Ideological tensions as an Effective Altruist in the civil service

The civil service delivers public services and supports the government of the day to implement policies. At first glance, working in the civil service seems to align quite strongly with EA principles and values as there's a common motivation to do good through evidence based decision making. 

In this post I want to discuss what I see as an ideological tension between working as a civil servant (in the UK government) and being an effective altruist. My main motivation for writing this is to help articulate a real frustration. On the one hand, working in the civil service can have enormous impact - arguably much more than relevant alternatives. On the other hand, there are serious ideological clashes between civil service and EA principles that any EA civil servant would need to internally reconcile.

The main structure of this post will be as follows:

1) A brief introduction outlining my experience working in the UK civil service, my experience with EA and why now's the time for me to write this.

2) An argument for why it might seem logical to work as a civil servant.

3) An argument for why one might think working as a civil servant is a more impactful than relevant alternatives in the private sector, research centres or charities.

4) An explication of various tensions between EA values and government values

5) Reconciliation and concluding remarks

 

1 - Introduction

I've worked as a civil servant in the UK government for four years now and this post mainly refers to the UK and other countries that use the Westminster political system. For those not aware, civil servants in the UK are apolitical. They work alongside politicians - ministers - but they themselves have no political affliation. The theory is that ministers are democratically elected to make decisions for the benefit of the country, and that civil servants are the ones that implement those decisions. In practice the line can be somewhat blurred - it is usually the civil service who suggest what decisions to take based on policy analysis, with the minister having the final say. It is worth noting that the civil service is wide and covers a range of roles - including key operational roles that have minimal ministerial engagement. This post will primarily focus on policy roles.

I took part in the civil service graduate programme, which involved 5 rotations across government. I've worked in the Department for Transport, the Cabinet Office, the Home Office, The Alan Turing Institute (the UK's national AI institute) and BEIS (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy). In my current role I work as a technical lead on policy around law and AI. My experience I think is relatively wide, although not very deep - but hopefully this provides context on where I'm coming from.

I've been aware of EA for a while, although started looking at it more deeply in the last year as I have been considering different career options. This naturally led me to 80,000 hours, as I've considered moving towards the AI policy space (the second highest rated career according to their analysis!). This led me to ask the question - where's the best place to do this kind of policy work. Should I stay in government, or should I go elsewhere? What's the best option based on traditional EA analysis?

There's also three observations I've had that surprised me and motivated this analysis:

• How few civil servants there are in EA
• How few civil servants care about the magnitude of their impact (compared just to the fact they are impacting society)
  
• How (comparatively) little I see civil service discussed as a EA career path
  

This post should hopefully shed some light on these questions and observations, detailing my thoughts on where I should go to make an impact. It will hopefully convince the reader of the potential impact of being a civil servant, and also explicate what I see as key tensions being an EA in the civil service.

My thoughts here were greatly informed from various discussions I've had through the Civil Service EA network, for which I'm very thankful.

2 - Why be a civil servant?

When you ask a civil servant why they work in government, you're likely to hear a few things. Flexibility, security and most relevant to this discussion - impact to society. Many people work for government because they want to change citizen lives for the better and to contribute towards long term change.

Now if you're like me, the next question you'll have in mind is this: do civil servants actually have impact? And perhaps more relevant - are civil service jobs more impactful than relevant alternatives in the private sector, research centres or charities?

Let's focus on the first question for now. In some sense the answer should be an affirmative yes. Civil servants work to implement government decisions, which are meant to support and thereby positively impact the citizens of the country. In this sense, the roles is designed to have social impact.

In response, consider the following argument: there are many 'well-motivated' roles in this world, but not all of them will have significant impact under 'traditional EA metrics (QALY, DALY etc). The main reason for this is usually the scale of the work. From my personal experience, there are two 'roles' volunteering in charities that I've done that I'd like to think were well motivated, but probably had rather minimal overall impact. The first role was volunteering in a charity shop - organising goods, steaming clothes and talking to customers. The second role was volunteering at a community centre helping the elderly with IT problems. My view is that both roles were impact constrained as they could only focus on supporting a few people. It felt good to support the old man down the road to use his phone to call his children, but the two hours spent may represent a large opportunity cost.

EA analysis I think can be heartless at times, but the numbers should be clear - helping individuals on such a local level lacks the same scalability as working in a larger organision to influence how society is run.  As EAs we'd ideally like to positively impact as many people as possible - scaling is critical.

I think this kind of argument forces a certain nuance in the analysis of being a civil servant. Strategy and policy roles are often criticised because they are very far away from the beneficiary - but I think there's an important trade-off. Macro roles allow for more potential impact - perhaps at the loss of feeling good about what one does. Writing the cost of living rebate policy probably doesn't give you the same emotions inside compared to being an assylum case worker supporting refugees but it's overall impact is likely higher. I will say of course that while policy roles may be the most obvious place to have this macro impact, there are many relevant alternatives. For example, as poor as the UK's overall Covid19 approach was, we could argue that the commercial team delivering on vaccines development and roll out had an extraordinarily high impact in reducing Covid deaths. A similar point could be made about technical teams building contract tracing applications.

Thus I argue that at least at first glance (and with the right considerations), working as a civil servant can have significant societal impact. Governments have enormous budgets and scope - there's a lot of potential.

3) How does the impact compare to relevant alternatives?

Now for the other question. Let's suppose that you're someone who wants to change how society functions. There are different ways to do this, but in the UK (I don't have experience of other governments, but I assume it is somewhat similar) this is usually done by influencing goverment law and regulation. Since I've already mentioned the 80,00 hours career review, let's just use the example that you care about AI governance or strategy.

The question now becomes - where should you go to have the most influence?

This is actually a real question I've been considering. Here is a list of roles that I've considered so far - I appreciate it is not comprehensive. We can consider this as our comparison space - we want to determine the most impactful role of the below.

• 1) Minister
  
• In the UK this would likely be in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, as a the minister for Science, Research and Innovation.

• 2) Civil Service
  
• Policy Lead in the same department.
  
•  3) Research Centre
• For example the Alan Turing Institute or something like the Centre for the Governance of AI. Research associates or other roles.
  

• 4) Academic Institution
  
• From a PhD / Post-Doc going up towards Professorship.
  

• 5) Private Sector
  
• Incredibly variable - this could include policy leads in big tech companies or product owners for AI safety products. It could also just amount to working a role that requires some degree of AI governance.
  
•  6) Charities
• I think there's overlap here with research centres -  some roles here might involve policy research and lobbying.
  

Now there's extraordinary nuance here and I really say comparison in the loosest sense. The barriers to entry for each role are clearly different and represent different levels of seniority. Furthermore, I lack personal experience in many of these options - unsurprisingly I haven't worked as a minister before! The argument I'm going to raise is primarily rooted in my own experience working on AI-related policy in government.

