency weaning us from sentimental attachments to usher in an era of objective social improvements. Behind the scenes, N.I.C.E. is furtively pursuing its evil program for the exploitation of nature and the annihilation of humanity.  

If you've ever encountered the arguments utilitarians use to defend their idea that the right action is the one that rationally brings about the best consequences, passages from (fictional) N.I.C.E.'s representatives will sound eerily familiar. Their aim is "the scientific reconstruction of the human race in the direction of increased efficiency." Other value judgments based on justice, beauty, or love are "essentially subjective and instinctive." Ethical beliefs turn out on inspection "to be simply an expression of emotion."

Readers of Peter Singer's 1995 "Ethics and Intuitions" may be reminded of his idea that common moral judgements conflicting with utilitarian outcomes are a "biological residue of our evolutionary history." We evolved to have "intuitions" about justice only because punishing wrongdoers was an evolutionary success.

As Singer explains, the status of moral judgments -- especially those reflecting justice -- is significant because these judgments have long been used to discredit utilitarianism. "H. J. McCloskey, writing at a time when lynchings in the U.S. South were still a possibility, thought it a decisive objection to utilitarianism that the theory might direct a sheriff to frame an innocent man in order to prevent a white mob lynching half a dozen innocents in revenge for a rape" (Singer 343-345). That is, our judgment is that framing an innocent person is wrong, regardless of the consequences, because it is unjust. But "bringing about the best consequences" seems to entail that preventing the riot could be the right thing to do. Thus judgments based on justice seem to undermine utilitarianism.

But Singer says not so. Unlike utilitarian judgments like "five deaths is worse than one," which is "rational," our justice-based "intuitions" should have no standing in our figuring out what is right. As with the fictional N.I.C.E., Singer urges that they reflect an "instinctive" sense of reciprocity -- and should be discarded.  

In retrospect, it's not surprising that Lewis would put into the mouths of N.I.C.E.'s representatives talking points familiar from utilitarianism. The rough idea Singer is presenting goes back at least to the British philosopher Sidgwick in the late 19th century. And it's obvious why a Christian ethics would be deeply at odds with utilitarian thinking and why Lewis would be tempted to depict utilitarianism as a manifestation of evil.

The U.K.'s actual real life N.I.C.E. isn't exactly utilitarian, but it does use the utilitarian principles of Cost-Effectiveness Analysis to decide which treatments should be publicly funded. Proposed treatments are evaluated according to how many QALYs they are likely to produce per unit cost: decisions are thus based on bringing about aggregated good consequences. 

Like utilitarianism, CEA leads to outcomes conflicting with our moral judgments. The process can lead to discrimination against people with disabilities, as people with disabilities are often judged to have a lower quality of life than non-disabled people; thus interventions extending their lives may be seen as less effective. Since "a QALY is a QALY," the process is insensitive to distribution and equity, with no priority for younger people or the worse off, and no amelioration of existing health inequities. Because of aggregation, low-cost interventions that benefit many people may be more cost-effective than those bringing enormous benefits to small numbers of people: in one famous example, the state of Oregon carried out a large-scale CEA that resulted in part in the conclusion that paying for capping teeth would be more cost-effective than paying for appendectomies.

How to respond to these problems with CEA is part of my current research project on Cost-Benefit Analysis and its offshoots, but this post isn't about that, it's about ACRONYMS. Who thought it was a good idea for an actual utilitarian U. K. organization promoting social progress and rationality to have the same name as a fictional evil utilitarian organization promoting social progress and rationality?

Did no one on the original board of directions pipe up and say "Hey, I know we're not the evil kind of utilitarians. But don't you think it's going to look weird if we say we're N.I.C.E, for progress, science, and rationality, and that other N.I.C.E. also says it's for science, progress, and rationality -- and the other one is EVIL?"

The only discussion of the acronym issue I could find on the internet was from "LifeSite," describing the case of Leslie Burke, a man with degenerative motor neurone disease who sued the UK government for the right not to be denied nutrition and hydration when his illness rendered him unable to swallow or communicate. The U.K. government appealed an initial ruling in his favor, with a representative for the government explaining that N.I.C.E. guidelines combine considerations of efficacy, quality of life judgments, and economics. "If the principle that "clinicians should be able to follow NICE guidelines without being obliged to accede to patient demands" were undermined, the government argued, then "there would be considerable risk of inefficient use of NHS resources."

