Can the Giftedness Argument be Salvaged? (Part Three)

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(Part One, Part Two)

Okay, it’s been awhile but at long last I’m going to finish off my series on Michael Hauskeller’s article “Human Enhancement and the Giftedness of Life”. To recap, in this article Hauskeller tries to refine, rehabilitate, and reconstruct Sandel’s giftedness argument against enhancement. I’m covering this as part of an ongoing series of posts looking at hyperagency-based objections to enhancement.

”Hyperagency” refers to a state of agency in which everything is contingent and manipulable, including the basic constitutive aspects of agency. In other words, if you take the typical human agent, with a complex set of desires and beliefs, and the ability to act in the world, that agent could be said to be a hyperagent if it has great power to act in the world such that it can freely manipulate and alter its desires and beliefs.

The concern of writers such as Hauskeller and Sandel is not so much that enhancement technologies literally create hyperagents (though they might), but rather that might lead us to believe that we are hyperagents. This is an important point. It would be easy to object to Hauskeller and Sandel by arguing that current and prospective enhancement technologies will not get us anywhere near to a state of hyperagency, but doing so would miss the strength of their arguments. Their critiques are based on the effect of the drive for enhancement (or “mastery”) on our beliefs or habits, erroneous though they may be. To be precise, the critique is that the drive for enhancement undermines our sense of gratitude for the gifted aspects of our lives, which has a number of deleterious consequences.

We examined one set of deleterious consequences in part two. There, I presented Hauskeller’s solidarity and gratitude argument (SGA). According to this argument, by undermining our sense of gratitude, the drive for enhancement undercuts social solidarity. And since social solidarity is a great intrinsic good this is one reason to think that the drive for enhancement is unwise. In this post, we look at another reason. This one appeals to the notion that the drive for enhancement causes us to relativise the value of our current lives, thereby missing what is good about them. Call this the “Relativisation of Value Argument” (RVA).

The post has two parts. First, I outline the argument, then I offer some general comments and reflections.


1. The Relativisation of Value Argument
Hauskeller’s basic contention is that proponents of enhancement, in their longing to be better than they currently are, tend to make better an enemy of good. Transhumanists like Bostrom (who is Hauskeller’s main scratching post in this portion of his critique) tend to optimistic about the future. This, you might think, is a healthy attitude to have. Certainly, I think people who are perpetual pessimists are no fun to be around. But Hauskeller warns that the kind of extreme optimism about the future that is present in some transhumanist writings has a negative flipside: extreme pessimism about the present.

This seems to be borne out in two quotes that Hauskeller takes from Bostrom’s article “Why I want to be a Posthuman when I grow Up”. The first quote, which is actually from Bishop Berkeley, highlights the problem that a better existence might create for our current lives:

I am apt to think, if we knew what it was to be an angel for one hour, we should return to this world, though it were to sit on the brightest throne in it, with vastly more loathing and reluctance, than we would now descend into a loathsome dungeon or sepulchre

Note the language here. Berkeley suggests that if we could just understand what it would be like to live as an angel, we would “loathe” our earthly existence, even if we were to live in the most congenial circumstances possible on this earth. These are strong words indeed. But, of course, they are fanciful. I don’t suppose anyone really thinks it possible to imagine what life as an angel (granting arguendo that such beings exist) would be like.

But maybe we have a shot at imagining what life as a posthuman is like? Certainly, this is what Bostrom tries to do in his article and, unsurprisingly given the fact that Bostrom chose the Berkeley quote as the epigraph to that article, in so doing Hauskeller thinks he creates the conditions needed for a Berkelyan-style loathing of our current lives. We see this in the following quote in which Bostrom imagines our posthuman future:

You have just celebrated your 170th birthday and you feel stronger than ever. Each day is joy. You have invented entirely new art forms, which exploit the new kinds of cognitive capacities and sensibilities you have developed. You still listen to music — music that is to Mozart what Mozart is to bad Muzak.

Well, that doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Living to at least 170 and inventing new, wonderful forms of music? Not so fast, says Hauskeller. Look at what Bostrom seems to be suggesting about the value of Mozart’s music. Isn’t he, in effect, saying that when we are posthumans, Mozart’s uplifting and life-affirming compositions will become the equivalent of dull, lifeless Muzak? That the value of Mozart’s music is relative. It seems good to us now because it is better than other forms of music, but in the future there will be even better forms of music and at that point Mozart’s music will no longer be good. In fact, it will be bad. Like Muzak.

Hauskeller thinks this is a very undesirable picture of our posthuman future. It causes us to lose an appreciation for the intrinsic value of certain things we currently have, like Mozart’s musical compositions. To be clear, Hauskeller does not seem to be saying that being a posthuman will be bad, but (again) that the drive for enhancement that precipitates that state of being is bad because it causes us to value our current lives in relative terms.

There are the ingredients necessary for an argument here, we just need to extract them and render them in the appropriate form. Here’s my shot at it:

• (12) It is good/wise that we appreciate that our lives have an intrinsic, non-relative value.

• (13) The drive for enhancement (for hyperagency) leads us to relativise our values: X is good only because it is better than something else.

• (14) Therefore, the drive for enhancement is bad.

This, like the other arguments I’ve looked at in this series, is an axiological argument, not a deontic one. It is not claiming that the use of enhancement is impermissible, it is claiming that it is unwise, that it somehow lessens or impoverishes our lives. This is a significant interpretive point, one that we do well to bear in mind as we ask: is this argument any good?


2. Is the argument any good?
I don’t think I can answer this question definitively. It’s something I need to think about, but I will offer some general comments. First, I want to highlight the similarities between this argument and ones that I have previously considered. Nicholas Agar’s species-relativist argument, for example, made some very similar claims about the unwisdom of enhancement. Agar felt that if we became posthumans, we would lose access to things we currently value as normal humans. This is because different “species” might value different things. In a similar vein, David Owens’s argument from disenchantment touched upon this theme. Owens’s suggested that enhancement removes the “fixed points” in our lives, leading to a state of listlessness and constant dissatisfaction. I offered critical responses to both theorists in previous posts (here and here), so I won’t repeat myself now. Still, I think it’s interesting that they, along with Hauskeller and Sandel, make similar kinds of arguments, albeit in slightly different ways. It’s always useful to be able to group arguments into common clusters like this.

Moving on to the argument proper, I want to make some comments about premise (12). I think this premise might well be true, but it’s interesting in that it clashes with some other popular views of value, particularly views about the value of life and the badness of death. Regular readers will know that I have an interest in arguments about the badness of death. Common to most of these arguments is something called the deprivation thesis. According to this thesis, death is bad because it deprives of goods that might otherwise have been if we hadn’t died. As such, the deprivation thesis adopts a counterfactual, and relativised conception of value. The goodness and badness of a particular state being is, if we follow the deprivation thesis, determined by a comparison of states of being across possible worlds.

I’ve looked at some criticisms of this view before, the main one being that it leads to seemingly absurd conclusions in certain cases. I won’t rehash those criticisms here. All I want to do is highlight the tension between these views and Hauskeller’s. That tension could be resolved in a couple of ways. Either the proponents of the deprivation thesis are correct, and hence Hauskeller’s complaint is flawed, i.e. there is nothing bad or unwise about the counterfactual comparison of the value of our lives implied by Bostrom’s comments. Or, Hauskeller is correct and this is just one more reason to be wary of the deprivation thesis and similar counterfactual approaches to value. I have to say, I lean in Hauskeller’s direction on this one.

But that doesn’t mean that his argument is successful. There is still the little problem of premise (13). Is it really fair to say that enhancement leads to the relativisation of value? Clearly not, since there is at least one value that proponents must think intrinsically worthwhile, namely: the value of enhancement (or self-improvement) itself. But that’s a weak response since Hauskeller’s concern is that enhancement leads us to relativise lots of other valuable things, even if some intrinsic values are retained. We could modify premise (13) to make this slightly weaker claim.

