The Lucretian Symmetry Argument (Part Two)

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(Part One)

This series is about the Lucretian symmetry argument against the badness of death. According to this argument, death is like the pre-natal state of non-being (PNNB) in all important respects. And because PNNB is neither bad for us, nor something we should be worried about, it follows (by analogy) that death is not bad for us, nor something we should be worried about.

This argument is defeated if there are significant disanalogies between the two states. In part one, we considered one such disanalogy. This came from the work of Brueckner & Fisher (B&F) and is summarised in the following argument:

• (6) We care about our future experiences in a way that we don’t care about our past experiences; more precisely: we prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences (if necessary) in the past. 

• (7) Death deprives us of future positive experiences; PNNB only deprives us of past positive experiences. 

• (8) Therefore, death deprives us of something we care about, but PNNB does not. Adding the premise that deprivation is bad for us, we get a significant disanalogy between death and PNNB, one that undercuts the original Lucretian argument.

In this post, we’re going to consider a recent critique of B&F’s argument. The critique comes from the work of Fred Feldman — who is himself a firm believer in the badness of death — and focuses on how the conclusion (premise 8) of B&F’s argument is to be interpreted. Since this means we’ll have to refer to different versions of the principle throughout the remainder of this post, I will hereinafter call it the Asymmetry Thesis or AT for short.

Here’s the structure of the remainder of the post. In the first section, I follow Feldman and disambiguate two versions of the AT: (i) a de re version; and (ii) a version. In the second section, I consider Feldman’s critique of the de re version, and in the third section I consider his critique of the de dicto version. I also add, in this section, two more critiques to mix, ones that Feldman himself makes of B&F. I then conclude by addressing B&F’s response to Feldman.


1. De Re and De Dicto versions of the Asymmetry Thesis
The de re and de dicto distinction is widespread in philosophy but I don’t think I’ve ever brought it up on this blog before. Partly, that was because I didn’t know too much about it in the early days, and so tended to studiously avoid mentioning it, afraid that my ignorance would be revealed through my mishandling of this imposing latin terminology. But as it turns out the distinction is not too difficult to grasp, or at least not too difficult for the purposes of this particular blog post.

So what is it? Take the following sentence:

S1: John wants to marry the most beautiful girl in Ireland.

The italicised portion of the sentence can be understood in two different ways. In the first instance, “the most beautiful girl in Ireland” might be taken refer to a very specific girl in the real world that I want to marry. My current girlfriend for example: who I happen to think is the most beautiful girl in Ireland. In the second instance, the phrase may taken to refer to whichever girl it happens to be that matches that general description.

The first way of understanding the sentence corresponds to the de re interpretation; the second way of understanding the sentence corresponds to the de dicto interpretation. The etymology of the words is helpful here. “De re” means “of the thing”, whereas “de dicto” means “of the word”.

With any luck, this makes the distinction tolerably clear. There are many arcane and fascinating discussions we could get into about it, but there’s no need to do so now. As long as you appreciate the difference between the two interpretations of S1 you should be fine.

Anyway, Feldman holds that the Asymmetry Thesis (AT) can be interpreted in a de re sense or in a de dicto sense. To see this, consider first the original version of the AT from B&F’s argument.

Asymmetry Thesis: Death deprives us of something we care about, but PNNB does not.

Feldman’s claim is that the “something” in the AT can be understood to either: (a) refer to a specific thing (or things) that the person who dies happens to care about; or (b) refer to the general category of things that the person would care about and that they might have experienced, if they did not die. Here, once again, the first of these corresponds to the de re interpretation and the second to the de dicto interpretation.

Let’s formulate both interpretations a little more precisely (both of these are lifted from Feldman’s article):

Asymmetry Thesis (dr): When death is bad for a person D, it is bad for D because there are certain pleasant experiences, such that his death deprives D of those experiences, and D cares about those experiences. (Contrariwise, PNNB is not so bad for D because even though there are some pleasant experiences such that D’s PNNB deprives D of those experiences, D does not care about them).

Asymmetry Thesis (dd): When death is bad for a person D, it is bad for D because D cares about the fact that if he dies, he will be deprived of some pleasant experiences (though he may not know what these will be) that he otherwise would have enjoyed. (Contrariwise, PNNB is not bad for D because, even though it deprives D of pleasant experiences, he does not care about the fact that if he is born late he will be deprived of some pleasant experiences.)

It would be worthwhile getting comfortable with the distinction between these two versions of the thesis before moving on. Otherwise, let’s proceed.


2. Problems with the De Re Version
We start with Feldman’s critique of the AT(dr). In his opinion, the AT(dr) does a poor job of explaining why death is bad. To be more precise, he feels that the AT(dr) is vulnerable to a number of counterexamples. Consider the following:

SIDS Case: James is 6-month old baby. He is healthy and has a loving family. If all goes well he can expect to have a “wonderful life filled with pleasant experiences”. But, unfortunately, all does not go well. James dies in a suspected SIDS case aged 6-months and 2 days.

Car Crash: Eleanor is a young woman (aged 20) who is about to complete her college degree. She doesn’t know it yet, but in her future lies a wonderful career and a serene retirement, provided she can avoid dying in a car crash in the next 20 minutes. This, alas, she does not do.

Both of these cases undermine the AT(dr). This is because the deceased in both cases share a fundamental property that excludes the applicability of the AT(dr) account of death’s badness. The property in question is ignorance. Neither James nor Eleanor are aware of the specific positive experiences that death deprives them of, but surely this doesn’t make their deaths less bad. And yet, since the AT(dr) holds that death is only bad if the subject is actually aware of the specific experiences of which they will be deprived, it would follow that the AT(dr) is false.

As a critique of B&F’s argument, this is an interesting one. Why? Because it actually works from the position that death is indeed (contra Epicurus and Lucretius) bad for the one who dies. Thus, it only defeats B&F’s argument on the grounds that it offers a faulty account of the badness of death; it does not thereby support the symmetry argument. The goal, presumably, would be to replace the AT(dr) with a better account of the badness of death, one that could also defeat defeat the symmetry argument.

Now, I have to say this is a slightly odd way of arguing about this topic. To presume that death is bad (which is what is being presumed by Feldman’s analysis of SIDS and Car Crash), in this particular dialectic looks like being dangerously close to begging the question. This problem will recur later in the discussion when we look at B&F’s response to Feldman. For now, let’s proceed to Feldman’s critique of the AT(dd).


3. The Problems with the De Dicto Version
The critique of the AT(dd) actually follows very similar lines. The idea behind the AT(dd) is that the person need not be aware of the specific experiences that death will deprive them of in order for it to be deemed bad, but rather they need only have the general concept of some positive future experience that death might deprive them of. This is what differentiates it from the AT(dr).

But the SIDS case again provides a counterexample. The six month old child does not have the general concept of future positive experiences, so according to the AT(dd) his death is not bad. But doesn’t it seem odd to suggest that his death is not bad because he lacks the necessary conceptual machinery?