Describing the principles of the fictional, evil N.I.C.E. as "a mechanistic and ultra-utilitarian, anti-life philosophy that regards human beings as merely a disposable means to an end," LifeSite says "it seems beyond a coincidental irony that a real-life, government-funded organization that bases its decisions on the same utilitarian principles, could be known by the same acronym: N.I.C.E." With this last part, I agree. It does seem beyond a coincidental irony.

As to the broader question of the status of moral judgments or "intuitions," in his article Singer doesn't say what he thinks about framing an innocent person to prevent a riot -- whether he thinks there is some way that contrary to first appearances framing the innocent person actually doesn't produce the best consequences, or whether he thinks framing an innocent person could be the ethical right action.

As a non-utilitarian, I can say more simply that framing an innocent person is wrong, because it's unjust, and I think that is true partly because moral judgments reflect what we care about, which can include values like justice.

In the spirit of this post you may be wondering: could you modify CEA so that instead of measuring QALYs it quantifies and takes into account these other values and thus becomes a new and improved decision-making method? I am so glad you asked! That is what I am working on. It's complicated, but the short answer seems to be "no."

The Subjectivity Of Everything: Music And Math Edition

Recently from a combination of world-weariness, pandemic-weariness, and me-weariness, I was seized by a desire to think about something abstract, useless, inert, and intellectually challenging. "I know what I'll do," I thought. "I'll buy a book about math."

I went to a small bookstore and asked, "Do you have a math section?" No. But there among the science books I came upon Music By the Numbers by math historian Eli Maor. I thought it would be about music theory and the mathematical underpinnings of classical music structures -- something I vaguely remember being interested in when I read about it in Gödel, Escher, Bach as a teenager forty years ago. But it was more about the fundamental mechanics of western music's organization of sound. Where did all these notes come from?

I knew that with a string, half as long means an octave higher. What I learned first is that the Pythagoreans and their followers based an entire scale on their idea of pleasing fractional intervals. The full story is a bit complicated, but taking fourths and fifths as a starting point, you can create a scale with a version of the "whole tone" interval we're familiar with (C to D, for example) based on a 9/8 ratio of a note to its predecessor (and a half-tone with ratio 256/243).

Maor says that while this way of creating a scale is mathematically elegant, it is out of step with the pitches produced in harmonic overtones -- and thus with the fundamentals of acoustics itself. From a philosophical point of view, Maor argues that their obsession with formal beauty led Pythagorean followers into a self-circular mathematical maze: by insisting on mathematical simplicity, pleasing ratios, and no irrational numbers, they "subject[ed] the laws of nature to their ideals of beauty."

But the more amazing moment for me came later, when I learned about tempering. As I kid, I knew about Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and I used to enjoy imagining that the well-tempered clavier had replaced a sour and irritable keyboard instrument known as "the ill-tempered clavier." But in all these years, I never learned what tempering is.

The background for tempering in the Western context happened around 1550, when a new scale was created bringing in intervals of thirds and their inversions. This "just-intonation" scale has intervals close to the ones we'd find on a modern piano. Maor argues that as it is based on the first six members of the natural harmonic series, and has pitches corresponding to the natural harmonics of musical instruments, it is acoustically and empirically superior to the Pythagorean scale. You could say that it has formalism that is not so much mathematical but rather musical.

However: a crucial feature of the just-intonation scale is that not all the tone ratios are the same. For example, in a C-major scale, the ratio of C to D would be 9/8 and from D to E, 10/9.

From a musical point of view, Maor argues, this is as it should be. It's from the practical and social point of view that these differences became a problem. For instruments with keyboards and fixed holes, a just-intonation tuning in one key will have notes at slightly different pitches from those in another key. Increasingly, people wanted to play together, with multiple instruments all at once. What if a group wants to play one piece in one key and another in another? The workarounds were complicated: early harpsichords had multiple keyboards, each tuned to a different key, for pieces written in different key signatures.

