Addressing the Free Will Problem by Reconciling Different Perspectives

First written: Sep. 2024. Last update: Dec. 2025.

I believe that many concerns over free will have to do with problems of reconciling different perspectives. Indeed, I have come to see the reconciliation of different perspectives as the main underlying problem in most concerns and discussions about free will, even if it is rarely recognized as such.

Contents

Contrasting Perspectives

The following are some of the contrasting perspectives, or modes of being, that seem relevant to discussions of free will:

passive vs. active
descriptive vs. prescriptive
receptive (e.g. purely observing) vs. creative
concerned with the actual vs. concerned with the possible

A similar contrast is the one between explanatory versus justificatory reasons and perspectives, such as when we descriptively explain versus normatively justify a given course of action (Alvarez, 2016).

Relevance to Free Will

I see at least three ways in which these contrasting perspectives are relevant to the issue of free will.

First, it seems that many people roughly understand free will as the capacity to adopt and act on the latter perspectives listed above — for example, the capacity to adopt a prescriptive stance that is concerned with realizing some future possibilities over others, and the capacity to take action on that basis. At the very least, these capacities seem to be core components of what many understand by free will (see e.g. Monroe & Malle, 2010; Lam, 2021). To be clear, I am not claiming that this is what everyone understands by free will; the term “free will” is obviously quite ambiguous, and there appears to be substantial variation in how people define it.

Second, in terms of what people take to be the underlying substance of the free will problem, it seems that a key issue for many is whether we can legitimately adopt the latter perspectives above. That is, whether we can legitimately adopt perspectives that are active, prescriptive, creative, and concerned with possibilities, as opposed to only (legitimately) having a passive and actualist perspective.

Third, some thinkers who argue against the existence of free will sometimes seem to speak as though we cannot legitimately adopt these more active and possibility-focused perspectives — as though the passive and actualist perspective is the only legitimate one. To be sure, these thinkers might not hold that view, yet many of their statements can nevertheless easily be interpreted that way, especially by those who see possibility-focused perspectives as being core to “free will” as they understand it.

Different yet Compatible Perspectives

The contrasting perspectives outlined above are surely different, yet they are not in conflict in the sense that we must choose only one of them. Granted, we might not be able to embody the opposing extremes of these perspectives simultaneously, but we can still fruitfully shift between them, and each of these perspectives seems to have their valid uses.

It is also worth noting that the ability to adopt and act on these perspectives can vary in degree. For example, we can develop our capacity to adopt more of a prescriptive stance — e.g. to reflect on our values and to consider the best path going forward. Similarly, we can increase our ability to act from such a values-based stance, thereby increasing our moral agency. Hence, these perspectives and capacities are not simply there or not in some binary sense, and they are not fixed. We can actively cultivate them, and we arguably have good reason to do so.

These points notwithstanding, some may object that there is a fundamental tension to be found in the contrasting perspectives outlined above, and that there are some contrasting perspectives that we cannot legitimately and consistently hold. I will explore this core tension below.

The Core Tension: One vs. Multiple Possibilities

While there are some tensions to be found between each of the general perspectives listed earlier, these tensions are not necessarily so strong and explicit. Where there is a strong tension is when it comes to the following more specific perspectives, or assumptions: (1) assuming that determinism is true, in the sense that there is only one physically possible outcome from any total state of the universe, and (2) assuming that there are multiple possible outcomes that are truly open to us. I believe this is the core tension for many people who are wrestling with the problem of free will.

Some might seek to deflate this tension with the statement that “determinism does not imply fatalism”, meaning that determinism does not imply that we are steered by fate to end up with the same outcome even if we act in different ways. This statement is true, but it does not clearly address the core tension above. If we assume that there is only one total outcome that is physically possible, then this seems inconsistent with at the same time assuming that there are multiple outcomes that are open to us, at least without further clarification. And the latter is an assumption that we seemingly all have to make when we consider and choose between different options — and arguably when we inhabit any broadly “active” perspective.

Of course, one could compartmentalize one’s beliefs and say that we at one level have our purely descriptive and ontological beliefs, while we at another level have our more “active” and decision-related beliefs. If these levels are sufficiently differentiated, one might at the “passive” level believe that there is only one ontologically possible future outcome, yet at the “active” level believe that we have multiple ex-ante possibilities — possibilities that we perceive to be open to us. (These could also be called “epistemic possibilities” or “possibilities in expectation”.)

Something akin to this two-level approach seems common among people who have thought a lot about the subject of free will — both among those who affirm and deny “free will” — even if the two-level approach is only adopted implicitly (see e.g. Harris, 2012, pp. 16, 39; 2013; Dennett, 2014; Tomasik, 2014; Strawson, 2022).

Yet it nevertheless seems rare to see direct and explicit attempts at addressing this core tension — that is, attempts at coherently reconciling a “passive” perspective that may involve one future possibility with an “active” perspective that involves multiple future possibilities. I believe it would be helpful if this core tension were generally addressed more directly by those who discuss the problem of free will.

Two Ways to Resolve the Core Tension

There are at least two ways to resolve the core tension described above: an ontological and an epistemic one. These resolutions are not in conflict — we can consistently endorse both and they are arguably complementary.

