Psychopaths and Moral Blame: Empirical and Philosophical Issues

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Ted Bundy

They are glib and superficially charming. They have a grandiose sense of self worth. They are often pathological liars and routinely engage in acts of cunning and manipulation. If they do something wrong, they are without remorse. Their emotional responses are typically shallow, and they commonly display a high degree of callousness and a lack of empathy. They are impulsive, irresponsible, parasitic and promiscuous. Some of them torture cats. Who are they? Psychopaths, of course.

Psychopaths fascinate the public. Although they are relatively uncommon within the general population, they are often overrepresented in prison populations, and are more likely to be responsible for the most heinous violent crimes, such as repeated acts of predatory violence and serial killings. They are also said to be overrepresented in the upper echelons of corporate and political life. If nothing else is true, they appear to have a significant impact on social life. Part of this impact seems to be helped by the fact that psychopaths don’t play by the same moral rules as the rest of us.

What is to be done about this state of affairs? Empirical studies seem to suggest that psychopaths lack important moral capacities (such as the capacity for empathy). And some philosophers use this empirical evidence to suggest that psychopaths fail to meet the basic conditions for moral blameworthiness. In this post, I want to take a look at the arguments these philosophers use to support this conclusion. I do so by calling, in particular, upon the discussion in a recent paper by Marion Godman and Anneli Jefferson entitled “On Blaming and Punishing Psychopaths”.

The paper makes a number of interesting arguments about how psychopaths should be viewed, both legally and morally. I don’t propose to cover all those arguments. I just want to hone-in on one particular aspect. As Godman and Jefferson point out, although arguments against the moral blameworthiness of psychopaths have found favour in some philosophical quarters, the empirical and philosophical assumptions upon which these arguments are based are somewhat dubious. I think this is an important claim — one that is worth analysing in more detail.


1. The Basic Structure of the Anti-Moral Blame Argument
It is important to appreciate how narrow the concerns of this post are. This post is solely about the moral blameworthiness of psychopaths. In this respect, “blame” is understood as a backwards-looking concept. In other words, people are blameworthy because of actions they have performed in the past. More precisely, it is the fact that their past behaviour exemplified certain morally salient properties that we deem them worthy of blame.

Because blameworthiness is being understood in this narrow, backwards-looking sense, it follows that assessments of blame have no necessary implications for questions relating to the punishment or legal confinement of psychopaths. They might do, of course. But only if one’s theory of punishment or legal confinement is such that it is only permissible to punish or confine people if they can be blamed for past actions. If one has a more consequentialist or forward-looking theory of punishment and/or confinement, such limitations may not apply. To put it more succinctly, even if one were to agree that psychopaths failed to meet the conditions for moral blame, one is not thereby obligated to accept the view that psychopaths do not warrant punishment or confinement.

With that caveat out of the way, we can proceed to consider the argument that psychopaths are not morally blameworthy. It is my contention that all such arguments — and certainly those covered in the Godman-Jefferson article — fit a common pattern. This pattern begins with a principle stating that an individual agent must, in their actions, meet certain conditions in order to warrant blame. Since the era of Aristotle, it has been common to identify two such general conditions. The first is the control condition, according to which agents must be in control of their actions in order to be deemed morally blameworthy for those actions. The second is the epistemic condition, according to which agents must have knowledge (or, “understanding”) of certain morally salient properties of those decisions in order to be deemed morally blameworthy.

Although the satisfaction of both conditions is an essential prerequisite to moral blame, most of the arguments about psychopaths tend to focus on the epistemic condition. This is probably because the control condition is deeply contested. In relation to the epistemic condition, the basic thrust of what I shall call the anti-moral blame argument (for want of a better name) is that an ability to understand certain moral concepts is an essential precondition for moral blame and that psychopaths lack that ability. As such, all these arguments tend to fit within the following abstract framework:

• (1) An ability to understand moral concepts C₁…C_n is an essential precondition for moral blame (motivating principle).

• (2) Psychopaths lack the ability to understand moral concepts C₁…C_n (empirical claim).

• (3) Therefore, psychopaths cannot be morally blameworthy.

Different philosophers fill out the premises with different accounts of the essential moral concepts and different empirical studies supporting the claim that psychopaths are unable to grasp those concepts. Although the inability to empathise, and the lack of remorse are usually central to this, the versions of the argument considered by Godman and Jefferson relate to the ability to grasp moral rules and the ability to understand the nature of personhood. Let’s look at both of these versions of the argument now.


2. The “Moral versus Conventional Rule” Version of the Argument
The first version of the argument claims that psychopaths are unable to grasp the difference between moral and conventional rules and that this inability undermines their blameworthiness. There are some problematic steps in this argument. But let’s try to give it the respect it deserves by outlining the basic idea.

First, we need to understand the distinction in question for ourselves. A conventional rule is one that is contingent, localised, and oftentimes produced by an authority figure (or figures) within a certain practical or social context. For example, I could, as a lecturer in a university classroom, create a conventional rule stating that it is impermissible to use a laptop in my class. Students would go along with this rule (I hope) because I have some authority in that context. Now, to be sure, I could have some good reasons for introducing that rule (laptops are distracting and they undermine concentration and deep learning), but I could also suspend that rule (maybe for a particular classroom exercise) and no one would say it was wrong for me to do so. The rule is purely conventional. Moral rules are different. They are not simply contingent or localised, nor are they capable of being suspended by appropriate authority figures. Imagine if I, as a lecturer in a university classroom, told my students that it was okay for them to torture one another for the purposes of a classroom exercise. They would balk at the notion. The rule against torture is not merely conventional. It is moral.

(Does that make sense? If not, you are probably a psychopath.)

According to developmental psychologists, acquiring the ability to grasp the distinction between conventional and moral rules is a key stage in the moral development of children. But there is behavioural evidence suggesting that psychopaths cannot grasp the distinction. The most commonly cited studies in this area are those performed by James Blair, published in 1995 and 1997. Blair took people who scored highly on Hare’s psychopathy test and assessed their ability to tell the difference between moral and conventional transgressions. He found that psychopaths tended to treat conventional and moral transgressions equivalently, and were less likely to focus on the harm associated with an action when deciding whether or not it was permissible. Interestingly, his study didn’t seem (I say “seem” because I’m reporting it second-hand) to find that psychopaths thought that moral rules could be easily suspended by authority figures. Rather, psychopaths seemed to view moral and conventional rules as equally authority-independent.

Some authors have taken these findings as evidence for the view that psychopaths lack genuine moral understanding and so cannot be morally blamed for what they do. Neil Levy (2007) has made this point. The gist of the reasoning is clear enough. It is that awareness that particular action (A) involves the transgression of a moral rule is an essential prerequisite for moral blame. We don’t ordinarily deem people who lack that awareness morally blameworthy. Think of children who have not passed through the requisite stage of moral development. Why should we treat psychopaths differently?

Let’s plug this into the general framework outlined in the previous section:

• (1*) An ability to understand that an action involves the transgression of a moral rule (as opposed to a conventional rule) is an essential precondition for moral blame for that action.

• (2*) Psychopaths are unable to understand moral rules (more precisely: they cannot distinguish them from purely conventional rules).

• (3*) Psychopaths cannot be deemed morally blameworthy for performing actions that transgress moral rules.

Is this argument any good? For what it’s worth, I have some doubts about the motivating principle, at least in its current form. I tend to think that awareness that an action involves the transgression of what you conceive to be conventional rule, but that you know everyone else deems to be a moral rule, and is in fact a moral rule, might be sufficient for moral blame. Furthermore, I suspect that many high-functioning psychopaths have that kind of knowledge. Still, I accept that this is an argument that would would require some elaboration.

Godman and Jefferson offer two other critiques in their paper. The first is targeted at premise (2*). They contend that the empirical evidence on the psychopathic inability to grasp that distinction is more uncertain than proponents of the argument let on. For example, in a 2012 study, Aharoni et al tried to test psychopaths’ ability to tell the difference between moral and conventional rules and were unable to reproduce Blair’s results. Indeed, they found that IQ, not psychopathy, was a predictor of an individual’s ability to grasp the distinction.