I argue now that while there are 6 kinds of roles, there are in practice only three relevant categories - decision makers, implementors and advisors. Using our above example, we can think that the decision maker signs off on the policy, the implementor ensures it happens (e.g. manages the law making process, communicates it and ensures compliance) and the advisor feeds into the evidence base (e.g. through a consultation).

Here, the decision maker is clearly the minister as they have formal authority. However one could argue that the civil servant also has considerable decision making capability - they are providing the formal recommendation to the minister, and it's fairly common for ministers to just do as their civil servants recommend.

The implementor is most obviously the civil servant as it is their job to implement ministerial decisions. In practice though, some of the implementation can be outsourced or decentralised - for example technical delivery is often done by private sector consultancies. Vaccines for example are produced outside of government, and vaccine centres decentralised to the NHS / local councils.

Who are the advisors? Definitely not the minister, and probably not the civil servant - but likely anyone else. As an example - the civil servant might release a consultation asking for views on various topics. It is common for various companies, research centres, charities and academics to feed into this work. The civil servant will analyse the responses, writes up a strategy and then tries to get broader agreement and eventually ministerial sign off. Now, I don't know how long it takes stakeholders to prepare such comments, but I'm fairly sure the amount of time civil servants spend on each one probably doesn't do it justice.

Another common thing is to run roundtables, where various academics or senior industry leaders are invited to make something happen. From my own experiences it is still surprising in some sense that these academics (who are far more intelligent than myself) are just feeding in their comments, for me to accept into our approach. I'd highlight of course that reality is more nuanced than this - certain stakeholders (e.g large tech companies) may have disproportionally more influence than the average advisor.

Now I would argue that the role with the most impact tends to be decision maker. Note that this can be a positive or negative impact but for sake of argument we will also assume that all role holders here are well motivated and competent. The second most impactful role is the implementor as they make it happen. The least impactful role is the advisor, although they still do considerable good for society.

If you've been following this argument you can see where this leads.

I'm arguing that if you want to make an impact you should be the minister, and if not then be the civil servant. If you can't do those then you should work as an advisor - providing feedback to the minister and civil servants.

Being a minister of course is tricky - there only say 100 such roles available at any one time. It requires one to get elected and chances of success are low. By all means would I encourage people to do so, but I don't think it's an entirely realistic path to pursue. 

There are hundreds of thousands of civil servants (with varying levels of impact), but it's clearly much easier to get into compared to being a minister. My personal view is that the entrance barrier to join the UK Civil Service is not particularly high. I recognise that my perspective might be a bit skewed here as I joined government four years ago. I also recognise that the roles I've mentioned have limited availability, although my experience running recruitment is that many roles are so niche that they receive few applications.

I think certain advisors have serious impact, however I think the investment in becoming an advisor with serious impact comes at a large time cost. As an example, most academics we engage with are professors with more than twenty years of experience in the field compared to our policy leads with potentially one to two. I'd argue the same point for other advisors - it takes to get into a position where you can have a large influence on policy. Of course it's worth mentioning that the policy eco-system relies on a range of stakeholders - I'm certainly not arguing that everyone should suddenly transition into the civil service. It's clearly important for example that there are people doing active research on the relevant questions that can advise government. I'm just arguing the marginal individual would likely make more impact in government than elsewhere.

Anyhow, let me just drive forward my point: if one is interested in changing government policy, usually the best route is to do it from the inside. In this sense, I'd argue that if you want to make an impact, being a civil servant is usually better than relevant alternatives.

4) Tensions between EA and the civil service

Hopefully I've given you at least some reason to think that being a civil servant is not only a suitable choice for an effetive altruist, but potentially even an optimal one. My hope is that such a recognition will make my next argument hit more deeply (and frustratingly), as I discuss some ideological tensions between the two.

I think it is fair to say that EA is value laden, in the sense it presupposes the acceptance of a particular set of values. Now it's entirely possible that these values are objectively true - and as a moral realist I'd be open to this - but epistemically it is difficult to know whether that's the case. What this means is that - potentially - the EA values are wrong, and we aren't yet sure if that is the case. Other values might therefore be more important, leading to the issue of value conflict.  

The centre for effective altruism website outlines principles such as a committment to others, a scientific mindset (evidence based decision making) and openess (transparency). Marginally more controversial, but lets also add some degree of acceptance of long-termism and placing great value on future life. In practice it might mean focusing only on policy areas that have high predicted impact.

Now, I think generally government should and does endorse a committment to others, evidence based decision making and transparency. These are good things. I will shortly however be covering two values that I think government would consider even more important - democracy and comprehensivity.

Before I go into these values in detail, I first want to outline and distinguish between two relevant but slightly different notions.

1) Whether government should follow Effective Altruism (the macro)

2) Whether a civil servant working in government should follow Effective Altruism (the micro)

The first notion essentially means that government should fully embrace EA principles (I'm using principles interchangeably with values) in decision making and prioritisation.

The second notion focuses on the individual working in government. It places greater emphasis on such an individual to seek high impact areas of work. It might additionally mean embodying the various principles mentioned above in one's day to day practice.

Onto the value conflict.

Democracy

The (UK) government is democratically appointed and ministers (with a few rare exceptions) are politicians who have the democratic mandate. The government prides itself (and I think rightly so) on this mandate - it has the power to make decisions because the people elected it to do so. Civil servants in comparison are hired by meritocractic principles - their authority is indirectly granted by the political establishment. This means that ministers have overriding decision making power - they can (and often will) disagree with their civil servants, even if it goes against the evidence.

It is actually somewhat ironic that having this democratic mandate can lead to surprisingly tryannical decision making.

While civil servants are (in theory) apolotical, and focused purely on the public good - ministers are not. They have pressures to get re-elected and must consider positions that are popular as opposed to merely effective. Ministers frequently worry about how they might be portrayed in the media and are (perhaps rightly) concerned that they might lose their jobs if things go poorly.  Ministers themselves might have a slightly warped sense of risk, at times taking an overly risk averse approach to avoid controversy and other times adopting an overly risk loving approach, taking advantage of generally short tenures in post.  

The democratic mandate means that government decision making can at times conflict with the scientific, evidence based decision making espoused in effective altruism theory.  Furthermore, the fact that ministers can change so frequently and priorities so radically can often undermine the capability to seriously evaluate evidence and make informed decisions. The shortness and uncertainty of ministerial post mean that government strategies are often focused on the immediate future - usually less than 5 years at a time. This represents further conflicts with the long-termist agenda often espoused by EAs.

I'd also like to discuss a real example that really hit home to me regarding this tension. The UK government has immense capital budgets, spending hundreds of billions of pounds on for example the net zero agenda. The government loves to talk about how much this capital spend. On the flip side, the government is making serious administrative cuts - they are trying to cut 90,000 civil servants by 2025. I appreciate here that a different government might slightly differ in approach, but I think the following argument still holds. Government is often evaluated on much it can spend on capital with a limited operational budget. Hopefully the parallel here is clear: this is exactly the same as the EA argument against evaluating charities based on what portion of one's donation goes towards the cause (instead of the operations). What should matter is not how much money is being spent but how much impact is created!

