One of my favourite philosophy papers recently disappeared from the internet. It’s anonymous, a beautiful and caustic dismissal of all rationalistic theories of ethics, which the author groups together as “Master Factor” theories (which reduce action to one dimension, when they think this cannot and should not be done).

moral theory is exclusive, reductively narrow in its approach to the practical questions that we need to answer; these features of moral theory make it boring, because monotonous, and corrupting, because they encourage us to see this monotony, wrongly, as a good thing; they make moral theory actually corrupt, where mauvaise foi is involved.


They’re not a nihilist, but rather openly intuitionistic:

love is what, most of the time, motivates most of us who are neither complete bastards, nor distracted by secondary concerns such as “what other people will think”—to say this is not to say anything very neat or tidy, either. But that too is as it should be.


It reads like a farewell to academia, a cry of exhaustion from a foiled job-seeker:

As all too often elsewhere in universities, the entrenched sects and their apparently immutable and interminable oppositions persist, not because a compelling intellectual case can be made in their defence (a priori it is entirely possible that the whole lot of them are indefensible), but because each of these sects has fought a successful campaign in institutional politics to establish its curricular and budgetary space—in other words, to become one of the vested interests that deans, heads of department, and other bureaucratic managers must accommodate.


I’m a thoroughgoing Boring-Corrupt consequentialist myself, but I like this paper and don’t want it to fall down the digital hole. Here’s the original .doc (Internet Archive) which I happened upon sometime in 2009.

(I spent a little while trying to work out who wrote it, based on their personal acknowledgments to various St Andrews, Leeds, and Sheffield philosophers, but decided I don’t care.)





Response

The key claim is that it’s psychologically impossible to be a human really acting according to a Master Factor theory. We are too divided, contradictory, and various; as a result it’s dishonest and unhealthy to pretend you are, or to try to.

For instance, if we were perfect (first-order) consequentialists, we’d be constantly paralysed by the need to analyse all of our actions in terms of their effect on the world. This would make us miserable and completely ineffective. (Stocker: “to the extent that you live the theory directly, to that extent you will fail to achieve its goods.”)

The standard response is to separate the ‘criterion of rightness’ (what is actually good) from the ‘deliberative procedure’ (how we go about trying to achieve good). You only optimise the big things, using your limited information and cognitive bandwidth as much as you can, but without angst at being imperfect; you cannot be responsible for something you have no power over. (Austin: “It was never contended… by a sound, orthodox utilitarian that the lover should kiss his mistress with an eye to the common weal.”) Anonymous says we can’t do that.

It’s clear that humans are at best imperfect consequentialists: not least, you must have accurate beliefs to reliably have good effects on the world, and almost no-one generally does. The psychological possibility of living a strict moral code is an empirical question in general - but as existence-proof I can tell Anonymous that I’m a happy person with fairly strict consequentialist morals, a strong sense of community, and as many loving relationships as I can take.

Also - if I’m allowed a circular comment: intuitionism generally leads to poor actions. Intuitionism (e.g. “act as love demands you to act”) is often wrong because our intuitions are rooted in our brutal and amoral natural history, where selfishness, nepotism, othering and myopia were all highly adaptive strategies. Vengeance is intuitive; honor killing is intuitive; actual political corruption is highly intuitive.

Around 1800, the arch-rationalist Bentham predicted that homosexuality wasn’t wrong, that abusing animals was wrong, that slavery was wrong, that women deserved the vote, that retributive punishment is wrong. These remained highly counterintuitive to most of the world for the next two hundred (three hundred?) years. (An imperfect reasoner like all of us, he was wrong about other things, e.g. the colonies.) Was it reason that made us comply with these? At least partially, yes.




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