Bitcoin and the Ontology of Money

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Image representing the decentralised Bitcoin network

Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever created. 

(Yuval Noah Harari 2011, 180)

Money has long fascinated me, and not for the obvious reasons. Although I’d like to have more of it, my interest is largely philosophical. It is the ontology of money that has always disturbed me. Ever since I was a child, collecting old coins and hoarding my pocket money, I’ve wondered why it is that certain physical tokens can function as money and others cannot. What is money made from? What is it grounded in? Why do certain monetary systems fail and others succeed?

For many years, I set these questions aside, convinced that I had a basic grasp of how they could be answered. But in the past year they have re-emerged. I have started to teach a course on money and banking law. And, as is my wont, I cannot possibly teach it without trying to address some of the deeper philosophical issues. Some of these issues are purely political or ethical, but some are ontological. In particular, I have found the ontological questions to be pertinent when trying to assess the nature of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

This post is my first attempt to write down my thoughts on the ontology of money, in general, and Bitcoin, in particular. It is pitched at an introductory level, reassembled from notes I prepared for my classes. It may well contain some misconceptions or misunderstandings. I welcome feedback. The post is an attempt to achieve some degree of insight through the process of writing; not an attempt to reproduce well-thought out views in a written form.

I’m going to break the discussion up into four main parts. First, I’ll talk about the social function of money. Second, I’ll discuss two different ontologies of money — the naive realist ontology and the more sophisticated subjectivist ontology. Third, I’ll talk about five steps in the social evolution of money. And then fourth, and finally, I’ll talk about Bitcoin and how it fits into my preferred subjectivist ontological theory.


1. The Social Functions of Money
I don’t think the ontology of money can be understood apart from the social function of money. So that’s where I shall start. I can’t remember where I picked up the idea (I think it might have been from this podcast) but I like the analogy between money and a computer's operating system. Money can be seen as the operating system for an economy: the software program that greases the engines of production and exchange (I guess that’s an awkward mix of metaphors).

Money has its origins in the importance of exchange. We all face the same basic problem of existence. We are mortal, fragile, biological beings. We need certain things in order to ensure our survival: food, clothing, shelter and so on. We also want certain things to make our existence more pleasant. How do we go about getting the things that we need and want? There are two basic strategies. The first is that of self-sufficiency, i.e. you, as an individual, can source and produce all the things you need to survive and (if you have any time left over) all the things you want in order to live a more pleasant life. The second is that of specialisation and exchange. Rather than spending all of your time catering to all of your needs and wants, you specialise in producing some particular good or providing some particular service, and then exchange with others who specialise in other areas.

While the self-sufficiency strategy holds appeal for some people, most societies have opted for the specialisation and exchange strategy. And this is where money comes into play. Although money is not strictly necessary for exchange (one could have systems of altruistic or communal sharing), it is the most common method of facilitating specialisation and exchange. This is because money performs three essential functions:

Medium of Exchange: It provides a medium for exchanging different goods and services. Put another way, it provides a medium for converting one type of good or service into another. This is perhaps the most important social function of money.

Store of value: The medium is one that retains (to some degree) its value over time. In other words, if you have money put in your hands on Monday it can still function as a useful medium of exchange on Friday, because people still accept that it has a roughly equivalent value. If money loses its value too rapidly — as happens in hyperinflationary cycles — it ceases to provide a useful medium of exchange. Similar negative effects occur if it increases in value too rapidly: people might stop using it as a medium of exchange and hoard it instead.

Unit of account: It provides a way of precisely accounting for the value of different goods and services. In other words, it is not too coarse-grained in how it accounts for their value. This is important insofar as an effective price system is thought to be essential not just for facilitating exchange, but for facilitating competition and the efficient use of resources.

This is the standard economic account of the functions of money. It will be familiar to all first year economics students. But it is connected to the ontological question that I find more interesting: what is the “stuff” that performs these three functions?



