Latex

Friday, 26 July 2019

Hypocrisy, morality and belief.


In this post I argue that one’s theory of morality should fundamentally motivate their behaviour. If an individual espouses that certain actions are morally wrong, they ought to follow by what they say. In this situation, I think hypocrisy is unacceptable for moral and epistemic reasons.
 
Let us define an act of hypocrisy as a situation in which an individual (or group) make a normative behavioural claim which has a scope that includes themselves, and then acts contrary to their claim.  A normative behavioural is a claim about what is a right behaviour in accordance to some (perhaps implied) criterion.

As an example, it is an act of hypocrisy if Adam states that ‘everyone should stop smoking’, but he himself does not. This is because
1) Adam belongs to the category of everyone. 
2) Adam is making a normative behavioural claim
3) Adam is not following his normative behavioural claim

With this analysis we seem to have provided three conditions that are jointly sufficient. Whilst the second and third conditions seem obviously necessary, I will now argue for the necessity of the first.
It is not hypocritical if a parent tells a child that ‘children need to go to sleep at 9pm’, and then they themselves go to sleep at 10pm. This is because the parent is not making a claim that they themselves must fall under. They are implicitly suggesting that different standards must be applied. Thus, for them not to follow the child’s standard is not an act of hypocrisy. Now scoping is not always apparent semantically. For example, suppose I made the claim that ‘You should donate to charity’. Whilst the literal scope only applies to the individual referred to by ‘ you’, one can interpret this claim as applying to any individual, including myself. As a result, it can be argued that it is hypocritical for me to ask others to donate, whilst I myself do not. If one is unsure about scope, it is always worth asking, for normative scope is not something that is easily hidden.

Now I use normativity to describe that which is right or good. Normative behavioural claims are claims about how we should behave or what is the correct way to behave. It is natural I think for us to ask ‘right based on what’? This is both a metaphysical point (what grounds the rightness) but also a structural point in that it points us to some kind of measure. For example with the behavioural claim not to smoke, the measure might be the health. When studying mathematics, I might be told ‘you should use this sort of notation’. Here the measure seems to be something to do with clarity. The measure here is fundamentally important, but I do not think it matters in terms of deeming whether something is hypocritical or not. The measure seems to only house relevance when determining whether a normative behavioural claim is convincing or not, as it provides us with a means to assess it. 

An interesting question: is hypocrisy itself bad? How should we think about the normative behavioural claim ‘one should not act hypocritically’? First we note that the use of ‘one’ indicates that we are making a broader claim that presumably encompasses all individuals. Now the measure here is not apparent; are we epistemically motivated (accuracy maximising), morally motivated (happiness, rights etc) or even pedagogically (maximising learning)? Furthermore, there are many different acts of hypocrisy, each with their normative behavioural claim and thus each with their own measure. Thus what seems like a rather simple sentence actually is very complicated. It covers a wide range of individuals, with a context dependent / not immediately apparent measure applied onto a whole class of sentences that themselves have differing measures.

Now for my thesis. I will argue in favour of the following position ‘Under the moral and epistemic measure, one should not commit acts of hypocrisy when dealing with morally measured behavioural claims’. That is, it is morally and epistemically wrong to be hypocritical about one’s moral beliefs. Or rather, if one makes a moral claim, they ought to act upon such claims, for both epistemic and moral reasons.

Now there are two separate issues here with my discussion of the moral and epistemic. I will have to tackle them separately. The reason I discuss both is because I want to achieve a conclusion where it is not only the morally right thing to do to follow one’s morality, but also the logical and rational thing to do. For this argument to apply I will make the assumption that both morality and epistemology can be somehow measured by a kind of utility function, and then argue in favour of some kind of maximisation principle. 

We begin with the epistemic measure. A common view in formal epistemology is to see epistemic good in terms of accuracy maximisation of one’s credence function. We take it that there are a range of propositions that one might be interested in. Propositions are either true or false, and we assume that their truth or falsity is of the mind independent kind. Our personal credence function assigns different values to each proposition depending on our level of confidence in the proposition’s truth value. We can apply a kind of distance metric on our credence function to measure its accuracy and thus epistemic goodness. The closer one is to the truth, the better. 