"Tempering," then, is creating a scale with even divisions, all the same. You just divide the octave into 12 equal semitones. Now all the instruments can play together, and playing in C is the same set of notes as playing in any other key.

Math people may already see that, unlike the just-intonation scale, the ratio of a note to its predecessor in the tempered scale is based on irrational numbers -- numbers that cannot be expressed as fractions. Having even divisions requires dividing the scale into equal parts -- in this case, 12 equal half-tones -- and to be equal, each ratio between a note and its predecessor in the sale would have to be the twelfth root of 2 to 1.

Maor: "This irrational number would have been regarded with horror by the Pythagoreans, as it cannot be written as a ratio of integers." !!!

Leaving aside Pythagorean worries, Maor describes tempering as "an acceptable compromise" between "the dictates of musical harmony" and "the practicality of playing a piece on the keyboard." The difference between the tempered semi-tone and the just-intonation semi-tone is just barely within what human ears can discern, a difference "most musicians were willing to live with." Maor alludes to a suggestion that Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier was partly PR: written to convince his fellow musicians of the benefits of this sociable way of organizing everything.

I found myself astonished by idea that the structural simplicity I associate with piano keys is the result of an "acceptable compromise" to solve practical problems of musicians playing together.

From a personal point of view, I guess I thought that the Western division of the octave into 12 equal semitones was somehow linked to the fundamental structure of music and sound. Not that it was the only way to exploit that structure -- I've always known that non-Western music was organized differently -- but that it was one way. Now this book says not only is that not so, but it's even weirder: there is structure of music and sound, and those equal piano divisions are really, deeply, not it.

From a philosophical point of view, the analysis provides an interesting reminder about the subjectivity of concepts like simplicity and elegance. For the Pythagoreans, these concepts translated to rationality. For the just-intonation fans, they relate to harmonics and ratios. For the temperers, it's like brute force to make it work -- hey, make 12 that are exactly the same, whether they are rational or not.

From a mathematical point of view, it's striking to see how slippery the difference between natural numbers and other numbers can be. The nineteenth-century mathematician Leopold Kroeneker is famous for having said "God made the integers; all else is the work of man." But when you can describe the tempered scale in terms of "12 equal divisions" or "12 irrational tone ratios" -- well, things start to seem less clear. Even in math, simplicity and elegance can mean one thing in one context and another in another.

From a sociological point of view, I found myself wondering: did books like this used to be more common, or more talked about, or something? I feel like Gödel, Escher Bach was a bit splash of a book, right around the time of other math books like the Gleick book Chaos. But now my bookstore doesn't even have a math section. Did the world change, or is it something about me that's different?

Advice Of The Pandemic, Ranked!

Among the by-products of the pandemic has been a tsunami of advice, especially about living your best life in lockdown. Was it any good?

Advice: if you're working from home, keep your routines
Early on, the news reports were that people working from home were flailing: cleaning the kitchen when they should be working, bingeing shows when they should be eating, eating when they should be cleaning the kitchen. Was this ever true, or was it just irresistible to imagine people collectively unable to get their shit together?

The advice was predictable and perfectly capitalistic. Keep your routines, they said. If you usually dress up and wear full make-up to work, get up in time to dress up and do your make-up, they said. If you usually commute to work, walk around the apartment for 30 minutes before you sit down at your desk. Take a virtual coffee break with your co-workers.

I thought to myself: who would be so stupid as to add the old burdens of their old life to the new burdens of their new life? Me, I worked in my exercise clothes and took naps over lunch. Did this advice work for anyone?



Verdict: terrible.

Advice: go easy on yourself
This one is complicated because clearly, for some people, "go easy on yourself" was the perfect advice. I'm here to tell you about the rest of us.

As for so many people, in March 2020 my job became an endless series of Zoom-style meetings, unanticipated problems, and difficult conversations. Early on, I thought "I'll go easy on myself" -- instead of trying to do things during weekends or early evenings, I'd spend the time "resting" or "hanging out."

Three weeks of this and I was mired in despair. My always-present sense of my life drifting away and passing me by intensified; thoughts in the "what am I doing and what is the point anyway" category buzzed around my brain like a bunch of gnats. I felt the mold between the bathroom tiles mocking me. With extra free time, my irrational body self-criticism meter ramped up from the blue "Guarded" category into the orange "High Alert!" range.