2. A Subjectivist Ontology of Money
Ontology is the study of what there is; what kinds of things exist and what are they made of. When it comes to the ontology of money, I tend to think that there are two schools of thought. One, which I think is clearly incorrect, is the naive realist theory of money. This is one that I, and I suspect others, found appealing in our youths. The other, which I think is correct, is the sophisticated subjectivist theory of money. Of course, the labels “naive” and “sophisticated” are value-laden, and I could perhaps do without them. Nevertheless, I think they are worth tacking on, mainly because I think there is a naive subjectivist theory that we should seek to avoid. More on this anon.

I start by offering a brief description of the naive realist ontology:

Naive Realist Ontology: Money is any physical commodity with intrinsic value, that can be used as a medium of exchange (i.e. it is a commodity that is valuable, but also portable, divisible, hard to fake etc.).

I call this a naive realist ontology because it maintains that money is “out there” in the natural world, the world beyond that of human imagination and culture. It corresponds, roughly, to other realist ontologies insofar as it thinks that the phenomenon of interest is not dependent on human observers for its existence (i.e. it thinks that money is mind-independent). This is a view that I think many people find attractive in their youths. I know I did. I used to think that coins, particularly those made of precious metals, counted as money because there was some mystical intrinsic value attached to those metals.

This view is naive and clearly false. History proves this point. Humans have used many commodities over the centuries, from tea leaves and cowry shells to pieces of paper and lines of computer code, as money. Many of these things lack intrinsic value (whatever that is). In fact, most of them lack instrumental value (beyond the value they provide as a medium of exchange). This is true of precious metals just as much as it is true of coloured printed paper. It is obvious that a piece of paper with numbers and symbols upon it has no intrinsic value, but, when you think about it, it is also pretty clear that gold and silver are devoid of intrinsic value. They merely have the value that particular cultures attach to them (e.g. for ornamentation and jewelry). If such a diverse, and clearly intrinsically valueless array of phenomena can count as money, the naive realist view must be false.

But this then raises the question: how is it that such a diverse array of phenomena can function as money? The answer lies in the sophisticated subjectivist ontology of money:

Sophisticated Subjectivist Ontology: Money is anything (physical or non-physical) that humans are collectively willing to represent and intend to function as a medium of exchange, store of value and unit of account.

To go back to the software analogy introduced earlier on, money isn’t some physical hardware that is “out there” in the real world, rather it is a software package that all participants in an economy simply agree to run on their brains. I believe it was Terence McKenna who once said that “what we call reality is, in fact, nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination”, and while I wouldn’t endorse this as a general description of reality, I think it is perfectly true when it comes to the reality of money. It really is just a collective hallucination.

That said, we must not fall into the trap of endorsing a naive subjectivist ontology. It is not the case that we can simply and easily hallucinate money into existence. It is far more complicated than that. Yuval Harari’s quote — which served as an epigram to this post — captures the difficulty. Money is a system of mutual trust, and societies have to go to extraordinary lengths to reinforce that system of mutual trust. As he puts it:

Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted….What created this trust was a very complex and long-term network of political, social and economic relations. 

(Harari 2011, 180)

Indeed, it is when you realise how difficult it is to create a system of mutually reinforcing trust that something of the naive realist view of money starts to creep back in. It turns out that some physical (and social) phenomena are better at creating such a system than others. So we cannot completely ignore the features of the objective (mind-independent) reality when it comes to understanding the ontology of money. This point can be illustrated by considering the historical evolution of money.


3. Five Steps in the Evolution of Money
Unfortunately, history is full of messy and complex facts. I cannot pretend to know everything about how money came to be or how it changed over time. Nevertheless, I think I can point to five steps in the evolution of money. These five steps may represent something of a historical “just so” story — one that cannot be easily mapped onto a chronological sequence of historical events — but I think they do capture something of the truth.