Is that slightly weaker claim correct? In my critique of Agar’s species-relativist argument, I suggested that even if it is true that in becoming posthumans we lose access to things we currently value, that doesn’t mean we lose access to valuable things. We simply trade one set of goods for another. This might be desirable if the new set of goods is better. I’d be tempted to say the same thing to Hauskeller. In becoming posthumans we don’t relativise all values, we simply trade one set of intrinsic goods for another.

But that might miss the point. As noted above, the argument here is not about the actual state of posthumanhood or hyperagency, it is about the attitude that motivates proponents of those states. Arguably, this attitude is such that, even if we become posthumans, we will not be satisfied. We will strive to jump the curve to the next radical state of being because we think that’s even better still. I think there may be something to this, but then I wonder: would it be alright if just stumbled into a state of posthumanhood or hyperagency? In other words, if the motivation for enhancement was not to seek mastery or hyperagency?

Frances Kamm made this objection to Sandel’s original giftedness argument, and Hauskeller responds to it in his article. I’m not sure his response is entirely satisfactory. He says that the actual motivations of people don’t matter because “I need not be motivated by a drive to mastery in order to fall victim to it”. The suggestion seems to be that irrespective of our consciously represented motivations, in pursuing enhancement we will become trapped or bound up with the logic of mastery. Even if we aren’t aware of it directly, we will become the dissatisfied, constantly striving beings that Hauskeller and Sandel counsel us against becoming.

As I say, I’m not sure about this, but it’s definitely some food for thought.

Can the Giftedness Argument be Salvaged? (Part 2)

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(Part One)

Is there something disturbing about the drive for human enhancement? Is it unwise? Likely to reduce the quality and meaning of our lives? Likely to deprive us of something of great value? Several prominent philosophers argue that it is. Among them is Michael Sandel, who several years back argued that enhancement was unwise because it caused us to lose our appreciation for the giftedness of our lives. More precisely, he challenged proponents of enhancement on the grounds that its pursuit would give rise to a state of hyperagency, i.e. a state in which virtually every aspect of our lives is open to our control and manipulation.

Sandel’s argument is problematic, but has its defenders. The most capable of whom is, probably, Michael Hauskeller. In his article “Human Enhancement and the Giftedness of Life”, Hauskeller tries to refine, reconstruct and rehabilitate Sandel’s giftedness argument. In so doing, he hopes to clear away some of the confusion and highlight the strengths of Sandel’s analysis. This series of posts is examining Hauskeller’s attempted rehabilitation. Part one kicked things off by briefly reviewing Sandel’s argument and the standard critiques thereof. It also took the first steps toward Hauskeller’s rehabilitation of the argument by distinguishing between the given and the gifted.

Two important conclusions were reached at the end of the last post. The first was that there is a defensible naturalistic notion of giftedness. In other words, some aspects of our lives can rightfully be said to be gifted, even if there is no gift giver. This is because there are things beyond our control, for which we feel grateful, but which do not (or at least need not) emanate from a particular agent. For example, I am grateful for being born in the late 20th Century, in a reasonably wealthy industrialised country. This is a gifted aspect of my life, but it does not come from any gift giver.

The second important conclusion had to do with gratitude. One of the key moves made by Hauskeller is to shift emphasis away from giftedness and onto gratitude. Thus, the argument really becomes the argument from gratitude not from giftedness. Hauskeller makes this move because he thinks that once something has been gifted to us we are under a curious and informal obligation to feel grateful for it. This obligation manifests itself in two important ways: (i) it creates the conditions needed for an important kind of social bonding; and (ii) it helps us to avoid relativising the value of our lives. It is these two manifestations that illustrate the unwisdom of enhancement.

My goal in the remainder of this post is to discuss the first manifestation of the gratitude argument. I do so in three sections. First, I discuss two types of social exchange, highlighting the difference between purely economic exchanges and “solidarity”-exchanges. Second, taking this difference on board, I offer the first formal version of the gratitude argument, something I call the Solidarity and Gratitude Argument (SGA). And third, I present some comments and queries about this argument. These are very preliminary in nature. Although I ultimately want to offer some kind of response to Hauskeller, my primary goal for now is to clarify the arguments he presents.


1. Beyond Purely Economic Exchanges
A number of years back, the late and lamented Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called God is Not Great. In it, Hitchens subjected the concept and belief in God to an excoriating, and at times witty, critique. Well aware that his book would attract the ire of many a religious apologist, and never one to back down from a fight, Hitchens promoted his book with a relentless series of debates against opponents of his view. Many of these are catalogued online should you ever wish to watch them.

I remember watching a couple of these — and subsequently reading the book — and while I will always be a fan of Hitchens public speaking and good humour, I wasn’t overly impressed by the intellectual rigour of the arguments he presented. Still, there was an example he constantly used in his debates that is rather apt in the present context. Whenever challenged by a religious believer with the perennial question “how can you be good without God?”, Hitchens appealed to a fairly typical “I do good for goodness sake”-answer. To illustrate, he gave the example of how he frequently donated blood. He adumbrated two reasons for doing this. First, he had a rare blood type that people less fortunate than he might need. And second, he might need blood someday himself. While the second of these reasons speaks to self-interest, the first does not and that’s the one I want to dwell on.

For in giving blood with the explicit desire to benefit those less fortunate or in greater need, Hitchens was manifesting gratitude for his own good fortune. He was benefiting others without expecting or desiring immediate reciprocation. Indeed, even though there was a faint worry that he might require a blood donation in the future, there was equally the hope that he never would. The blood was given, freely and willingly, because of a deeper connection with his fellow man (Note: this may be a touch hagiographic of me, but even if Hitchens wasn’t quite so noble as I’m supposing him to be, there are plenty of others who are so the point still holds).

The blood donation example reveals the essential character of a solidarity exchange, which I’ll define as follows:

Solidarity Exchange: A engages in a solidarity exchange with B (or with a group of agents G) if A gives something to B (or G) out of a feeling of gratitude, not necessarily directed at B (or G), and without believing he or she has a right to receive something equivalent in return.

So a solidarity exchange is like a gift that is paid forward to others. It is given out of a sense of gratitude for one’s own good fortune, and expresses a deep commitment to the well being of others.

Contrast this with a purely economic exchange, of the sort that takes place on the open market. When I go down to my local grocery store, the shopkeeper and I engage in a typical economic exchange. I give him money; he gives me food. The exchange arises not from a feeling of gratitude but from a feeling of need or want. Furthermore, the exchange comes with the belief that one is entitled to something in return. If I don’t pay the money, the shopkeeper will not be happy and will have a legal right to make a claim against me. This is most unlike the case of the blood donation.

Economic Exchange: A engages in an economic exchange with B (or with a group of agents G), if A gives something to B out of a feeling of need or want, believing they have the right to receive something of roughly equivalent value from B (or G), and expecting to receive it.

Economic exchanges are certainly important, and are perhaps morally significant in ways we don’t fully appreciate, but the suggestion underlying Hauskeller and Sandel’s work is that solidarity exchanges are very precious indeed. They lead to a deeper, more long-lasting form of social bonding. If lost them, we would lose something of great value.


2. The Solidarity and Gratitude Argument
And so this is essentially what the first manifestation of the gratitude argument maintains. It says that the conditions necessary for solidarity exchanges will be eroded or damaged by the increased use of enhancement technologies. As a result, I call this the Solidarity and Gratitude Argument (SGA). Let’s formulate the argument first, then look at how one might defend it’s key premises.

Here’s my attempt to formalise the SGA (numbering follows on from part one):

• (6) Gratitude makes possible a form of human exchange (the solidarity exchange) that transcends the form of exchange found in casual economic transactions. 

• (7) An appreciation for giftedness helps to cultivate a sense of gratitude. 

• (8) The increased use of enhancement technologies causes us to lose appreciation for giftedness (Sandel’s argument). 

• (9) Therefore, the increased use of enhancement technologies will limit our ability to engage in solidarity exchanges. 

• (10) It would be bad for us if our ability to engage in solidarity exchanges were limited. (11) Therefore, the increased use of enhancement technologies is bad for us.