The advice to go easy often reminds me of some advice my mother once gave me about cleaning. I was complaining that on the occasions when I was on my own and cooking, I hated having to cook *and* having to clean up, which does feel to me like an outrageous burden at the end of a long day. My mom -- whose motto in life was "If you don't want to, you don't have to" -- told me I should clean up the dishes in the morning, and that if I didn't want to wake up to a messy kitchen, I should just "put the dishes in the oven" after dinner. I'm sorry, but dirty dishes in the oven? What kind of a bizarre suggestion is this?

Anyway, to stay sane in the pandemic, I switched into "mental discipline" mode. I scrubbed the floors. I did a zillion live-stream workout, yoga, and ballet classes. I made an elaborate system of calendar alerts. I recommitted to Duolingo.

Obviously, for some people this particular challenge didn't arise, because they were working massive hours or juggling child care or whatever, and obviously "go easy on yourself" makes total sense in that context. For other people, "go easy on yourself" was just what they needed to hear for whatever reason. It just didn't work for me.  

I feel like there's a lot of pointless social aggression out there between the "go easy" people and the "mental discipline" people. Can we please have a détente on this issue?

Verdict: variable.

Advice: create a Zoom social spot
This is the idea that if your job is virtual meetings and your social life is virtual meetings, you should do those two things in two different physical spaces in your home.

I love this advice, because it is geared toward people with lizard brains and I am 100 percent a person with lizard brain.

Virtual interactions give me a special kind of social anxiety. I'm not sure why, but one possibility is that when I'm with people, I'm used to relying a lot on subtle physical and facial cues in figuring out how to interact. Also, I feel like in a room with people, I enjoy the small pauses and silences -- I've always been good at being together and being quiet -- but somehow on a screen, I feel like I have to fill the air with talk, like some kind of demented TV show host. Ugh.

Because I have lizard brain, the layers of Zoom-social-anxiety particular to work-Zoom are queued right up for me when I'm in my work spot -- the chair, the wall behind me appearing on my own screen, the light bouncing off the desk in just such a way. What a relief to take the laptop to the dinner table for the friend-Zoom!

Verdict: the best.
 

Why Do I Care About The Gender Of Elena Ferrante?

When I first encountered the kerfuffle around the true identity of the novelist Elena Ferrante, I had two immediate and diametrically opposed reactions. First, smugness: I never concern myself with the autobiographical details of authors I love. So who cares? Second, freak out: wait, "Elena Ferrante" might not be a woman?

Normally I use mental discipline to avoid finding out about fiction writers. If I love a novel, thinking about which parts might be based on real life leads me down a mental rabbit hole of pointless philosophical questions. "If that part is real, did it really happen like that? Or is the author changing the details to manipulate me into feeling one way or another about a thing?" Then I'm like "What do you mean, 'manipulating,' anyway"? Talk about pointless and dumb.

However, I have also been shaken to learn certain facts about books I love, especially books representing the experience of women, especially books representing the experience of women and sexuality.

As a young person, I fell in love with Colette, the early twentieth-century French writer whose work and life challenged gender norms and all other kinds of conventions. Colette is best known now for the book that inspired the movie Gigi, but if that's all you know about Colette then you have the wrong idea -- as so often happens, the novel is darker, weirder, and more interesting. Colette is also famous for her many short stories. But the books I feel hardest for were the Claudine series.  

Over the course of the four Claudine books, Claudine grows from a precocious and rambunctious fifteen-year-old into a comfortably bourgeois but also free-thinking and unconventional adult. The first book, Claudine at School, gives an amusing side-on look at French social life in the provinces and the complex emotions of mid-adolescent feminine life. Among other complexities, Claudine has a massive crush on her young school teacher Aimée; they have a budding sensual romance when Aimée throws her over for the head schoolmistress, mystifying Claudine and giving her minor heartbreak. Aimée's younger sister Luce develops an unreciprocated love for Claudine, who doesn't understand her own desire to hurt Luce and cause her pain.

