Against Human Rights

Hey, look at my eye-catching and misleading title! I must be a journalist...

Seriously, though, today I'm going to discuss some of my recent thoughts on consequentialism, and why I don't think we need to appeal to a concept of 'human rights' in order to act ethically toward other people.

First, a brief explanation of the topic:

Consequentialism is a position in moral theory which holds that the consequences of a particular action determine the moral value of that action. An action with good consequences is a morally correct action, and an action with bad consequences is morally incorrect. Different consequentialist theories have different criteria for what counts as a "good" or "bad" consequence. The most widely defended version of consequentialism is utilitarianism, which was developed by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham in the 19th century. Utilitarianism holds that the ultimate judge of any action is its tendency to produce a net increase in happiness (or pleasure). For example, lying is acceptable in cases where there are readily apparent benefits for doing so.

Consequentialism is usually defined in opposition to deontology and virtue ethics (together, these are sometimes referred to as the "Big Three" of moral theory). Deontology judges actions based on how well those actions conform to a set of moral rules. The best-known defender of deontology is Immanuel Kant, who developed the idea of the categorical imperative. One formulation of the categorical imperative is as follows: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."* The basic idea is that an immoral action is one which would destroy itself if it were made into a universal rule of action. For example, lying is always immoral because, if everyone lied about everything, that would destroy the very meaning of a lie.

Finally, virtue ethics stipulates that the important element of ethics is not any particular action, but rather the character of the person who performs that action. Hence, a lie is judged by the virtue of the liar. If I tell you that dress looks good on you because I want you to feel good about yourself, then I did the right thing. If I tell you it looks good on you just so you'll stop harping on about the dance tonight, then I did a bad thing. Virtue ethics is largely defunct in modern philosophy, due to the growing doubt that people actually act according to a set of robust character traits. For a brilliant treatment of the psychological problems inherent in virtue ethics, please read John Doris's Lack of Character**.

Although most philosophers believe that the "correct" moral theory is neither deontological nor consequentialist, but some mixture of the two, I am growing more and more convinced that a rational moral system can only be hashed out in terms of consequences. The most contentious side-effect of such a system is the utter destruction of anything we now know as "rights" (human rights, animal rights, etc.).*** The idea behind having a "right" is that there are some things other people should never do to us, regardless of the consequences. Imagine that I'm a jailer, and there is an angry mob outside my door. They are demanding that I kill a certain prisoner in my jail. I happen to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man is innocent, and I also know that if the mob doesn't get what they want, there will be a riot and many more innocent people will be trampled to death. Assume that trying to tell the mob the man is innocent is pointless--they simply don't care. The "obvious" consequentialist answer is that I should kill the prisoner. The deontologist will object that the man has a right to not be killed, especially because he has done nothing wrong, and I can't take away that right regardless of the consequences.

I think most of the people who read this blog would agree that I shouldn't kill the man. I also believe that I shouldn't, but I do not think that I need to (or even should) appeal to the idea of an intrinsic right to come to that conclusion. What is needed, I think, is a better account of the consequences of my actions. The short-term consequences of killing the man are obvious: I save many innocent people at the cost of a single innocent person. But what about the long-term consequences? What would our society be like, if people in positions of authority were allowed to kill innocent people to satisfy the masses? I can imagine that a great number of people would live in fear that they would be the next victim of blind hate. Surely those people must be taken into account, if we're going purely on the consequences of my action.

On the other hand, what if I weren't in a position of authority? What if I were some random Joe who had the keys to the prison cell? Then, I would argue, I should kill the man. What's the difference? The difference is that I'm an independent agent--my actions won't affect the rules of society. I'm not violating a professional ethic, so to speak. There is no worry about future consequences--the only effects that matter are the present ones. There may be other concerns (I'm not psychologically capable of killing the man, e.g.) which affect what I can do, but these don't appear to comment on what I should do.

I've only barely sketched the outline of a theory, but I think the benefits of such a theory are readily apparent. First, it's intuitive (at least to me). I speculate that most people would accept killing the man in the second situation, but not the first. This isn't to say that most people wouldn't find killing the man repugnant, but rather that they would grudgingly accept it as a "necessary evil". Second, it avoids the very complicated business of 'rights'. What are rights? Why do we have them? Who decides what rights we have, and on what authority? Granted, calculating consequences is also often difficult, but (I would argue) not obviously as complicated as an abstract notion of rights. Finally, the theory makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. A moral theory should, I think, conform to what is natural for us. Any theory that demands unnatural and unintuitive actions is unlikely to be adhered to, and thus, pragmatically useless. This is the primary reason I reject both virtue ethics and deontology: virtue ethics makes unfounded claims about human psychology, and deontology demands all manner of unnatural actions.

As a last point, I believe this kind of theory is a form of act consequentialism, as opposed to rule consequentialism, but I will discuss that distinction more in a later post.