The democratic mandate can at times be very challenging and frustrating for civil servants themselves. We've seen recent news cases where civil servants have actively pushed back against government policies. Whether this is the ethical choice is an interesting question. I would argue that they're certainly not meeting their civil servant responsibilities, and maybe that they're even undermining democratic values. I still however have some sympathy for them - it really can be a struggle working on policy that one does not believe in.

Suppose a civil servant works in a policy area but really disagrees with the ministerial steer. This might be because of ethical reasons, or it could be because the steer goes completely against what the evidence suggests. This can be a really challenging experience and I think one that many civil servants experience in their career. 

One option is of course to go through with it nevertheless, but this can feel quite powerless and to some extent undermines the reasoning for joining the civil service. I argued earlier that one should join the civil service because it is better to influence the policy from within. If we're unable to leverage this influence at all it might feel pointless doing the role. Furthermore, if you have serious ethical qualms with the policy area you're dealing with, then it might even feel like you're selling out - not only are you not creating good, but you're actively implementing bad.

I've also seen cases where people try to actively block work. This seems somewhat problematic as well - you're actively going against your responsibilities as a civil servant, you're (arguably) taking a politically biased position and undermining the democratic mandate. You're also contributing to civil service beaurocracy, making it more difficult for things to get done - while being paid by the public purse. One argument to consider is whether it is really that bad to undermine democratic principles - especially if it is leading to negative outcomes. One of my colleagues has talked to me (quite proudly) about their (successful) attempts to block new policies that would reduce benefits for pregnant women. If the policies are really that bad, then maybe it's really worth fighting for - and democracy be damned.

Finally, you could just quit. This saves one's own moral character to some degree, but there are worries that your replacement will probably still make it happen, and likely worse than yourself (as it takes time to learn a role). This also feels a bit like giving up.

Comprehensivity

Government cannot just focus on a select few problems - in some sense, everything is its responsibility. Traditional EA theory might suggest that we focus on impact - donate to the best charities and work in the most critical areas. If government took this approach then maybe it focuses on say net zero, AI safety or pandemic preparedness - investing all of its resources.

What however happens to other areas - the one's that are less obviously impactful to our long term future but still need someone to work on. Presumably someone still needs to work on trade policies to ensure that there sufficient exports to meet the needs of UK citizens. And presumably someone needs to control who can immigrate or ensure that local councils have the funding for constitutent bins are collected.

 One thought is that if government don't do this, then someone will. Perhaps the free market will pick up on it and provide the relevant service. I don't think this a particularly convincing argument. Government takes responsibility to address market externalities and ensure fair access. There are specific work areas where it just isn't financially viable for private sector parties to respond to, and if pushed - would just lead to only wealthy gaining benefit. Moving on to the regulative side - we might think there needs to be some kind of central authority to ensure market compliance. Presumably we don't want to just let big coorporations decide immigration policy.

It's worth mentioning that comprehensivity is linked to democracy. In so far as government has a democractic mandate, it also has a responsibility to ensure that all citizen needs are accounted for. Some of these needs can certainly be provided by the private sector - and government invests a lot of resources to stimulate these markets. The government is voted for by the public and is there to serve their needs. If certain needs aren't being met elsewhere then it is up to the government to ensure that it is.

Just to mention a few nuances here. Government does not deal with everything, and in fact a lot of implementation work is outsourced. Thus the notion of comphrensivity is bounded primarily to work mentioned above that addresses externalities or requires central authority. Additionally, one might argue that EA theory places emphasis on supporting areas that are neglected. If government suddenly eschews responsibility for a workstream, it would become more neglected and thereby shift the priority areas. I suspect however that this new equilbrium would be probably be inadequate - there would likely be new priorities but I think there would still be significant gaps of neglect from government departure.

It's also worth considering what happens if government does suddenly place great focus on a few key areas. In fact, it's not that hard to imagine - there's been an extraodinary push in recently towards the net zero agenda and significant amounts of investment given towards it. The important question is whether these fields can properly scale with more investment  - which would likely be monetary, as opposed to operational resource.

So now suppose we grant that government should take responsibility for a wide range of areas. As an EA in government you'd presumably be going to the highest impact policy areas. There are concerns about a potential bottleneck, where all the EAs of government all pivot towards the roles - massively increasing competition in the space while leaving other areas neglected. One solution of course is to suggest that people place value on areas that they might be suitable for. For example, clearly not all policy advisors in government have advanced knowledge on AI, so maybe they shouldn't apply.

There's a few problem with this solution. First thing is to note that the civil service tends to pride generalism - it's not about knowledge of a specific policy, but knowledge of being a policy person. It's very common for people to enter policy spaces with no prior knowledge of the field. If this view is taken to the extreme then the suitability argument weakens (although still holds to some degree). A big follow up problem to this is the fact that civil servants rotate careers incredibly frequently - with most policy leads switching jobs every 1-2 years (not that dissimilar to ministers). Now I think these are primarily practical issues with the running of government, as opposed to a fundamental clash between civil service and EA values, but I think it is important to note.

I'd also highlight that the range of roles in the civil service and its generalism can lead to a pressure to always be searching for new opportunities. It's no surprise that some of the most senior civil servants I've met have rotated between crisis jobs yearly. I do think that the range and ease of movement can create a pressure on effective altruists within government as they provide a push to always do the job with more impact - further driving the problem of churn. One should also consider their own marginal impact in pursuing such roles. If they are so high in demand then it's likely that another person could do the role to a good standard as well. It's important not to ignore neglected areas that might need people the most!

Reconciliation and concluding remarks

I'd ideally have ended up this post with a comprehensive and tangible solution. It would have explained exactly how I would solve all the problems of government and outlined a direct approach for a civil servant navigating the process. I think however the tensions are at a fundamental level that there is no easy solution. I will however express a few comments on how I and I think other civil servants can start to reconcile these tensions.

Let's start with democracy. There's a whole raft of political philosophy literature discussing potential problems with the model and a whole lot more discussing why it might seem better than alternatives. I'll instead focus on the civil servant perspective.

I mentioned an irony that the democratic mandate can lead to tyrannical and anti-scientific decision making. I think it's worth considering a notion of a democracy from a macro as well as local lens. If we choose to block work getting done we may be undermining 'macro' democracy. If however we have considerabl evidence from stakeholders then choosing to block such work might uphold a more 'local' democracy. Such behaviour could be consistent with EA principles such as consideration towards others or evidence based reasoning. I'd of course be remiss to highlight the possibility that our own views might wrong when disagreeing with ministers.

Another approach to consider is to simply avoid policy areas with significant ministerial opinion. A lot of new areas such as AI governance are actually quite good in this regard - most ministers lack the technical knowledge to effectively comment on policy in this space, meaning there is less likely to be conflict. Getting the right balance here can be tricky as you want them to be interested enough to have skin in the game and push it forward, but not so interested that they too many opinions themselves.