Another counterexample might work here too:

Suicide: Mike is 40 years old and suicidal. He believes there is no hope left for him: he has lost his job, his marriage has broken up, and he believes his continued existence will be nothing but misery. What he doesn’t realise is that in about six days time, he will undergo a dramatic reversal of fortune which will lead to incredibly powerful and rewarding experiences in the future. Unfortunately, Mike commits suicide just before this happens.

The problem is that Mike has a mistaken set of beliefs about his future prospects. He doesn’t actually care that his death might deprive him of some non-specific positive experience because he doesn’t believe that he will have any such experiences. But it still seems like his death is, all things considered, bad for him. This runs contrary to the AT(dd). Or so Feldman believes.

Perhaps the problem here is that the AT(dd) is, like the AT(dr), indexed to the psychological characteristics of the one who dies. Thus, lack of mental development or mistaken beliefs undermine its account of the badness of death. We could solve this by coming up with a de dicto version of the AT that is not conditioned upon the makeup of the person who dies. But what would this look like. Feldman suggests the following:

AT(dd2): When death is bad for a person D, it is bad for D because other people care about the fact that if D dies, D will be deprived of some pleasant experiences (though they may not know what experiences these will be) that D would otherwise have enjoyed. (And PNNB is not bad for contrary reasons).

The problem with this version is that it seems downright implausible. For if the other versions of the AT fail because they are indexed to the psychological peculiarities of the one who dies, then so too must this version fail because it is indexed to the psychological peculiarities of other people. Those other people could just as easily be mistaken or ignorant about possible futures.

This, then, is the main part of Feldman’s critique of B&F. He does, however, have two other observations that warrant some discussion here.

The first is that B&F’s argument is problematic in that it conflates axiology and psychology (I mentioned this problem in part one). It assumes that the fact that D does not care about something (e.g. PNNB) supplies us with reason to think that that something is not prudentially bad. But why should we accept this? Prudential axiology seems like it could be separate from our psychological quirks. Indeed, if we go back to the inspiration for B&F’s argument — the Parfittian thought experiments about our bias to the future — we find that Parfit was actually using those thought experiments to cast doubt on our general view about personal well-being. Perhaps, Parfit suggested, we are wrong to be biased toward the future. Maybe we should adopt a temporally neutral perspective on what is good or bad for us? If so, the symmetry argument may still stand, but lead to the opposite conclusion, namely: that PNNB is, contra Lucretius, bad for us.

The second problem is that B&F’s argument may simply beg the question against Lucretius. The Lucretian argument was explicitly designed to counter the asymmetric psychological attitudes that everyone has toward death. Lucretius knew that people worried about death, and that death lay in the future. He just didn’t think this attitude was rational. One of the goals of the symmetry argument was to offer a defeater for this attitude. All B&F have done is re-asserted the fact that we have asymmetric attitudes and used that to defeat the argument. Surely more is needed?


4. Brueckner and Fisher’s Response
B&F have offered a short response to Feldman’s critique. The response leaves a lot to be desired, but if you’ve been following the basic logic of Feldman’s critique you can pretty much guess where it goes. The essence of Feldman’s critique was this: the AT, in all its forms, conditions the badness of death on the attitude of some actual person or group of persons. The person who dies, in the one instance, or a non-specified group of “other people” in the other instance. But since both groups of people may suffer from psychological quirks or incapacities that result in them failing to “see” what it is rational to care about in the future, the AT fails to explain the badness of death when those quirks or incapacities are present.

Well, in that case, why not simply avoid conditioning the badness of death on the attitudes of actual people? Why not, instead, condition it on the attitudes of some hypothetical, idealised, “rational” person? That’s what we do in ethics all the time: if real people don’t have the attitudes we would like them to have, we imagine idealised people who do. David Boonin does this when responding to Don Marquis’s “Future Like Ours Argument” about the ethics of abortion.

It should come as no surprise to learn that this is what B&F do too with their revised de dicto version of the AT:

AT(dd*): When death is bad for an individual D, it is bad for D because it is rational for D to care about the fact that if D dies, D will be deprived of some pleasant experiences (though D may not know what experiences these will be) that D would otherwise have enjoyed. (Contrariwise, PNNB is not bad for an individual because, even though it deprives him or her of pleasant experiences, it is not rational for an individual to care about the fact that if he or she is born late he or she will be deprived of some pleasant experiences.)

The use of the word “rational” is key here. With it, B&F make the appeal to an idealised perspective on our psychological attitudes. No longer are they focusing on what someone does care about, instead they are focusing on what the person should care about, if they were being rational.

They claim that this version of the AT is immune to the counterexamples posed by Feldman. For instance, look at the case of the six month-old child. Clearly, it is in the child’s interest to have food, even if the child lacks the ability to conceptualise the fact that this is good. Why is that? Because from the idealised perspective of the rational person, obtaining nourishment is good. The same reasoning applies, a fortiori, to the case of the SIDS baby: their death is bad for them because, from the idealised perspective, it deprives them of something they ought to care about if they were rational.

B&F suggest that this revised version of the AT advances the case against the Lucretian symmetry argument. In a technical sense, they are correct: they have supplied a new principle that avoids Feldman’s critique and this could be used to rebut the Lucretian argument (following the method I laid down in part one). Further, they argue that this doesn’t simply beg the question against Lucretius, because his argument was purely about asymmetric attitudes toward death, not about asymmetric attitudes toward life in general. They claim that AT(dd*) is not simply being posited without support but that it is being derived from the more general rationality of asymmetric, future-biased attitudes toward life.

But is this persuasive? One clear problem is that the rationality of this more general attitude is not fully established. B&F acknowledge this in a footnote, and at the very end appeal to an article that one of them has written (Fischer) that vaguely sketches a defence of it. This defence relies on the claim that a future-biasing in our desires is rational because it is evolutionarily advantageous. To quote from the authors: “there would appear to be a clear survival advantage to any creature who cares especially about future good experiences, as opposed to past good experiences.”

I haven’t read Fischer’s earlier piece, but I’m quite familiar with this style of argument and I find it highly circumspect, particularly in this context. For one thing, I don’t see any strong reason to think that evolutionary goals are either constitutive of, or correlative with rational truths. Indeed, I think one could plausibly argue that the exact opposite it true. But in addition to this, I think the appeal to evolutionary goals is suspicious in this context. Why? Because evolution as a process is (at least partly) biased against death. Which suggests to me that the survival advantage of future-biasing may simply be feeding off the asymmetric attitude that evolution has toward death. Which means that B&F’s argument is circular: the AT(dd*) is defended by appeal to the general rationality of asymmetric attitudes toward the future, which are in turn defended by appeal to survival advantage, which is essentially an asymmetric attitude toward death in another name.

Or so it seems to me.


4. Conclusion
So where does that leave us? Probably more confused than we were when we started out. So let’s try to distill the main threads of argument.