The Ontological Resolution: Total vs. Relative Perspectives

The central move of the ontological resolution is to distinguish two levels at which we can talk about possibilities. Broadly speaking, there is the total level, which pertains to the entire universe, and there is the relative level, which pertains to some subset of the universe.

For example, at the relative level, we may place a boundary around a particular agent and thus partition the world in two: the agent and the world external to that agent, where the agent is concerned with possibilities available in the external world.

The agent in question can be construed in many ways. It could be a small subsystem within a brain, or it could be a large group of individuals with shared aims. How exactly we construe the agent is not important here.

The point of the ontological resolution is that the truth about possibilities can differ depending on whether we are talking about the total or the relative level. In particular, it can both be true that there is one possible outcome at the total level and that there are many possibilities that are truly open to the agent at the relative level, in the sense that the external world fully permits those possibilities.

Note that this resolution does not rely on merely epistemic possibilities: the possibilities of the external world are genuine possibilities whose realization depends on what the agent does. Indeed, these possibilities are arguably what our epistemic or ex-ante possibilities track to the degree they are well-calibrated. In this sense, we can have genuine ontological possibilities available to us even if the total universe is fully deterministic — that is, fully determined by the external world plus our choices.

This enables the reconciliation of two seemingly opposed perspectives: the universe can be wholly deterministic while we are nevertheless determining actors who choose among genuine possibilities.

The Epistemic Resolution: Uncertainty About Possibilities

The epistemic approach practically reconciles the following contrasting perspectives:

Unitary openness: There is one possible future at the total level, but agents can still choose among genuine possibilities.
Plural openness: There are multiple possible futures at the total level, and agents can choose among these possibilities.

Proponents of plural openness might object that unitary openness seems internally inconsistent, despite the distinction between total and relative levels. However, the epistemic resolution does not require us to settle this debate. Instead, it resolves the issue and practically reconciles these perspectives based on our uncertainty. In particular, when it comes to the question of ontological possibilities at the total level, we have reason to assign a non-zero probability both to there being one possible future and to there being multiple possible futures.

This uncertain stance seems to be the most defensible one for the simple reason that we do not know what is true regarding ontological possibilities at the total level, and there are reasons to think that we cannot know (see e.g. Vinding, 2012, ch. 2). There are probably not many who outright deny this uncertainty; the issue is more whether this uncertainty and its potential role in practically reconciling the two views above are explicitly acknowledged.

The uncertain stance is compatible with each of the perspectives outlined above. Proponents of the unitary view may still hold that there is most likely one possible future at the total level, and they would maintain that we can choose among genuine possibilities regardless. Likewise, proponents of the plural view would find no contradiction in this stance of uncertainty: by their lights, the non-zero probability of multiple possible futures at the total level makes it consistent and practically justified to assume that we can choose among genuine possibilities (cf. “Ontological Possibilities and the Meaningfulness of Ethics”).

In short, proponents of these competing views can broadly agree on these key substantive points, including the point that we can legitimately assume genuine possibilities in our decision-making.

Conclusion

Problems relating to free will often appear intractable because we see a strong conflict between different perspectives: the passive view of a cause-and-effect universe and the active view of an agent choosing among multiple possibilities. Yet these perspectives can be reconciled.

Whether we resolve the tension through the ontological distinction between total and relative levels, or through the admission of epistemic uncertainty, the result is the same: we are practically justified in assuming that multiple possibilities are open to us. We need not reject the scientific worldview to legitimate our role as agents. This insight allows us to set aside any paralyzing concern that our choices are somehow illusory and instead focus on using our active and prescriptive capacities to create a better future.

September 11, 2024

A convergence of moral motivations

My aim in this post is to outline a variety of motivations that all point me in broadly the same direction: toward helping others in general and prioritizing the reduction of suffering in particular.

Contents

Why list these motivations?

There are a few reasons why I consider it worthwhile to list this variety of moral motivations. For one, I happen to find it interesting to notice that my motivations for helping others are so diverse in their nature. (That might sound like a brag, but note that I am not saying that my motivations are necessarily all that flattering or unselfish.) This diversity in motivations is not obvious a priori, and it also seems different from how moral motivations are often described. For example, reasons to help others are frequently described in terms of a singular motivation, such as compassion.

Beyond mere interest, there may also be some psychological and altruistic benefits to identifying these motivations. For instance, if we realize that our commitment to helping others rests on a wide variety of motivations, this might in turn give us a greater sense that it is a robust commitment that we can be confident in, as opposed to being some brittle commitment that rests on just a single wobbly motivation.

Relatedly, if we have a sense of confidence in our altruistic commitment, and if we are aware that it rests on a broad set of motivations, this might also help strengthen and maintain this commitment. For example, one can speculate that it may be possible to tap into extra reserves of altruistic motivation by skillfully shifting between different sources of such motivation.

Another potential benefit of becoming more aware of, and drawing on, a greater variety of altruistic motivations is that they may each trigger different cognitive styles with their own unique benefits. For example, the patterns of thought and attention that are induced by compassion are likely different from those that are induced by a sense of rigorous impartiality, and these respective patterns might well complement each other.