The way Claudine has romantic feelings for women and men and the way at fifteen she is both highly sensual and also a child both profoundly resonate with me. So I was disturbed to learn that the first version of Claudine at School may have been a more chaste and childlike story, and that Claudine's husband -- the writer Willy, who first told her to write up her memories and initially published the Claudine books under his own name (!), may have told her to tart them up, to liven them up with sex. I don't have sophisticated thoughts about this, but the idea that my favorite things were in there because some guy wanted them in there made me feel sad and weird.

Then a similar thing happened with erotic novel Story of O. That's not a book I loved (and the kind of submission/dominance thing in that book is not my kind of thing), but I always appreciated Story of O as a frank and explicit presentation of a certain version of positive sexuality from a woman's point of view. How many stories depict a woman being sexually adventurous and just basically enjoying it and having a great time? It's not a lot.

So, again, I was unsettled to learn late in life that while the author is a woman, the book may have been originally written for a man. That is, the author was in a relationship with a man, and wanted to get his attention, to turn him on, and to flirt with him. Again, I don't have sophisticated thoughts about this, but I find it disappointing to think that this, too, like so many things depicting women's sexuality, was ultimately crafted to appeal to a man's taste.

I loved Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, and I found The Days of Abandonment conveyed vividly what if feels like to be trapped in your life and in despair. Like Claudine at School, The Lying Life of Adults shows a textured experience of girlhood-womanhood adolescence.

It's been suggested that Ferrante may be a woman, or may not be a woman, or may be a woman and a man writing together. I feel like there's some sense in which I shouldn't care: the books are the books whoever the author is, and Ferrante herself has suggested that it's misogyny and sexism that makes people want to know.

But I also can't shake the feeling that the thoughts and feelings of people who aren't women so often affect what gets presented as the truth about women. It happens in pornography, it happens in movies, and it happens in books; given the way social gender norms work, it probably happens whenever there is an audience. While the books are the books whoever the author is, I also don't want the books by Elena Ferrante to be another example where the tastes, attitudes, and feelings of people who are not women are shaping narratives of our woman- and girl-hood experience.

What Compelled Me to Reread Dracula During Lockdown?

I don't know how it started, but I think it was something in the NYT crossword, something to do with Keanu Reeves. My partner said, "Keanu Reeves was in Dracula." Wait, what? From the miracle of modern self-surveillance, I know that I looked it up and learned that Keanu Reeves did not play Dracula (thank god) but rather Jonathan Harker, the lawyer. Whether Gary Oldman is any less WTF as Dracula I leave as an exercise to the reader.

I have a long history with Dracula, a book that obsessed my father when I was a kid. My father was the kind of guy where a lot of things were like 80 percent jokes and 20 percent serious and others were 20 percent jokes and 80 percent serious and it was always a little murky, probably even in his own mind, where we stood on things. After his annual rereading, my father would sleep with garlic under his pillow out of fear. You might think that's the 80 percent joke, but this was a man whose nightmares tended to actual devils actually chasing him, so I'm not so sure.

Later, I had the widely shared adolescent girl experience of being "into" vampires, whatever that means. I watched the movie The Hunger over and over, and read a lot of Anne Rice. My first reading of Dracula, around that time, I had a vivid sense of the erotic in the vampires' ways -- you may not remember this, but these are literally described as "voluptuous" in the book. Poor Jonathan Harker, on meeting the women in the castle who want to drink his blood, describes their voluptuousness as "both thrilling and repulsive." I remembered the book as basically anti-vampire, but not in any particular way.

On this rereading, by contrast, I felt the full weight of the Christian anti-sex moralizing. As Lucy's appearance begins to shift toward the vampiric zone, her friends are disgusted by the new sensuality of her face; after they destroy her body to free her from Dracula's spell, they're thrilled to see her previous sweet, pure expression and physiognomy return. A "diabolical sweetness" allows vampires to express love and desire to seduce new recruits. I guess I'm as against killing people and sucking their blood as anyone else, but this framing struck me as depressing and dumb.

Rereading Dracula during lockdown, I couldn't help but notice that it's partly a travel book. The best part of the story is when Jonathan Harker first goes to Transylvania, ostensibly to help the Count with some clerical matters, and slowly gets caught up in Dracula's web. There are trains, and ships, and transfers to carriages, and rides on horses. I was like, "Oh yeah -- travel!" Of course, so much of that late nineteenth-century mode, of going to truly unknown places and being completely cut off from anything familiar, is totally lost to us now. These days, Jonathan Harker could read on Yelp, "Castle looks interesting but they will kill you and drink your blood. One star."