Now the question here is how we are to establish whether a given individual is committing an epistemic bad or is epistemically problematic. We don’t expect agents to have perfect accuracy largely because accuracy seems to depend on evidence. It also seems hard to establish a numerical threshold for being irrational. What we can however do is establish a number of norms that – if violated – establish an agent as being epistemically problematic. We can then link these norms to our argument with hypocrisy; if a hypocritical agent necessarily violates certain norms then the act of hypocrisy is epistemically problematic.

A standard epistemic or credal norm is for an agent’s credence function to be probabilistic. That is, it follows the probability axioms. One can establish an accuracy first argument to show that an agent striving to maximise accuracy will always have a probabilistic credence function. This is because non probabilistic credence functions are always accuracy dominated by some other credence function. The norm however that I wish to focus is a norm of consistency; rational agents will not have inconsistent sets of beliefs. 


The assumption here is that agents can choose what they believe. I also assume that rational agents can determine the logical consistency between sets of beliefs. I’m not asking for perfectly ideal agents here, for logical consistency should be attainable for most individuals. Certainly I think that an agent who believes that both p and not p even after being told of their inconsistency, can be thought of as violating this consistency norm and behaving epistemically poorly.

With this argument out of the way, what I therefore intend to establish is that epistemically rational agents. Essentially I need to establish there is something fundamentally contradictory with believing that one should morally act in a certain way, but not feeling compelled to act in that way.

Now I want to suggest that the moral case here is something special because of how it interacts with one’s beliefs and motivations. To see this, let us first consider the following normative behavioural claim that instead uses the health measure: “You should not smoke”. Suppose a smoke tells us this, thus behaving hypocritically. They might however make the claim that they do not feel compelled to behave in a certain way. That the fact smoking affects their health does not necessarily motivate them to behave in a certain way. That is, they can accept that smoking is bad from a health perspective but perhaps they place no value in health and thus don’t feel compelled to change their behaviour. Whilst somewhat odd, it doesn’t seem like there is anything epistemically bad about this – their position is consistent. Morally speaking, it might even be a good practice – they want to encourage others to have healthy lifestyles since they recognise other individuals value health, even if they themselves do not.

The moral case I think is different and the reason for this is that I think morality is intrinsically motivating. That is, one does not need a reason to do moral things aside from the fact that it is good. One does not need a reason not to do immoral things, aside from the fact that immoral things are bad. If someone claims that something is moral, then they have inherent and sufficient reason to be compelled to do it. Contrast this to health – I can question what the value of good health. Perhaps I don’t care if I live. It seems like I can question why I should behave in accordance to what is healthy.  Yet it seems like when dealing with morality, the fact of morality is enough.
In this sense, to think that something is moral can be to think that something is intrinsically motivating. If you think something is a moral norm then you also think that you have an intrinsic motivation to fulfil it. 

Let's look at an example. Suppose that I think that eating is meat is morally - I'm convinced by an environmental or pain based argument and think I shouldn't eat meat. Now this is a common situation, and many people indeed choose to continue eating meat. Now some might respond that they think that the pleasure they get from eating meat overcomes the negatives to the environment or animals. That's plausible, although unconvincing in my view. Suppose however that when pressed, they think that this pleasure argument fails to outweigh the reasons not to eat meat. That the moral argument overrides all others. The situation seems rather problematic, and not only for moral reasons. An individual has agreed that they should behave in a certain way for moral reasons, that there aren't any arguments to outweigh this requirement to behave, yet they continue not to do so. 

It is strange because the individual is perfectly free to think that their pleasure does outweigh the negatives, yet they choose to adopt the line of thought that it is problematic, yet fail to behave in accordance to it. I've argued that morality provides an intrinsic justification to behave. In this situation, the individual has accepted that this is an overriding justification to behave in a certain way. Yet they still fail to do so. It seems clear there is something epistemically problematic. 

The key premise in this argument I think is the claim that morality is intrinsically motivating. This premise is really needed in order to tie together morality and belief. I think I need to develop the justification for this premise and see whether there are any other ways to tie morality and belief.
I really do like the overall argument though because to me, failing epistemically is in some ways much worse than failing morally. We can all envision in our minds the evil genius who seems perfectly rational, yet ignores the demand to be moral. There is something satisfying with an argument that can slight them as irrational.