The second critique is more conceptual, though it has an empirical aspect to it. I guess it would be targeted at premise (1*) insofar as it calls into question the tenability of the moral-conventional distinction. Reflecting on it from my philosophical armchair, I find the distinction, as described, to be somewhat problematic. Oftentimes, moral rules are contingent, situational and localised in nature. Furthermore, on at least some occasions, moral rules can be authority-dependent (in fact, if you are a proponent of divine command theory this is always true). For example, I think it is immoral to drive on the right side of the road in certain countries (I live in one such country). This is not because driving on the right is intrinsically immoral, but rather because within a particular community an appropriate authority has chosen the “everyone drive on the left”-equilibrium. The unsatisfactory nature of the moral-conventional distinction has also been confirmed by some empirical studies. Godman and Jefferson cite an online survey study published by Kelly et al in 2007 which found that judgments of moral impermissibility were not always universal, authority-independent and sensitive to factors like harm to others.

This suggests that this version of the anti-moral blame argument leaves something to be desired.


3. The “Lack of Personhood” Argument
This brings us to a second version of the argument, one that has recently been defended by Levy (again). To understand it, we need to go back to my original description of the behavioural characteristics of psychopaths. Note how several of them suggest that psychopaths have problems with delayed-gratification. We are told that they tend to be impulsive, promiscuous and irresponsible. This suggests that they aren’t always great at projecting themselves into the future and planning for that future. Likewise, some of their characteristics suggest that they aren’t that great at projecting themselves into the past either. An example would be their ability to act callously and without remorse.

Levy has suggested a unitary theory of these phenomena. He claims that what psychopaths lack is an ability to engage in Mental Time Travel (MTT -i.e. an ability to project themselves into the past and future). They are capable of short-term planning and execution, but notoriously bad at long-term planning and execution. As some have put it, they are “stuck in the present”. Levy cites several others in support of this view. All say much the same thing (e.g. McIlwain 2010; Petrican and Burris 2011): psychopaths seem to have a limited temporal imagination. They find fleeting impulses nearly irresistible; they find self-control more difficult.

Levy argues that these deficits in MTT are significant when it comes to moral blame. The reason being that MTT is central to the standard philosophical conception of personhood. For instance, Michael Tooley’s famous definition of personhood holds that a person is a continuing subject of conscious experiences. What makes me a person is that I have an awareness of my current experiences and an awareness that those experiences continue over time. This notion of personhood is also central to many aspects of our morality. Though it is probably wrong to harm any sentient life, it is more wrong to harm a person. Levy argues that understanding this unique type of harm is essential to understanding several of our moral duties and responsibilities. An inability to grasp the nature of that harm may be an impediment to moral blame. His claim is that the psychopathic deficits in MTT engender such a disability. Psychopaths are unable (or, at least, less able) to view themselves and others as persons in the morally relevant sense.

In short, Levy puts forward the following argument:

• (1**) An ability to understand the unique nature of harm to a person is an essential prerequisite for (at least some) types of moral blame.

• (2**) Psychopaths lack the ability to understand the unique nature of harm to a person (due to their deficits in MTT).

• (3**) Therefore, psychopaths cannot be deemed morally blameworthy for at least some types of moral wrong.

Note how this is a narrower argument than the preceding one. As is clear from both premise (1**) and the conclusion, this argument does not exonerate psychopaths from all types of moral blame. It only exonerates them from moral blame attaching to actions that involve harm to another person. To the extent that they understand harm to sentient beings (as distinct from persons) they could still be blamed for that. And since all persons are typically sentient, this suggests that in a case involving harm to a person, a psychopath could still be blamed for the lesser type of harm that they knew to be present.

But with that restriction in mind how should we view the argument? Premise (2**) is problematic. For one thing, the empirical support for it is unimpressive. The studies that Levy cites tend to involve either single cases, philosophical reviews of psychopathy, or studies not directly aimed at testing psychopaths. Furthermore, as he himself notes, what evidence there is suggests that a deficit in MTT is only present among low-functioning psychopaths. High-functioning psychopaths seem to be capable of long-term planning and execution. Thus, the argument may have an even more restrictive reach than what has already been described. Beyond this, the link between a deficit in MTT and an inability to grasp the nature of harm to persons is merely conceptually appealing, not something that has been meticulously investigated.


4. Conclusion
To sum up, in this post I’ve been looking at philosophical arguments claiming that psychopaths are not morally blameworthy. As I noted, these arguments tend to focus on the inability of psychopaths to satisfy the epistemic conditions for moral blame. Two versions of this epistemic argument have been considered. The first claimed that psychopaths are unable to understand transgressions of moral rules because they are unable to grasp the distinction between moral and conventional rules. This version of the argument was challenged on both empirical and conceptual grounds: recent studies suggest that psychopaths do understand that distinction; and both conceptual and empirical evidence suggests that the distinction is not as robust as some have tended to believe. The second argument claimed that psychopaths are unable to understand the nature of harm to a person because they suffer from deficits in Mental Time Travel. This is a more restrictive argument and one that, for the time being, lacks a credible empirical foundation.

God, Immortality and the Futility of Life

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William Lane Craig has a pretty dispiriting take on the atheistic view of life:

If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value or purpose. 

(Craig 2008, 72)

Embedded in this short quote are a number of important claims. The first is that in order to avoid futility and meaninglessness we need our lives to have ultimate significance, value and/or purpose. The second, perhaps more important, is that we cannot have these things unless two conditions are met:

Craig’s Two Conditions for Meaning: Our lives are without ultimate significance, value or purpose unless (a) there is a God (who, among other things, determines objective value, purpose and significance); and (b) we are immortal.

Over the years, I have written several pieces that call into question Craig’s claims about futility and the atheistic view. In particular, I disagree with his claim that God determines objective value, purpose and significance. I also disagree with the notion that “ultimate” significance is absent on the atheistic view, or that we need it in order to avoid futility.

Today, I want to consider another criticism of Craig’s view. This one comes from Toby Betenson who has just published a nice little article in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion entitled “Fairness and Futility”. In it, Betenson mounts an internal critique of Craig’s view of God and the futility of life. In short, he argues that if we take Craig seriously in his views about God, it turns out that God actually undermines the meaningfulness of our lives. Betenson then uses this internalist critique to suggest that Craig’s focus on ultimate significance (as opposed to relative significance) is misconceived.

I want to go through the main phases of this argument. I have my own thoughts on it and I will insert those into the discussion as I proceed.


1. How might our lives be futile?
Betenson’s argument works by paying close attention to what Craig himself says about the futility of life under atheism and the meaning of life under theism. This close attention is what allows him to hoist Craig on his own petard. This means that several portions of Betenson’s article are given over to quoting Craig verbatim and then drawing out the implications of what Craig is saying. I don’t want to follow the same approach here, since that would end up with me simply repeating what Betenson has to say, but I’ll have to do a little bit of it in order to illustrate a key point in the dialectic.

This key point relates to Betenson’s claim that Craig’s account of meaning under theism implies the existence of a “causal relevance” condition for meaning. In other words, in addition to the two conditions stated above (viz. the existence of God and personal immortality), Betenson thinks that Craig’s account of meaning implies a third condition. This third condition stipulates that in order to live a meaningful life, one’s actions must make a causal contribution to events that are of ultimate significance. Betenson cites some passages from Craig in support of this. In these passages, Craig speaks repeatedly of the need for one’s life to ‘make a difference’. Here’s an example:

The contributions of the scientist to the advance of human knowledge, the researches of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the sacrifices of good people everywhere to better the lot of the human race—all these come to nothing [on the atheistic view]. In the end they don’t make one bit of difference, not one bit. Each person’s life is therefore without ultimate significance. And because our lives are ultimately meaningless, the activities we fill our lives with are also meaningless. 

(Craig 2008, 73)

Craig is here talking about the difference between a life filled with actions that make some relative difference (i.e. that have value relative to a particular person or time frame) and those that make some ultimate difference (i.e. have value from the point of view of the universe). The latter are what matter when it comes to meaning. So this gives us Craig’s third condition for meaning in life:

Craig’s Implied Third Condition for Meaning: Our lives have meaning (and they avoid futility) if our actions make some causal difference to events of ultimate significance, value or purpose.

It’s important to realise how this affects Craig’s complete account of meaning in life. It means that in order to live a meaningful life, you must have three things. First, you must have a God that brings into existence objective values. Second, you must live forever. And third, your actions must be causally relevant to events of ultimate significance (or ultimate “value” if you prefer).

There are already some peculiarities in this account. For instance, one could dispute the role of God in bringing into existence objective values. One could also puzzle over the importance of personal immortality in this account (why must I hang about forever in order for life to have meaning? Isn’t it enough for my actions to make a difference to something of ultimate value?). I puzzle over these things myself and as we shall see such puzzles reemerge in Betenson’s argument. But set them to the side for now.

Let’s focus, instead, on the consequences of Craig’s third condition. Granting its coherence, there are at least four possibilities when it comes to the state of the universe and the satisfaction of that condition. They are:

• (i) The universe could contain events of ultimate significance/value, and our actions could make a causal difference to them.