The most melancholy aspect of my reading experience was the way that it was stupidly mediated by all the ridiculous parodies, take-offs, and remakes of the Dracula story that I've encountered in my time. Chief among these was the 1979 film Love at First Bite, which as a kid I saw on TV multiple times and found hilarious and awesome. How could I not love a vampire movie that featured the classic disco song "I Love the Nightlife"? There's also Young Frankenstein, which takes place at a castle in Transylvania for who knows what reasons. Memories of those films made me see Renfield as an annoying twerp, the horses and wolves under Dracula's command as side-shows, and even the Count himself in the light of a ridiculous show-boater.

Overall, the whole thing was a sadder and less fun affair than I'd hoped it would be, though whether that's because I'm old, or because of lockdown, or because the book isn't really that good is totally unclear.

Enraged by Irritations: Human Nature Or Aristocratic Problem?

I don't know if you've read The Leopard -- the 1958 book by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that tells a story of social change and the decline of the nobility in 19th-century Sicily through the narrative of the Salina family and its patriarch Don Fabrizio.

I love The Leopard. I love the sensuality of the narrative and of Don Fabrizio himself. I love the way Don Fabrizio admires and supports his nephew Tancredi, even though Tancredi represents the decline of the Salina's social class. I love the way that Don Fabrizio's real interest, and true comfort, lies in astronomy and mathematics.

At one point in the story, Father Pirrone - a priest who lives with the Salina family -- is asked to reflect on what the aristocrats think about then coming shifts in social equality. And he tries to answer, he gets caught up in a long and rambling response because he doesn't know how to explain how the nobility see the world and how different it is.

In trying to express the incomprehensibility what the nobility care about and what they don't, he says "I've seen Don Fabrizio get quite testy, wise and serious though he is, because of a badly ironed collar to his shirt; and I know for certain that the Prince of Làscari didn't sleep for a whole night from rage because he was wrongly placed at one of the Viceroy's dinners."

Encountering that passage always gives me a shock of recognition in an uncomfortable way. Because I, too, am frequently thrown by small irritations. I went through a phase where if I was chopping vegetables and a small piece of something would fall on the floor, I would flip out, feel the world was against me. The problem of price stickers leaving sticky residue on elegant objects sends me into a tailspin. Sometimes I get dressed to go out, and realize my shoes won't work with the weather, and realize my outfit won't work with different shoes, and I get a complete feeling of despair come over me. Yesterday morning, my clothes hangers got tangled up and I was like OK, that's it, we're done.

I don't think I'm alone. I've seen friends in a rage because of coffee spilled on a shirt, or a glass dropped on the floor.

I used to buy into the orthodoxy of "underlying mood": that this kind of thing happens because there is an undercurrent of stress and anxiety so intense that the seeming OKness of the surface is a superficial layer, a paint job over roiling chaos. Sometimes that's true. You can always describe it that way if you want to. But often it doesn't feel that way to me. To me, it feels more like a plunge into the essential pointlessness and harrassingness of human existence, a plunge caused by the irritation itself, not requiring unusual life stress as a background condition.

At first, I was inclined to draw the conclusion that Father Pirrone's association of this experience with aristocracy was questionable. I'm not an aristocrat, and neither are my friends. But then I started wondering if maybe just being middle-class and white in North America was a kind of experience of aristocracy -- I mean, that the relevant background needs and social comforts are met at such a high general high level that our idea of what is a "problem" would be more similar to that of the Salina family than to the non-aristocrats of 19th century Sicily.

But then -- "on the third hand," as my mother liked to say -- I got to thinking, maybe Father Pirrone is wrong about it after all -- because what does Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa know about it? He was the last Prince of Lampedusa and owner of a hereditary agricultural estate. He has no special insights into whether being enraged by irritations is a special aristocrat thing or more a general human thing.