The first premise (premise 6) of the SGA is important. I’m not sure that Hauskeller offers an explicit defence of it anywhere, but something like this might work: A solidarity exchange needs a very pure kind of motive to get started. You must act without the belief that you deserve anything in return. A sense of gratitude is the most obvious foundation on which such a belief can be built. Certainly, it cannot emanate from greed or ambition, nor can it be achieved through coercion or forced exchanges. Gratitude involves thankfulness for what one has, and it is this thankfulness that provides the basis for generosity toward others.

The second premise (7) of the SGA is even more important. Hauskeller does offer an explicit defence of the proposition contained therein. To paraphrase, he argues that if you think every aspect of your life is under your own control and manipulation (i.e. if you believe that you are a hyperagent), you will have no reason to feel grateful. Quite the opposite in fact. You will feel that all the good things in you life can be earned or achieved through exercises of agency. This then blocks the route to gratitude. If you think everything can be earned, you will be less inclined to act out of generosity toward others. After all, you’ll tend to think: they can achieve what I have achieved if they just put their minds to it.

Premise (8) is just Sandel’s argument repeated. The claim is that enhancement reduces appreciation for giftedness because enhancement brings everything within our control or manipulation. Or, rather, the use of enhancement encourages us to think that everything is within our control and manipulation. It is the belief, not so much the reality, that matters here. This is an important point, one that critics of the argument might miss.

Finally, premise (10) can be supported by going back to the blood donation example. The claim being put forward is that the kind of social bonding inherent in that exchange is not merely instrumentally valuable, but intrinsically valuable. It constitutes a deep form of commitment and communitarianism, one that is absent in other exchanges.


3. Some quick thoughts about the SGA
The SGA strikes me as being an interesting argument, one which the proponent of enhancement should consider. It bears some remarkable affinities to an argument made by Saskia Nagel, which I discussed a couple of weeks back. (This may, of course, just be my own projection onto the text). Like Nagel, Hauskeller argues that enhancement may damage important social bonds. Nagel’s focus was on issues of justice and responsibility — she was concerned that belief in hyperagency would lead people to think that others were responsible for their own shortcomings; Hauskeller’s focus is on issues of generosity and charity — he is concerned that belief in hyperagency will eliminate the motive to help other without expectation of return.

A variety of things occur to me when I look at the argument. First, I wonder whether premise (10) is really that convincing. I agree that there is something nice about solidarity, but I wonder whether we over-romanticise it. Is it really all that bad if someone donates blood but is given money to do so? Are we too quick to denigrate purely economic exchanges? I think we might be. I think an important point to bear in mind is how effective the different forms of exchange really are. If I can encourage more people to give blood by paying them, and thereby save more lives, then isn’t that a good thing? I suspect it is, and I suspect it is even if solidarity is, as Hauskeller seems to suggest, an intrinsic good. In this case, I think the intrinsic good of solidarity would be trumped by the intrinsic good of saved lives. What matters then is whether damage to the former is necessary to achieve the latter.

Second, I wonder whether the argument engages in a little bit too much armchair psychologising. As I pointed out above, the argument turns on whether people believe that the use of enhancement gives rise to a state of hyperagency, not on whether it really does give rise to such a state. In one sense, this focus on beliefs as opposed to reality is a strength of the argument. Critics of Sandel’s argument — like Buchanan — argued that the state of hyperagency was a myth, something that could not really be achieved. But if it’s a question of belief this criticism misses the mark. Still, focusing on beliefs creates problems. It seems to me like it is an empirical question as to whether people really think that the advance of enhancement gives rise to hyperagency. I can see reasons for thinking they would, but I haven’t seen any studies suggesting that they do. My own experience in dealing with people with disabilities suggests the attitude might be preventable anyway, since we don’t tend to blame or shift burdens onto the disabled, even when we think there are technologies or medications they could use to overcome their problems. Quite the opposite in fact. The goal of much equality and disability legislation is to shift some of the burden onto others. Admittedly, these may be asymmetric cases, but I think there is a lesson to be learned from this.

Third, and this is rather more speculative, I wonder whether gratitude is a necessary or sufficient condition for solidarity. If its the former, and if enhancement really does undermine gratitude, then Hauskeller’s argument would work pretty well (ignoring the other questions I have raised). But if it is the latter, then it is possible that enhancement doesn’t completely block the route to solidarity. Other feelings or emotions might allow for solidarity, and they might be compatible with the belief in hyperagency.

As I said at the outset, these thoughts are preliminary and somewhat protean. I’d love to hear comments and suggestions from others on the strengths and weaknesses of Hauskeller’s argument. In the meantime, I conclude this post. In the next post I’ll take up the second manifestation of the gratitude argument, the one that focuses on the relativisation of values inherent in the drive toward hyperagency.

Can the Giftedness Argument be Salvaged? (Part One)

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A while back, I wrote a post about Michael Sandel’s case against human enhancement. As noted at the time, Sandel’s central claim was that enhancement was bad because it caused us to lose appreciation for the gifted nature of our lives. On the face of it, this doesn’t look to be a particularly persuasive argument, and indeed it has been repeatedly criticised in the literature since it was originally presented (see the earlier post for some examples of this). But maybe there is more to Sandel’s argument than meets the eye?

Michael Hauskeller certainly seems to think so. In his 2011 article, “Human Enhancement and the Giftedness of Life”, he tries to rehabilitate, refine and reconstruct Sandel’s argument, defending it from common criticisms, and turning it into a powerful objection to the human enhancement project. Over the next few posts I want to take a fairly detailed look at Hauskeller’s attempted rehabilitation.

This fits in with one of my current projects, which is to explore anti-enhancement arguments of a particular sort. Specifically, anti-enhancement arguments that appeal to the negative effects that enhancement might have on human agency. In other words, arguments claiming that enhancement technologies will fundamentally alter the decision problems we face, resulting in changes to our self-conception and our relationships with others. These are distinct from the fairness, inauthenticity, and harm arguments common in the anti-enhancement literature, though they do focus on certain kinds of harms and inequalities.

I’ve looked at two examples of these arguments already. The first was David Owens’s, which claimed that enhancement will remove the “fixed points” necessary for decision-making, thereby disenchanting our picture of the world. The second was Saskia Nagel’s, which claimed that enhancement will increase the number of decisions we have to make, thereby damaging our sense of well-being and increasing (in a negative way) our feeling of responsibility for our failures.

Sandel’s giftedness argument plays upon similar themes, though possibly in a more obscure way. With the help of Hauskeller I want to remove some of that obscurity, and subject the resulting arguments to closer scrutiny. I shall do this in a few parts. Today I kick things off by briefly revisiting Sandel’s arguments, and the criticisms thereof. I follow this up by distinguishing between the notion of the “given” and the “gifted”. As Hauskeller sees it, this distinction is crucial to understanding the strength of Sandel’s argument.

I should say at the outset that I am not entirely sympathetic to Hauskeller’s project. As I have said on other occasions, I am conditionally inclined to favour human enhancement and this inclination no doubt seeps through much of what I say about this topic. Still, I want to hear the best case for the opposing side, and I will try to present Hauskeller’s arguments in a charitable form. This sometimes means that I reconstruct his arguments a slightly different, but I think clearer and more formalised manner.


1. The Giftedness Argument and its Discontents
Let’s start with Sandel’s giftedness argument. In his book, The Case Against Perfection, Sandel presents the argument in the space of a few short paragraphs. To quote the most salient passage:

The deeper danger is that they (i.e. enhancement and genetic engineering) represent a kind of hyperagency, a Promethean aspiration to remake nature, including human nature, to serve our purposes and satisfy our desires. The problem is not the drift to mechanism but the drive to mastery. And what the drive to mastery misses, and may even destroy, is an appreciation for the giftedness of life…An appreciation of the giftedness of life constrains the Promethean project and conduces to a certain humility. 

(The Case against Perfection, pp. 26-27)

This passage contains a term I deem sufficiently important to warrant its own definition and because I don’t think anybody has done this before — not even Sandel — I will duly oblige:

Hyperagency: A state in which virtually all aspects of an agent’s life, including his/her nature, desires, and beliefs, are subjects of choice. In other words, a state in which virtually nothing escapes the agent’s control and manipulation.