• (ii) The universe could contain events of ultimate significance/value, and our actions could make no causal difference to them.

• (iii) The universe could contain events of mere relative significance/value, and our actions may make a difference to them.

• (iv) The universe could contain events of mere relative significance/value, and our actions may make no difference to them.

These four possibilities are further illustrated by the diagram below.

For Craig, only the first of these possibilities allows for a meaningful life. The other three all lead to futility. Craig is well aware of the futility of (iii) — that’s what he is talking about in the passage quoted above, and that’s what he finds so problematic about the atheistic view. The fourth possibility (iv) is an example of what Betenson calls “futility overkill” since it involves a double failure. We can ignore it. The second possibility (ii) is the interesting one. Betenson wants to argue that Craig’s understanding of God actually supports this view. If so, then even by Craig’s own standards, the theistic view implies futility.


2. Betenson’s “Theism implies Futility” Argument
The argument for this is actually quite simple. It comes, once again, from paying close attention to what Craig says about God. As I have noted on previous occasions, one of Craig’s favourite critiques of the atheistic view is that it does not allow for “ultimate accountability” (or “ultimate justice”). In the atheistic universe, we can perform moral acts throughout our lives, including acts of great personal sacrifice, but in the end these acts count for nothing because they will not be rewarded or punished. We could have lived lives of debauchery and sadistic cruelty and the result would be the same.

In the theistic universe things are different:

[O]n the theistic hypothesis, God holds all persons morally accountable for their actions. Evil and wrong will be punished; righteousness will be vindicated. Good ultimately triumphs over evil, and we shall finally see that we do live in a moral universe after all. Despite the inequities of this life, in the end the scales of God’s justice will be balanced. Thus, the moral choices we make in this life are infused with an eternal significance. We can with consistency make moral choices which run contrary to our self-interest and even undertake acts of extreme self-sacrifice, knowing that such decisions are not empty and ultimately meaningless gestures. Rather our moral lives have a paramount significance. 

(Craig - quoted in Betenson 2015) 

Betenson thinks that there is something odd going on here. Craig seems to be saying that there must be ultimate justice in order for any of our actions to have moral significance (it’s the only way we can be sure that we “live in a moral universe after all”). He also seems to be saying that God is the only thing that can supply the necessary justice. He ensures that the moral scales will ultimately be balanced. The net result of this, according to Betenson, is that our actions don’t seem to be all that relevant on Craig’s account of ultimate significance. It is God as justice-giver, not us as moral decision-makers, who “makes the difference”. In short, if Craig is right about the importance of God in ensuring ultimate significance, he implies that our lives are not causally relevant to events of ultimate significance. But that was one his conditions for meaning in life. We have a contradiction.

To put this a little more formally:

• (1) If our lives are not causally relevant to events of ultimate significance, then our lives are futile (devoid of meaning).

• (2) If God exists, then God ensures that the universe has ultimate significance (by ensuring that it is ultimately just).

• (3) If God ensures that the universe is ultimately just, then our lives are not causally relevant to events of ultimate significance.

• (4) Therefore, if God exists, our lives are futile.

Is this a persuasive argument? Let’s consider some objections and replies.


3. Objections and replies
Betenson covers four objections in his article. The first two strike me as being fairly uninteresting. The last two are more important. I’ll briefly summarise what he has to say about each of them. Here’s the first objection (note: they are not set out exactly like this in the original article):

Objection 1: Even if God is responsible for the ultimate balancing of the moral scales (the ultimate Good), that does not mean that our lives are not causally relevant to lesser, but still significant goods.

This is an obvious criticism because Betenson’s critique seems to take an overly narrow view on the range of goods to which our moral choices must be causally relevant. It seems plausible to say that the decision of the doctor to cure a patient is a causal contribution to the good, even if it is not a contribution to the ultimate Good. Betenson argues that this objection is not available to Craig. This is because Craig repeatedly emphasises that a causal contribution to events of localised significance (like the curing of a patient) are not enough. Contribution to those sorts of events is possible on the atheistic view and Craig clearly doesn’t think it is enough.

The second objection is slightly more interesting:

Objection 2: On Craig’s view, our actions do have ultimate significance because our actions determine whether we go to heaven or hell, and since we live forever in heaven or hell, this means that our actions have everlasting moral implications.

But there are problems with this too. For starters, one has to accept a very traditional view of heaven and hell to find it at all persuasive (if you are a universalist, this option won’t be available to you). For another thing, it assumes that a causal contribution to an event of everlasting personal significance is equivalent to a causal contribution to an event of ultimate significance. This equivalence is dubious. As Betenson puts it, when assessing events in terms of their ultimate significance, you have to take the “point of view of the universe” (i.e. a depersonalised point of view). From that point of view, it is not at all clear that whether you get into heaven or hell is ultimately significant. It is important to you, for sure, but not from the universal point of view. All that matters from that point of view is that the moral scales are balanced: that good is rewarded and wrongdoing is punished.

As I say, I don’t find these first two objections to be particularly important. It is with the third objection that things really start to heat up:

Objection 3: Betenson’s argument assumes that ultimate reward and punishment are what matter from the universal perspective; but this is wrong. What matters is whether objective good is done. There are other objective goods and we can, as moral beings, contribute to the total amount of objective good.

This is a modification of the first objection, but it is an important modification. It highlights problems in Betenson’s original discussion of the ultimate good. It suggests that, from a universal point of view, ensuring that people are appropriately rewarded and punished is just one good among many. There are other potential, universally significant goods (e.g. pursuit of knowledge and understanding, or, if you are a Christian, the worship of God). We can causally contribute to the total sum of those other goods.

As it happens, this is pretty much my view of meaning in life (except I do not think the worship of God is an impersonal good). The problem with it is twofold. First, it is not at all clear why immortality would be required on this account. I could make my contribution to the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, then shuffle off this mortal coil and drift into eternal oblivion. The total amount of good in the universe would still have increased through my actions. Second, it is not at all clear why God is needed on this account. Craig thinks He is needed because God determines what is and what is not good, but if like me you think that standards of goodness must be independent of God the need for His existence dissipates.

The problems with this third objection lead to the construction of a fourth:

Objection 4: In line with objection 3, what matters from the universal perspective is that good is done and this conception of good extends beyond ultimate justice. But it just so happens that the most important objective goods require that you live forever.

This is effectively a slight modification of objection 3 that tries to explain why personal immortality is needed in order to avoid futility. It may seem a little ad-hoc right now, given the order in which I have presented these objections, but there is some independent motivation for it. There are those — and I believe Craig is among them — who think that eternal salvation or eternal worship of God are the most important objective goods. And it just so happens that both of those things seem to require personal immortality.

The difficultly with this objection is twofold. First, it doesn’t rule out the possibility of there being other objective goods to which we could causally contribute and which could provide some degree of meaning to our lives. Second, there are serious questions to be asked about whether these objective goods really are objective goods. I and others have written about the dubious nature of the obligation to worship God. It also seems pretty strange and arbitrary for God to create us and then decree that the ultimate objective good — the one which will allow our lives to have meaning — is our willingness to worship him forever. As Maitzen points out in another article on this topic, it is doubtful whether such divinely ordained purposes could rescue our lives from futility. They will always seem questionable and unsatisfactory. This leads to some doubts about the very notion of “ultimate” significance.

I tend to agree, but that’s where I shall leave it for now. To briefly recap, Craig holds that God, personal immortality, and a causal contribution to events of ultimate significance, are needed if we are to avoid a futile and meaningless existence. Betenson counters that on Craig’s conception of God, we make no causal contribution to events of ultimate significance. This is because God is the ultimate justice-giver, who balances the universe’s moral scales. There are responses to this, but they tend to create more problems for Craig’s account.

Should prospective parents have to apply for licences? An Ethical Debate

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Should prospective parents have to apply for parental licences? The argument seems obvious. Having children is a serious business. Negligent or irresponsible parents risk causing long-term harms to their offspring, harms that often have spillover effects on the rest of society. A licensing system should help us to filter out such parents. Therefore, a licensing system would benefit children and society at large. QED

Of course, I’m being somewhat facetious here. The idea of prospective parents applying for parental licences will strike many as both absurd and offensive. But there is no idea so absurd and offensive that at least one philosopher has not defended it. And when it involves something as contentious as parent-child relationships, you can rest assured that there will be more than one.