On the point around comprehensivity, I think there are a few questions to consider. I think it's generally quite damaging to government for policy people to move so frequently. On the flip side, it's entirely possible that certain policy areas are just so more immensely more impactful that it's worth investing whatever you can do to get there. 

I wonder if the best approach is more to stay in a specific field and develop expertise, as your marginal replacement (the best person who would be next to do the job after you) would just be radically worse than yourself in terms of impact. While in the same role, one could then try and bring in EA principles to the day to day work. I think there's already lot of demand in government to write business cases with the right KPIs (Key performance indicators). A lot of EA theory is well suited to government decision making. 

I'm going to draw this post to a close now. In summary I have argued for three main things. First, that EA and civil service principles are at first glance very much aligned, and that civil servants can have really high impact to society if they work in the write space. Second, that someone interested in making an impact should consider the civil service even over other relevant opportunities as it is more impactful to be an implementor over being a advisor. Finally I have argued that there are theoretical tensions between EA values and CS values, and that an EA civil servant will need to properly reconcile them.

I hope you can see that I'm still on my own journey in reconciling these issues, and I'd really welcome thoughts and feedback.

 

 

 

 

A meaning to life: Part 4 - Effective actualisation

 At the end of last post, we broadly agreed with:

ActualisationAnswer:   the answer to Meanlife is that each human should aim for self-actualisation- they should develop themselves and strive to achieve their potential.

 We also discussed further the concept of creating a society in which we enable other people to achieve actualisation, as well as the value in working towards such a society. Aristotle accepted that eudaimonia was not something that could be achieved by everyone - one had to be in the right circumstances. I agree with this view - but I see it as deeply unfair. If we take ActualisationAnswer as valid, then it seems unjust that only certain people could ever achieve the meaning of life. Why should one's circumstances - which are to some degree luck based - affect whether one can truly flourish in life? 

Now, it is intuitive to assume that the circumstances that we're discussing relate to financial circumstances. It is clear that those less well off in society will have to use more of their resources to finance basic existence - for example food and rent. This is compounded in cases of dependants and larger families - it seems harder to justify spending money to enrich oneself when one might have a child that needs feeding. I think it is likely however, that there are also other barriers aside from money - the primary one being culture. 

 Flourishing probably requires money, but I suspect a bigger blocker is time. Certainly if one lacks money, they may have to invest their time into earning it, and certainly one can use money to save time (for example hiring a cleaner). However there are people who have enough money in society who still struggle to find time to flourish. In some sense we'd expect this - we assume that a CEO of a company will live a busy life. It feels like the money motivation is linked with the hedonistic view of happiness - where one is motivated to achieve these goals but without it genuinely providing flourishing. It is not surprising that money tends to have diminishing returns with regards to life satisfaction.

I think this analysis indicates two primary concerns; 

1) The resource gap - people need a certain amount of resources in order to be able to live. If they lack these resources natively then they need to invest their time (or otherwise) to obtain them.

2) The time gap - people need to have the time to flourish. Flourishing requires dealing with adversery and developing oneself in accordance to one's goals. It is worth noting of course that working may indeed act as a source of flourishing - and that for some people the focus on career can be their way of development. I think that this is unlikely to be the case for everyone however.

Effective actualisation

Let us assume that the two gaps mentioned above are to some degree valid. The intuitive next step is to ask how we can address both of these resource gaps. For each gap it's worth considering three things.

i) What is the current state?

ii) What would block me from filling the gap, or what would make it worse?

iii) What would enable me to address this gap, and what circumstances would make it better?

Blockers

I think it is here that it may be worth drawing upon some relevant concepts in Effective Altruism. Broadly speaking, effective altruism is about making a larger difference with one's resources. It initially started by looking at donations and charities. It is clear that certain charities are more impactful than others - for example it costs around 11,000 dollars to 'make a wish' as part of the 'make a wish foundation'. In comparison, it costs around 6000 dollars for some of the malaria charities to save a life. Given this difference, there is clearly an opportunity cost in terms of how one uses their money. 

What I find quite interesting is that the effective altruism movement tends to be relatively risk focused. They are worried (and I think rightly) by people dying from (relatively) treatable diseases. They are concerned about existential risk - nuclear war, physical events and AI takeover. These are all useful things to consider and are certainly relevant for our second question.

For example - if we look at the resource gap. If we want people to have enough resources to flourish we would ideally be looking at a world where those resources might come even if the person does not 'directly contribute'. That is, we might be looking towards a world where the person is provided resources (food,  money, living) without working. This would likely be from the state, but not necessarily. To have such an infrastructure would likely require some degree of a functional and sustainable economy.

Concerns around existential risk are quite relevant here. A nuclear fall out for example would certainly distabilise our lives and likely make it harder to achieve the necessary resources for survival. 

Looking at the time gap - it is clear that 'needless' death is a big problem. If people are dying they clearly are losing time to achieve certain goals or to flourish. If we can provide treatments that increase people's time on earth then we are helping them address a flourishing gap.

 Addressing the gap

From the more positive side, let us consider our third question, which lacks at how we can try and address these gaps. Here we are are talking about how we can increase and improve resource distribution and provide people with more 'valuable' time that they can use to flourish. I think the important thing here is for us to take active steps towards the achievement of flourishing.

For example, let's look at the resource gap. If we want to ensure all people have sufficient resources to flourish we likely need to make certain decisions around our economy and how we distribute resources. I mentioned for example that this could be achieved by the state - with one approach being a universal basic income. This could ensure that everyone has a minimal amount of resources to survive. We would however still need to consider problems of how the state could generate enough money to do this.

One area to look might be around automation and technological advancement. If we could leverage technology more effectively, we may be able to create sufficient growth that meant the government could fuel most people a universal basic income.

On to the time gap - it's clear that income and time are connected here. If someone has the income to surive without working, it makes it much more likely that would actually invest their time into flourishing. I think it's worth noting that for various cultural reasons, this might not actually happen. For example, some people struggle to identify what makes them flourish, and many people tend to procrastinate in doing things. In this sense, simply providing time and resources may not be enough to really enable people to achieve flourishing.

It's possible to take a more heavy handed approach - where the state or some other entity actively engages with people to help them find worthwhile flourishing opportunities. This could be the equivalent of a career advisor, except a flourishing advisor! We'd need to seriously consider how this would work though - and who would do it.

Other areas where we could focus more research into would be eudaimonia and flourishing. We still need to understand these concepts more deeply in order to help positively establish actions for the future. I suspect right government policy (as well effective altruism) is more focused on eliminating risks and blockers, as opposed to actively improving our lives.

I think I'm going to end this post here. In the next post I think I'll try and go a bit deeper into what I view the more 'positive side' and try and better articulate a world that we should live in. From there I hope to move towards a discussion on how I (we) can get there, and some of the logical steps I should take.

A meaning to life: Part 3 - Actualisation for everyone

At the end of last post we elaborated on an answer to Meanlife by appealing to Eudaimonia. This led to:

EudaimoniaAnswer:   the answer to Meanlife is that each human should aim for human flourishing - they should leave an enriching life where they can develop theoretical and moral virtue.