Lastly, being aware of our altruistic motivations could help give us greater insight into our biases. For example, if we are strongly motivated by empathic concern, we might be biased toward mostly helping cute-looking beings who appeal to our empathy circuits, like kittens and squirrels, and toward downplaying the interests of beings who may look less cute, such as lizards and cockroaches. And note that such a bias can persist even if we are also motivated by impartiality at some level. Indeed, it is a recipe for bias to think that a mere cerebral endorsement of impartiality means that we will thereby adhere to impartiality at every level of our cognition. A better awareness of our moral motivations may help us avoid such naive mistakes.

Clarification

I should clarify that this post is not meant to capture everyone’s moral motivations, nor is my aim to convince people to embrace all the motivations I outline below. Rather, my intention is first and foremost to present the moral motivations that I myself am compelled by, and which all to some extent drive me to try to reduce suffering. That being said, I do suspect that many of these motivations will tend to resonate with others as well.

Compassion

Compassion has been defined as “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it”. This is similar to having empathic concern for others (compassion is often regarded as a component of empathic concern).

In contrast to some of the other motivations listed below, compassion is less cerebral and more directly felt as a motivation for helping others. For example, when we experience sympathy for someone’s misery, we hardly need to go through a sequence of inferences in order to be motivated to alleviate that misery. The motivation to help is almost baked into the sympathy itself. Indeed, studies suggest that empathic concern is a significant driver of costly altruism.

In my own case, I think compassion tends to play an important role, though I would not claim that it is sufficient or even necessary for motivating the general approach that I would endorse when it comes to helping others. One reason it is not sufficient is that it needs to be coupled with a more systematic component, which I would broadly refer to as ‘consistency’.

Consistency

As a motivation for helping others, consistency is rather different from compassion. For example, unlike compassion, consistency is cerebral in nature, to the degree that it almost has a logical or deductive character. That is, unlike compassion, consistency per se does not highlight others’ suffering or welfare from the outset. Instead, efforts to help others are more a consequence of applying consistency to our knowledge about our own direct experience: I know that intense suffering feels bad and is worth avoiding for me (all else equal), and hence, by consistency, I conclude that intense suffering feels bad and is worth avoiding for everyone (all else equal).

One might object that it is not inconsistent to view one’s own suffering as being different from the suffering of others, such as by arguing that there are relevant differences between one’s own suffering and the suffering of others. I think there are several points to discuss back and forth on this issue. However, I will not engage in such arguments here, since my aim in this section is not to defend consistency as a moral motivation, but simply to present a rough outline as to how consistency can motivate efforts to help others.

As noted above, a consistency-based motivation for helping others does not strictly require compassion. However, in psychological terms, since none of us are natural consistency-maximizers, it seems likely that compassion will usually be helpful for getting altruistic motivations off the ground in practice. Conversely, as hinted in the previous section, compassion alone is not sufficient for motivating the most effective actions for helping others. After all, one can have a strong desire to reduce suffering without having the consistency-based motivation to treat equal suffering equally and to spend one’s limited resources accordingly.

In short, the respective motivations of compassion and consistency seem to each have unique benefits that make them worth combining, and I would say that they are both core pillars in my own motivations for helping others.

Common sense: A trivial sacrifice compared to what others might gain

Another motivation that appeals to me might be described as a commonsense motivation. That is, there is a vast number of sentient beings in the world, of which I am just one, and hence the beneficial impact that I can have on other sentient beings is vastly greater than the beneficial impact I can have on my own life. After all, once my own basic needs are met, there is probably little I can do to improve my wellbeing much further. Indeed, I will likely find it more meaningful and fulfilling to try to help others than to try to improve my own happiness (cf. the paradox of hedonism and the psychological benefits of having a prosocial purpose).

Of course, it is difficult to quantify just how much greater our impact on others might be compared to our impact on ourselves. Yet given the enormous number of sentient beings who exist around us, and given that our impact potentially reaches far into the future, it is not unreasonable to think that it could be greater by at least a factor of a million (e.g. we may prevent at least million times as many instances of similarly bad suffering in expectation for others than for ourselves).

In light of this massive difference in potential impact, it feels like a no-brainer to dedicate a significant amount of resources toward helping others, especially when my own basic needs are already met. Not doing so would amount to giving several orders of magnitude greater importance to my own wellbeing than to the wellbeing of others, and I see no justification for that. Indeed, one need not endorse anything close to perfect consistency and impartiality to believe that such a massively skewed valuation is implausible. It is arguably just common sense.

The horror of extreme suffering: The “game over” motivation

A particularly strong motivation for me is the sheer horror of extreme suffering. I refer to this as the “game over” motivation because that is my reaction when I witness cases of extreme suffering: a clear sense that nothing is more important than the prevention of such extreme horrors. Game over.

One might argue that this motivation is not distinct from compassion and empathic concern in the broadest sense. And I would agree that it is a species of that broad category of motivations. But I also think there is something distinctive about this “game over” motivation compared to generic empathic concern. For example, the “game over” motivation seems meaningfully different from the motivation to help someone who is struggling in more ordinary ways. In fact, I think there is a sense in which our common circuitry of sympathetic relating practically breaks down when it comes to extreme suffering. The suffering becomes so extreme and unthinkable that our “sympathometer” crashes, and we in effect check out. This is another reason it seems accurate to describe it as a “game over” motivation.