In this post, I want to review the philosophical debate about parental licensing. I start by looking at Hugh LaFollette’s now-classic argument in favour of parental licences. This argument was originally published in 1980 in Philosophy and Public Affairs. It has since been the subject of much commentary. After outlining LaFollette’s argument, I want to consider a recent critique of that argument from Jurgen de Wispelaere and Daniel Weinstock. As we shall see, they claim that while there is something to be said for educating prospective parents and avoiding risks to children, it is not at all clear that licensing is the best way to go about doing this.

Let’s see how the argument develops.


1. LaFollette’s Argument for Parental Licensing
LaFollette’s argument for parental licensing was based on a simple set of analogies. Modern societies routinely rely upon licensing regimes. The most obvious example is the licensing regime that governs the driving of cars. If you want to drive a car, you must earn a driving licence. This involves passing a test of knowledge and skill that establishes a minimum level of competence. The same holds true in other areas. If I want to practice brain surgery, I have to earn a medical licence. If I want to practice law, I have to earn a law licence. And so on.

What is the rationale for all these licensing regimes? The answer seems pretty straightforward. Activities like driving and brain surgery carry significant risks to the rest of society. A car is a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. Likewise a scalpel. We can reduce these dangers by having a testing and credentialing system that establishes basic levels of competency. The benefits of such policies more than outweigh the risks. This chain of reasoning may not hold true in all cases. The cost of licensing lawyers, for instance, may not outweigh the benefit. But that doesn’t matter right now. What matters is that it holds true in some cases.

That is all that LaFollette’s argument requires. Because if it does hold true in some cases it should also, by analogy, hold true in the case of parental licensing. Having and rearing children is a risky business. Incompetent parents risk causing significant long-term harm to the their children. A licensing system would train parents to obtain a basic level of competence and would filter out those who pose a serious risk to children. The benefits would outweigh the costs.

In other words, the following argument from analogy seems to hold:

• (1) Licensing systems are desirable/justifiable in the case of driving, doctoring or lawyering on the grounds that (a) those activities pose significant risks of harm to others; and (b) a licensing system would help to reduce those risks in a cost-effective manner.

• (2) Reasons (a) and (b) would also be true in the case of parental licensing.

• (3) Therefore, parental licensing would be desirable/justifiable.

Like all arguments from analogy, this has some holes in it. Two are particularly important. The first is the strength of the analogy itself. It could be that there are important differences between parenting and driving that justify licensing in the latter but not in the former. The second has to do with implementation. It could be that there are significant differences between driving and parenting when it comes to the practical implementation of a licensing system. In particular, the costs associated with licensing parents might be significantly higher than the costs associated with licensing drivers.

Let’s consider both of these problems in turn.


2. The Non-Substitutability of the Parental Good
Consider first the important disanalogies between the activity of driving (or performing surgery or whatever) and parenting, particularly in relation to the value of those activities to those who are unjustly denied their licences. No licensing system is perfect. Every system is likely to issue “false positives” and “false negatives” (i.e. likely to deny licences to those who are genuinely competent and grant licences to those who are not). The question is whether we can tolerate those imperfections. To answer that question we need to think of the nature of the licensed activities.

Driving is, for most people, a useful (occasionally necessary) convenience. It gets them about from A to B. This may have considerable value in their lives, but if they really need to get about, there are often reasonable substitutes to driving themselves. They could ask someone for a lift, or they could use public transport, or they could cycle or walk. Some of these will be more reasonable than others, depending on the circumstances. The important point is that — with some limited exceptions — there are always other ways of getting from A to B. If someone is denied a driving licence, they are not damned to permanent house imprisonment.

Something similar is true of performing surgery or practicing law. Those activities will be valuable to many people. It is true that some of those people may have had their hearts set on a career as a doctor or lawyer — that it is their dream job — but there are, nevertheless, alternative forms of employment available to them, many of which might end up being equally (if not more) fulfilling. So, once again, there are reasonable career substitutes available to those who are denied their medical or legal licences.

Is the same thing true of parenting? De Wispelaere and Weinstock argue that it is not. They argue that there certain aspects of the parental good (i.e. the relationship between parent and child) that render that good non-substitutable. If people were denied this parental good thanks to the vagaries of a licensing system, they would lack the reasonable substitutes available in other cases. So what is it about the parental good that makes it non-substitutable? They put it like this:

First, children are utterly dependent on parents for securing their basic needs and wellbeing, and therefore vulnerable to the choices and actions of parents. Second, children typically have no right or power to exit the relationship. Third, children’s love for their parents is spontaneous and unconditional; at times it simply defies ‘rationality’. Finally, the parent is explicitly charged with the responsibility of taking care of the child. Because of the form and quality of the intimacy associated with raising a child, many individuals develop a very strong interest in experiencing such a relationship. 

(De Wispelaere and Weinstock 2012, p 199)

When you add the distinctive nature of the parental good to the fact that any licensing regime with a sufficiently large reach is likely to issue a high number of false positives, you have a situation in which those false positives start to look less tolerable. For example, if a licensing regime successfully authorised 99% of all competent parents and only denied 1% of competent parents, you still have a significant problem if the regime is used to licence every potential parent. Say you have a population of one million potential parents. Even with a 99% accuracy rate, you would be denying parenthood to 10,000 competent parents. These parents would not be like unlucky drivers who can hop on the next bus.

To sum up:

• (4) Every licensing system will be imperfect, i.e. it will deny licences to those who deserve them and grant them to those who don’t. The question is whether this imperfection is tolerable.

• (5) If the goods that deserving people are denied through the imperfections of the licensing system are reasonably substitutable, then some imperfections are tolerable; if the goods are not reasonably substitutable, then the imperfections are less tolerable.

• (6) The goods associated with traditional licensing schemes (e.g. driving, performing surgery) are reasonably substitutable; the good associated with parenting is not reasonably substitutable.

• (7) Therefore, the inevitable imperfections of a parental licensing system are less tolerable than the imperfections of typical licensing systems.

I have relatively little to say about this argument. I agree with the De Wispelaere and Weinstock that the parental good is non-substitutable. Nevertheless, I would make two points. First, it is not clear to me that the good associated with particular careers are as reasonably substitutable as they let on. In particular, I think there may be unique goods associated with, say, the act of saving someone’s life through surgery that are not easily replicated by other career paths. Second, I think the properties of the parent-child relationship that make it non-substitutable cut both ways. In other words, the dependency and vulnerability of children might be part of what makes parenting so special, but those properties are also reasons to worry about the harms of incompetent parenting. Indeed, they may even provide stronger grounds for licensing than would apply in the case of driving or performing surgery.


3. Implementation Problems
Let’s set aside the disanalogies for now and assume that the prima facie argument for licensing goes through. What would such a licensing system look like? What would be its practical costs? Even in his original paper, LaFollette acknowledged that it would be very difficult to implement a restrictive licensing regime. Unless you are willing to allow mass sterilisations and or invasive clampdowns on procreative sexual behaviour, the regime would probably be highly ineffective. People who would not pass the licensing tests would still be allowed to conceive and bear children.

Once the children are brought into existence, various options would arise for taking them away from irresponsible parents, but this may well have undesirable effects. The adoption system is unlikely to have the capacity to absorb such children, which will put pressure on institutional or foster care systems, which are often bad for child welfare.

These practical difficulties have led LaFollette to revise his proposal. In a 2010 article, he suggests that a licensing regime should not focus on punishing or restricting unlicensed parents but should, rather, focus on rewarding or incentivising licensed parents. In particular, he suggests a system of tax breaks. Parents who are willing to undergo the training and pass the basic competency tests should be rewarded with some tax break. This would avoid the significant costs associated with a punitive regime, while still retaining some of the benefits of a licensing regime.

The problem with this, as de Wispelaere and Weinstock point out, is that it leaves the licensing proposal in tatters. If the idea is that educating prospective parents has social value, and that it is not possible to punitively filter out irresponsible parents through a traditional licensing regime, then its not clear why we should retain a voluntary licensing regime. The most irresponsible prospective parents would have very little reason to engage with such a regime. Surely there are better ways of supplying the necessary education. For example, why not simply include parenting classes and tests as part of the mandatory school curriculum? That way everybody would still require some basic knowledge and skills of parenting and you’d avoid all the negatives associated with a licensing regime. This would come with its own set of problems, but they would be no more significant than the problems associated with all other forms of standardised education, and they might do some (comparative) good.

This sounds about right to me. Indeed, I am more persuaded by this critique than the former one. I think a restrictive licensing regime would be morally and practically unworkable (not unless we are willing to tolerate costly invasions into our private sexual lives). Given these practical problems it seems likely that there are other, less costly, means to a similar end.