I used to have a lot less money than I do now, and for a time I was in difficult circumstances. I've been trying to remember whether I was just enraged by small irritations then as I am now. But I can't quite sort it out. In my mind's eye of that time, I'm just smoking a lot of cigarettes. I do remember that when I worked as a waitress, one of my tasks was to break cold feta cheese into crumbled feta cheese with my hands, and I hated the feeling so badly, I swore I'd never do that by choice. To this day, I use a knife to chop feta into little cubes.

So: enraged by irritations: human nature or aristocratic problem? I'm really not sure. Or -- maybe it's just me?

Trade-Offs Versus Optimization: Is Everything An Optimization Problem?

In my work on ethics, I'm what I think of as a "trade-off" person rather than an "optimize" person. In the informal sense, this means that I see conflicting and competing considerations and values all around, and I think the ethical task is often to figure out how to prioritize among various considerations, instead of thinking that the ethical task is to figure out what is good and then bring about as much of that as possible.

If your first thought is "Wait, how are those really different?" then you are right in lock step with what a lot of other people are thinking.


To me, on the face of it they seem very different. For example: when the pandemic led to conditions where not everyone could be treated because there weren't enough resources, ventilators, and so on, one system of decision-making would be to "maximize overall health by directing care toward those most likely to benefit the most from it." For example, give the resources you have to the people most likely to survive, in ways that maximize the additional healthy years they will live. This is an optimizing strategy as it identifies a good -- healthy years of life to come -- and frames choices as maximizing that good.

A problem with this optimizing strategy is that it leads to discriminatory effects. "Health years" of life is usually understood as meaning years of life without a disability, so other things being equal, a person with a disability would be less likely to be treated than a non-disabled person. Because of social injustice and oppression, Black people in the US often have worse health than white people; if they were therefore less likely to have good outcomes, they would be less prioritized for treatment. Poor people are much more likely to have underlying health conditions and thus would be less likely to be treated. 

The "trade-off" perspective, on the other hand, frames the problem as one in which there are a variety of considerations that have to be weighed and balanced. Producing good effects in the sense of future years of life might be one consideration, but fairness and justice would also be a consideration. You might decide to use subjective measures of quality of life in which having a disability does not make a life less good; you might explicitly bring-anti-racism into the picture. You have to come up with a way of proceeding that weighs multiple considerations against one another. It might be complicated, and you might have to use your judgment.

When I have talked about these issues in classes or at conferences, defending a trade-off approach, occasionally someone will say to me: "If you frame it properly, everything is an optimization problem." I take it they mean something like this: while maximizing healthy years is one way of optimizing, it is not the only way; whatever value you think is good you can run a maximizing strategy on it. For instance, if you think future years of life, fairness, justice and equality are all important, you can create some concept like "overall goodness" that incorporates all of these. Then you can just maximize that. So there isn't really any difference; trading-off is not a separate and different kind of thing; it's more just what you're trying to maximize.

In harmony with this idea, there is a technical result that any set of ethical judgements can be "consequentialized" -- that is, expressed as the result of an optimizing procedure.

So if you were thinking, "Wait, how are those really different?" the answer is that in some deep conceptual sense, maybe they are not really different.

OK. But then I think: what about the other senses -- the ones that are not the deep conceptual senses? Even if you *can* frame your approach in optimizing terms-- should you?

I think the answer to this question is often "No." The details are tricky and probably boring for most people, but here is a short version:

1) Both methods require moral judgment, in the sense of figuring out what is important and how important it is, but "optimizing" has a veneer of objectivity to it, like we're just number-crunching. News flash: we're never just number-crunching. Talking about "trade-offs" reminds us constantly that we're using our human judgment and our values to figure out what to do.

2) "Trade-off" reminds you immediately that no matter what you do, you may have lost something, so that even if you get the right balance something bad happened. The language of "optimizing," however, has unsettling connotation of "everything is all for the best." If you have to prioritize one person over another, and you make a good decision, but the other person dies, do you really want to say "well, that was optimal"? In fact, noticing that it wasn't optimal may prompt you to think or plan differently in the future -- e. g., trying to prevent people from getting sick in the first place.  