In part one, we saw how the Lucretian argument challenges the badness of death by drawing an analogy between it and PNNB. B&F rejected this by appealing to the fact that we seem to care about the future in a way that we don’t care about the past. They claimed that this meant that death deprived us of something we care about, but PNNB does not. This was their “asymmetry thesis” (AT).
In this post we have encountered the problems arising from this thesis. Starting with Feldman, we saw how the de dicto and de re versions of the AT are vulnerable to various counterexamples. These counterexamples exploited the fact that the AT seems to condition the badness of death on the actual attitudes of particular people. B&F reply to Feldman by reformulating the AT so that it relies on the attitudes of a hypothetical, idealised, and rational person. But as I have just argued, their defence of this thesis leaves something to be desired.

None of which means that the Lucretian argument is sound. If nothing else, we are still left with the live possibility, hinted at by Parfit, that the argument simply proves that PNNB is bad for us.

The Lucretian Symmetry Argument (Part One)

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Death looms large for most of us, even if we try not to think about it. But should we be worried at the prospects of our eventual demise? Should we do everything we can to avoid it (e.g. by opting for cryopreservation)? Or should we approach it with indifference and equanimity?

The Epicurean school of thought supports the latter view — that of equanimity and indifference — with two classic arguments. The first, which we might call the experiential blank argument, holds that death is nothing to us because “we” won’t be around to experience it. This argument was the subject of a previous series of blog posts. The second, which is typically called the Lucretian symmetry argument, is the subject of this series of blog posts.

I’ll spread the discussion of the argument over a couple of blog posts. In the remainder of this post, I’ll outline the general form of the argument and consider possible strategies for responding to it. I’ll also consider Brueckner and Fischer’s (B&F’s), by now famous, objection to the argument. In subsequent posts, I will consider Feldman’s recent riposte to B&F and, in turn, their reply to Feldman.


1. What Lucretius Said
Once we get into the debate between Feldman and B&F, things will start to get pretty complex (and, if I’m honest, slightly arcane). But it’s reassuring to know that the debate between these parties is rooted in a fairly simple argument. The argument comes from a couple of passages from Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. Here they are:

“In days of old, we felt no disquiet...So, when we shall be no more - when the union of body and spirit that engenders us has been disrupted - to us, who shall then be nothing, nothing by any hazard will happen any more at all. 

Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that Nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead.”

The passages present a simple analogy (although you have to get past the archaic language in this translation to see it clearly). The analogy compares two states: (i) post-mortem non-being, or, more simply, “death”; and (ii) pre-natal non-being, which we’ll label PNNB. The suggestion is that these two states are similar in all crucial respects because they both entail our non-existence. The claim is then made that since PNNB “counts to us as nothing” so too should death count to us as nothing.

The phrase “counts to us as nothing” requires some unpacking. As with the other Epicurean arguments about death, there is a danger that we will conflate two distinct conclusions that the arguments might allow us to reach. The first conclusion has to do with the prudential axiology of death (i.e. whether death is good or bad for you). The second conclusion has to do with the psychological attitude one should have toward death (i.e. whether one should be afraid or not). The two conclusions may be connected, but if they are, this connection will have to be made explicit.

That’s exactly what this formal reconstruction of the argument attempts to do (inspired but modified from Feldman):

• (1) The state of pre-natal non-being is not bad for us. 

• (2) Post-mortem non-being (death) is the same as pre-natal non-being, in all important respects.

• (3) Therefore, death is not bad for us. 

• (4) If something is not bad for us, then it is irrational to fear it. 

• (5) Therefore, the fear of death is irrational.

There are two-steps to the argument. The first taking us to the axiological conclusion; the second to the psychological conclusion. The steps are bridged by way of the principle posited in premise (4). One may doubt whether this principle is true. For instance, it could be that we rationally fear things that are not bad for us (e.g. things that are bad for others). I won’t be considering such concerns here (I will do some other time). Instead, I shall assume that prudential badness and the rationality of fear are intimately linked in the manner suggested by premise (4).

This shifts most of the focus back to the first step of the argument. As we can see, that step is strictly analogical in nature. As a result, that part of the argument is not logically sound: the conclusion does not actually follow from the premises as a matter of deductive certainty. This is because, following Douglas Walton, I view analogical arguments as presumptive arguments. These are arguments that lead to defeasible conclusions that can be set aside under certain conditions. Those conditions relate to: (a) the truth of the claim made about the first relevant case; and (b) the strength of the similarity between the two relevant cases: death and PNNB. If the claim made about PNNB is not true, or if the two cases are not similar “in all important respects”, then the conclusion does not follow.

The first possibility — i.e. that PNNB is, contra Lucretius, actually bad for us — will resurface later in the discussion. In the meantime, the second possibility — that death and PNNB differ in certain crucial respects — will monopolise our attention.


2. The Simple Disanalogy and the Parfittian Bias
An obvious difference between PNNB and death is this: our existence precedes our death, but not our PNNB. That much seems banal, even platitudinous in its obviousness, and by itself it does not seem like it could defeat the Lucretian argument. One imagines Lucretius replying with a confident “So what? That’s not a significant difference.”

But maybe he’s wrong. Maybe this difference is significant. Consider the following thought experiment from Derek Parfit:

Amnesia Operation: You are in hospital for a serious, and extremely painful operation. The operation cannot be performed with anaesthetic, and the pain is so severe that doctors have decided to administer powerful memory-erasing drugs to everyone who undergoes it, believing that this is the only way for people to overcome the trauma. The medication is administered before the operation and essentially blocks out your memory for several hours on either side of the operation. You awake in your hospital bed, unable to remember what has happened. You ask the nurse on duty, but she can only tell you that either (a) you just woke up from the operation or (b) you are due to undergo the operation in the next half hour.

Query: Which possibility do you prefer?

Parfit reckons that most people would prefer possibility (a). This suggests that we have a certain “Con Bias Toward the Future”. In other words, we prefer not to have negative experiences lying in our future.

Now, Parfit has his own reasons for discussing this case, and they will feature in part two, but for the time being what’s important is how two other philosophers — Brueckner and Fischer — have used this idea to respond to the Lucretian symmetry argument. Taking Parfit’s notion onboard, B&F argue that not only do we have a “Con” bias toward the future, we also have a “Pro” bias toward the future. In other words, given the option, we prefer to have positive experiences in the future. To see this, simply modify the Parfittian thought experiment:

Pleasure Drug: You are in the hospital to test some new drug. The drug gives you intense feelings of pleasure for approximately one hour. However, soon after you will forget everything. You wake up in your hospital bed and ask the nurse on-duty what your status is. She tells you that you either: (a) took the drug yesterday but have now forgotten; or (d) are due to take the drug later today.

Query: Which possibility do you prefer?

B&F suggest the answer is obvious: you would prefer (d). This, they argue, justifies their belief in the pro-bias toward the future. The gist of the idea is depicted below.