4. Conclusion
In sum, the argument for parental licensing is provocative, controversial and initially quite plausible due to the seductive analogies with similar licensing regimes. In short, it has everything that you might want from an applied ethical argument. It is only when you delve a little deeper and consider the distinctive nature of the parental good and the costs of practical implementation that it starts to unravel.

But there may be broader implications here. At the very end of their article, de Wispelaere and Weinstock point out that this critique of the licensing proposal might have unforeseen implications for traditional adoption regimes. After all, adoption regimes already tend to involve the de facto licensing of adoptive parents. But if licensing is unwelcome in the case of natural parents why is it any more welcome in the case of adoptive parents? There may be answers to that question, but I won’t pursue them now. Something to take up in the comments section, perhaps?

Three Practical Hurdles to a Universal Basic Income

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The campaign for the introduction of a universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining ground in recent years. What was once a slightly obscure proposal, beloved by certain political theorists and welfare reformists, is now being embraced as a potential solution to the threat of technological unemployment. I myself have written about it on several occasions, mainly focusing on different political and philosophical arguments in favour of its introduction. These arguments focused on the normative/political grounding for the UBI. They rarely, if ever, focused on the practicalities of the UBI. How would it be introduced? Would this be an easy thing?

In this post, I want to take up some of those practical questions. In particular, I want to consider a pragmatic argument in favour of the UBI, one that is often trotted out by its supporters. Then, I want to consider some potential pragmatic hurdles to the introduction of a UBI. In doing so, I draw upon an article by Jurgen De Wispelaere and Lindsay Stirton entitled ‘Practical Bottlenecks in the Implementation of a UBI’. In that article they look at three specific hurdles to the introduction of a UBI, ones that supporters of the policy should consider.


1. The Under-consumption of Welfare and the Simplicity of the UBI
Most welfare entitlements are selective. That is to say, only certain people qualify for those entitlements. For example, jobseekers allowance is a selective entitlement: you are only entitled to it if you are an adult who is actively seeking work. Similarly, childcare benefits are selective: they are only available to those who have dependent children. Sometimes, there are multiple dimensions to the selectivity. For instance, childcare benefits might be means-tested, meaning that only those with children and with incomes below a certain level, are entitled to the benefit. These selective policies can be justified on various grounds, but their selectivity can give rise to certain practical problems. Chief among these practical problems is the problem of under-consumption.

This problem is widely discussed in the literature on welfare entitlements. It arises whenever people who are genuinely entitled to a welfare payment fail to receive it. This is a significant failure of policy: the rationale behind selective welfare programmes is that they provide benefits to people who are genuinely in need of them (who genuinely deserve them). If they fail do this, then there is a significant “justice gap” associated with their implementation.

Under-consumption may be attributable to any number of causes, but it is generally believed to increase whenever the programme includes complex sets of rules and guidelines, whenever the entitlement criteria are vague, whenever the programme requires the applicant to pass a means test, or whenever the criteria of entitlement are associated with some negative prejudice (e.g. the “unemployed”). Selective entitlement programmes tend to exhibit these properties to greater or lesser degrees, which means they often suffer from the problem of under-consumption. Furthermore, there is a limit to how fast and effective bureaucracies can be at tracking people as their life circumstances change (e.g. their employment status, marital status, parental status). Since these life circumstances often determine eligibility for selective entitlements, it follows that selective programmes will always have to contend with a significant risk of under-consumption.

There are other practical problems associated with selective programmes. As you might imagine, the bureaucratic costs associated with policing the boundaries of entitlement are often significant, and sometimes entail humiliating and morally costly intrusions into the lives of those trying to claim the entitlements. It would be better if we could minimise those costs.

This is where the pragmatic benefits of the UBI are typically touted. Irrespective of its moral, political or economic credentials (which are nothing to be sniffed at) the UBI seems attractive because of its administrative simplicity. If it is truly universal, then there is no need to police the boundaries of entitlement. There is no need for costly bureaucratic structures to assess those who make claims, no need for complex rules and guidelines, or prejudicial criteria of entitlement that might dissuade people from making a claim. The problems of bureaucratic cost and under-consumption can be addressed in one fell swoop.

If only things were that simple. Although the UBI certainly has some practical advantages over its more selective peers, it also comes with its own practical hurdles to implementation. As de Wispelaere and Stirton point out, the sheer size and scale of a UBI would be unprecedented. Setting up the infrastructure for its administration would be no small feat. Indeed, there are at least three hurdles that would need to be cleared. Let’s examine them all.


2. The First Hurdle: Maintaining a ‘Cadaster
The first practical hurdle for the UBI is:

Hurdle (1)- Identifying all eligible claimants: If the UBI is to be made available to everybody (or at least every adult or citizen) in a given society, then it is essential that we have some way of identifying all these people. In other words, it is essential that we have some universal register or ‘cadaster’ for eligible claimants.

Many people don’t perceive this as a problem. This is because they think the main problem with selective entitlement programmes is that they struggle to identify the ineligible, i.e. to exclude those who don’t meet the criteria for the programme. Consequently they tend to think that the UBI, because it removes most criteria of ineligibility, solves the problem of identifying eligible participants. But this is incorrect. Just because we no longer have the same number of criteria of exclusion, does not mean that we will magically succeed in including everyone entitled to the UBI. Identifying every person (or adult or citizen) in a given state is itself a significant administrative task.

So how could we do it? De Wispelaere and Stirton look at two possibilities. First, we could try to construct a register from scratch. In other words, introduce some new scheme for tagging and identifying every person (adult or citizen) in an administrative area. This is likely to be a costly endeavour. When the UK proposed to introduce a ID card scheme in the 2000s, the original government estimates were that this would cost approximately £5.6 billion. Later independent estimates suggested that the true cost could be anywhere between £10 and £20 billion (these figures are cited in De Wispelaere and Stirton’s paper). Furthermore, there may be great cultural differences in the willingness of a populace to put their names on such a register. People may not trust the government, and people may worry about how their personal information would be used (beyond simply determining eligibility for the UBI).

The other possibility is that we make use of pre-existing registers. Obvious examples would include registers of social security numbers or voting registers. The problem with these is that they are often far less universal than people suppose. Social security registers tend to work pretty well for people whose births are registered in a particular state but not for those who move to a state later in life. They usually need to apply for a number, and some are either unaware of the need to do so, or simply cannot be bothered to do so. The same holds true for voting registers. I can speak from personal experience on this front since there have been several times in my adult life that I failed to register to vote and so my name was missing from the register. Use of overlapping, but pre-existing, registers might be a possibility but this too would come with costs and would be likely to contain gaps.

I would make one point about this practical hurdle. While I agree with de Wispelaere and Stirton that we shouldn’t ignore the practical hurdles associated with the UBI, I also think it is important not to overstate them. As with every policy, the assessment of the UBI should be conducted comparatively, i.e. by comparing it to its rivals. No welfare policy will completely avoid the problem of under-consumption, or be free from all administrative costs. What matters is whether it is preferable to its rivals and whether these problems can be minimised. The importance of this observation holds in relation to the other two hurdles as well.


3. The Second Hurdle: Ensuring Robust Payment Modalities
The second practical hurdle is an obvious one:

Hurdle (2)- Ensuring that everyone gets paid: It is key to the ethos behind the UBI that everyone receives their income grant, but how can you ensure that this is the case? In other words, how can you ensure that the payment modalities are sufficiently robust to include all eligible claimants?

As I say, this is a pretty obvious practical hurdle to implementation. There are many different payment modalities in modern societies. Not everyone is able or willing to access to all of them. In their analysis, de Wispelaere and Stirton consider a few options.

The first is to use the existing taxation system. This would involve disbursing the basic income grant as a tax deduction (or “negative income tax”). The advantage here is that you could piggyback on top of pre-existing administrative structures. The disadvantages are multifold. First, not everyone participates in the formal economy, or is capable of or willing to submit a tax return. Furthermore, this system is often disliked by feminists on the grounds that taxation systems are often set-up for households as opposed to individuals, and men have tended to control the household. This might impact on the alleged benefits of a UBI for women. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the fact that taxation systems often operate on a “once a year” basis, meaning that the income grant may only be supplied in one large annual lump sum. It is arguable that a more regular system of payments would be more beneficial to vulnerable members of society.

But if there is to be a more regular system of payments, how would it be disbursed? Direct payments to bank accounts might be problematic on the grounds that some people may not have bank accounts, and direct cash payments would have significant administrative costs (i.e. the need to have large, well-staffed payment centres where people could go to pick up their payments on a weekly or monthly basis). A more innovative solution would be to introduce a system of basic income debit cards for all eligible persons. These could be used to make payments or to take out cash from approved ATMs. But problems arise when it comes to: (a) ensuring that people actually get these cards; and (b) setting up and maintaining the IT systems that would be used to administer this payment system.