3) "Optimization" lends itself to methodologies where the inputs are easily measurable. Yes, you can optimize for things like justice and fairness and anti-oppression, in the sense that you can come to a judgment about what to do that honors those values in the way you think best in the circumstances. But, especially given 1), once you're in the optimization frame of mind, it's natural to start thinking that you're going to be more objective, precise, and accurate if you have numbers to put in -- something like, I don't know, estimates of "healthy future years lived." When those don't reflect the values you wanted to use, you'll end up coming to the wrong answer.

The pandemic and our responses to it are full of massively complex challenging questions: How should we balance protecting our health with the losses that come from lockdowns? How should we express our valuing of children's schooling with protecting everyone from harm? How far should we go in trying to eliminate COVID as opposed to just flattening the curve?

These questions have no easy answers and that's one reason we're all in dismay and disagreement about them. Talk of optimizing, even if conceptually sound, makes it seem like some of us are right and some of us are stupid, and makes us want to invest in computer science. Talk of trade-offs reminds us: honoring multiple values in complex circumstances is difficult and fraught, and it's values all the way down. 

Anti-Racist Values And Decision-Making On Campus

Like a lot of other universities around North America, my university has been talking over the last few weeks about anti-racism and what universities need to do to do better. Among other things, events included a workshop I attended last week. I've been thinking about an important point that the speaker made, which is if you say that you have anti-racist values (which universities do), then you have to put those values into practice, otherwise it's just talk. Success at putting those values into practice is manifested in practical outcomes, and can thus be seen and measured.

This point got me to thinking about the different ways that university systems work to create the outcomes that we do, in fact, experience and see. One thing that happens a lot in universities, to one degree or another, is that decisions are driven by undergraduate enrolment statistics. Departments and faculties get resources if they attract more students and majors. Departments and faculties die if they fail to attract students and majors. Individual classes run, or don't run, based on whether they attract students. As you can imagine, this can influence big decisions, like who gets hired to do what, and vast numbers of smaller decisions, like what gets on a syllabus.

This way of proceeding has always seemed to me a bit bizarre. Are we really going to let the decisions of a bunch of 18-22 year-olds -- and, the narrow slice of them who happen to go to university -- determine the direction of scholarly research and the ideas that a community invests in? This is nothing against young people -- it's just weird to have this tiny cross-section of society wield this enormous power over something that is quite important and complicated.

And even from an abstract point of view, you can see how this way of proceeding might tend away from, rather than toward, teaching and research focused on anti-racism and anti-oppression. Young white people may not want to confront their place in an unjust system. Almost all young people are pressured to study practical subjects. In universities without breadth requirements, students in STEM majors may feel they don't have time in their course schedule for other things. These pressures don't come just from anxious parents, they also come from the way our world is -- hyper competitive, capitalistic, etc. etc.

If I understand correctly, one way of framing decision-making based on enrolment goes something like this: undergraduate tuition pays the bills, so that is the income; a sensible organization of a system lines up the income and the expenses so that the one pays for the other in some linear kind of way.  I've even heard of universities where they say "you eat what you kill": the idea being that self-sufficiency market-based norms coordinating input and output should undergird university decision-making.

There is much to say about this, but what I want to focus on here is the veneer of objectivity and neutrality sometimes placed on this framing. Apportioning resources in a way that seems to line up supply with demand can seem like you are avoiding these problematic value-laden judgments. It may seem like you're taking a step back -- *we* aren't the ones making these decisions. It's just how things shake out when you look at the numbers.

But all ways of making decisions are value-laden and non-neutral. If you do a cost-benefit analysis, you're making judgments about how to weigh everyone's choices and what other values -- like justice -- you're ignoring. If you base everything on consent and individual liberty, you're making judgments that privilege the status quo, and that rule out rectification of historical injustice. The metaphor of the market rests on assumptions that what your customers want and need is what should be created, and that their sense of worth should inform yours.

As racialized people have been saying for a long time, the social structures in place that feel neutral or objective to those in the dominant social group are anything but, and often work to reinforce the injustices of the past.

Of course universities should factor into their decision-making what students are looking for. When they do so, they pay respect to certain values, including respect for student needs and student autonomy. The point here is just that other values matter too -- values that are distinct from these, and may conflict with them. If you say you care about these other values, you have to find a way to make room for them in practical decision-making at various levels, which can mean bringing judgment calls back into the picture.