There is obviously a bit of hand-waving going on here with the “virtually all…” comment. One could rightly challenge the definition on the grounds that it doesn’t pin down the precise moment at which one transitions from a state of normal agency into a state of hyperagency. I agree that this is a problem, but I still think the transition-point has to be somewhat fuzzy in a case like this. Many morally salient distinctions are fuzzy (for Sorites-type reasons) and I don’t think we can ever change that. I also think the definition is important, irrespective of its fuzziness, because it captures a concept that features not only in Sandel’s argument, but also in Owens and Nagel’s arguments. If this is something that bothers several critics of enhancement, it seem to me that it is worth isolating it, labelling it, and at least attempting to define it. Once we do this we can refine it in response to objections and clarifications.
With this definition on board, we can proceed to formalise the argument Sandel presents in the preceding passage. I think it runs something like this:

• (1) The increased use of enhancement technologies constitutes or creates a state of hyperagency.

• (2) Hyperagency causes us to lose (maybe even destroy) our appreciation for the giftedness of life. 

• (3) Therefore, the increased use of enhancement technologies causes us to lose (maybe even destroy) our appreciation for the giftedness of life. 

• (4) It is bad for us to lose appreciation for the giftedness of life. 

• (5) Therefore, the increased use of enhancement technologies is bad for us.

One can object to various premises in this argument. Buchanan for instance rejects premise (1), arguing instead that there will be many aspects of our lives that lie beyond our control even if we embrace the most radical forms of enhancement. This cuts off the initial conclusion (premise 3). Such criticisms are worth considering, but here I want to focus on objections to premise (4), since it is the defence of that premise that takes up Hauskeller’s time.

Standard criticisms of premise (4) point out that the humility inherent in the appreciation for the giftedness of life is not necessarily a virtue. Far from it. Harris and More, for example, argue that humility involves an unnecessary subservience to and acceptance of the natural order. This might be at home in a Christian or theological worldview, but not in a secular one. Similarly, it is argued that premise (4) seems to assume that the bequeathments of nature are invariably good. But this is clearly not true. One could be born with some congenital defect that makes life a misery. Is one supposed to appreciate this congenital defect? Ironically, this is something that Leon Kass, a notorious bio-conservative critic of enhancement, uses in critiquing Sandel’s argument. He argues that whole notion of “giftedness” is not very useful in this debate for the very reason that it cannot distinguish between good and bad aspects of our natural bequeathment.


2. The Given versus the Gifted
Hauskeller objects to this line of criticism in no uncertain terms. He suggests that these criticisms of premise (4) trade on the elision of two distinct concepts: the given and the gifted. The “given” covers all aspects of our natural bequeathment, good and bad; the “gifted” does not. It covers a much narrower band of bequeathments, those that are good for us in a particular sort of way.

In saying this, Hauskeller is playing a dangerous game. By defining the gifted as that which is good he risks begging the question. But he seems aware of this problem and tries to sidestep it by subjecting the concept of the “gifted” to a much more detailed analysis, isolating the essential properties of a gift, and drawing out some interesting conclusions about the social obligations emerging from gift giving. The result shifts focus from the gifted, to the attendant emotion of gratitude. I’ll quickly run through this analysis, starting with three essential properties of a gift:

It is good or intended to benefit: A gift is either something good that is given to us, or something that is intended to benefit us (assuming it is given by a person). Thus, a healthy body is gift, but a diseased body is not. Interestingly, Hauskeller acknowledges that a diseased body might be a gift in certain circumstances, specifically if it leads one to reorient one’s life to what is good an proper. He cites the example of Michael J. Fox here, who apparently claims that his Parkinson’s disease is a “gift” for these very reasons. I won’t comment on this suggestion now, except to say I worry that it renders the concept of a gift beholden to the rationalisation strategies of different people. The problem is that people might rationalise virtually every misfortune into a “gift”, meaning that the distinction between the given and gifted becomes blurry once more.

It cannot be demanded, acquired or earned: To put it bluntly, there is no right to be given a gift. Though there are many things in life we deserve, and though there are many things in life we can earn, gifts are not among them. This is not to say that gifts are always unexpected — social conventions surrounding gift-giving suggest otherwise — but it is to say that gifts are always undeserved or non-deserved.

It must be accepted with gratitude: A gift is not a loan, nor is it something that the receiver can simply treat as they please. In receiving a gift, one takes on a curious and informal type of social obligation. The obligation requires one to accept the gift with gratitude.

This third property plays a significant role in Hauskeller’s rehabilitation of the giftedness argument. In fact, with one qualification that I will mention in a future post, I think it’s fair to say that Hauskeller’s rehabilitation of the argument involves its transformation into the argument from gratitude and not the argument from giftedness. I’ll explain all this in more detail in the next post.

Before doing that I want to conclude with a couple of comments about giftedness and atheism. Obviously, one thing that might disturb people about the giftedness argument is that while it fits well with a theistic worldview, it fits less well with an atheistic one. After all, it is often thought that another essential property of a gift — one that is conspicuously absent from Hauskeller’s list — is that it is alway given by one person to another. Thus, there cannot be a gift without a gift giver. On theism the natural world is God’s creation, so it makes sense to say that our own personal natures are gifts from God. But on atheism the natural world is just there, a product of chance or necessity, so it makes no sense to say that our personal natures are gifts.

Hauskeller actually spends a long time dealing with this problem in his article. In a section titled “the naturalistic conception of gratitude” he argues that there is a place for gratitude and giftedness in a completely naturalistic worldview. Indeed, he concludes that impersonal forms of gratitude and giftedness are more basic than the personal forms. There is an argument for this conclusion, but I don’t wish to discuss it here. I’ll just offer two observations. First, I basically agree that one can feel grateful without necessarily directing that emotion at other people. And second, in any event, I think the theistic notion of gratitude and giftedness is problematic. In many ways, it just creates problems similar to those raised by critics of Sandel’s argument, such as Kass. If all of nature is a gift from God, how come there are so many bad aspects to it? This leads to familiar problem-of-evil concerns.

Okay, I’ll leave it there for now. To briefly recap, Hauskeller’s goal is to rehabilitate Sandel’s giftedness argument. The first step he takes in this attempted rehabilitation is to argue that critics of Sandel elide the given with the gifted. If we isolate the latter, and figure out its essential properties, we will be in a better position to appreciate the strengths of Sandel’s argument. This comes about when we appreciate the role of gratitude in gift-giving. As we shall see in the next post, it is gratitude, not so much giftedness, that does the heavy lifting in the argument.

The Logic of Indirect Speech (Part Three)

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(Part One, Part Two)

Over the course of the past two blog posts, I have been looking at different aspects of Pinker, Nowak and Lee’s (PNL’s) theory of indirect speech, as presented in their article “The Logic of Indirect Speech”. PNL’s goal is to offer some explanation for the prevalence of indirect speech acts in human social discourse.

The motivating reason for doing this is that indirect speech poses something of a paradox. If people do not directly say what they mean — i.e. if they try to implicate what they mean — they adopt a form of locution that is inefficient and runs the risk of being misunderstood. So why bother? Why not just say what you really mean?

PNL argue that part of the answer to this question comes in the shape of plausible deniability. What indirect speech gives us, that direct speech cannot, is the ability to deny certain implications of our speech. This is useful in a variety of domains. In part one, we looked at the simple example of the police bribe, where denying that you are offering a bribe can be of great value. Similarly, in part two, we looked at the case of relationship negotiation, where plausible deniability allowed one to hover between different relationship types and thereby avoid giving offence.

This seems like a decent start to the explanation of indirect speech, but there is, however, a final puzzle that needs to be addressed. Why are there so many indirect speech acts whose implications cannot be plausibly denied? For example, expressions such as “would you like to come up and see my etchings?” or “this is a real nice place, it would be a shame if something happened to it” are indirect, but everyone knows what they really mean. The conventional implication is so widely understood that it seems odd that anyone would use them. So why do they stick around?

In the remainder of this post, we will look PNL’s solution to this puzzle. As we shall see, their argument is that even when the conventional implication of the phrase is widely understood, the phrase has some utility. To appreciate their argument, we need to do three things. First, we need to appreciate the digital nature of language. Second, we need to understand the concept of common knowledge. And third, we need to see how indirect speech blocks the route to common knowledge.