(Note added after original publication: The historical problems with the following account have been pointed out to me in the comments. I accept that it is probably inaccurate and tried to hedge against this possibility in the original draft. Nevertheless, I think the steps outlined below do provide some potential conceptual (i.e. non-historical) truths when we adopt an exchange theory of money. This exchange theory is what my ontological theory covers. If we adopt alternative theories (e.g. the social relation theory) some aspects of that ontology would be affected, though I think the basic gist -- that money is an exercise in reinforced collective imagination -- would be retained. It is something I will be thinking about and may write an alternative ontology of money/bitcoin at a later date. For the time being, you can take this as the exchange ontology of money/bitcoin).

I’ll start by describing the five steps and explaining why they succeeded or failed to create an effective system of money. I’ll use this as a bridge toward the discussion of Bitcoin:

Step One - Barter: This is actually a pre-monetary step. It is what prevailed in economically simple ancient communities and what resurfaces at times of monetary crisis. It involves the direct exchange of one good or service for another, with no intervening medium of exchange. Its limitations are what spur the need for the mental creation of money. In a barter system, members of the community can struggle to store value in physical goods and services (the vegetables I grow in my garden will rot and go off), to find willing partners for exchange (the fisherman down the road may not want any of my vegetables) and to meaningfully account for the value of different items (how much is a freshly-caught salmon worth in sticks of celery?).

Step Two - Commodity-based Systems: This is really the first step in the development of proper money. It is what happens when a community picks some available commodity (barley grains, shiny stones, sea shells, salt, tea leaves etc) and collectively agree (through practice and trial and error, not through formal contract) that this commodity will function as money. Many different societies have trialled many different types of commodity money. Some commodities are clearly better at doing this than others. The stone disks used as money on the Island of Yap, for instance, have some limitations. They are not readily portable and divisible, and are unlikely to be accepted as valuable in other communities. They also face a trust problem: how do you ensure that people do not “double-spend” their stone disks?

Step Three - Coined Money: This is a sub-type of commodity money based on coins made from precious metals such as gold, silver and bronze. It was an effective system of commodity money and became popular in a number of different cultures. There were many reasons for this. Precious metals had some instrumental value across many different cultures (for making weapons, tools, jewelry etc) and so could facilitate larger trade networks. They were also highly portable, and capable of being melted and sub-divided into units representing different quantities of value. However, they too faced a trust problem. Initially their value was tied to the weight or quantity of the metal in the coin, that was part of the reason people were willing to accept them as currency. But it was always possible to introduce counterfeit or impure coins. Communities tried to counteract this by adding official stamps and signs to the official currency. Counterfeiters reacted by developing methods for copying these stamps and signs. The trust arms-race started to take-off: governments introduced more and more elaborate mechanisms designed to restore trust in the monetary system (I ignore, for now, the fact that some governments also tried to decrease the value of their currencies through a practice known as seignoirage).

Step Four - Paper Money Backed by Coin/Precious Metal: Although coined money was relatively effective as a medium of exchange, it did have some inconvenient features. In addition to the counterfeiting problem, large sums of coined money were difficult to carry around and made one a target for thieves and bandits. As a convenience, goldsmiths started to offer safe storage facilities to people who wished to stash their coins. They would be issued with receipts which they could exchange for coin. In time, people started to use these slips of paper to pay for goods and services, confident that the holder of the receipt could always trade-in for the prescribed amount of coin. Paper money was born. Paper money also had its trust problems, with counterfeiting being a serious issue (as it still is) and with occasional crises of confidence when the holders of coin reserves became involved in fractional reserve banking. Since these institutions would lend multiples of the actual sums of coined money they held on reserves, they were prone to “runs” when people worried that borrowers would not be able to pay back their loans. Centralisation of the banking and monetary systems solved some of these problems and led to perhaps the most famous system of paper money backed by precious metal: the Gold Standard.