3. The Future Bias and the fear of Death
These biases are all well and good, and the thought experiments used to uncover them are interesting, but where does it get us? Surely, all they really show is that we are (or, at least, might be) biased toward the future. How can we use that fact to defeat the Lucretian argument?

It takes a bit of work, but we can eventually use it to undermine the analogy Lucretius tried to draw. That process starts with the following argument:

• (6) We care about our future experiences in a way that we don’t care about our past experiences; more precisely: we prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences (if necessary) in the past. 

• (7) Death deprives us of future positive experiences; PNNB only deprives us of past positive experiences. 

• (8) Therefore, death deprives us of something we care about, but PNNB does not.

This is clearly articulates the difference between the two cases. But it doesn’t quite get us to the rejection of premise (2). Premise (2) talks about death and PNNB being similar “in all important respects”. Before we can conclude that premise (2) is flawed we have to know that the deprivation of something we care about is an important difference between the two cases.

It is at this point that something called the Deprivation Thesis enters the fray. According to the deprivation thesis, something is bad for us if it deprives us of something we would have had but for that thing. It is a counterfactual principle, one that compares our welfare across possible worlds in order to determine whether the actual world is bad for us. If we append the deprivation thesis to the end of the previous argument...

• (9) If X deprives us of something we care about, then X is bad for us.

…we can reject premise (2). This is depicted in the diagram below.

But is this really a persuasive rebuttal to the Lucretian argument? Is there not something slightly suspicious about appealing to the Deprivation thesis in order to defeat Lucretian symmetry, especially given that it was really this deprivation-based account of the badness of death that Lucretius was trying to undermine? We’ll look at these questions in part two.

Book Recommendations ♯8: On Politics by Alan Ryan

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Political history fascinates me. And philosophy is clearly one of my passions. Consequently, it should come as no surprise to learn that the history of political philosophy is something I’m interested in. That’s why Alan Ryan’s recently published meisterwerk — On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present— is something I heartily recommend. (Aside: Would it really be that surprising if the history of political philosophy was not one of my interests? Maybe not, since the syllogism I offered exhibits the compositional fallacy)

The book is a bit of monster: it weighs in at just over a thousand pages, and in its hardback form (which is the only form it’s available in for now) it will put a serious dent in your bookshelf. Furthermore, in terms of content it covers an impressive sweep of history: as the subtitle says “from Herodotus to the Present”. Despite this, the immensely readable. Ryan is a long-time political philosopher and theorist (currently based in Princeton, I believe) and the book is very much the product of years of his years of personal reflection, research and teaching on the topic. As a result, there is an intimacy to the book that might so easily have been lost in its epic sweep.

In each chapter, Ryan looks at a particular figure or movement in the history of political thought. He sketches the socio-political backdrop to that figure or movement, and then exposits and critically engages with some of the key ideas and concepts. The format here is similar to that adopted Russell’s infamous A History of Western Philosophy — and Ryan acknowledges the influence in his introduction — but it is less showy and opinionated than Russell’s work. Don’t get me wrong, I love Bertrand Russell and enjoy his writing immensely, but whereas Russell tends to insert himself too much between the reader and the subject, Ryan tends to stand to one side, guiding you through the mire of political thought and conversation, providing some helpful commentary and observations along the way, but never forcing you towards one particular view.

The book is divided into two volumes. The first dealing with the period of history from the Ancient Greeks to the Renaissance (or as Ryan puts it “from Herodotus to Machiavelli”); and the second, which is nearly twice the length of the first, dealing with the period from Hobbes to the present day. Generally speaking, I’d be much more interested in the material covered by the second volume, but I found myself surprisingly captivated by the first volume. I suspect this is because I have recently been reading books (both fictional and non-fictional) dealing with the Holy Roman Empire and the role of the Catholic Church in the political life of Europe, and so it was interesting to read about the intellectual backdrop to some of that in more detail. Nevertheless, I imagine that others would find this pretty interesting stuff too since that era of history is often neglected in contemporary discussions of political force.

Now, I’ll be honest and say that I haven’t read the whole thing — it is over a thousand pages long — but I have dipped in and out repeatedly, and read substantial chunks. In so doing, I’ve been relieved to find that the book easily accommodates this a la carte method of reading. But despite this, the book does tell a coherent story about the development of political philosophy, and the changing conceptions and justifications of political structures that have come with it.

One criticism of the book, and an obvious one at that, is its neglect of non-Western sources. Only in the latter stages does it take a truly global perspective. This will no doubt irk some readers, but it hasn’t bothered me too much. Perhaps this is because I know so little about non-Western philosophy, an ignorance that is in no way helped by reading a book like this, but fortunately or unfortunately: ignorance is bliss.

Is Craig's Defence of the DCT Inconsistent? (Part Two)

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(Part One)

This is the second part in a short series of posts looking at Erik Wielenberg’s recent article “An Inconsistency in Craig’s Defence of the Moral Argument”. Unsurprisingly, given its title, the article tries to show that the manner in which William Lane Craig — that most famous and indefatigable of Christian apologists — defends the moral argument for the existence of God leads him to contradict himself.

Part one traced out the various dialectical steps that Craig takes when defending the moral argument (more precisely: when defending his version of the modified DCT). The central premise of Craig’s moral argument holds that (a) only God provides a sound foundation for the existence of objective moral truths; and (b) objective moral truths are in need of a sound foundation. Critics challenge both (a) and (b).

In defending (a), Craig develops his version of the modified DCT. The modified DCT is designed to overcome classic Euthyphro-style objections to the DCT. It holds, contra the Euthyphro, that God’s nature is such that he cannot command that certain acts are permissible (e.g. the torture of the innocent). Thus, according to the modified DCT, there are such things as “N-commands”:

N-Commands: God’s nature is such that there are certain things that he forbids, and certain others that he obliges, in every possible world. That is: there are certain logically necessary moral duties.

In defending (b), Craig rejects the approach of non-theistic, non-natural moral realism (NTNNMR). According to NTNNMR, (at least some) moral truths do not need to be explained or grounded. Rather, they are logically necessary and hence self-explanatory. Craig accuses proponents of NTNNMR of adopting a “shopping list” approach to metaethics, of helping themselves to the moral entities they prefer, and thus he imposes the following condition of success on metaethical theories:

Craig’s Condition: Any approach to metaethics that posits the existence of logically necessary connections must adequately explain those necessities.

Wielenberg’s argument is that these two things — N-commands and Craig’s Condition — lead to a contradiction. Let’s see exactly how this works.


1. Wielenberg’s Argument
Superficially, there’s nothing contradictory about Craig’s commitment to the existence of N-commands and his condition of success for metaethics. The former says only that certain moral duties exist as a matter of logical necessity; the latter says that logically necessary connections must be explained. It’s only if an additional premise is added to the mix — viz. that N-commands are unexplained logical necessities — that a contradiction emerges.