Where the motivations listed above all serve to motivate efforts to help others in general, the motivation described in this section is more of a driver as to what, specifically, I consider the highest priority when it comes to helping others, namely to alleviate and prevent extreme suffering.

Personal identity: I am them

Another motivation derives from what may be called a universal view of personal identity, also known as open individualism. This view entails that all sentient beings are essentially different versions of you, and that there is no deep sense in which the future consciousness-moments of your future self (in the usual narrow sense) is more ‘you’ than the future consciousness-moments of other beings.

Again, I will not try to defend this view here, as opposed to just describing how it can motivate efforts to help others (for a defense, see e.g. Kolak, 2004; Leighton, 2011, ch. 7; Vinding, 2017).

I happen to accept this view of personal identity, and in my opinion it ultimately leaves no alternative but to work for the benefit of all sentient beings. In light of open individualism, it makes no more sense to endorse narrow egoism than to, say, only care about one’s own suffering on Tuesdays. Both equally amount to an arbitrary disregard of my own suffering from an open individualist perspective.

This is one of the ways in which my motivations for helping others are not necessarily all that flattering: on a psychological level, I often feel that I am selfishly trying to prevent future versions of myself from being tortured, virtually none of whom will share my name.

I would say that the “I am them” motivation is generally a strong driver for me, not in a way that changes any of the basic upshots derived from the other motivations, but in a way that reinforces them.

Fairness

Considerations and intuitions related to fairness are also motivating to me. For example, I am lucky to have been born in a relatively wealthy country, and not least to have been born as a human rather than as a tightly confined chicken in a factory farm or a preyed-upon mouse in the wild. There is no sense in which I personally deserve this luck over those who are born in conditions of extreme misery and destitution. Consequently, it is only fair that I “pay back” my relative luck by working to help those beings who were or will be much less lucky in terms of their birth conditions and the like.

I should note that this is not among my stronger or more salient motivations, but I still think it has significant appeal and that it plays some role for me.

Status and recognition

Lastly, I want to highlight the motivation that any cynic would rightly emphasize, namely to gain status and recognition. Helping others can be a way to gain recognition and esteem among our peers, and I am obviously also motivated by that.

There is quite a taboo around acknowledging this motive, but I think that is a mistake. It is simply a fact about the human mind that we want recognition, and this is not necessarily a problem in and of itself. It only becomes a problem if we allow our drive for status to corrupt our efforts to help others, which is no doubt a real risk. Yet we hardly reduce that risk by pretending that we are unaffected by these drives. On the contrary, openly admitting our status motives probably gives us a better chance of mitigating their potentially corrupting influence.

Moreover, while our status drives can impede our altruistic efforts, we should not overlook the possibility that they might sometimes do the opposite, namely improve our efforts to help others.

How could that realistically happen? One way it might happen is by forcing us to seek out the assessments of informed people. That is, if our altruistic efforts are partly driven by a motive to impress relevant experts and evaluators of our work, we might be more motivated to consider and integrate a wider range of informed perspectives (compared to if we were not motivated to impress such evaluators).

Of course, this only works if we are indeed motivated to impress an informed audience, as opposed to just any audience that may be eager to throw recognition after us. Seeking the right audience to impress — those who are impressed by genuinely helpful contributions — might thus be key to making our status drives work in favor of our altruistic efforts rather than against them (cf. Hanson, 2010; 2018).

Another reason to believe that status drives can be helpful is that they have proven to be psychologically potent for human beings. Hence, if we could hypothetically rob a human brain of its status drives, we might well reduce its altruistic drives overall, even if other sources of altruistic motivation were kept intact. It might be tantamount to removing a critical part of an engine, or at least a part that adds a significant boost.

In terms of my own motivations, I would say that drives for status probably often do help motivate my altruistic efforts, whether I endorse my status drives or not. Yet it is difficult to estimate the strength and influence of these drives. After all, the status motive is regarded as unflattering, and hence there are reasons to think that my mind systematically downplays its influence. Moreover, like all of the motivations listed here, the status motive likely varies in strength depending on contextual factors, such as whether I am around other people or not; I suspect that it becomes weaker when I am more isolated, which in effect suggests a way to reduce my status drives when needed.

I should also note that I aspire to view my status drives with extreme suspicion. Despite my claims about how status drives could potentially be helpful, I think the default — if we do not make an intense effort to hone and properly direct our status drives — is that they distort our efforts to help others. And I think the endeavor of questioning our status drives tends to be extremely difficult, not least since status-seeking behavior can take myriad forms that do not look or feel anything like status-seeking behavior. It might just look like “conforming to the obviously reasonable views of my peers”, or like “pursuing this obscure and interesting idea that somehow feels very important”.

So a key question I try to ask myself is: am I really trying to help sentient beings, or am I mostly trying to raise my personal status? And I strive to look at my professed answers with skepticism. Fortunately, I feel that the “I am them” motivation can be a powerful tool in this regard. It essentially forces the selfish parts of my mind to ask: do I really want to gain status more than I want to prevent my future self from being tortured? If not, then I have strong reasons to try to reduce any torture-increasing inefficiencies that might be introduced by my status motives, and to try, if possible, to harness my status motives in the direction of reducing my future torment.