Again, these problems could be overcome (with some inevitable errors or gaps), but the costs should not be underestimated.


4. The Third Hurdle: Maintaining an Effective Oversight Mechanism
The third hurdle arises even if we can clear the other two:

Hurdle (3)- Maintaining effective oversight: Once a UBI is implemented it will be still be important to ensure that everyone is receiving their income grant and that no one is being left out.

This is again about ensuring that we avoid under-consumption. You might wonder why the focus is solely on under-consumption. Surely, you might say, there is also a problem associated with potential overconsumption (or “double-dipping”)? We don’t want people to get more than their fair share of the income grant, do we? I would tend to agree with this but de Wispelaere and Stirton deliberately avoid this issue in their analysis. Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that an oversight mechanism would also be needed to avoid the problem of over-consumption.

So what kinds of oversight mechanism could we have? In the public administration literature, two general types of oversight mechanism are discussed. The first is a “police patrol” mechanism. This requires some centralised administration, specifically a group of enforcers, to investigate and ensure proper enforcement and compliance with the terms of the policy. This is typical of traditional selective entitlement programmes involving means-testing. Since the absence of such a centralised system of enforcement is usually thought to be an advantage of the UBI proposal, it is unlikely that UBI advocates would be keen to create such a system. Furthermore, given the size and scale of the UBI, it is pretty clear that any such system would represent a massive and unprecedented intrusion into our private lives. Maybe we are willing to tolerate that; but recent scandals about government data collection suggest otherwise.

That leaves us with the second type of oversight mechanism. This is the “fire alarm” mechanism. This doesn’t require a centralised group of enforcers. Instead, it relies on individuals self-reporting the problems they are having with the system (e.g. failures to receive entitlements). The complaints from individuals would then be processed by some agency, which could help to ensure optimal levels of consumption.

There are at least two problems with the fire alarm mechanism. The first is that it is unlikely to work in identifying possible incidents of over-consumption. People who are receiving more than they are entitled to will have few incentives to report this problem (though, of course, some honest souls might do so). Resolving this by getting people to “spy” on one another seems like it could lead to some unpleasantries. The second problem is that even though it might work better when identifying incidents of under-consumption, it is likely to face some practical costs. There will need to be some bureaucratic agency for processing complaints, and people will need to feel comfortable trusting this agency with their problems.


5. Conclusion
In sum, although the UBI may represent a gain in terms of social justice and economic efficiency, it will not be without its practical costs. Three costs, in particular, were discussed in this post. The first is the cost associated with identifying all the eligible claimants; the second is the cost associated with setting up some reliable means for disbursing the income grants; and the third is the cost associated with maintaining some ongoing oversight mechanism. Although every policy is likely to have some costs and some inevitable flaws in consumption, it is important that UBI advocates don’t ignore the costs that are unique to it.

Interview on Robot Overlordz Episode 150: Tech Unemployment and Enhancement

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I have the good fortune of being a guest on the Robot Overlordz podcast this week. Some people might be interested in checking it out. The link is here.

Robot Overlordz is a biweekly podcast, hosted by Mike Johnston and Matt Bolton. As they say themselves:

Robot Overlordz is a podcast about the future. On the show, we take a look at how society is changing. Everything from pop culture reviews to political commentary, technology trends to social norms. All in about 30 minutes or less, every Tuesday and Thursday

I recommend checking out their website and listening in regularly to their show. In my episode, I discuss three things with Mike and Matt:

• Tech Unemployment: Are human workers going to be replaced by robots? Is this happening now? Are fears about tech unemployment misplaced? And doesn't this simply point to a tension or contradiction inherent in capitalism?

• Neuroenhancement and the Extended Mind: Could smartphones and wearable tech be a part of our mind? Is interfering with someone's iPhone ethically equivalent to interfering with someone's mind?

• Enhancement in Sports and Education: Should we allow the use of enhancement technologies in sport or in education? Are traditional methods of educational assessment fit for purpose?

Human Life and the Quest for Immortality

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Romano - Allegory of Immortality

Human beings have long desired immortality. In his book on the topic, cleverly-titled Immortality, Stephen Cave argues that this desire has taken on four distinct forms over the course of human history. In the first, people seek immortality by simply trying to stay alive, either through the help of magic or science. In the second, people seek resurrection, sometimes in the same physical form and sometimes in an altered plane of existence. In the third, people seek solace through the metaphysical/religious concept of the soul as an entity that houses the essence of our personalities and which will live on beyond the death of our physical bodies. And in the fourth, people seek immortality through their work or artistic creations.

With the exception of the last of these forms, most versions of the quest for immortality share the belief that the immortal existence of the self — i.e. the human person — is something worth pursuing. But some philosophers reject this notion. They do so not because they wish to die or think that death is a good thing, but because they think that without death there is no possibility of a recognisably human life. That is to say: they believe that the quest for an immortal human life is incoherent.

One such philosopher is Samuel Scheffler. In his recent(ish) book Death and Afterlife, Scheffler tries to defend the claim that an immortal life would be no life at all. More precisely, he tries to argue that temporal scarcity is a condition of value in human life, and that without the “threat” of death, it would be difficult to make sense of our existence. In this post, I will try to outline Scheffler’s argument and consider its implications for those who seek to promote radical life extension.


1. What is an immortal life anyway?
One thing I have noticed in the debate about life extension and immortality is a tendency for the participants to talk past one another. This is chiefly because the participants often conceive of an “immortal life” or the quest for “immortality” in very different ways. It’s important that we try to avoid this mistake here.

Let’s suppose that there are four types of human life that we could be arguing about (I am aware that this fourfold distinction doesn’t exhaust the possibilities, but I think it suffices for now):

Ordinary Contingent Human Life: This is the kind of life we all currently lead. We are organic beings, whose bodies are susceptible to injury, disease and decay. We can stave off some of these existential threats, but eventually our bodies will give up and we will die. At present, we can expect to live (roughly) between 80-100 years. With medical advancements we might expect to increase that life expectancy (maybe even up to 150 years), but still we will eventually die.

Necessarily Immortal Human Life: This the kind of life in which we continue to exist in something roughly equivalent to our current form, but we do so forever, without the risk or possibility of death. In other words, it is the kind of life in which we must continue to exist, irrespective of our wishes.

Contingently Immortal Human Life (Type 1): This is the kind of life in which we continue to exist in something roughly equivalent to our current form, and we do so with the continuing risk of death by injury or, maybe, some diseases. In other words, our bodies no longer decay or degrade over time, but they are still vulnerable to some external existential threats (perhaps the main one being the risk of fatal attack from other human beings).

Contingently Immortal Human Life (Type 2):: This is the kind of life in which we continue to exist in something roughly equivalent to our current form, without the risk of death by injury or disease, but with the periodic option of ending our lives. In other words, it is the kind of life in which we are free from all existential threats, apart from “threats” realised by our own volition.

Let’s agree, for the sake of argument, that we want to escape the limitations of the first option and live forever. Which of the remaining three options do we hope for? In my experience, most life extensionists and scientifically-inclined immortalists argue for something like the third and fourth options, i.e. lives of indefinite duration with the lingering possibility of death. Most of them don’t really consider the second option. On the other hand, many religious believers seem more committed to the second possibility. The most obvious examples of this are those that believe in the traditional conceptions of heaven and hell, which often seem to require involuntary immortality.

So which type of existence is the subject of Scheffler’s argument? The answer is the second. It is the necessarily immortal human life that he deems to be an incoherent concept. This immediately limits the audience for his argument. Most life extensionists will be non-plussed by what he has to say because it doesn’t touch upon the sort of life they wish to live; religious believers (at least, those who are committed to the idea of immortality) will more plussed about what he has to say.

I think it is important to acknowledge these limitations at the outset as it helps to avoid potential misinterpretations of Scheffler’s argument. That said, in making the case against the necessarily immortal life, Scheffler says some things about temporal scarcity and conditions of value that could have a (lesser) effect on contingently immortal lives. This is something worth bearing in mind.


2. The Argument for Incoherence
With that clarification out of the way, we can proceed to address Scheffler’s argument for the incoherence of a necessarily immortal life. Scheffler doesn’t present this with any degree of formality. Instead, he adduces a number of considerations and tries to informally draw out some conclusions. I’ll try to adopt a more formal approach here. I take it that the argument is something like this:

• (1) Much of what is central to our conception of human life (including our conception of value in life) tacitly assumes that that life will come to an end, and/or is persistently vulnerable to existential threat.