This means that Wielenberg is proposing that the following argument is a good one.

• (1) Craig’s modified DCT posits the existence of N-commands: divine commands, which define the scope of our obligations, and which flow as a matter of necessity from God’s nature.

• (2) Any successful metaethical theory must explain posited logical necessities, otherwise it fails.

• (3) N-commands are unexplained logical necessities.

• (4) Therefore, Craig’s modified DCT fails.

Clearly, this argument is valid: the conclusion follows from the conjunction of the premises. Furthermore, premises (1) and (2) look to be pretty solid. As outlined above, Craig seems to be committed to them in his defence of the DCT. If he rejects (1), he opens himself up to Euthyphro-style objections that he worked so hard to avoid. Similarly, if he rejects (2), one of the key assumptions of his moral argument is undermined.

So premise (3) is where the action is. And premise (3) is obviously going to be controversial. Certainly, when I first read Wielenberg’s article, I thought to myself “but, of course, Craig will argue that N-commands are explained. He will say that they are explained by the divine nature.” Wielenberg’s task is to show that this response doesn’t work.


2. Are N-commands Unexplained?
The simple answer to Wielenberg’s argument — and the one I suspect Craig would give — is that N-commands are explained. They are, after all, grounded in the divine nature. So something like this will be used to rebut premise (3) of Wielenberg’s argument.

• (5) N-commands are explained: they are explained by the fact that they flow necessarily from God’s moral nature.

How exactly does this work? Let’s take a command like “Love thy neighbour and do them no harm” (not a quote, I hasten to add). The idea is that this is explained by the fact that God’s nature is good and it consists of the property of lovingkindness. Thus, the goodness of lovingkindness explains the command in question. A similar story can be told about other moral commands such as the command not to torture the innocent. This is explained by the fact that it is contrary to the divine nature, hence bad, and its badness then explains why it is impermissible.

This simple answer is dubious. As Wielenberg points out, and as Craig seems to agree, goodness and badness do not provide sufficient explanations for obligatoriness and impermissibility. In other words, the mere fact that something is good cannot tell us (for sure) whether it is permissible or obligatory. Quoting Craig:

It is good that I become a wealthy philanthropist…; it is also good that I forgo the pursuit of wealth to become a medical missionary to Chad. But obviously I cannot do both, since they are mutually exclusive. I am not, therefore, obligated to do both, though both are good. Goods, then, do not imply moral obligations. (Craig in Is Goodness without God good enough? 2009, p. 172)

Wielenberg argues that something similar is true in the case of the relationship between evil and the impermissible. Because there are situations in which any act one performs is bad (i.e. because there are moral dilemmas), there are situations in which the mere fact that something is bad does not tell us whether it is forbidden.

This seems right on the money to me. Indeed, if one goes back to the originator of the modified DCT — Robert Adams — one finds that this is one of his main reasons for defending the DCT. Adams argues that God’s commands are needed in order to explain the existence of moral duties because without a command from an authoritative being, we cannot tell the difference between an act that is obligatory and one that is supererogatory. I discuss this argument elsewhere, but in essence it holds that there is an explanatory gap between the value status of an act or state of affairs and the deontic status of an act or state of affairs. The former does not entail the latter.

This suggests that N-commands are fundamentally mysterious entities. The fact that God’s nature is essentially good, does not by itself explain why certain things are necessarily impermissible or obligatory. Or, at any rate, this is what Wielenberg argues. He provides additional support for this view by appealing to sceptical theism (a position that Craig also endorses). According to sceptical theism, we should doubt our ability to explain and justify the connections and entailments between good, bad, right and wrong. Thus, to the extent that Craig endorses sceptical theism, it seems like he should also accept that N-commands are unexplained logical necessities.

We’ll summarise and create an argument map:

• (6) God’s moral nature cannot explain N-commands: there is an explanatory gap between goodness/badness and obligatoriness/impermissibility.

I have to say: I’m not entirely convinced. It seems to me that Adams’s explanatory gap may not hold true in all cases. It may be that it only holds true in those cases which involve dilemmatic choices. But are such dilemmatic choices a necessary feature of the moral universe? Do they arise in all cases of N-commands? Obligations such as “Do not torture an innocent child for fun” seem like they would never feature as part of a credible moral dilemma.

Nevertheless, I think there are other problems for Craig. Leaving the issue of obligations to one side, Craig’s theory also posits certain necessary connections between God’s nature and the properties of goodness and badness. So, for example, Craig says that lovingkindness is good because it is one of God’s properties and God is essentially and necessarily good. But this in itself posits a deeply mysterious necessary connection between God’s properties and goodness. This is something I discussed before.

In addition to this, there is a more general problem for Craig. This is that the condition of success he imposes on metaethical theories is absurdly high. We simply cannot explain all logically necessary connections. The reasons were well articulated by Simon Blackburn and I want to close by exploring them.


3. Blackburn’s Dilemma
Simon Blackburn is a well-known Cambridge-based philosopher. Perhaps his most famous contribution to the philosophical world comes in the shape of his quasi-realist, expressivist account of morality. Interesting and all as that account is, I want to focus on another of his contributions to philosophy here.
In one of his papers, Blackburn formulates a dilemma for those wishing to explain the sourcehood of necessity. This has subsequently become known as “Blackburn’s Dilemma”. Here is my paraphrase of the dilemma:

Blackburn’s Dilemma: Either the necessity of a necessary truth is to be explained by a contingent truth or it is to be explained by another necessary truth. If the necessity of a necessary truth is explained by a contingent truth, then that contingent truth could have been otherwise and hence the necessary truth need not have been necessary. Therefore, the necessity of a necessary truth cannot be explained by a contingent truth. But if a necessary truth is explained by another necessary truth, then we have not explained its necessity, we have simply transferred its necessity elsewhere and started off on a regress of necessary truths that need to be explained.

The two horns of the dilemma are illustrated in the diagram below. The two horns of the dilemma are illustrated in the diagram below. We call the first the contingency horn and the second the necessity horn.

Blackburn's Dilemma

Now, as it happens, there are certain technical problems with how Blackburn formulated the dilemma, but these need not detain us here since the overall thrust of the dilemma remains intact (for a discussion of the technical problems and how they can be overcome, I recommend this article by Hanks). Furthermore, that overall thrust seems to highlight the main problem with Craig’s Condition.

If Craig really thinks that every logically necessary connection must be explained before there can be a successful metaethics, he is doomed to permanent disappointment. Every time he purports to explain a posited logical necessity he will either have to appeal to a contingent fact (in which case the necessity will not explained) or to another logical necessity (in which case the problem is pushed back). We see this pattern above: even if God’s goodness did explain the existence of N-commands, the logically necessary connections between God’s nature and the property of goodness would need to be explained. Thus the problem of satisfying Craig’s condition remains, simply being pushed back one step.