*From Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
**The class I had with John Doris ( "Mind and Morals") while I was at Washington University was the largest determining factor in my decision to concentrate in moral theory.
***There may still be some place in my theory for discussion of 'rights', but the concept would be merely a neat short-cut that ultimately still appeals to consequences. This is not what we generally mean when we refer to rights.

Insect of the Week: Monkey Grasshopper

This week's insect is a colorful orthopteran of the family Eumastacidae (commonly known as a monkey grasshopper):



From How Stuff Works:

The monkey grasshopper, which lives in tropical rain forests, is famous for its beautiful colors. The monkey ’hopper’s head seems to shine and there are many different colors on its abdomen!

There are over 1,000 different kinds of monkey grasshoppers. Some are mostly green, and these blend in with the colors of their rain forest homes.

Monkey grasshoppers have very short antennae and very long hind legs. Their hind legs are so long that when a monkey ’hopper sits on a leaf, its legs often splay, or spread out, to the sides.

Insect of the Week: Blue Carpenter Bee

This week's insect (ignoring that I missed a week--again) is a gorgeous hymenopteran from Malaysia:


This beautiful lady is a carpenter bee of the species Xylocopa caerulea. According to this website:

A large bee, reaching slightly more than 23mm. Female is mainly black. The thorax is covered with light blue hairs, making it almost fully blue except for a small black patch in the centre. The first abdominal segment and sides of the abdomen are also lined with similar but finer and more sparse blue hairs. I am not srre of what the male looks like, although he is supposed to be similar but lighter in body colour with long blue hairs on part of his head!

This species is apparently quite widely distributed across Southeast Asia, as well as India and parts of China (Yunnan, Guangxi, Hainan).

Science: i does it rite

My brother and I have a water cooler in our apartment, and we pay about $40/month to have bottled water delivered to our door. Both of us are willing to swear up and down that water from the cooler is just that much better than tap water. Because it is. It is goddamn tasty. Anyways, last night, my boyfriend Brian made fun of me for spending money on something that comes free from the tap, and said he couldn't tell the difference between cooler water and tap water. Curious to see whether my own preference was mere confirmation bias, I performed the following experiment.

Set-up: I took four equal-sized notecards. I wrote F on two, and T on the other two (in very light pencil, so there would be no chance that I could see the writing through the cards). I taped the cards on the bottom of four identical glasses. I then filled up each glass to the same mark, either with Tap water or Filter water, depending on which notecard was taped to the bottom. I rearranged the glasses a few times and stuck them in the fridge (because water from the cooler is always colder than water from the tap). After a while, I opened the fridge and mixed the glasses around again, on the off chance that I had subconsciously memorized where I had placed the colder glasses. Finally, I took the glasses out, drank from each one, placed my guesses, and then checked the notecards on the bottom.

Result: I could not only distinguish the filtered water from the tap water, it was superbly easy to do so.

Conclusion: Tap water is objectively nasty.

Suck it, Brian. (No, really.)

Note: There are obvious difficulties with performing a rigorous blind study on yourself, but my set-up was good enough to convince myself of the result. I would be more than happy to repeat the experiment under tightly controlled circumstances.

Insect of the Week: Vinegarroon

This week's Insect isn't an insect at all, but it's not his fault that he has too many legs:


This weird looking critter is a vinegarroon: i.e. an arachnid of the order Thelyphonida. They get their common name from the acid they spray when threatened. It's a mix of acetic and octanoic acid, and smells strongly like vinegar. From Wikipedia:

Vinegarroons are carnivorous, nocturnal hunters feeding mostly on insects and millipedes, but sometimes on worms and slugs. The prey is crushed between special teeth on the inside of the trochanters (the second segment of the leg) of the front legs. They are valuable in controlling the population of roaches and crickets.

Males secrete a sperm sac, which is transferred to the female. Up to 35 eggs are laid in a burrow, within a mucous membrane that preserves moisture. Mothers stay with the eggs and do not eat. The white young that hatch from the eggs climb onto their mother's back and attach themselves there with special suckers. After the first molt they look like miniature vinegarroons, and leave the burrow; the mother dies soon after. The young grow slowly, going through three molts in about three years before reaching adulthood. They live for up to another four years.

I mostly just want to put this guy in a cage with my tarantula and watch them battle it out.

Complicated Atheism

According to this taxonomy, I'm an

• agnostic
• positive
• broad
• unfriendly
• open
• evangelical
• active
• non-religious

atheist. Although I'm not certain about "evangelical". I try to persuade people to give up beliefs that I believe are harmful, but I don't have a lot to say to theists who aren't pushing their beliefs on other people (except maybe "What the hell are you getting out of this?"). I'm not sure I would call myself an "unfriendly" atheist either; it kind of turns on how you interpret "justified belief". I'm in the middle of developing my own theory about the ethics of belief, so I'm not yet comfortable making a definitive statement about what kinds of beliefs a person should hold. Overall, though, I think most of the things I say can be interpreted as "unfriendly" toward religion.

How do you measure up?