Final reflections

The motivations described above make up quite a complicated mix, from other-oriented compassion and fairness to what feels more like a self-oriented motivation aimed at sparing myself (in an expansive sense) from extreme suffering. I find it striking just how diverse these motivations are, and how they nonetheless — from so seemingly different starting points — can end up converging toward roughly the same goal: to reduce suffering for all sentient beings.

For me, this convergence makes the motivation to help others feel akin to a rope that is weaved from many complementary materials: even if one of the strings is occasionally weakened, the others can usually still hold the rope together.

But again, it is worth stressing that the drive for status is somewhat of an exception, in that it takes serious effort to make this drive converge toward aims that truly help other sentient beings. More generally, I think it is important to never be complacent about the potential for our status drives to corrupt our motivations to help others, even if we feel like we are driven by a strong and diverse set of altruistic motivations. Status drives are like the One Ring: powerful yet easily corrupting, and they are probably best viewed as such.

June 15, 2023

Making Our Concern for Non-Human Beings Common Knowledge

The following is an excerpt from my book Reasoned Politics.

Two levels of knowledge are worth distinguishing in the context of human coordination (De Freitas et al., 2019):

Private knowledge: “where each person knows something, but knows nothing about what anyone else knows”
Common knowledge: “where everybody knows that everybody else knows it”

Common knowledge is often explained with the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone had private knowledge that the emperor was naked (as far as they could see), but they could not be sure that others saw the same, and hence it was not common knowledge. But the moment a child exclaimed that the emperor wore no clothes, it soon became common knowledge, and eventually everyone shouted the child’s words in unison.

This story makes a deep point about the importance of common knowledge for social coordination, as the child’s exclamation did not merely change the state of knowledge of the onlookers, but also enabled them to coordinate, emboldening them to act in ways they would not have otherwise dared, such as laughing and shouting at the emperor. Indeed, not only do psychological studies show that people cooperate significantly more and better when they have common knowledge (Pinker, 2016; De Freitas et al., 2019), but there are also countless real-world examples of the importance of common knowledge for creating social change — and, conversely, how the suppression of common knowledge can prevent social change.

For instance, in Saudi Arabia, most young men are privately in favor of female labor force participation, but they will not say this until they are informed that most other young men think the same (Sunstein, 2019, p. 6). Likewise, all dictatorships, from Nazi Germany to contemporary North Korea, have made it a priority to suppress all expressions of dissent, as such expressions risk creating common knowledge about people’s opposition to the rulers and their totalitarian policies (Mercier, 2020, p. 134). As one North Korean coal miner noted: “I know that our regime is to blame for our situation. My neighbor knows our regime is to blame. But we’re not stupid enough to talk about it” (as quoted in Mercier, 2020, p. 134).

The relevance of this point to our moral and political neglect of non-human suffering is that the concern we have for non-human beings is not yet common knowledge. That is, most people care about non-human animals, but most people, including most animal advocates, do not realize the extent to which most people care about non-human animals (Anderson & Tyler, 2018, p. 8). This may help explain why surveys of public views on this matter consistently surprise us, as our privately held beliefs and ideals are far more compassionate than our actions might suggest.

For example, in a US survey from 2017, more than 80 percent of people expressed agreement with the statement that “farmed animals have roughly the same ability to feel pain and discomfort as humans”, with about 30 percent agreeing strongly (Sentience Institute, 2017; Norwood & Murray, 2018). More than 60 percent of people agreed that “the factory farming of animals is one of the most important social issues in the world today”, and around 40 percent of people said they would be at least somewhat likely to join a public demonstration against “the problems of factory farming” if asked by a friend (Sentience Institute, 2017; Norwood & Murray, 2018).

Another survey of more than 4,000 US adults found that 93 percent believed that chickens feel pain, 78 percent believed that fish feel pain, and a majority of respondents believed that insects such as honeybees (65 percent), ants (56 percent), and termites (52 percent) can feel pain. Among the minority of respondents who did not express agreement with the statement that these animals can experience pain, most expressed agnosticism rather than disagreement (Dullaghan et al., 2021, p. 3; see also Beggs & Anderson, 2020, pp. 10-11).

A similar survey conducted in the UK found that a majority agreed that honey bees (73 percent), shrimps (62 percent), caterpillars (58 percent), and flies (54 percent) can feel pain, and even more people thought that lobsters (83 percent), octopuses (80 percent), and crabs (78 percent) experience pain (Rethink Priorities, 2021).

Moreover, a US poll from 1996 found that 67 percent of people expressed at least some agreement with the statement that a “[non-human] animal’s right to live free of suffering is just as important as a [human] person’s right to live free of suffering”, with 38 percent agreeing strongly (Deseret News, 1996).

A US Gallup poll from 2015 yielded similar results, with 32 percent of people indicating that, among three different statements, the one that came the closest to their view was that “[non-human] animals deserve the exact same rights as people to be free from harm and exploitation” (42 percent of female respondents agreed with the statement, as did 39 percent of Democrats). Meanwhile, 62 percent held that non-human animals deserve some protection from harm and exploitation, whereas only three percent thought that “animals don’t need much protection from harm and exploitation” (Riffkin, 2015).