 So far our analysis has been relatively abstract, but in this week I hope to ground it more concretely by forming an initial association between Eudaimonia and self-actualisation, as well as arguing that a societies purpose is to maximise this actualisation.

Eudaimonia in practice

The Aristotelian notion of Eudaimonia is somewhat abstract, if a little vague. 'Human flourishing', 'The telos of man', 'Theoretical and moral wisdom' - these sound great but lets make it more concrete. An initial caveat is that I'm sure there are many philosophers who have analysed Aristotle far more than myself - my interest here is not in perfectly capturing Aristotle's view, but to express my own perspective as having grown (to some extent) out of my own reading of Aristotle's work.

I think a good place to start is to focus on 'theoretical and moral wisdom'. Aristotle focuses his analysis of man on their ability to reason, thus it seems plausible to think that part of Eudaimonia revolves around improving our reasoning abilities. What does that mean? More broadly I'd consider reasonining to be practice of considering different positions, their relation with one another and coming up with a conclusion. I'd associate it fairly closely with concepts of rationality. I'm personally an Accuracy First epistemologist, which means that what matters to me is that we have accurate beliefs - where a belief is accurate if it is 'close' to the truth. A rational person is one who maximises their accuracy given their evidence. So part of improving our ability to reason is to develop how we think about arguments, how we use logic and how we come to conclusions given our evidence. Let us call these skills 'meta-theoretical knowledge'. 

We can then mention broader 'theoretical knowledge' as things that help us deal with specific domains. For example, we can imagine that as an engineer, I might need to have a grasp of physics and material sciences in order to build something safe. Theoretical knowledge is still useful as it helps us respond to specific instances, where the additional knowledge allows us to establish relationships between propositions and concepts ('this material will break under this force'). It however contrasts with our meta-theoretical knowledge which touches at the purest of theoretical virtues.

On to moral wisdoms. I think that Aristotle is touching on the wisdom one gains through engaging in different moral actions and decisions. As we learn more about the world, we have a better perspective of the moral dimension - we have a better perspective on what is good and what is bad. When we're younger we might be told never to lie, however a few years later might learn of the concept of a 'white lie'. I'd also be open to thinking that emotions are some kind of indicator to moral concepts, and our ability to understand the emotions of others also improves over time. They key concept here is that we know more about people, more about the world and this gives us the knowledge of how to behave better.

Between these two concepts is a clear sense of self-improvement and self actualisation. We as humans need to develop ourselves for the better - both rationally and morally. Achieving this actualisation can take a life time - it's certainly not something one learns in specific instances, but something developed over time with deliberate practice.

Now, I would consider self actualisation as something a broader than what Aristotle is calling Eudaimonia. For example, I would see physical feats (e.g. training oneself to run a marathon) as fitting in with actualisation, even if its not directly related to moral or theoretical wisdom. Essentially, I'm less concerned by the idea that Human's telos is reason, but more focused on this broader notion of flourishing and living one's best life.

This leads me to my final analysis of Meanlife:

ActualisationAnswer:   the answer to Meanlife is that each human should aim for self-actualisation- they should develop themselves and strive to achieve their potential.

 What is the purpose of society?

 On its most basic level, we could consider a society a group of people. Generally we might expect them to have come together for some additional purpose - safety, common interest, familial all come to mind. Now an initial question comes to mind - all other things being equal, is it better for humans to be in a society or not? I'm not entirely sure if this is a philosophical question, as I imagine that it's probably better answered by athropological or biological analysis. 

Anyhow, I ask this question because we already have an analysis of the meaning of life for an individual person, so it's natural to ask whether a larger society helps, deters, changes this analysis.

If we focus for now on the normative side, we might argue that a society should be there to help improve the lives  of the people in the society. I.e. we should group together only if it helps us in some sense. And what sense is most relevant? Well I think the natural answer is to say that we should group together only if it helps us achieve the meaning of life - self actualisation.

Now, should society be helping each individual person achieve actualisation, or should it be trying to maximise (more broadly) the potential of the group of people? It's worth noting that the former may have a specific tension - if two individual people are trying to e.g. become the president of the society then it will be hard for both of them to reach actualisation. Of course, one might argue that the 'winner's' potential was higher (and they achieved it) while the loser's potential was lower (and they also achieved it) but I still feel there is some tension. For the latter, we might focus on enabling everyone as a collective - e.g. we aspire towards a society that is overall more advanced, humane and so on, even if some people may have a more stifled experience (for example, we might avoid funding research on more 'exploratory' topics such as space travel, and instead centre it on smaller and local issues). Anyhow, I won't focus on this distinction and I think the ideal society should achieve some kind of balance between the two.

What would this ideal society look like? Well one way to think about this is to consider what currently stops people in society achieving their potential. Suppose I'm an artist - I'm reasonably talented and would like to spend the rest of my life painting. Let us further suppose that while I'm good, I'm not *that* good, people probably won't be paying millions for my work and it is unlikely to be shown in any major exhibits. Still - I have a love for painting. Now in our current society it might be tricky to for me to devote my life to painting, as I normally need to spend time 'working a job'. If we assume that this takes around 35-40 hours a week, this significantly reduces the time I have to focus on my passion and achieve actualisation.

One response to this might be to say that I could instead be unemployed and just receive benefits from the government. There are a number of reasons why I think this is unconvincing. The first is that it's not really 'sustainable' in the sense that the government see benefits as a short-term solution. You're in theory expected to constantly be looking for new jobs and they might take away your benefits if you spend all your time painting, with no evidence of job hunting. The other problem is more of a social issue - some people may consider it shameful to need to take benefits. We want society to encourage us to achieve our potential - not shame us about doing so. 

I conclude from this that an ideal society should be able to provide sufficient income to it's members such that they can spend their time pursuing self actualisation. This would probably take the form of some kind of universal basic income, but I'm fairly neutral at the moment about how it would be done or funded - I'm currently just expressing a theoretical ideal.

Another thought I had was that some people might not have any explicit passions in life that they want to do. The ideal society I think would also need to have a way to help or at least encourage people to find their passions.

It's clear to me that the creation of this ideal society would be fantastic, as it would help a lot of people achieve their actualisation. Indeed, i think that the goal of achieving this ideal society would in itself be a great accomplishment and something that I myself would like to strive towards. Of course the exact properties of this ideal society are not fixed - the broader goal is to help as many as people achieve actualisation as possible.

I'm going to leave it there for this post. In my next post I'm going to discuss in a bit more detail my thoughts around creating this ideal society and helping people achieve self actualisation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A meaning to life: Part 2 - Eudaimonia, enrichment and flourishing

Last post we refined our question on the meaning of life to the following:  

Meanlife: What is a / the purpose o f an individual's existence?

We then ended last post with the HappyAnswer to MeanLife: "The answer to Meanlife is that each human should aim to be happy. The reference to 'purpose' is because it is good for a human to be happy.