1. Language as a Digital Medium
PNL argue that language is tacitly perceived to be a digital medium. In using this term “digital” they mean to draw upon the digital/analog distinction. Roughly, a digital signal is one in which something has either one value or another, there is no intermediate state; whereas an analog signal is one that is continuously variable. The classic example here comes from musical recordings. In an analog recording, a signal is taken from a recording device and directly laid down on (say) magnetic tape in an continuously varying sine wave. In a digital recording, the signal is sampled and laid down in a discrete discontinuous wave.

PNL say that language consists entirely of discrete signals — morphemes, words and sentences — which are combined in order to communicate meaning. There is a reasonable amount of evidence underlying this, some of which is discussed in Pinker’s book The Stuff of Thought. To give a quick example, phenomena that are continuous in the real world (e.g. space and time) are digitised by language (e.g. “a moment in time”), resulting in a communicated meaning that is discrete and discontinuous.

None of this is to say that there aren’t a huge variety of shades of meaning present in language. Anyone with a passing familiarity with interpretive practices knows this. It is, however, to say that words and sentences are typically perceived to have a discrete meaning. In other words, people typically believe you to be saying one thing or another, not both.

This has three consequences for indirect speech, according to PNL. They are:

Overt Propositions serve as Focal Points: A focal point is a location within a physical space that two rational agents, acting independently, can coordinate on. The concept comes from Schelling’s work on game theory. He gave the example of two agents who wish to meet each other in New York on a particular day, but have not agreed a time and place. He argued that Grand Central Station at 12 noon would be an obvious focal point. PNL claim that something similar is true of overt or direct propositions. They are focal points within semantic space and two rational agents can coordinate on their meaning, acting independently. Indirect propositions, on the other hand, are not focal points and thus cannot serve the same coordinative function, even when their implications are 99% certain.

Playing to an Audience: According to some psychological theories (e.g. Goffman’s) people are always playing to a hypothetical audience,, when they say or do things, even if they have a real audience. Thus, when I talk to you I am obviously trying to say something to you, but I might also be playing to a hypothetical audience of eavesdroppers. This has an interesting effect on my use of indirect speech acts. Although the implications of those speech acts might be very clear in the particular context of my conversation with you, they might not be clear to the hypothetical audience. Thus, I may continue to use them, even when their implications are certain, because I have that audience in mind.

Blocking the Route to Common Knowledge: Because language is typically perceived to mean one thing or another, an indirect speech act — which hovers between at least two interpretations — can block the route to common knowledge. This has an interesting psychological effect on how people interpret the indirect speech, even if they are sure what the implication actually is.

This final suggestion is of most interest to me and so I’ll spend the remainder of the post fleshing it out. But I can’t resist passing some comment on the first suggestion. While I like the idea that overt propositions serve as focal points, I wonder whether this really helps to resolve the problem we started with. After all, focal points are largely a matter of convention. Grand Central Station serves as a focal point only to people who share a common set of assumptions. Similarly, a focal point of this sort could change over time. Thus, if Grand Central Station were knocked, another location might become a focal point. If this is right, then why can’t focal points change within semantic space too? Why can’t an initially indirect proposition come to treated like an overt proposition. Indeed, I have hard time believing that this hasn’t already happened when it comes to allegedly indirect locutions like “would you like to come up and see my etchings?”


2. Blocking the Route to Common Knowledge
If we are going to understand the “blocking the route to common knowledge”-argument, we’ll first need to understand what common knowledge really is. This is a technical concept from the literature on game theory, which can be defined in the following manner:

Common Knowledge: A proposition P is common knowledge among a group of agents G, if everyone in G knows P, they all know that they know P, they all know that they all know that they know P, and so on ad infinitum.

An example would be the following. You and I are sitting at a desk opposite each other. I take a banana out of my pocket and place it on the desk, announcing the fact as I do so, knowing that you can see and hear me. In this instance, there is common knowledge that there is a banana on the desk. Why? Because you and I both know that there is a banana on the desk. I know that you know that there is a banana on the desk, and you know that I know that there is a banana on the desk. Furthermore, I know that you know that I know that there is a banana on the desk, and you know that I know that you know that there is a banana on the desk. (And so on ad infinitum).

If you are confused by the recursive phrases — “I know that you know that I know…” — in this example, you are not alone. It is a difficult concept to wrap your head around. One way to get a better grasp on it is to contrast common knowledge with the closely related, but importantly different, concept of “mutual knowledge”. This is perhaps best illustrated by an example. This one is taken from Ben Polak’s lectures on game theory, available from the Open Yale website (lecture 2 if you must know).
Suppose we have two people facing forwards, looking in the same direction, but not at each other. Suppose that a third person approaches these two people from behind and then places a pink hat on each of their heads. This third person then gets the two people to face each other. Is the fact that at least one person is wearing a pink hat common knowledge?

The answer is: no. If you look at the diagram above, and follow my reasoning, you can see that the conditions for common knowledge are not met here. Person X knows that person Y is wearing a pink hat; and person Y knows that person X is wearing a pink hat. But X doesn’t know that Y knows that X is wearing a pink hat, nor does Y know that X knows that Y is wearing a pink hat. This is because neither of them knows what kind of hat they are wearing.

This actually gives us everything we need to understand PNL’s argument about indirect speech. For it is the distinction between common and mutual knowledge that allows them to conclude that indirect speech blocks the route to common knowledge, even when its implications are virtually certain. To put it most succinctly they argue that indirect speech gives us mutual knowledge, but not common knowledge.

Take a scenario in which A says to B: “would you like to come up and see my etchings?”. We can assume that A knows what the implication of this really is, and we can also grant that B knows what the implication is. Thus, there is mutual knowledge of the implication. But there isn’t common knowledge of the implication. Why not? Because B doesn’t know that A knows what the implication is, and A doesn’t know that B knows what the implication is. This is true even if there is 99% certainty of the implication on both sides. The lingering uncertainty blocks the route to common knowledge. This wouldn’t be true in the case of a direct proposition. If A had said to be “would you like to come up and have sex?” there would be common knowledge that A had made a sexual advance.
I think this is a pretty interesting argument.


3. Conclusion
To sum up, in this series we’ve looked at PNL’s theory of indirect speech. According to PNL indirect speech is used — despite its inefficiency — because it provides the speaker with a valuable commodity: plausible deniability. This is true even if the indirect speech act has an implication which is widely understood.

In this post, we explored some of the reasons for this. The primary argument advanced by PNL is that because language is tacitly perceived to be a digital medium — i.e. a medium in which words digitise continuous properties, and a proposition has either one meaning or another — the value of indirect speech is maintained even where its implications are widely known. One of the main reasons for this is that the use of an indirect speech act blocks the route to common knowledge.

The Logic of Indirect Speech (Part Two)

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(Part One)

An indirect speech act is one in which a speaker does not say what they really mean. Such speech acts are prevalent in a variety of social contexts. On the face of it, this poses something of conundrum as these speech acts are inefficient and prone to being misunderstood. So why are they so common?
In their article, “The Logic of Indirect Speech”, Pinker, Nowak and Lee (hereinafter “PNL”) try to develop a theory that explains the prevalence of indirect speech. They do so by eschewing classic cooperation-based theories of implied meaning, in favour of a conflictual and strategic theory. As they see it, people rely on indirect locutions because doing so allows them to achieve desirable outcomes when interacting with others who may have different or unknown interests.

We looked at the first part of their theory the last day. This argued that indirect speech is used in certain settings because it provides the speaker with a valuable commodity, namely: plausible deniability. The classic illustration of this came in the shape of the Briber’s Dilemma, a shorthand name for the decision problem in which a speeding driver must decide whether to bribe a traffic cop. In this scenario, an implied bribe can be the rational choice because it provides the speaker with the best of both worlds: the scrapping of their ticket if the cop is dishonest, coupled with no risk of arrest for bribery if the cop is honest.