• (2) A necessarily immortal life is one that does not come to an end and is not persistently vulnerable to existential threat.

• (3) Therefore, much of what is central to our conception of human life (including our conception of value) would be lost if we lived necessarily immortal lives.

• (4) If a form of existence entails the loss of much of what is central to our conception of human life, it is not clear that that form of existence can be deemed “human”.

• (5) Therefore, there may be no such thing a necessarily immortal human life (i.e. the concept of a necessarily immortal human life may be incoherent).

The argument can be dragged in different directions once this main conclusion is reached. In particular, it can be used to support the claim that we ought not to desire a necessarily immortal life, or, perhaps more interestingly, to argue against certain religious doctrines that presuppose such an existence (Brian Ribeiro does this in his article “The Problem of Heaven”).

But I am not too interested in those possibilities. I am more interested in how Scheffler defends the main premises of the argument. In particular, I am interested in how he defends premise (1). I take it that the rest of the argument is relatively uncontroversial. Premise (2) is true by definition. (3) looks to be a valid conclusion from (1) and (2). (4) might be controversial because it is vague, but that can be corrected by having a more detailed account of what is taken from the concept of human life by immortality. That is something that the defence of (1) helps to provide. And, finally, (5) also looks to be a reasonable inference from (3) and (4).

So let’s consider the defence of premise (1). In the book, Scheffler offers three reasons in support of premise (1). The first is:

• (6) Our conception of life, and of success in life, is bound up with the notion that life has stages that come to an end.

Scheffler provides more detail on what he is talking about in the book. He notes how the standard conception of a human life has a finite duration, i.e. a beginning (birth) and an end (death). Between these two endpoints, the living person passes through a number of stages, childhood, adolescence, adulthood etc.. These stages, and their durations, vary somewhat from culture to culture. Nevertheless, all cultures share the notion that life is broken down into distinct stages and that these stages come to an end. More importantly, our sense of accomplishment and satisfaction is often intimately linked to our conception of these stages. Thus, what counts as an achievement for a child (first words, learning to read) would not count as an achievement for an adult, and vice versa. As Scheffler puts it:

Our collective understanding of the range of goals, activities, and pursuits that are available to the person, the challenges that he faces, and the satisfactions that he may reasonably hope for are all indexed to these stages. The very fact that the accomplishments and satisfactions of each stage count as accomplishments and satisfactions depends on their association with the stage in question…” 

(Scheffler 2013, p 96)

Scheffler’s point is that this division of life into stages, each with its own characteristic virtues and vices would be lost if we lived necessarily immortal lives.

So much for the first reason. The second reason Scheffler offers is linked to the concepts of loss, illness, injury and so on:

• (7) Concepts such as loss, illness, injury, harm, health, gain, security, safety (and so on), all of which are central to how we understand value in life, derive a good deal of their content from the assumption that life is temporally limited.

This is probably a more significant claim than the first since it focuses directly on things that are deemed to be of value (or disvalue) in human life. Scheffler doesn’t offer much in the way of support for this claim. He simply points out that much of human life is spent trying to avoid things like loss, illness, injury and harm, and trying to pursue health, gain, security and safety. And then adds that these concepts “derive much of their content from our standing recognition that our lives are temporally bounded, that we are subject to death at any moment, and that we are certain to succumb to it in the end.” (p. 97) Since that temporal boundedness is lost in a necessarily immortal life it follows that such a life would consist in a radically altered set of values. (It should also be added that if you are necessarily immortal you would presumably be free from many physical limitations and needs, e.g. hunger and thirst).

Arising from this is Scheffler’s third reason for supporting premise (1). This reason has to do with human planning and decision-making:

• (8) Much of human decision-making and planning only make sense against a background assumption of temporal scarcity.

As I say, this arises from the same set of considerations as the previous reason, and so it may not be fair to treat it as a distinct ground for supporting premise (1). Still, I think it is worth separating it out because the planning and making of decisions (sacrifices, choices etc.) is central to human existence and may well be radically altered in a necessarily immortal life. The reasoning would be, roughly, that whenever we plan or decide to do something we do so on the basis that we must “give up” something (what economists call the “opportunity cost”). The presence of that opportunity cost lends some normative significance to our decision-making and adds to our sense of urgency and motivation. These things would be lost if we lived forever because we would always have a second chance (or a third or fourth or fifth…). Some people might welcome this fact, but even still it would make for a very different type of existence. (I wrote about this argument in much more detail before).


3. Concluding Thoughts
So what are we to make of all this? Let me close with two reflections on Scheffler’s argument. First, I accept most of Scheffler’s argument and I think it says something important about the desire for a (necessarily) immortal life. For example, I accept that a necessarily immortal life would be free from many of the limitations that currently shape our conception of what is or is not of value. Consequently, I am largely persuaded by his use of (7) and (8). I am less persuaded by his use of (6). It seems conceivable to me that an immortal life could still be broken down into stages of finite duration. Maybe it would be more difficult to then associate those stages with distinctive accomplishments and satisfactions, but sufficient ingenuity may make it possible. That said, I believe this to be a minor point. The larger point is that a necessarily immortal life would be radically different from what we currently have, and there is no doubt that much of our current understanding of value would be altered. Although this might not make the desire for a necessarily immortal life incoherent, it may make it silly or misconceived: such a life cannot hope to preserve the things we value about our present lives.

Second, although I accept he was not arguing about contingently immortal lives, I think it is worth asking how much of his argument would carry over to such lives. It seems fair to say that some of it would. After all, a contingently immortal life would reduce at least some of the existential threats that Scheffler thinks are essential to our conception of a human life. For instance, it would force some restructuring of the stages of life and their associated accomplishments and satisfactions (I considered this before). Likewise, with a contingently immortal life of the second type (i.e. one free from all involuntary existential threats) things like loss, illness, harm, safety, health and so on would be deeply affected. How exactly they would be affected is difficult to say. There would still, presumably, be some values that are independent of existential threats (e.g. the intrinsic value of pleasure, or of enhancing theoretical knowledge), but we may find that a good deal of our values are lost or radically altered. We may also, of course, acquire new values that compensate for these losses. But there is something of bet taking place: we risk trading one set of familiar values for another, less familiar, set.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say for now.

Two Interpretations of the Extended Mind Hypothesis

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I’m trying to wrap my head around the extended mind hypothesis (EMH). I’m doing so because I’m interested in its implications for the debate about enhancement and technology. If the mind extends into the environment outside the brain/bone barrier, then we are arguably enhancing our minds all the time by developing new technologies, be they books and abacuses or smartphones and wearable tech. Consequently, we should have no serious principled objection to technologies that try to enhance directly inside the brain/bone barrier.

Or so some have argued. I explored their arguments in a previous post. In this post, I want to do something a little different. I want to consider how exactly one should interpret the claim that the human mind can extend into the external environment. To do this, I’m calling upon the help of Katalin Farkas, who has recently written an excellent little article entitled “Two Versions of the Extended Mind”. In it, she argues that there are two interpretations of the EMH, both extant in the current literature. The first makes a wholly plausible and, according to Farkas, uncontentious claim that can be endorsed by pretty much everyone. The second is rather more contentious and, arguably, more significant.

In the remainder of this post, I will go through both interpretations.


1. Some Key Concepts
Before I get to those interpretations, I need to run through a few key conceptual distinctions. First, I need to distinguish between different types of mental event. We all know what the mind is: it is that “thing” that thinks, feels, believes, perceives, dreams, and intends. Mental events are the events that happen within the mind, i.e. the thinking, feeling, believing, perceiving and so on. By describing it in this way, I do not mean to rule out the possibility that the mind is itself an extended set of events (and so not a “thing” per se). The mind could well be an extended set of events and still consist of sub-events like believing, perceiving, dreaming, intending and so forth.

Anyway, although there are many different mental events, they seem to fall into two broad categories:

Events in the Stream of Consciousness: As the name suggests, these are the mental events that form part of the subject’s occurrent conscious life. They include things like the taste of chocolate, the feeling of warmth, the perception of red and so on.

Standing Events: These are mental events that need not form part of the subject’s occurrent conscious life. The classic examples are beliefs and desires, which are generally taken to characterise a subject even when they are not directly conscious of them (they are taken to be dispositions). For example, I can be said to “desire a meaningful relationship with my children” even when I am asleep and not consciously representing that desire. (Farkas refers to these as standing “states” not “events”; her terminology may be more correct)

This distinction turns out to be important when it comes to understanding what is being “extended” when we talk about the extension of the mind. That is to say, it is important when it comes to understanding the content of the mental extension. It is, however, less important than the next distinction when it comes to understanding the two competing interpretations of the EMH.