In sum, then, it would seem like Craig’s best bet would be to abandon his strict condition of success. But in so doing NTNNMR becomes a live possibility once more. And so the explanatory battle between NTNNMR and modified DCT must be fought on different turf.

Is Craig's Defence of the DCT Inconsistent? (Part One)

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He's smiling now...

Forgive me. I am going to start with a self-indulgent bit of blog history.

I started this blog over three years ago. At the time, I saw it as an outlet. I was completing my PhD and finding that I was reading lots of things that weren’t directly relevant to my research. I found a lot of that stuff interesting and I didn’t want to let it go to waste. So this blog became my information dump: when I read something interesting I would write up a blog post about it so it I would have a permanent record of how I understood the arguments it made, which I could return to at a later date.

Originally, my main extra-curricular interest was in the philosophy of religion and ethics. Consequently, the majority of my early posts tended to cover those topics. Practically none of my early posts covered material related to my own research, mainly because I used this blog to get away from my PhD.

Obviously, things have changed quite a bit since then: my posts have become longer and more complicated (neither of which is necessarily of good thing), and the subject matter has moved away from looking at philosophy of religion toward looking more and more at ethical-legal issues that happen to be the focus of my current research and teaching. Nevertheless, I remain interested in the philosophy of religion, and like to occasionally do blog posts on it.

This post is going to be an example of that continuing interest. In it, I’m going to take a look at a recent paper by Erik Wielenberg entitled “An Inconsistency in Craig’s Defence of the Moral Argument”, which unsurprisingly argues that William Lane Craig’s defence of the modified Divine Command Theory (hereafter “modified DCT”) is best by a (fatal) inconsistency.

The paper is quite short, and readily available online, but I’m going to try to add some value to it by simplifying its elements, diagramming its main argumenst, and offering some commentary of my own. To that end, I’ll spread my discussion over two separate posts. In the remainder of this post, I will do three things. First, I’ll quickly sketch the basic structure of the dialectic between Craig's moral argument and its critics. Second, I'll explore one branch of the dialectic, which challenges the role of God in the explanation of moral facts. And third, I'll consider another branch of the dialectic, which challenges the assumptions underlying Craig's moral argument.


1. The Moral Argument and its Discontents
William Lane Craig, like many others, believes that there are objective moral truths. He believes that there are states of affairs in the world of which it is true to say “that state of affairs is good/bad" and that there are actions in the world of which it is true to say “that action is right/wrong”. What’s more he believes this without thinking that the truth conditions of either statement is wholly dependent on subjective states of those who might utter them. To put it more succinctly, he believes that there are objective (mind-independent) moral values and objective moral duties.

He also believes that objective moral truths can only exist if they have some “sound foundation” or explanation. What’s more, he believes that the only possible foundation or explanation for such truths is theistic in nature. This suggests that he is committed to something like the following argument:

• (1) There are objective moral truths. That is to say: there are objective moral values and objective moral duties. 

• (2) There is a sound foundation (explanation) for objective moral truths if and only if God exists (i.e. only God provides a sound foundation for objective moral truths). 

• (3) Therefore, God exists.

Those of you who are familiar with Craig’s work will realise that this is not a perfect replication of the moral argument that he typically presents in his debates and writings. To be precise, Craig doesn’t usually frame the second premise in terms of “sound foundations” or “explanations”; rather, he frames it in terms of the existence of such facts in the first place. In other words, he says such truths cannot exist if God does not exist. But the modest framing that I have adopted above is more appropriate given the dialectic that commonly arises between Craig and his critics.

What is that dialectic? Well, obviously, as with any logical argument of the sort presented above, there are two potential sites of criticism. One could criticise premise (1) and thereby reject the notion of objective moral truths. That would be radical and discomfiting to many, but there are some who take that approach. We won’t, however, be looking at it here. The other option is to criticise premise (2). That’s the one that’s relevant here and we’ll be spending the remainder of the post looking at it.

Significantly, the criticism of premise (2) can follow at least two separate branches (there is at least one more). The first branch — which we shall call the theistic branch — challenges Craig’s contention that God provides a sound foundation for objective morality. The second branch — which we shall call the foundationless branch — challenges the assumption of premise two, namely: that we need to provide a foundation for objective moral truths in the first place. For Craig’s argument to succeed, he has to cut off both of these branches of criticism.

Wielenberg’s claim is that in trying to do so, Craig contradicts himself. Thus, the way in which he prevents the theistic branch of the criticism from taking hold is in direct contradiction to the way in which he prevents the foundationless branch of criticism from taking hold. To see this, we need to carefully trace out the dialectic that takes place along both branches. The remainder of this post tries to do so.


2. The Theistic Branch of the Dialectic
The most direct critique of Craig’s argument takes place along the theistic branch of the dialectic. As a first step, the critic can pose the question to Craig: why think God provides a sound foundation for moral truths? Craig might (if he were extremely naive, which he isn't) duly oblige by saying: through his commands God tell us what is right and wrong, and good and bad. Thus, God's commands provide the foundation we need. This is the unmodified DCT.

The critic will immediately highlight a problem with this. As noted long ago by Plato in his dialogue Euthyphro, making moral truths dependent on God’s commands in this manner seems to render them disturbingly arbitrary. Allow me to explain. Take an objective moral duty of the following sort:

Duty_ct: It is morally wrong (read: impermissible) to torture an innocent child for fun.

This would seem to be an uncontroversial example of a moral duty. What’s more, it seems like the kind of moral duty that simply has to hold true, irrespective of the circumstances. In other words, it seems like there could never be a scenario in which it is morally acceptable to torture an innocent child for fun. There is no possible world in which such torture is permissible.

But what if God commanded it? What if he said: you must torture an innocent child for my amusement. If one is a proponent of the unmodified DCT, then it would seem like one is committed to the view that if God commands it, it becomes morally acceptable. So in that case, if God issued that command, the torture of the innocent child would become permissible. The deontic status of an act is suddenly dependent on the arbitrary whim of God.

That seems unpalatable to many — including many theists who accept that God must provide the ultimate foundation for moral truth. So they’ve come up with an escape route: the modified DCT. This was (I believe) originally formulated by Robert M. Adams, but Craig has become a staunch proponent of it in latter days.

The essence of the modified DCT is that moral duties are indeed grounded in God’s commands — thus, Duty_ct is true only because God has commanded it — but that there are constraints on what God can command. To be precise, because God is essentially and necessarily good, he could never command (for example) the torture of an innocent child for fun. Thus, certain key moral duties are not dependent on some arbitrary divine whim.

Of course, the upshot of all this is that certain moral truths must hold as a matter of logical necessity. For example, the torture of an innocent child is always and everywhere wrong because God’s nature is such that he forbids it in every possible world; because it is not logically possible for a being with that nature to command otherwise. Following Wielenberg, we call such moral truths “N-Commands”:

N-Commands: God’s nature is such that there are certain things that he forbids, and certain others that he obliges, in every possible world. That is: there certain logically necessary moral duties under the modified DCT.