The thing is, it’s easy to see the value of plausible deniability in such a context. The costs and benefits are readily discernible, and so the rationality of indirect speech reveals itself with a minimum of fuss. It’s more difficult when the costs and benefits are opaque or hidden. This is where the next part of PNL’s theory comes into play. They argue that the phenomenon of relationship negotiation can help us to unearth the hidden value of plausible deniability in other social contexts.

In the remainder of this post, I look at PNL’s discussion of relationship negotiation. I do so in three parts. First, I discuss the three main types of social relationship (according to Alan Fiske). Second, I explain the problem of relationship ambiguity. And third, I explain why indirect speech in general — and plausible deniability in particular — can play a valuable role in addressing the problem of relationship ambiguity.


1. The Three Main Types of Relationship
We all know that human social intercourse is mediated through a variety of relationships. In my capacity as a university lecturer, I stand in a particular kind of relationship with my students. The relationship comes with a set of norms and standards that most people try to respect. It is, however, a very different kind of relationship from the one I have with my friends and family, both of which have a distinctive set of norms and standards associated with them.

Mapping out all the possible relationships and the concomitant norms and standards sounds like an exhausting task. Fortunately, social scientists have been trying to do this for some time, and although I imagine there is no perfect taxonomy of relationship-types, Alan Fiske’s taxonomy is the one used by PNL. Fiske argues that all human relationships (across all societies) fall into three distinct categories:

Dominance Relationships: These are relationships in which one party exerts dominance or authority over another, and the other defers to the dominant party. This relationship can be seen in the animal kingdom where dominance hierarchies are common. As PNL put it, this relationship is governed by the ethos “Don’t mess with me”.

Communal Relationships: These are relationships in which resources are shared freely between the parties, resulting in almost perfect equality. As PNL put it, this relationship is governed by the ethos “What’s mine is thine and what’s thine is mine”.

Reciprocal Relationships: These are relationships that lie somewhere in between the other two. They are characterised not by dominance, nor by free sharing of resources, but by tit-for-tat exchanges. As PNL put it, the governing ethos is “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”.

Fiske actually identifies a fourth relationship type (“Market Pricing”) which is found only in industrial societies. It is not discussed by PNL so I will ignore it (perhaps to my own cost).

The key thing about each of the three relationship-types listed above is that in addition to having a governing ethos, there is a distinctive style of communication associated with each. Thus, in the dominance relationship, imperatives, direct requests and non-verbal dominance displays are common. In the communal relationship, nonverbal cues, physical contact and coordinated activities are common. And in the the reciprocal relationship, actual tit for tat exchanges are the dominant signal, but these can be negotiated through explicit verbal contracts.


2. The Problem of Relationship Ambiguity
If at any given time everyone was aware of the exact relationship-type they happen to be in, then there may be no role for the plausible deniability of indirect speech. The distinctive communicative style associated with each of the three relationships would provide perfect information to the respective parties, and they could thereby say what they mean, provided that what they say fits within the ethos of the particular relationship.

The problem, however, is that relationships can be ambiguous. This arises from mixed beliefs and mixed signals. For example, sometimes I think that the relationship I have with my students is one of dominance and authority. But at other times I think this wrong and that it should be viewed as a relationship of reciprocity or maybe even communality. It’s quite possible that the students are unsure of this too. Some of the verbal and nonverbal cues I send out might indicate that it is, indeed, a relationship of authority, and they may act accordingly. But, at other times, I may send out verbal and nonverbal cues that suggest a relationship of communality and friendship. This may confuse them, resulting a less certainty about the appropriate form of conduct.

As PNL point out, relationship ambiguity of this sort can lead to aversive emotions, such as the feeling of “awkwardness”, as well as undesirable outcomes. This arises most commonly when there is a mismatch between the two parties regarding the type of relationship they are in. To quote:

When relationships are ambiguous, a divergent understanding between the parties can lead to the aversive emotion we call “awkwardness”. There are awkward moments in a workplace or university when an underling or student makes a transition from a subordinate (dominance) to something closer to a friend (communality). Good friends (communality) are advised not to engage in a business transaction (reciprocity), like the sale of a car or a house, which can endanger the friendship. The ambiguity between dominance and sex (a kind of communal relationship) is the battleground of sexual harassment conflicts… 

(PNL, p. 836)

These last two examples — the friends falling out over the sale of a car, and the work colleagues involved in a sexual harassment suit — indicate just how serious the problem of relationship ambiguity can be. Is it possible that indirect speech plays a role in minimising this problem?


3. Plausible Deniability in Relationship Negotiation
This is what PNL argue. Turning first to something called “politeness theory”, they point out that language serves at least two functions (probably more). The first is to state a proposition such as “it is now raining” or “I will pick up my dry-cleaning”; the second is to negotiate and maintain relationships with others. Indirect speech is particularly important in performing this second function because it allows people to straddle the boundaries between two types of relationship, without giving rise to awkwardness or undesirable consequences.

To see this, go back for a moment to the Briber’s Dilemma from part one. In this scenario, the key problem from briber’s perspective was his lack of certainty as to cop’s values. If the cop was dishonest, he could safely offer an overt bribe, but if the cop was honest, he could not. The indirect bribe allowed him to make a pitch for the benefits of the overt bribe, without incurring its negative consequences. If the dishonest cop understood the implication of what the briber was saying, he would take the bribe. But even if the honest cop had suspicions about the implication, he would not act upon it because he knew it would be difficult to prove his case in court. The indirect bribe provides plausible deniability.

The lack of certainty as to the cop’s values has an analogue in cases relationship ambiguity, namely: lack of certainty as to which relationship-type we happen to be in. If I think I stand in a relationship of authority to my students, and they think the same thing, then I can safely adopt the conversational idioms of an authority figure without offending anyone. But if our views diverge, things become trickier. Indirect speech becomes our saviour. Instead of demanding things directly from students, I can issue polite requests (“If you could find time to do the advance reading, that would be awesome”) which allows them to take the hint, without giving rise to awkwardness.


4. Conclusion
To sum up, the plausible deniability of indirect speech is a valuable commodity, not only in the quasi-legal setting of the Briber’s Dilemma, but also in the everyday art of relationship negotiation. Indirect speech allows conversational parties to avoid unpleasant outcomes arising from divergent views about the type of relationship they happen to be in. This gives one good reason for the prevalence of indirect speech.

But surely something is still missing? As PNL highlight in their paper, many indirect locutions — including the classic “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” — do not seem to involve much in the way of plausible deniability. After all, everyone knows what the implied meaning of that offer really is. Explaining the prevalence of these blatant indirect locutions is a task we take up in the last part of this series.

The Logic of Indirect Speech (Part One)

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I’ve been a fan of Steven Pinker’s work for some time. And although I like to think I never fall into the cognitive trap of hero worship, I do think his books and articles bristle with fascinating, thought-provoking and oftentimes controversial ideas. I also think he is among the best science communicators, writing in a clear and accessible style, without talking down to the reader. I guess this isn’t too surprising given that his next book is going to be about style in written communication.

Pinker’s primary academic specialism is in the field of psycholinguistics. Roughly, this is the study of the psychological (and perhaps neurological) mechanisms underlying the human ability to use and comprehend language. As part of his work in this field, Pinker (along with some co-authors such as James Lee and Martin Nowak) has been exploring the logic of indirect speech.

Indirect speech is a significant psychological and cultural phenomenon. An indirect speech act is one in which a speaker does not say what he or she really means. Instead, they rely on commonly recognised implied meanings to communicate their true intentions. Pinker asks the obvious question: why do people do this? Especially when it seems like it would be easier and more efficient to use direct speech.

As it happens, the phenomenon of indirect speech is something that interests me too. I maintain an active interest in linguistic theory and the law. One thing that has emerged from this is a concern with the role of implicature in the interpretation of legal texts. In other words, I wonder to what extent implied meanings can (and more importantly should) affect the interpretation of the law.

Because of this, I’m interested in Pinker’s work on the logic of indirect speech. To be sure, his goals are quite different from mine. Whereas I’m interested in the normativity of indirect speech, he is interested in developing an explanatory theory of indirect speech. Still, these interests can overlap so I thought it would be worth taking a look at some aspects of his theory of indirect speech. This will make a nice break for me from the heavily ethical and normative work that I usually examine on this blog.