Additionally, a recent study in the UK found that most meat eaters consider vegetarianism and veganism to be ethical (77 percent and 72 percent, respectively) as well as healthy (more than 72 percent and 50 percent, respectively) (Bryant, 2019).

Making such beliefs and attitudes common knowledge should plausibly be a high priority: to simply document people’s expressed views of non-human suffering and its moral importance, and to then publicize the results. This is important for two principal reasons. First, it makes it clear to politicians that the public actually does care about this issue, and that it wants to see legislators take this issue seriously (even if it is not most voters’ primary concern). Second, it helps make the general public aware of the already widespread concern that exists for non-human animals, at least at the level of people’s expressed ideals, which may in turn embolden them to stand by their values more firmly.

Indeed, making prevailing attitudes common knowledge might effectively reverse the social pressure: where people otherwise thought that public opinion went against their concern for non-human animals, and thus chose to hold back from expressing their views, the realization that a large fraction of the public shares these concerns may encourage them to speak up, suddenly giving them the feeling that the wind of social pressure is in their favor rather than against them. (And this would largely be true, as long as the problems and objectives are phrased in institutional terms.)

Furthermore, not only may people with sympathy for the cause feel more willing to speak up, but most people will likely also (slowly) increase their actual level of concern as they become aware of other people’s pro-animal attitudes. After all, public attitudes and social pressure are among the strongest influences on people’s views (cf. Haidt, 2001; Reese, 2018, ch. 6).

This is then another powerful tool that is not being employed to anywhere near its full capacity: continually broadcasting people’s own stated attitudes — through popular articles, social media, documentaries, etc. — so as to make these attitudes common knowledge. And unlike in the case of oppressive dictatorships, there is really nobody who forcefully prevents us from employing this strategy. We are simply not choosing to use it, probably to the great detriment of non-human beings.

February 21, 2022

Suffering-focused ethics and the importance of happiness

It seems intuitive to think that suffering-focused moral views imply that it is unimportant whether people live fulfilling lives. Yet the truth, I will argue, is in many ways the opposite — especially for those who are trying to reduce suffering effectively with their limited resources.

Personal sustainability and productivity

One reason in favor of living fulfilling lives is that we cannot work to reduce suffering in sustainable ways otherwise. Indeed, not only is a reasonably satisfied mind a precondition for sustainable productivity in the long run, but also for our productivity on a day-to-day basis, which is often aided by a strong passion and excitement about our work projects. Suffering-focused ethics by no means entails that excitement and passion should be muted.

Beyond aiding our productivity in work-related contexts, a strong sense of well-being also helps us be more resilient in the face of life’s challenges — things that break, unexpected expenses, unfriendly antagonists, etc. Cultivating a sense of fulfillment and a sound mental health can help us better handle these obstacles as well.

Signaling value

This reason pertains to the social rather than the individual level. If we are trying to create change in the world, it generally does not help if we ourselves are miserable. People often decide whether they want to associate with (or distance themselves from) a group of people based on perceptions of the overall wellness and mental health of its adherents. And this is not entirely unreasonable, as these factors arguably do constitute some indication of the practical consequences of associating with the group in question.

If failing to prioritize our own well-being has bad consequences in the bigger picture, such as scaring people away from joining our efforts to create a better future, then this failure is not recommended by consequentialist suffering-focused views.

To be clear, my point here is not that suffering-focused agents should be deceptive and try to display a fake and inflated sense of well-being (such deception would likely have many bad consequences). Rather, the point is that we have good reasons to cultivate genuine physical and mental health, both for the sake of our personal productivity and our ability to inspire others.

A needless hurdle to the adoption of suffering-focused views

A closely related point has to do with people’s evaluations of suffering-focused views more directly (as opposed to the evaluations of suffering-focused communities and individuals). People are likely to judge the acceptability of a moral view based in part on the expected psychological consequences of its adoption — will it enable me to pursue the lifestyle I want, to maintain my social relationships, and to seem like a good and likeable person?

Indeed, modern moral and political psychology suggests that these social and psychological factors are strong determinants of our moral and political views, and that we usually underestimate just how much these “non-rationalist” factors influence our views (see e.g. Haidt, 2012, part III; Tuschman, 2013, ch. 22; Simler, 2016; Tooby, 2017).

This is then another good reason to seek to both emphasize and exemplify the compatibility of suffering-focused views and a healthy and fulfilling life. Again, if failing in this regard tends to prevent people from prioritizing the reduction of suffering, then a true extrapolation of suffering-focused views will militate against such a failure, and instead recommend a focus on cultivating an invitingly healthful state of mind.

In sum, there is no inherent tension between living a healthy and fulfilling life and at the same time being committed to reducing the most intense forms of suffering.

January 12, 2021

Darwinian Intuitions and the Moral Status of Death

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, wrote evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky. And given that our moral psychology is, at least in large part, the product of our biology, one can reasonably make a similar claim about our moral intuitions: that we should seek to understand these intuitions in light of the evolutionary history of our species. This also seems important for our thinking about normative ethics, since such an understanding is likely to help inform our ethical judgments — by helping us better understand the origin of our intuitive moral judgments, and how they might be biased or evolutionarily contingent in various ways.