Saturday, 19 January 2019

Skepticism, moral realism and applied ethics (1)

In this post I want to discuss the connections between these three issues, and argue for the need to have a theory that attempts to unify them in a coherent manner.

A good starting point is a discussion of moral realism. Let us define the moral realist position as the claim that there exist things like moral facts, and that these moral facts can be true independent of our perception or beliefs about them. Moral realism claims that sentences such as 'abortion is wrong' are the sort of sentences that attempts to describe reality, and the sort of sentences that can be true because when they successfully describe reality.

Due to the mind independenct nature of these sentences, we can connect moral realism with views such as moral objectivism - the claim that morality is objective. As a result, if two people have conflicting moral attitudes, they cannot both be correct and we could in theory use the objective moral standards to determine who is correct.

Now in many ways, moral realism does seem quite intuitive. In particular the claim that moral sentences can be truthful. Not all of them of course - 'rape is right' seems like an false sentence. Yet when I go around telling people that murder is wrong, it seems as if I am doing the correct thing; that what I say not only has impact, but also has content. That it is in some sense meaningful and backed up.

Now there are many challenges to moral realism. The most common challenge that I observe is the problem of disagreement. In particular, one might observe that different people will see the same issue in different ways, morally speaking. I might think that it is immoral for a women to have abortions, whilst someone else might think that such an action is morally permissible. The issue it seems is that I don't seem to have anything to ground my view, i.e. I lack any concrete evidence that would prove me correct over the other person. Intuitions also don't seem to fully resolve these issues because we might have very different intuitions depending on our upbringing and culture. As many people would argue, it is arrogant to assume that our own theory of morality is correct when none of us have 'real evidence'.

I say 'real evidence' because I'm making the comparison to theories in science where our evidence, one might argue, is concrete. We can see it, and we can point to it as evidence. This provides a rather nice epistemology about how we might know our scientific theories are correct, or at least provides justification in believing them. It seems with morality, our evidence is only what we feel, and perhaps the hope that other people feel the same way. Since we presumably want to be justified in our beliefs, this gives us reason to doubt that our own moral intutions correspond to any objective moral values. Furthermore, if we apply the same reasoning to every other individual, we might reject the idea of objective morality altogether. The thought is that since we have so much disagreement, and we have no way of verifying who is correct, perhaps there is no such thing as a 'correctness' in the first place.

There are two interesting lines we might go down from here. So far we have this recognition of an epistemic problem. If morality is true independent of what we know, how do we know that what we think is right (our 'own morality') is the truthful one?  Furthermore, if morality is objective but is something completely in accessible to us, then why should we take our moral intuitions seriously at all. For example if I have no concrete evidence for the claim 'killing is wrong', then even if this claim is correct, the fact that I can't justify my belief in the claim should suggest I should not believe in it. In this sense, perhaps our whole talk of morality is an entire sham. Suppose we think indeed that we cannot epistemically access moral claims. Then either, 1) we are discussing things with content (because morality is objective), but we have no access to and have no way to justify, or 2) we are discussing things which are entirely without content and so our various claims about them are in some sense meaningless. I say in some sense, because many things that appear unsubstantiated by the world could have meaning if people's minds are influenced by them.

The argument so far has suggested that we be sceptical about moral sentences. It has given us many reasons to doubt the truth and justification when we make claims that 'killing is wrong'. What do we do now? One thing perhaps is to doubt the existence of morality in the independent reality. The question then is how we should respond to people making moral claims. You will presumably see everyone who is making moral claims as in some sense making meaningless statements. The exact content of what they see is empty, because whenever they use 'moral vocabulary' there is literally nothing for their words to point at.

At the same time, it seems like we do have significant motivation to follow by whatever rules our current system of morality has. For example, I do want to live in a society where people think killing each other is morally wrong, or where stealing is viewed as bad or where being kind is a good thing. And I say this independently of legal reasons. I want to live in a society where murder is bad for reasons beyond the law. Yet if I follow my very sceptical position towards moral realism, I will also have to be content with accepting that such wants, both in my beliefs and in my actions, lack real content. And that is unsatisfying I think.

In my next post I will discuss how we should connect our views on morality with our views on action, and how having a moral sceptical position is undesirable. I will then discuss ways we might justify our belief in moral realism.