So, up for consideration over the next few blog posts will be Pinker, Nowak and Lee’s (hereinafter “PNL”) paper “The Logic of Indirect Speech”, which appeared in the 2008 edition of PNAS. This piece is almost entirely theoretical in nature. Pinker and Lee have followed it up more recently with an experimental study that finds some support for their theory, but I won’t be looking at that here. I’ll focus purely on the theory.

This theory is broken into three parts. Part one examines the link between indirect speech and plausible deniability. Part two looks at the role of indirect speech in relationship negotiation. And part three tries to explain why indirect speech is used even when the implied meaning is obvious (and thus the speech no longer even seems indirect). I’ll look at part one today, leaving the other two parts to subsequent posts.


1. The Briber’s Dilemma
The first thing to note about indirect speech is that it throws up something of a paradox. To use one of Pinker’s favourite examples, the classic line “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” is widely (though not universally) recognised as an indirect sexual request. If translated into direct speech it might read something like “Would you like to have sex with me (or engage in some cognate activity)?”. The question is why do people use the indirect locution when the direct locution is available to them. After all, the direct locution is more efficient and less vulnerable to being misunderstood. If you really want to have sex with someone why not just come out and say so?

Now, clearly we all see the problem here. We know, instinctively, that there are many advantages to the indirect locution. The challenge is to explain exactly what those advantages are, and why the use of indirect speech, far from being paradoxical, is actually a highly rational act. To do this, PNL introduce us to a game theory-style conundrum* involving a speeding driver (“speedster”) and a traffic “cop” (to use the crude American term). The game goes through two iterations, one in which indirect speech is not an option, and the other in which it is.

In the first iteration, we must imagine that the speedster has been pulled over to the side of the road and is about to be issued a speeding ticket. The speedster has two options: (i) say nothing; or (ii) offer an overt bribe (e.g. “If you scrap the ticket, I’ll give you 50 bucks!”). These two choices lead to different outcomes, depending on the state of the world. In this case, the “state of the world” refers to the values of the cop. If the cop is honest, then he won’t accept a bribe. If he’s dishonest, he will accept a bribe. This creates a significant decision problem from the perspective of the speedster. If the cop is honest and the speedster offers a bribe, then he could be arrested for bribery. This would be a worse outcome than getting a speeding ticket. But if the cop is dishonest and the speedster offers a bribe, he could avoid the ticket. What should he do?

I’m going to represent this problem on a decision matrix. To make it more concrete, I’m going to assume that there is a 50-50 chance that the cop is dishonest, and that costs to the speedster are as follows:

Cost of Bribe = $50

Cost of Ticket = $100

Cost of Arrest for Bribery = $1000

That gives us the following payoff matrix:

As you can see, given the probability of dishonesty and the costs of the various outcomes to the speedster, the most rational choice from their perspective is to say nothing. The expected cost of saying nothing is $100, whereas the expected cost of an overt bribe is $525.

Now let’s run through a second version of the game. This time instead of having only two options, the speedster has three options: (i) say nothing; (ii) offer an overt bribe; or (iii) implicate a bribe (e.g. “could I make a donation to the policeman’s benevolent trust?”). The inclusion of this third option changes the nature of the problem. This time round it becomes important to know how the dishonest and honest cops will react to the implicit bribe. For ease of analysis, I’m going to assume that the dishonest cop will automatically recognise it as a bribe, and readily accept it. Contrariwise, the honest cop may or may not recognise it as a bribe, but in either event won’t act upon it. In other words, he’ll just proceed to issue the speeding ticket.

Assuming that the costs and probabilities are the same as the previous version, we get the following payoff matrix:

As you can see, this time around the rational choice is rather different. The implicit bribe is the option that yields the lowest expected cost ($75).

This gives us a partial explanation for the persistent and prevalent use of indirect speech. It shows how, in certain contexts, indirect speech is the rational option. PNL argue this is because indirect speech provides us with a valuable commodity: plausible deniability.


2. The Logic of Plausible Deniability
To see the value of plausible deniability, we need to confront some of the limitations in the preceding model. As I have presented it, the Briber’s Dilemma ignores several significant variables. Let’s work our way through each of them now.

For starters, it ignores the fact that recognition of the implied meaning of the indirect bribe will not be perfect. In other words, the model I have presented assumes that the dishonest cop will be able to recognise the implied meaning with probability 1; and that, likewise, there is no chance that the honest cop will act on the implied meaning and arrest for bribery. This needs to be corrected in any proper model of the scenario.

In a somewhat similar vein, the model sketched above assumes that indirectness is a discontinuous property. In other words, it assumes that there is one, and only one, level of indirectness that can be present in an implied bribe. In reality, the indirectness of the bribe is likely to vary along a graded scale. One can try to imply a bribe with an extremely indirect locution (e.g. “it’s a lovely day isn’t it officer, it’s shame to have these unpleasantries”), or slightly less indirect bribe (e.g. “I was hoping we could sort it out here in Brainerd”), all the way up to a direct bribe. Picking the appropriate level of directness is something the rational briber will need to keep in mind.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the model fails to highlight the significance of the directness threshold and the role it plays in the decision-making of the dishonest and honest cop. To put it bluntly, in order for an indirect bribe to be rational, it must be the case that the dishonest cop accepts the bribe at a lower level of directness than the honest cop requires before making an arrest for bribery. If the level of directness is the same for both, indirect bribing cannot be a rational strategy.

For sake of argument, imagine that the locution used to imply a bribe is “could I make a donation to the policeman’s benevolent trust?”. Suppose that for the dishonest cop this implies a bribe, one that he is all too ready to accept. But to the honest cop, things are less certain. He kinda-sorta thinks it might be a bribe, but he’s not sure enough to make an arrest for bribery. After all, the level of proof at trial is pretty high, and if there’s any reasonable doubt as to what the speedster really meant, a conviction will not be secured. If this is the case, indirect bribing is the rational strategy. On the other hand, if the honest cop is willing to make an arrest at the same level of directness as the dishonest cop requires to recognise a bribe, indirect bribing is not rational.

PNL’s model of rational bribing takes into account these three factors. In doing so, it makes a better case for the rationality of indirect speech. As they frame it, it is the fact that the dishonest cop is willing to act on a different level of directness than the honest cop that gives rise to the phenomenon of plausible deniability. And it is this phenomenon of plausible deniability that makes indirect bribing rational.


3. Conclusion: Expanding the Explanation
To summarise, PNL are concerned with the paradox of indirect speech. That is, speech that does not say what its speaker actually means. This kind of speech is less efficient, and more prone to being misunderstood than direct speech. So why is it so common? PNL suggest that part of the answer lies in the phenomenon of plausible deniability. In certain social contexts, an indirect locution yields a higher payoff (or lower cost) than a direct locution. This is because the implied meaning of the indirect locution is plausibly deniable, and so blocks a higher cost outcome. This is evinced by the Briber’s Dilemma.

But this is, at best, a partial explanation for the prevalence of indirect speech. The role of plausible deniability is easily appreciated in a case like that of the Briber’s Dilemma because in a case like that, the costs and benefits of indirect speech are quite obvious. The problem is that indirect speech pervades innumerable social contexts, including contexts in which the costs and benefits are barely noticeable. Why is this? To answer that question, we need to appreciate the role of indirect speech in relationship negotiation. We’ll consider that the next day.

*To me, this is just a decision problem, not a game theory problem because it doesn’t consider the payoffs from the perspective of the traffic cop. Still, PNL refer to it as “game theoretic conundrum”.

Should pornography be considered "speech"? (Part Two)

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(Part One)

This is the second part in my series looking at pornography and the free speech principle. The series is focusing on the arguments analysed in Andrew Koppelman’s article “Is Pornography “Speech”?”. In part one, we looked at Frederick Schauer’s argument. In this post, we will look at John Finnis’s one. Both authors suggest that pornography is not covered by the FSP.