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An Example: “Julie and Mark”

A commonly cited example that seems to demonstrate how evolution has firmly instilled certain moral intuitions into us is the following thought experiment, which first appeared in a paper by Jonathan Haidt:

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it OK for them to make love?

According to Haidt: “Most people who hear the above story immediately say that it was wrong for the siblings to make love […]”. Yet most people also have a hard time explaining this wrongness, given that the risks of inbreeding are rendered moot in the thought experiment. But people still insist it is wrong. An obvious interpretation to make, then, is that evolution has in some sense hammered the lesson “sex between close relatives is wrong” into our moral judgments. And given the maladaptive outcomes of human inbreeding, such an intuition would indeed make a lot of evolutionary sense. Yet in a modern context in which birth control has been invented and is employed, the intuition suddenly seems on less firm ground.

(It should be noted that the deeper point of Haidt’s paper cited above is to argue that “[…] moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached.” And while it seems difficult to deny that there is a significant grain of truth to this, Haidt’s thesis has also been met with criticism.)

Moral Intuitions About Death: Biologically Contingent

With this idea in the back of our heads — that evolution has most likely shaped our moral intuitions significantly, and that we should perhaps not be that surprised if these intuitions are often difficult to defend within the realm of normative ethics — let us now proceed to look at the concrete issue of death. Yet before we look at the “human view of death”, it is perhaps worth first surveying some other species whose members are unlikely to view death in remotely the same way as we do, to see just how biologically contingent our view of death probably is.

For example, individuals belonging to species that practice sexual cannibalism — i.e. where the female eats the male prior to, during, or after copulation — seem most unlikely to view dying in this manner in remotely the same way as we humans would. Indeed, they might even find pleasure in it, both male and female (although in many cases, the male probably does not, especially when he is eaten prior to copulation, since it is not in his reproductive interest, which likely renders it yet another instance of the horrors of nature).

The same can likely be said of species that practice so-called matriphagy, i.e. where the offspring eat their own mother, sometimes while she is still alive. This behavior is also, at least in many cases, evolutionarily adaptive, and hence seems unlikely to be viewed as harmful by the mother (or at least the analogue of “viewed as harmful” found in the minds of these creatures). There may, of course, be many exceptions — cases in which the mother does indeed find herself harmed by, and disapproving of, the act of being eaten. Yet it nonetheless seems clear that the beings who have evolved to practice this behavior do not view such a death in remotely the same way as a human mother would if her children suddenly started eating her alive.

The final example I wish to consider here is the practice of so-called filial cannibalism: when parents eat their own offspring. This practice is much more common, in terms of the number of species that practice it, compared to the other forms of cannibalism mentioned above, and it is also a clearer case of convergent evolution, as the species that practice it range from insects to mammals, including some cats, primates, birds, amphibians, fish (where it is especially prevalent), snails, and spiders. Again, we should expect individuals belonging to these species to view deaths of this kind very differently from the way we humans would view such, by any human standard, bizarre deaths. This is not to say that the younglings who are eaten do not suffer a great deal in these cases. They likely often do, as being eaten is often not in their reproductive interests (in terms of propagating their genes), although it may be in the case of some species: if it increases the reproductive success of their parents and/or siblings to a sufficient degree.

The deeper point, again, is that beings who belong to these species are unlikely to feel remotely the same way about these deaths as we humans would if such deaths were to occur within the human realm — i.e. if human parents ate their own children. The evolutionary history of a species greatly influences how it feels about deaths of various kinds, as well as how it views death in general.

Naturally, Most Beings Care Little About Most Deaths

It seems plausible to say that, in most animal species, individuals do not care the least about the death of unrelated individuals within their own species. And we should not be too starry-eyed about humans in this regard either, as it is not clear that we humans, historically, have cared much for people whom we did not view as belonging to our in-group, as the cruelties of history, as well as modern-day tribalism, testify. Only in recent times, it seems, have we in some parts of the world made all of humanity our in-group. Not all sentient beings, sadly, but not merely our own family or ethnic group either, fortunately.

So, both looking at other species, as well as across human history, we see that there appears to be a wide variety of views and intuitions about different kinds of deaths, and how “problematic” or harmful they are. Yet one regard in which there seems to be less disagreement is when it comes to “the human view of an in-group death”. And I would suspect this particular view to strongly influence — and indeed be the main template for — any human attempt to carve out a well-reasoned and general view of the moral status of death (of any morally relevant being). If this is true, it would seem relevant to zoom in on how we humans naturally view such an in-group death, and why.

The Human View of an In-Group Death

So what is the human view of the death of someone belonging to our own group? In short: that it is tragic and something worth avoiding at great costs. And if we put on our evolutionary glasses, it seems easy to make sense of why we would be inclined to think this: for most of our evolutionary history, we humans have lived in groups in which individuals collaborated in ways that benefitted the entire group.

In other words, the ability of any given human individual to survive and reproduce has depended significantly on the efforts of fellow group members, which means that the death of such a fellow group member would be very costly, in biological terms, to other individuals in that group — something that is worth investing a lot to prevent for these other individuals, and something evolution would not allow them to be indifferent about in the least.