This is a neat solution to the arbitrariness objection, but it comes at a cost. Or so Wielenberg will argue. To see what that cost, we need to proceed to the foundationless branch of the dialectic.

(Note: You may wonder what happens to objective moral values under the modified DCT. Does God still provide the foundation for them? After all, the modified DCT solves the abritrariness problem by saying that God’s nature is such that he commands certain things as a matter of necessity. But that seems to focus solely on obligations and duties, not on values. As it happens, Craig argues that God’s nature is the grounding for moral values. Thus, God remains the foundation for all moral truths. This grounding of values in the divine nature has problems that I’ve explored before on the blog.)


3. The Foundationless Branch
The second critique of Craig’s argument follows a less direct path, but it highlights a venerable and increasingly popular view among metaethicists.

What is this view? It can be called, for want of a better name, non-theistic non-natural moral realism (NTNNMR). It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. I know. But it accurately describes the view, which is something. NTNNMR holds that moral truths do exist, but that they don’t really need an explanation or grounding. They simple are true. Thus, the second premise of Craig’s argument relies on a faulty assumption. Objective moral truths don’t need what Craig claims he can provide.

There is much to be said for this view. That there are certain things that are self-explanatory, self-grounding or brute is widely accepted. After all, few people think that explanations or grounding exercises can continue indefinitely. There must be some stopping points after which it makes no sense to ask for explanations or foundations. Our conception of reality must bottom-out somewhere.

But Craig nevertheless objects to NTNNMR. Why so? Let’s hear from the man himself:

If our approach to metaethical theory is to be serious metaphysics rather than just a “shopping list” approach, whereby one simply helps oneself to the supervenient moral properties…needed to do the job, then some sort of explanation is required for why moral properties supervene on certain natural states.” (Craig in Is goodness without God good enough?, p. 180)

So Craig thinks that proponents of NTNNMR aren’t serious metaethicists. Their claim that moral facts need no grounding is a case of special pleading. No serious metaethicists play this game: they all think the supervenience of moral properties on natural properties requires some explanation.

But as Wielenberg points out, this is an odd claim to make. The supervenience relation is one of logical necessity. To say that the moral property of wrongness (call this M₁ supervenes of the natural states of childhood, torture, innocence and amusement (call these “N₁ - N₄), is to say that in any two possible worlds in which N₁ - N₄ hold, so too does M₁. In other words, it is logically necessary that if N₁- N₄ is true, so too is M_1.

The upshot of this is that when Craig complains about the “shopping list” approach to metaethics employed by proponents of NTNNMR, he is complaining about a failure to explain logically necessary connections. This suggests that Craig imposes the following success condition on a metaethical theory:

Craig’s Condition: Any approach to metaethics that posits the existence of logically necessary connections must adequately explain those connections.

Now, Wielenberg exploits the appeal to this condition in his challenge to Craig. We’ll look at that the next day. But I want to close by dwelling on the substance of this condition for a moment.

To me, it is somewhat redolent of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). The PSR states (in one form) that for every fact F there is a sufficient explanation of that fact. But Craig’s Condition is both less and more extreme than that famous principle. It is less extreme in that it only applies to the explanation of moral facts — a restriction that could be called into question by critics of Craig’s position. But it is also more extreme in that it applies to logically necessary facts. Many would hold that logically necessary facts fall outside the remit of the PSR since they can be self-explanatory. So in calling for logically necessary connections to be explained, Craig is doing something quite extreme. Of course, Craig defends this by claiming that just because a fact is necessary does not mean it cannot be explained. For example, he claims that “2+2=4” is a necessary truth, but nevertheless it is explained by the Peano axioms This suggests that at least some logically necessary facts can be explained. All that needs to be shown then is that moral facts are among those necessary facts that both have and need an explanation. But can this be shown?

Wielenberg doesn’t answer this question in his short article. That is understandable. He has other fish to fry. Still, I find it quite interesting. And as it happens I have a piece currently under review somewhere that tries to critique Craig (and some other theistic metaethicists) on this very point. That, however, is a topic for another day. For now, I shall conclude this post.

In part two, I’ll outline Wielenberg’s critique in full detail, and consider his defence of it. Stay tuned.

The Singularity: Overview and Framework Redux

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(Original Version)

I want to begin with the problem.

A couple of weeks back — the 24th of December to be precise — I published a post offering a general framework for understanding and participating in (philosophical) debates about the technological singularity. The rationale behind the post was simple: I wanted to organise the dialectical terrain surrounding the technological singularity into a number of core theses, each of which could be supported or rejected by a number of arguments. Analysing, developing and defending the premises of those arguments could then be viewed as the primary role of philosophical research about this topic. Obviously, I was aware that people are engaged in this kind of research anyway, but I had hoped that the framework might provide some utility for those who are new to the area, while also enabling existing researchers to see how their work connects with that of others.

The framework I came up with centred on three main theses: (i) the explosion thesis, which was about the likelihood of an intelligence explosion of AI; (ii) the unfriendliness thesis, which was about the likelihood that any superintelligent AI would be antithetical to human values and interests; and (iii) the inevitability thesis, which was about the avoidability (or evitability) of the creation of superintelligent, unfriendly AI. In the earlier post, I suggested that each of these theses represented a point on a spectrum of possible theses, with the other points along the spectrum being made up of weaker or contrary theses.

The post attracted a number of comments, some of which were not directly related to the substance of the post, and some of which expanded (in very useful ways) on the various ideas contained therein. One comment, however, from Eliezer Yudkowsky was somewhat critical of the framework I had proffered. Upon reflection, I think that a significant portion of this criticism was on target. The main problems with the framework as I had formulated it was: (a) it conflated notions of possibility and probability when it came to the discussion of AI development; and (b) it made the inevitability thesis seem separate from the other two when in reality it was a sub-part of both. That led to an overly-complicated framework.

You can see the problem more clearly by looking at the three theses as I originally defined them (note: the explosion thesis appears in abbreviated form here):

The Explosion Thesis: There will be an intelligence explosion, i.e. there will be AI++.

The Unfriendliness Thesis: It is highly likely that any AI+ or AI++ will be unfriendly to us. That is: will have goals that are antithetical to those of us human beings, or will act in a manner that is antithetical to our goals.

The Inevitability Thesis: The creation of an unfriendly AI+ or AI++ is inevitable. (A number of related theses were developed which suggested that it might be strongly or weakly inevitable, or maybe even “evitable” or avoidable).

Here, both the Explosion Thesis and the Unfriendliness are phrased in terms of what is going to happen or in terms of what is likely to happen. And yet, despite this, the inevitability thesis (and the associated evitability theses) is phrased in terms of what can or cannot be avoided. But isn’t that simply to say that certain outcomes either likely or not likely to occur? And thus isn’t that already included in the definition of the other two theses? A framework which conflates and blends theses in this manner is likely to do more harm than good; to confuse rather than enlighten.