A brief recap is in order first. Koppelman claims that both Schauer and Finnis develop their arguments within a common argument-pattern. I sketched out that argument-pattern in part one. It started with the basic free speech principle (FSP):

Free Speech Principle: (Some or all types of) speech ought to be free from government censorship and regulation

The FSP is a very common trope (well, more than that) in political debates. The idea that some (perhaps all) categories of speech must be protected from government interference is a powerful one, and a variety of arguments can be amassed in its favour.

The key move made by the likes of Schauer and Finnis is to claim that in order for speech to be covered by the FSP, it must do certain things. Specifically, it must contain ideas or engage the faculty of reason. Thus, both authors hold that the following Coverage Principle can be derived from the FSP:

Coverage Principle: The FSP only covers speech that communicates ideas and/or engages the faculty of reason.

It is this coverage principle that forms the basis of the common argument pattern, which runs as follows:

• (1) The FSP only covers speech that communicates ideas and/or engages the faculty of reason. (Coverage Principle)

• (2) Pornography neither communicates ideas nor engages the faculty of reason. (Factual claim)

• (3) Therefore, pornography is not covered by the FSP.

In the remainder of this post we’ll look at how John Finnis defends this argument-pattern. It should perhaps be noted that the Finnis article which is the subject of discussion here dates from 1967 (LINK). I’m not sure if Finnis has changed his views on the matter since then, but I doubt they would have changed greatly given the general character of his beliefs on matters of sexual morality.


1. Finnis on Reason and Passion in Symbolic Communication
The first thing we need to do is to see how Finnis defends the key premises of the argument-pattern, starting with premise (1). As you will recall from the previous post, premise one only makes sense in light of the more general defence of the FSP. More precisely, premise (1) needs to be derived from the general defence of the FSP. It is only once we know why the defence of free speech is important that we can know what kinds of communications or artistic productions fall within the remit of the FSP.

So why does Finnis think free speech is important? I’m going purely by the representation of his views in Koppelman’s article, and according to that representation Finnis offers a fairly typical instrumentalist defence of the role of free speech in a democratic. Quoting from James Madison, Finnis comments that one of the main roles of government is to aim at some control over people’s passions. That is to say, to prevent them acting on a purely emotional basis; and to allow reason to rein in the excessive and deleterious manifestations of the passions.

Building upon this, Finnis claims that value of free speech lies in its ability to create independent rational (not emotional) critics of the government. Thus, any expressions that engage the faculty of reason, in preference to the emotions and passions, deserves protection from government interference. For it is those kinds of expressions we need in order to keep the peace and to keep the government honest.

Finnis thinks this allows him to derive the coverage principle because:

“…to the extent that expressions derive from the passion end of the reason-passion continuum, the rationale for that freedom [i.e. freedom of speech] disappears.

This comment might seem a little cryptic, but file it away in your mind for now, paying particular attention to its reference to the “reason-passion continuum”, because we’ll be coming back to it later.

One thing that is clear from Finnis’s discussion is that he does not think this defence of the FSP only covers so-called “political speech”. On the contrary, Finnis thinks there is a robust and defensible space for purely artistic forms of expression under the FSP. He just argues that art always expresses emotions in a detached, reason-enriching way. In other words, artistic expression doesn’t merely provoke or enrage; it symbolically represents emotions thereby enabling us to critically reflect upon them. This view of artistic expression is what allows him to defend premise (1) without falling into the trap of excluding all non-political forms of speech from the FSP.

Granting this, we proceed to consider premise (2). As you might imagine, Finnis’s claim is that pornography falls outside the scope of the FSP because its “expressions” engage the passions, without providing space for the detached critical reflection in other forms of art. Perhaps surprisingly, Finnis thinks that erotic feelings can legitimately be symbolised in works of art. He merely argues that in pornography the feelings themselves swamp or overwhelm their symbolisation.

Finnis envisions the stereotypical consumer of pornography as being one who desires a state of emotional arousal (most commonly orgasm) to the exclusion of any high-level aesthetic reflection. Somewhat amusingly, Koppelman gives this stereotypical consumer a name and highlights the role he (or she!) plays in the argument:

Grimly Purposive Masturbator (GPM): The stereotypical consumer of pornography is one who wants to achieve orgasm and does not care how he achieves it. The pornography is a mere aid to their sexual satisfaction.

I must confess to being a little puzzled as to how discussion of the GPM helps us to defend premise (2). But, being charitable, I guess the claim could be that it is the fact that the GPM is the typical consumer of pornography that provides evidence for premise (2). Or, it could be that it is the fact that the producer of pornography has the GPM in mind when he creates pornography that provides evidence for premise (2). Bringing these two observations together we can say that: if the GPM is both the intended user and the typical user we have good evidence to support the claim that pornography does not engage the faculty of reason.


2. Evaluating Finnis’s Argument
So what should we make of all this? Let’s look at the defence of both premises in turn. The first thing I would say is that the instrumentalist, Madisonian defence of the FSP isn’t entirely persuasive to me. While speech definitely has a role to play in ensuring an intelligent and critical electorate, I think it has other, intrinsic and instrumental benefits too.

For starters, it is the medium through which knowledge and culture are shared, and through which important actions are performed. Not all of these things are primarily reason-based, but they are valuable nonetheless. Separate from this, I see no reason to think that certain kinds of emotions should not be valued and protected by society. Indeed, and on this very point, Andrew Altman has argued that there might be a “right to be turned on”, a right that could be protected through pornographic speech.

In addition to this, I think one has to bear in mind Schauer’s sceptical defence of the FSP from part one. As you’ll recall, one classic defence of the FSP is that the failure of governments to exercise powers of censorship in a sensible and non-abusive manner in the past gives us good reason not to hand such powers over to them again. If we accept this rationale for the FSP, we should be pretty sceptical about the government’s ability to reliably distinguish the materials that primarily engage the passions from those that primarily engage reason. Thus, the underlying defence of the FSP seems dubious to me.

But even if I accepted the Madisonian line, thought that only speech which affected the capacity for reason could be covered by the FSP, and that the government could reliably distinguish such materials, I would be pretty sceptical of Finnis’s argument. The problem is that I simply don’t buy his notion of a reason-passion continuum. To me, this word “continuum” creates the impression that there can be forms of communication that fail to impact upon the emotions, and vice versa. This doesn’t seem to be the case to me. Reason and passion are intimately bound together. Every interpretation and every act of attention involves some input from the passions.

This, of course, brings us to premise (2) and the claim that pornographic speech overwhelms the faculty of reason. This also seems pretty weak to me. In line with what I just said, I think every form of expression can engage the faculty of reason. Certainly, there’s no reason to think that pornography cannot do this. This is something that several feminist critics of pornography seem to accept. As discussed previously on this blog, MacKinnon (among others) argues that pornography involves some extremely powerful, and politically important, symbolic encoding. Specifically, it encodes the permissibility conditions for heterosexual relations. The very fact that these kinds of arguments can be made illustrates that aesthetic reflection about the nature and value of the symbolism in pornography is possible. This runs contrary to Finnis’s claim. Furthermore, as Koppelman point out, many great works of art play to and encourage erotic responses (he mentions the play Equus as an example). But this doesn’t preclude aesthetic reflection.

These two responses to the defence of premise (2) highlight perhaps the main flaw in the whole argument. Namely, that the focus is misplaced. The fact the likely consumer of pornography (the GPM), or the likely producer of pornography, have certain intentions and goals in mind, does not support the claim that pornography cannot engage the faculty of reason. If there is one lesson from the arts and humanities, it is that all human artifacts are fit objects for deep aesthetic reflection. Pornography is no different in this regard.

3. Conclusion

To sum up, neither Finnis nor Schauer’s arguments are persuasive. In the first instance, their defences of the FSP are either dubious or fail to provide support for the coverage principle. In the second instance, their claims that pornography fails to communicate ideas or engage the faculty of reason are weak. Pornography can do both of these things, irrespective of the characteristics of the typical user.

None of this, however, should be taken to imply that pornography is a valuable cultural product, worthy of respect and protection by our laws. There may be other reasons to object to or restrict pornographic speech. It’s just that the claim that it is not “speech” or does not fall under the auspices of the FSP is not one of them.