This may help resolve some puzzles. For example, many of us claim to hold a purely sentiocentric ethical view according to which consciousness is the sole currency of moral value: the presence and absence of consciousness, as well as its character, is what matters. Yet most people who claim to hold such a view, including myself, nonetheless tend to view dreamless sleep and death very differently, although both ultimately amount to an absence of conscious experience just the same. If the duration of the conscious experience of someone we care about is reduced by an early death, we consider this tragic. Yet if the duration of their conscious experience is instead reduced by dreamless sleep, we do not, for the most part, consider this tragic at all. On the contrary, we might even be quite pleased about it. We wish sound, deep sleep for our friends and family, and often view such sleep as something that is well-deserved and of great value.

On the view that the presence and absence of consciousness, as well as the quality of this consciousness, is all that matters, this evaluation makes little sense (provided we keep other things equal in our thought experiment: the quality of the conscious life is, when it is present, the same whether its duration is reduced by sleep or early death). Yet from an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense why we would not only evaluate these two things differently, but indeed in completely opposite ways. For if a fellow group member is sleeping, then this is good for the rest of the group, as sleep is generally an investment that improves a person’s contribution to the group. Yet if the person is dead, they will no longer be able to contribute to the group. And if they are family, they will no longer be able to propagate the genes of the family. From a biological perspective, this is very sad.

(The hypothesis sketched out above — that our finding the death of an in-group member sad and worth avoiding at great costs is in large part due to their contribution to the success of our group, and ultimately our genes — would seem to yield a prediction: we should find the death of a young person who is able to contribute a lot to the group significantly more sad and worth avoiding compared to the death of an old person who is not able to contribute. And this is even more true if the person is also a relative, since the young person would have the potential to spread family genes, whereas a sufficiently old person would not.)

Implications

So what follows in light of these considerations about our “natural” view of the death of an in-group member? I would be hesitant to draw strong conclusions from such considerations alone. Yet it seems to me that they do, at the very least, give us reason to be skeptical with respect to our immediate moral intuitions about death (indeed, I would argue that we should be skeptical of our immediate moral intuitions in general). With respect to the great asymmetry in our evaluation of the ethical status of dreamless sleep versus death, two main responses seem available if one is seeking to make a purely sentiocentric position consistent (to take that fairly popular ethical view as an example).

Either one can view conscious life reduced by sleep as being significantly more bad, intrinsically, than what we intuitively evaluate it to be (classical utilitarians may choose to adopt this view, which could, in practice, imply that one should work on a cure for sleep, or at least to reduce sleep in a way that keeps quality of life intact). Or, one can view conscious life reduced by an early death as being significantly less bad — intrinsically — than our moral intuitions hold. (One can, of course, also opt for a middleroad that maintains that we both intuitively underestimate the intrinsic badness of sleep while overestimating the intrinsic badness of death, and that we should bring our respective evaluations of these two together to meet somewhere in the middle.)

I favor the latter view: that we strongly overestimate the intrinsic badness of death, which is, of course, an extremely unpalatable view to our natural intuitions, including my own. Yet it must also be emphasized that the word “intrinsically” is extremely important here. For I would indeed argue that death is bad, and that we should generally view it as such. But I believe this badness is extrinsic rather than intrinsic: because death generally has bad consequences for sentient beings. Furthermore, I would argue that we should consider death a bad and harmful thing (as I indeed do) not just because this belief is accurate, but also because not doing so has bad consequences as well.

An Ethic of Survival

With respect to ethics and death, I recently encountered an interesting perspective in an exchange with Robert Daoust. He suggested, as I understood him, that the fundamental debate in ethics is ultimately one between an ethic of survival on the one hand, and an ethic of concern for sentience on the other. And he further noted that, even when we sincerely believe that we subscribe to the latter, we often in fact do support the survivalist ethic, for strong evolutionary reasons. A view according to which, even if life is significantly dominated by suffering, survival should still be our highest goal.

I find this view of Daoust’s interesting, and I certainly recognize strong survivalist intuitions in myself, even as I claim to hold, and publicly defend, values focused primarily on the reduction of suffering. And one can reasonably wonder what the considerations surveyed above, as well as similar considerations about the priorities and motives that evolution has naturally instilled in us, imply for our evaluation of such a (perhaps tacitly shared) survivalist ethic.

I would tentatively suggest that they imply that we should view this survivalist ethic with skepticism. We should expect evolution to have given us a strong urge for survival at virtually any cost, and to view survival — if not of our own individual bodies, then at least of our own group and bloodline — as being intrinsically important; arguably even the most important thing of all. Yet I would argue that this is an implausible ethical view. Specifically, to accept continued survival at virtually any cost, including the cost of increasing the net amount of extreme suffering in the world, is, I would argue, highly implausible. Beyond that, one can argue that we, for evolutionary reasons, also wildly overestimate the ethical badness of an empty world, and grossly misjudge the value of the absence of sentience. Indeed, on a purely sentiocentric view, such an absence is just as good as deep, dreamless sleep. And what is so bad about that?

August 10, 2018