Step Five - Fiat Money: [Skipping over lots of the important historical details] The next step in the evolution of money came when governments (who controlled the gold standard) realised that this system was expensive, and limited what they could do during times of national crisis (e.g. during WWI and the Great Depression) to restore confidence to the broader economy. They realised that it was possible to get people to trust the paper money system through force of law alone. All the government had to do was declare that X amount of money was in existence, and thus it was that X amount money came into existence. This is money created by governmental fiat. This is the system that prevails today, and nowadays the majority of such money does not exist in paper or coined form. It exists as account balances on computer programs run by the banking system. This fiat system also clearly suffers from trust problems: it only works to the extent that people have faith in the stability and probity of government, and the prudence of the banking system.

As I say, this is a crude summary of the historical evolution of money. But I think it does show why our subjectivist ontology must be sophisticated rather than naive. We see now the problems that arise when trying to create a system of mutual trust that will provide the basis for money. For the majority of human history, these problems were solved by attaching value to commodities with the right kinds of properties (portable, divisible, widely perceived as having instrumental value, hard to fake etc.) and correcting for any trust deficits through the use of institutions and laws. In the most recent evolutionary step, money has been delinked from physical commodities. The mutual trust needed is fashioned from our trust in other social institutions (specifically governments, central banks and banks). These institutions are themselves fashioned out of our collective imaginations. Money has now truly become a collective hallucination, one that is maintained by a complex and esoteric network of rituals and laws.


4. The Ontology of Bitcoin
Where do Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies fit within this ontological framework? Despite claims to the contrary made by its mysterious founder — Satoshi Nakamoto — Bitcoin is not a “trustless” monetary system. It is just as much an exercise in collective trust and imagination as is the fiat money system. But it does mark something of a move away from the pure fiat system and a return to the classic commodity-based systems. Only this time the commodity in question is not some physical object like silver or gold, but rather a digital program that runs on a decentralised network of computers. Bitcoin tries to solve the trust problem by getting us to attach value to a computer program with a number of unique properties.

I’m going to try to describe some of these properties now. But before I do so a caveat: the Bitcoin protocol solves the trust problem in a manner that also tries to implement a whole political and economic philosophy (roughly that of the Cypherpunk movement). In what follows, I try to ignore the features of that political and economic philosophy as much as possible. I do so not because I think they are unimportant or uninteresting — far from it: I want to write another post on whether Bitcoin is an economic and political failure at a later date — but because some of those details may distract from the purely ontological focus of this post.

So, anyway, what are the properties of the Bitcoin protocol that address the trust problem? This is not the place to launch into a full explanation of how Bitcoin works. To be honest, some of the technical details elude me (I have a basic grasp of how cryptographic hash functions work and how the mining competition operates, but I couldn’t claim to know everything). Fortunately, all I need to explain the ontology of Bitcoin are a few choice details. One of which is the basic gist of the idea. Bitcoin takes to the hilt the notion that pretty much anything can be used to represent value. It does this by encouraging people to attach value to digital tokens that represent numerical balances stored in personalised digital wallets. It then gets people to trust that these digital tokens and balances really can represent stores of value, and really can function as a medium of exchange, by creating a system that protects them from fraud and abuse (the digital tokens are bitcoin the currency; the protective system is Bitcoin the protocol).

Every type of money is open to fraud and abuse. What types of fraud and abuse are unique to Bitcoin? One of the major problems with a digital currency is that its users are being asked to trust that the digital records of their balances and payments are accurate. This is a tough sell since it is so easy to create and copy digital files. A user will always be inclined to ask: Couldn’t somebody be using the same digital token to pay for many different things? Couldn’t a sophisticated programmer or hacker be altering the digital records, stealing currency from others or creating an endless supply for themselves?
Bitcoin solves these specific trust problems by creating a computer program with a number of distinctive properties. I’ll mention four of them here:

The Blockchain: This is probably the key property of the Bitcoin program. It is a decentralised digital ledger that contains a record of every bitcoin transaction that has ever taken place. This ledger is what gives people confidence in the system. It allows them to be sure that there are no double-spends or fake transactions. It is constantly growing, and maintained and verified by a decentralised network of computers (in theory: anyone can contribute to this effort, provided they have the right equipment). This process of maintenance and verification occurs in ten minute intervals.