Now, I mentioned that there were various kinds of metaphysical concerns around this answer. My interest however is to look at the more practical issues around what happiness means. My aim is to get to a satisfactory analysis to this answer that I can then practically apply in my own life.

Let me first revisit the two readings of happiness that I previously mentioned. The first is around happiness in a hedonistic sense - seeking pleasure. The second is happiness in a flourishing sense - enrichment and eudaimonia. I argued for the latter, but let's take a quick look at the former.

 Hedonism

There are different ways people might get pleasure, but the hedonistic kind if quite specific. It's about the maximising of the 'good feelings' of pleasure beyond all else. We aren't talking here about the pleasure we might get from reading a book in the morning. We're talking about the exact dopomine we're getting from taking drugs or having an orgasm. Hedonism is focussed on that feeling of pleasure regardless of where it comes from. The causation does not matter, and even the epistemology does not matter. 

What's wrong with this? Well in some sense nothing, and in another sense a lot. There's a sense in which its hard to argue against the good feelings. After all, most would say that being happy requires one to feel good - is it a problem to reverse this and say that if one feels good then one is happy? 

Let's consider some objections to happiness = hedonism. The first is an epistemic objection and I'll explain it via a pop culture reference! In the film 'The Matrix' a character discusses how they are satisfied for their brain to be fed false memories and experience, as long as those false memories are experiences are ones in which they are doing well. In essence, they would be happy to be in a situation where their life was a lie, but they were experiencing a lot of pleasure. In my view, this captures some of the essence of hedonism - it's about pleasure above all, which also means pleasure above truth. The hedonist would rather live a false life of pleasure than a real life of pain. Is that a problem? Not obviously, but I do feel like something is going wrong if the answer to 'What is the meaning of life' somehow resolves into a solution where a false life of pleasure becomes the model answer.

I think the epistemic issue expands a bit further when we consider hedonistic committment to things like drugs. The feeling of the high when on drugs may be incredible, but there's a sense of falsity that seems to mimic the Matrix situation. When a drug addict is in a constant sense of craving for their next high, surely they are not in a happy situation - even if their experience of the drug provides this hedonism. 

The other issue worth considering it the causation aspect. It's about considering 'Why am I happy, or why have I derived pleasure? Not to fully go down a naturalistic argument, but I would argue that the pleasure we experience from activities such as sex is because the body wants to encourage certain things that are 'good for you'. In this sense, the pleasure is meant to be some kind of bodily reward mechanism and not something to aspired for in itself. I think this is more relevant when we consider certain drugs which provide chemical highs - there's a sense in which we want to be rewarded the 'natural way' - just hitting the chemicals almost feel cheating as we are getting the reward without doing anything. We should be getting pleasure as a reward for doing good things, not as a prize for a competitition that we've cheated.

I don't think this is a real take down of hedonism, but I wanted to share some intuitions as to why I didn't go down this route. 

Eudaimonia

The Philosopher Aristole describes eudaimonia as the highest human good - and the only good that is desirable in its own sake. Eudaimonia refers the condition of human flourishing and living well, and is sometimes translated as happiness. According to Aristole, every entity has some kind of characteristic function that distinguishes it (also known as its Telos or purpose), with the highest good of a thing being its performance against its Telos. Thus the virtue of a knife is that which enables it to cut well, the virtue of an eye is that which enables good seeing. To Aristotle a person's telos is eudaimonia, and thus eudaimonia defines what human excellence and virtue is meant to mean.

Now Aristotle believes that the telos of man is their ability to reason, and thus achieving eudaimonia is in some sense about being a rational individual. Aristotle connects virtue and rationality together, where he places great praise on gaining intellectual virtues such as theoretical wisdom and rationality, but also places emphasis on moral virtues such as justice and courage. Furthermore, these virtues are not innate talents or specific pieces of knowledge - they are traits that are developed with practice, and reflection throughout ones life. This discussion of course feeds into the theory of 'Virtue Ethics', a form of normative ethics that proposes that encourage us to live virtuously.

That's a lot of exposition, but I think the central point here is that achieving this kind of virtue or flourishing is essential to doing good as a human. It is challenging and requires experience and practice, but is something we should strive for. Note that this assessment of Eudaimonia shares some parallels with what we might call self actualisation which I would see as being achieved through enriching one's life. The goal to achieve these virtues is a goal of self enrichment, where we develop ourself and become better people.

I am therefore proposing that by happiness, I actually mean the striving to achieve Eudaimonia.

A few short objections or concerns to consider before I talk about what this all practically means. I guess the first thought is a simple one - what if Aristotle is wrong. Sure we can broadly understand the idea that the purpose of a knife is to cut, but I might not share the exact intuition that the purpose of a human is to become a moral intellectual. I think the idea that we should develop moral virtues (such as kindness, justice etc) seems plausible if we want to associate goodness and purpose. However it isn't quite clear why theoretical virtues. In a sentence - what does reason have to do with all this? I guess if we are to consider eudaimonia as more about 'reaching my potential' and 'human flourishing' I can see buy that developing my virtues across the board has some value.

The second thought to consider is along the lines of 'what does this have to do with happiness'? Aristotle himself mentions that eudaimonia takes time and that 'a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy'. This is interesting, as I think he's attempting to draw a contrast with hedonistic views of happiness. One does not achieve eudaimonia simply by having short bursts of happiness - it requires time. I think there are two ways to justify the eudaimonia view of happiness. The first is to consider an association between flourishing and happiness, which does seem plausible. Another way is to look at our objections to Hedonism and see if Eudaimonia can address them. 

Let's look at the epistemic objection first, which argues that a hedonistic analysis of happiness would prefer a pleasurable life of lies than a struggling life of truth. Eudaimonist would not need to committ to the same conclusion - as they are open to the idea that happiness may require struggle - after all eudaimonia is something achieved after a life of experience. Furthermore, the eudaimonia places some emphasis on achieving theoretical wisdom and epistemic virtue. It seems plausible that they could avoid the pleasurable life of lies.

Second, we get to the causation based objection. Again, I don't think this is necessarily the best objection, but I do think that the Eudaimonist can respond very effectively. If the Eudaimonist is right, then eudaimonia is what one gets once one has succeeded in achieving a life of virtue, suceeded in self flourishing and enrichment. In this sense, one deserves the satisfaction they get - if they are happy its because they got it through a hard battle through life.

There are additional thoughts as to whether there is a third alternative to happiness, but I won't go into detail here. 

I will end today's post with a new conclusion, another refined answer to Meanlife.

EudaimoniaAnswer:   the answer to Meanlife is that each human should aim for human flourishing - they should leave an enriching life where they can develop theoretical and moral virtue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A meaning to life: Part 1 - laying the foundations

As noted by many a pop-philosopher, there's this constant question around what might constitute the meaning of life. Today I'd like to start a series where I outline my view on this question on a abstract level but also (perhaps surprisingly!) on a practical level. I want to outline what I think one should be doing in their life, and why this is the case.