That next distinction arises from the functionalist theory of mind. According to that theory, whether something counts as a mental event or not depends on the role that it plays in fulfilling some function. Thus, for example, something counts as a “belief” not because it is made of a particular substance (res extensa or res cogitans) but because it has a particular role in an overarching mental mechanism. Thus, it can be said to counts as a belief because it is capable of producing certain conscious states, action plans and decisions.

Functionalists distinguish between two things that are necessary for mental events/states:

The Mental Realiser: This is the object or mechanism that realises (i.e. constitutes) the mental event. In other words, it is the physical or mental stuff that the event is made out of.

The Mental Role: This is the position (or locus of causal inputs and effects) that something occupies in the mental system.

This distinction is important when it comes to understanding the method or nature of mental extension. In fact, a very simple way to understand Farkas’s main contention is that when it comes to extending the mind, there is a significant difference between realiser-extension and role-extension. The former is trivial, and can arguably be embraced by non-functionalists. The latter is more significant. Let’s try to see why.


2. The Trivial Interpretation: Extending Mental Realisers
As mentioned in the introduction, the gist of the extended mind hypothesis is that the mind can extend out beyond the brain/bone barrier. There may be sound evolutionary reasons for our minds to be limited to that space, but according to proponents of the EMH there is simply no good, in-principle, reason to suppose that the mind has to remain confined to the three and half pound lump of squidgy biomass that we call the “brain”.

The easiest way to interpret that claim is to interpret it as a claim about mental realisers, i.e. as a claim that mental realisers can extend beyond the skull:

Extended Mind Hypothesis (1): The physical basis for mental events can extend beyond the boundaries of our organic bodies

Farkas appeals to an example used by Andy Clark (one of the original proponents of the extended mind hypothesis) to illustrate this version:

Diva’s Case: There is a documented case (from the University of California’s Institute for Nonlinear Science) of a California spiny lobster, one of whose neurons was deliberately damaged and replaced by a silicon circuit that restored the original functionality: in this case, the control of rhythmic chewing. (...) now imagine a case in which a person (call her Diva) suffers minor brain damage and loses the ability to perform a simple task of arithmetic division using only her neural resources. An external silicon circuit is added that restores the previous functionality. Diva can now divide just as before, only some small part of the work is distributed across the brain and the silicon circuit: a genuinely mental process (division) is supported by a hybrid bio-technological system. 

(Clark, 2009 - quoted from Farkas)

Here, the hybrid bio-technological system constitutes an extended mental realiser for the performance of mental arithmetic. The word “constitutes” is important. The claim is not merely that the extended system causally precedes the mental event; it is that the extended system either is or grounds the mental event. What’s more, this claim applies to standing states just as much as it applies to events in the stream of consciousness. Indeed, in Diva’s case it is a mental event in the stream of consciousness that is getting its realiser extended beyond the brain/bone barrier.

Farkas argues that this version of the EMH is fairly trivial. Indeed, she goes so far as to say that non-functionalists and some dualists may be able to embrace it. All it is saying is that if some physical realiser is necessary for mental events (and many theories of mind accept that a physical realiser is necessary, even if it is not sufficient) then there is no reason to think that the realiser has to be made up of neurons, or glia or whatnot. Not unless you think that neurons have some magical mentality-exuding stuff attached to them.


3. The Significant Interpretation: Extending Mental Roles
The more significant interpretation of the EMH claims that more things can count as performing a mental role, even when they seem remarkably distinct from what traditionally seems to perform that role. As Farkas sees it, this is largely a claim about what counts as a standing mental state and, more precisely, as a claim about the possibility of extending the set of things that can count as a standing mental state.

Extended Mind Hypothesis (2): “the typical role of standing states can be extended to include states that produce conscious manifestations in a somewhat different way than normal beliefs and desires do.”

It will take a little longer to understand this version, but we can start by looking at the most famous thought experiment in the debate about the extended mind. This is the Inga vs Otto thought experiment from Chalmers and Clark’s original 1998 paper:

Inga and Otto: Imagine there is a man named Otto, who suffers from some memory impairment. At all times, Otto carries with him a notebook. This notebook contains all the information Otto needs to remember on any given day. Suppose one day he wants to go to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York but he can’t remember the address. Fortunately, he can simply look up the address in his notebook. This he duly does, sees that the address is on 53rd Street and attends the exhibition. Now compare Otto to Inga. She also wants to go to the exhibition, but has no memory problems and is able to recall the location using the traditional, brain-based recollection system.

The essence of Chalmers and Clark’s original paper was that there is no significant difference between what happens in Otto’s case and what happens in Inga’s case. They can both be said to “believe” that the Museum of Modern Art is on 53rd Street, prior to “looking up” the information. It just so happens that in Otto’s case the recollection system extends beyond his brain.

Farkas argues that this is a very different type of extension when compared with that of realiser-extension. In this instance, it is not simply that the notebook replaces the brain with a functionally equivalent bio-technological hybrid; it is that the notebook mediates the recollection process in a very different way. Consequently, to say that Otto’s mind extends into the notebook is to say that we should be more liberal in our understanding of what kinds of system can count as fulfilling a mental role.

To see this, it helps to consider some of the important differences between the recollections of Otto and Inga. First, note how they are phenomenologically distinct. Inga gains access to the relevant information through direct mental recall, not mediated by any other sensory process; Otto needs to literally see the information written down in his notebook before he can be said to “recall” it. Second, note how Inga’s “belief” is more automatically integrated with the rest of her mental system than Otto’s. If Inga learns that she got the wrong address, this will affect a whole suite of other beliefs and desires she might have had. In Otto’s case, learning that he has the wrong address will simply involve deleting the entry from his notebook and correcting it. This will not immediately affect other entries in the notebook that relied on the same information.

One could point to other differences too but these suffice for now. Some people argue would argue that these differences should lead us to re-evaluate the Inga-Otto thought experiment. In particular, they should lead us to say that Otto does not really believe that the Museum of Modern Art is on 53rd Street and that Inga does. The problem is that proponents of the EMH can come back and highlight how focusing on phenomenological and integration-based differences between Otto and Inga can affect how we interpret other cases. For example, the phenomenology of recollection varies greatly from case to case. I remember all of Macbeth’s “full of sound and fury” monologue from Act 5, Scene 5 of Macbeth. But in order to remember the fifth line (“Til the last syllable of recorded time”) I actually need to speak, out loud, the first four lines. That does that sensory intermediation deny me the status of an ordinary mental recollection? Likewise, with respect to automatic-integration, it is possible that Otto could have a “smart” organiser that automatically updates other entries with the new information. This is something that is increasingly a feature of smart devices with cloud-based syncing.

And this is where the EMH becomes significant. By responding to critics of their position in such a manner, proponents of the EMH are arguing that we should be much more ecumenical when it comes to determining what can count as a standing mental state. That’s what EMH (2) is claiming. Furthermore, this time round the claim is that the extension is limited to standing states and does not also encompass events in the stream of consciousness. There is a good reason for this. As Farkas sees it, EMH (2) isn’t really about physical expansion outside the brain-bone barrier in the way that EMH (1) is. For all that proponents of EMH (2) care, the notebook-lookup system could be located entirely within the confines of Otto’s skull. That wouldn’t make a difference to their claim. What matters for them is that we are less restrictive when it comes to determining what counts as a providing the basis for a mental standing state.


4. Conclusion
Where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us with two versions of EMH. The first is relatively straightforward and simply claims that mental-realisers need not be confined to the brain. The second is more contentious and claims that we should have a more expansive conception of what can count as a standing mental state.

To really understand the significance of the second version it helps if you consider Chalmers and Clark’s original criteria for assessing whether something could count as standing state. They suggested that anything that was readily accessible and automatically endorsed could form part of the extended mind loop that constituted a belief or desire. This could include something like the information in Otto’s notebook, the information stored on the Web, and also, more controversially, the information stored in someone else’s head. Imagine a really close couple who are in the habit of relying upon the mental content stored in their partners’ heads. In many ways, they would be just like Otto and his notebook.

But if it is possible for all such closely connected information-exchange partnerships to form part of an extended mind, we will find ourselves in some pretty tricky ethical and social waters. What does it mean for privacy? Individual autonomy? Responsibility and blame? Praise and reward? All of these concepts would need to be revised if we fully embraced the implications of EMH (2). That is some serious food for thought.