Cryptographic Security: The program uses a variety of cryptographic methods to protect the anonymity of its users and to prevent fraud and abuse. The primary methods are public key encryption, cryptographic hash functions, and proof of work protocols. These methods are used, respectively, to enable primary transactions between buyers and sellers, to add transaction data to the decentralised ledger, and to verify that the correct transaction data is being added to the Blcokchain. These are all essential to ensuring that people trust the system.

Competitive Mining: The people who maintain and verify the Blockchain are encouraged to do so through an interesting reward mechanism. During each ten-minute round, the computers running the system participate in a competition to ensure that they are the ones that get to add the next verified transaction block to the Blockchain. If they win this competition, they are rewarded with some freshly minted bitcoin. This has nothing to do with creating and maintaining trust per se, but rather with attracting people to the currency in the first place. In other words, it gets them to buy into this particular collective hallucination.

Radically Deflationary Currency: The final property of the Bitcoin program is that the currency is radically deflationary. That is to say: less and less of it will be created over time, until the maximum of 21 million bitcoin is reached. This stands in direct opposition to modern fiat money systems which are, if anything, radically inflationary in nature. Again, the radically deflationary nature of the currency has nothing to do with maintaining trust in the system, but rather with encouraging people to get onboard. Why? Because if a radically deflationary currency takes off, the particular units of currency can be expected to go up in value over time. Thus, if you are an early adopter, you will be richly rewarded. The purchasing power of your units of currency will increase, rather than decrease over time.

These are the four properties of the Bitcoin program that I think have facilitated is acceptance as a type of money. But these four properties are not the end of the story. Many other people tried to create digital currencies with similar properties, and yet they all failed to take off. What was it about this particular version that captured the popular imagination? The answer does not lie in the features of the protocol alone. The answers lies in the particular socio-cultural milieu in which Bitcoin was launched.

It is probably no coincidence that Bitcoin was launched and took off in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis of ’08. This was a moment when our collective trust in the social institutions propping up the fiat money system was at a low ebb. It is also helped that Bitcoin came along at a point in time when the internet — and the concept of digital transactions — had reached a certain level of maturity. People had already begun to believe in the notion of a digital payment system: the notion of a completely digital currency was less of a conceptual leap. Finally, it no doubt helped that the anonymity of Bitcoin facilitated a community of people who wanted to trade in illegal goods and services (such as the illegal narcotics that could be bought and sold on the Silk Road).


5. Conclusion
This post has gone on for too long. I’ll wrap up by summarising three key points. First, in terms of the ontology of money, I think we ought to subscribe to a sophisticated subjectivist ontology, according to which money is simply anything that people collectively agree can represent and function as a medium of exchange, store of value and unit of account. In short, money is a collectively reinforced hallucination.

Second, it is not easy to get people to collectively agree to a particular system of money. They need to trust that the system really will function as a medium of exchange, store of value and unit of account. Many different systems have been trialled over the course of human history, each of which comes with advantages and weaknesses. The two primary systems are the traditional commodity-based systems — which try to manufacture the necessary trust by utilising commodities with a unique set of properties; and fiat systems — which try to manufacture the necessary trust by using a network of social institutions, norms and laws.

Third, Bitcoin fits within this general subjectivist ontology. It is not a trustless system. It tries to manufacture the necessary trust by utilising a computer program with a number of unique properties. These include: (i) the Blockchain, which provides an authoritative record of transaction data; (ii) the various methods of cryptographic security, which make it hard for hackers to fake or manipulate transaction data; (iii) the mining competition, which incentivises people to maintain the authoritative record; and (iv) the radically deflationary nature of the currency, which encourages people to opt into the system by guaranteeing that, if it takes off, the units of currency will increase in value.

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?