We begin first by disecting the question of interest, making transparent various nuances and articulating what aspects I'd like to focus on.

To ease reference, let me denote MeanLife1:

MeanLife1: What is the meaning of life?

- Philosophy of Language

So much to discuss but let us begin with philosophy of language. 

What is meant here by 'meaning'? Perhaps it is about semantics - for example we might ask a question like 'what is the meaning of this sentence', to which the answer might be 'a specific proposition'. Under one analysis the response might simply to provide a definition of 'life'. Intuitively, this doesn't seem right - a response to MeanLife1 that provides some kind of biological definition just seems inadequate. The semantics point however does seem to be getting somewhere, especially if we view 'life' as eliptical for a deeper construct such as 'human / personal existence'. I'd also argue that when people ask about 'meaning' they are not making a semantic comment - they are instead saying something more akin to purpose.

The first three words 'What' 'is' and 'the' are also interesting and potentially imply some kind of reference or denotation. It seems to invite the sort of response to MeanLife1 in the form of that - that is the meaning of life. We'll discuss what sort of thing that can be (if anything) when we move onto metaphysics. The use of the definite article 'The' is also rather interesting. Traditional Russelian analysis of definite articles is that it implies a unique reference. I.e. that there is a unique answer to this question. Let's keep things open for now.

Note that issues of uniqueness become slightly more complicated if we take our above eliptical construct 'human / personal existence' as context dependant. Indeed, this leads to the possibility that each human / person has its own unique reference.

Let's offer a rephrasing of our question:

MeanLife: What is a / the purpose of an individual's existence?

- Metaphysics

 Now onto some metaphysics. First we observe that MeanLife does seem to be a referencial statement, and we can be interested in what is referenced by 'purpose'. We can ask now whether this reference is mind dependant or mind independant. If it is mind dependant then we might think that there is effectively a sort of prophesy written in reality for each person, which denotes what their purpose it. It does seem a bit strange to imagine how this kind of prophesy could exist. One way to justify this might be through religion. For example, one might think that 'God has a plan for everyone'. God of course would be supernatural, and thus it would not be strange to think that these 'prophesy' entities could also exist in a supernatural way. 

Now, I've often used the 'God' example to articulate how a moral realism could work. God would either make things moral or would simply be pointing to things that are moral. If it is the latter, then you could take away God and you could still have an objective morality. Let's attempt an analogous argument - God is either creating these 'purposes' or God is only pointing to them. Is it plausible to think that these prophecies could exist and be pointed to? 

Intuitively, it does seem rather strange to think that reality somehow writes prophesies for individual people. Aside from large issues around time (reality can tell the future?) there's also a question about how it indexes these objects against individuals that are born (or maybe even those that are not). One way to respond to this latter point is to consider that these prophecies might not be unique for each person. For example, there might be a universal prophecy for all humans - especially if is a prophesy that can reached in different ways.

Taking this view seems somewhat plausible, but we still have to deal with another question. What kind of 'reference' are we dealing with? Are we actually talking about concrete 'prophecy objects' or might we be talking about something something much weaker? One analysis that comes to mind would be a view like the following:

BioAnswer: "The answer to MeanLife is that each human being just needs to reproduce. The reference to 'purpose' is simply the existence of reproductive organs and biological history'"

I'd argue that this a somewhat plausible argument. It is indeed true that we only exist right now because of reproduction. Furthermore that many of our biological faculties are specifically deisgned to aim for reproduction (e.g. sex) It's similar in some sense to saying that moral properties could be reducible or at least superveniant on physical properties such as happiness or pain. Still, this kind of answer does seem to have a few odd flaws.

Firstly, what about people who a) Don't want to have kids, b) Are unable to have kids, c) would be immoral to have kids. How does this kind of universal purpose respond to this? Consider also d) people already with kids. Has their purpose been complete? I guess there's a natural thought of 'once I've met my purpose then my life can end'. Is this what we should be thinking about the above 4 cases? 

The above cases I think showcase some problems with BioAnswer but I also think there's another problem in that it just doesn't seem to be a satisfying response to MeanLife. When people ask MeanLife they are often asking with the underlying view that somehow they are meant to do something 'meaningful'. It is plausible to consider that for some people, reproduction may provide this meaning - but it seems odd to think that this would apply to everyone! Still, to be unsatisfying does not mean that BioAnswer is incorrect.

Are there any other answers? Well how about the following:

HappyAnswer: "The answer to MeanLife is that each human should aim to be happy. The reference to 'purpose' is because it is good for a human to be happy'.

A lot of comments on this one!

 First, what does happy mean? There are at least two readings. The first reading is of happiness in a hedonistic sense - to just seek pleasure. A second reading might be to read happiness in a flourishing sense - to achieve enrichment and eudaimonia. I think the second reading has a lot more credence, but I won't argue this point right now. 

The second comment is about the reference. 'good' seem to have a moral dimension. It is worth noting that if 'good' is somehow mind dependant then we have a large problem as we are currently evaluating analyses which are (at least to some extent) mind independant. If we are moral realists (as I am) then we avoid the metaphysics issues but we do still face some problems around whether it is actually good for a human to be happy. One way to fix that is by taking a very naturalist view of realism - maybe ethical properties are reducible from things like happiness. In that case, this statement would be almost tautological!

 There's still the issues that happiness seems to be a state of being, and arguably a mental state or experience. How do we avoid subjectivism here? We can try the following clarification: that it is mind independant in so far that there is a proposition that is satisfied when someone is genuinely happy, where being happy is a mental experience that only manifests where certain other conditions are met. The analogue here would be to say that 'pain genuinely exists even if it is a mental experience, as you are experiencing it (here in particular) because of physical conditions.' I'm not certain that this line of argument works though!

In fact still, I do take a stance a bit like this, and I'm sort of happy to endorse HappyAnswer. I would however say that there are huge metaphysical problems that I would need to deal with for this position to actually seem convincing. Whilst I'm fairly convinced by realism, there's still significant work around whether I am naturalist (and what kind), as well as whether what sort of happiness should we be looking (and what it involves).

In my future posts I'm going to step away from the metaphysics side, and focus on the latter questions around happiness. That is, I'm going to assume for the time being that HappyAnswer is a somewhat satisfying response to MeanLife, and I'm going to try and disect what HappyAnswer is actually about.

 

 

 

 

 

Existence without witness

In this blog post I'm going to talk about existential statements, the witnesses for these statements and whether there is value in existential statements without witnesses. 

PART 1: How can we have existence without witness

An existential statement is of the form 'There exists X with property Y in domain Z ' which means that there is an (at least 1!) entity (call it X) that has a property (call it Y) in whatever domain or area that we're interested (call in Z). For example, 'there exists a bottle that is blue in the fridge'. The entity is the bottle, the property is blueness and the domain is the fridge.

Now, in practice people will make existential statements without explicitly following the format above. Consider statements like:

1A: 'There's a soulmate out there for you'

2A: 'Someone lives here'

One can consider these as elliptical constructions which means that the statement ommits certain words but are nonetheless understood in the context of the remaining elements. In other words, they can be considered short hand for a more expansive sentence. The equivalent expanded sentence might be:

1B: 'There exists a person who has the property of being your soulmate and is in the current world'

2B: 'There exists a person who has the property of living (in this building) and is in the current world'

A witness for an existential statement is an entity that satisfies the existential statement.

For example, a witness to 1A would be the persons actual soulmate. This person would validate the existential statement - it provides a proof that the statement is true.A witness to 1B would be the specific person who lives in the building. 

Now ideally our existential statements all come alongside witnesses. I.e. whenever we say something exists, we can actually identify that specific thing that exists. As long as I have an entity, I can construct a existential statement in which the entity acts as the witness. The inverse is not however true - the fact that I can construct existential statements, even prove existential statements says nothing about whether I can identify the relevant witness.

Consider the following mathematical statement:

< 3 >: There exists irrational numbers A and B such that A^B is rational

Now consider the following argument (I will write R(X) to indicate the square root of an integer X):

R(2)^R(2) is either rational or irrational.

If is rational, then we have a witness to the existential statement, A = R(2) and B = R(2).

If it is irrational then let A = R(2)^R(2) and B = R(2).

Note that A^B = (R(2)^R(2))^R(2) = R(2)^2 = 2, which is rational. Therefore one of the above is a solution.

The point is that we know for sure that the existential statement is true - we have just proved it. However we are unable to determine with certainty a witness for the solution.

Now a keen observer might notice that the problem seems to be the first line of our proof - a claim that a number is either rational or irrational. This is an instance of the law excluded middle which states that it is always the case that (P OR not P). Whilst this law is true logically, is has the annoying habit of allowing us to provide existence without witness. In the example above we showed that the P case leads to a solution and the not P case leads to a solution, without identifying which one is the case. This lack of witness can be rather frustrating and has lead to an interesting area of mathematics known as constructivist mathematics, where one is unable to prove an existential statement without providing a witness. One way this is done is by restricting the use of the law of excluded middle.

PART 2: What value is there in existence without witness?

Our example with the irrational numbers showed that we can have existence without witness. In a lot of pure mathematics we probably don't care about picking out a specific witness that validates our proof. We will however construct a name for a witness (that we know exists) and allow the name to point to said witness. Let us call this a denoting witness.

This might seem a bit confusing, so let's consider an example. Suppose it is true that 'there exists a richest person in the world'. Now off the top of my head I might not know who this person is. However I might still make claims such as 'the richest person in the world should donate some of their money to help world hunger'. Essentially I'm using 'the richest person in the world' as a name that refers or denotes its witness and then making claims about this entity. The same is frequently done in mathematics where we might let X denote our witness to an existential claim. The reason this is useful is because we want to later use X (and it's proven properties) for further proof claims without going through laborious effort of actual identification.

 It's clear that denoting witnesses have significant uses in mathematics, but I think this has arguably more important ramifications for metaphysics. In mathematics, we act within a supposedly objective world (there's contention here, but most people would argue that mathematics is mind-independant). In contrast it is often more difficult for us to determine to what extent our reality is objective.

Consider for example the following claim:

 < 4 >:  'There is an objective morality'

 This is an existential statement and a standard analysis is that it is elliptical for the following claims:

4i - Moral claims purport to facts and are true if they get those facts right

4ii - Some moral claims are true

4iii - The truth value of moral claims is determined mind independently.

Now, I think there are some very good arguments to think that other moral theories are weak and I've already argued about this in previous posts. So we have some reason to believe that < 4 > is true.

One can note however that < 4  > is to some extent uninformative - it tells us about the nature of morality without telling us what things are actually moral. It doesn't tell us whether murder is wrong, whether it is okay to lie or whether we should be helping the poor. Essentially, the next step to the existential claim is to ask for a witness - please give us some kind of thing that satisfies the conditions addressed above.

It might be considered that the lack of witness is a big problem for moral statements. Moral statements are strange and while most people have basic moral intuitions, this doesn't seem to be the most robust of epistemologies. Even as a moral objectivist, I would probably cede that it is difficult to produce a witness for our moral existential statement. Furthermore, some people believe that moral theories should be to some extent action guiding. To say that there is an objective morality but provide no way to identify what that morality is, is unhelpful as it doesn't say how we should behave.

In fact the question then becomes - does it provide any value at all? We haven't even proven the moral objectivst position and are already doubting what the point of doing so would be. 

I argue that whilst having a witness would be fantastic, it is still very useful even if we don't.

Suppose we think < 4 > is true and let W be a denoting witness. What do we know about W? Well only that it exists and satisfies properties (4i, 4ii and 4iii), which actually amounts to quite a lot.

 For example, if moral M satisfies 4i then that means that when people are talking about morality, they are actually referring to facts about the world. This is also means that if two people disagree about a moral claim, at least one of them is wrong. Suppose I make a moral claim, C and you make the opposite claim Not C. Now, C is true if gets the relevant facts about the world correct. However that means that Not C must be wrong as it would get the relevant facts about the world wrong.

Another interesting observation of W being true (even without a witness) is that it seems people can do things that are morally wrong without knowing it. One can act in a certain way, that goes against the moral facts of the world. In this sense, we could argue that the person is morally wrong even if they had no idea about it. This can have some interesting after effects - it means that people in the past could be morally wrong as they go against the moral standards of the world. 

I might be wrong when judging the people of the past (or the people of different cultures) for being immoral, but the moral facts of the world don't care. You're either moral or not, depending on how your map to those facts. This therefore puts quite a lot of pressure on things like cultural relativism.  

We might also consider what value 4ii has. As we lack a witness, I can't tell what moral claims are true. However, since I know that some moral claims are true, I know that it isn't the case that 'anything goes'. Things I do could be morally wrong. Knowing that I could be doing something bad is quite interesting as it enforces some restrictions on our behavior. A final comment on 4iii is that it doesn't matter as much what one thinks - it is the facts about reality that judge. 

Finally, I know I often talk about morality so I do want to mention some other examples. One useful example to consider is physical reality. Many people think there is sufficient justification for a claim of scientific realism which is the view that the universe described by science is real regardless of how it may be interpreted. At the moment science provides an incomplete picture, but I think many scientific realists might endorse a stronger version - a claim that there is a 'true physics' that would fully describe the world. Note that this puts us an interesting situation - we might endorse the idea of a true physics, yet we obviously lack the witness to it. However by endorsing existence even if we lack witness, we can make some useful statements. For example we can reasonably conclude that people are crazy or hallucinating when they don't believe the same physical statements ('there is a chair') to others around them. We can consider some people irrational if they refuse to take a vaccine, especially if they believe in alternative methods that lack evidence. 

I think I've written enough but I found this quite useful to jot some thoughts. People often argue with me about the importance of epistemic access about certain metaphysical claims I have made. What they are really asking for is a witness. Of course I'd love a witness - but I don't think they realise that existence if often enough.