That is the problem.


1. Correcting the Problem: Thoughts and Methodology
The obvious solution to the problem is to provide a better overview and framework, and that’s what I want to try to do in the remainder of this post. But before I do so, I want to say a few things about the methodology I’m adopting and the limitations of my approach.

The methodology remains committed to same goals as last time round. First, I want to organise the dialectical terrain surrounding the technological singularity into a set of theses, each of which can be supported by one or more arguments, the analysis, evaluation and evaluation of which is the role of philosophical research in this area. Second, I want to ensure that the organisation is simple without being simplistic; that it succinctly covers the key topics in such a way that the debates can be isolated in a short space of time, while also retaining some reductive complexity for those who want to think about it in more detail. Finally, I want the framework to work in such a way that those who accept particular combinations of theses will end up with distinct and recognisable positions on the technological singularity.

Those three things — identification of core theses, simplicity with reductive complexity, and the ability to locate distinct positions or views — form my self-imposed conditions of success for the organisational framework. But obviously, any such organisational exercise starts with certain biases on the part of the organiser. To be more precise, the exercise starts with the organiser having a fuzzy sense of what ought to be included within the framework, which is hopefully rendered less fuzzy, and less arbitrary in the process of formulating and refining the framework. In this instance, my own fuzzy sense of what ought to be included within the framework is threefold.

First, I think some characterisation of the technological singularity is necessary. In other words, at least one of the theses has to say something about the possibility of AI creating AI+ and AI++. That, after all, is what the “singularity” is supposed to be. This is unsurprising given that the whole terrain is already grouped under that particular heading and this is what the Explosion Thesis was supposed to capture last time out. Second, at least one of the theses should cover the risks and rewards associated with the creation of AI+. Again, this is unsurprising given that concerns about the safety of AI technologies, along with hopes as to their beneficial potential, is what provides most of the motivation for researchers in this area. This is what the Unfriendliness Thesis was supposed to capture. And third, some characterisation of the psychological, social, and political factors influencing the development of AI++ — what I will call the “strategic infrastructure of AI development” — is necessary. These factors are distinct from those relating to the pure technological possibility of AI+, but assuming possibility they will obviously play an important role in its future creation. The Inevitability Thesis was supposed to capture this aspect of the debate, but I now think it failed to do so appropriately.

So this suggests the shape that the new framework ought to take. In essence, all three of these topics ought still to be covered, but they should not necessarily be represented as distinct theses. At least, not as distinct theses in the way they were before. Instead, the framework will be reduced to two core theses — the Explosion Thesis, and the Unfriendliness Thesis — each of which comes in two versions: (i) a technical version, which relates to conceptual and technological possibility; and (ii) a strategic version, which relates to all-things-considered likelihood, given either the current or plausible forms that the strategic infrastructure could take. Arising from these two theses, will be two decision trees, the endpoints of which will represent different positions one can take on the technological singularity. The decision tree format flows naturally out of the two versions of theses, since the strategic version depends on the technical version. That is to say: technologically possibility must be addressed before we consider the strategic implications.

The end result is a framework that (I think) corrects for the primary defects in the previous version, while still satisfying the three conditions of success mentioned above. Nevertheless, the framework still has its limitations. In addition to flaws I have not spotted myself, it will not be to everyone’s tastes since it works from my own intuitive biases about what is important in this area. It also ignores some interesting topics and runs the risk of constraining speculation in this area. Consequently, despite the fact that I’m dedicating two blog posts to the exercise, I don’t want to treat it too seriously. If this version of the framework is flawed — as it no doubt will turn out to be — then so be it. I won’t waste time perfecting it since it would probably be more worthwhile to evaluate and improve upon what has been written in this area.

Anyway, onto the revised framework itself. Remember: two theses, each coming in two flavours, which can then be co-opted into a pair of decision trees, the endpoints of which represent recognisable positions one can take on the technological singularity.


2. The Explosion Thesis
We start with Explosion Thesis, which in its technical form looks like this:

The Explosion Thesis_TV: It is possible (conceptually & technically) for there to be an intelligence explosion. That is: a state of affairs could arise in which for every AI_n that is created, AI_n will create a more intelligent AI_n+1 (where the intelligence gap between AI_n+1 and AI_n increases) up to some limit of intelligence or resources.

This is roughly the same as the version of the Explosion Thesis presented in the previous post but there are two major changes. First, in line with what I said above, this version now focuses on what is technologically possible, not on what is likely to happen. Second, I’ve added the important caveat here that in order for there to be a true intelligence explosion, the intelligence gap between AI_n and AI_n+1 must be increasing (at least initially). If the gap were merely incremental, there wouldn’t really be an explosion (h/t Yudkowsky’s comment on my previous post). The actual speed of the “takeoff” is left open. Following Chalmers, I’ll use the abbreviation AI+ to refer to any AI with greater-than-human intelligence, and the abbreviation AI++ to refer to the kind of AI one might expect to arise following an intelligence explosion.

A couple of other points are worth mentioning here. First, the notion of “intelligence” is somewhat fuzzy, and likely to be contested by researchers. In order to have a fully-functional version of the explosion thesis, one would need to pin down the concept of intelligence with more precision. However, in line with my goal of formulating an overarching framework for philosophical research on the singularity, I’m leaving things a bit fuzzy and general for now. Second, the Explosion Thesis continues to represent a point along a spectrum of theses about the possibility of AI, AI+ or AI++. The lower end of the spectrum is represented by complete skepticism about the possibility of AI, with the middle of the spectrum being occupied by the AI thesis (i.e. AI is possible but nothing more) and the AI+ thesis (i.e. AI+ is possible, but AI++ is not). My own feeling is that the risk-related concerns are somewhat similar for AI+ and AI++ (though, obviously, more pronounced for the latter), hence I tend to lump those two theses together. In other words, I think that if you accept the possibility of AI+, you should ask yourself the same kinds of questions you would if you accepted AI++.

I won’t talk too much about the arguments for and against the Explosion Thesis in this post. I mentioned a few the last day, and they remain roughly the same. The classic argument is that of I.J. Good, and Chalmer’s lengthy philosophical analysis of the singularity presents a couple of arguments too. I’m going to look at those in a later post.

Moving on then to the strategic version of the Explosion Thesis, which looks like this:

The Explosion Thesis_SV: It is highly likely (assuming possibility) that there will be AI++ (or, at least, AI+).

In essence, this version of thesis is claiming that the strategic infrastructure surrounding AI development is such that, if AI++ is possible, it is likely that it will, at some stage, be created. People will be motivated to create it, and the necessary resources will be available for doing so. Although this thesis is phrased in a parsimonious manner, hopefully it can be seen how it covers issues surrounding political, social and psychological incentives, not issues of pure technological possibility. Note, as well, how in this version of the thesis I have explicitly lumped the possibility of AI++ and AI+ together. This is in keeping with what I just said about the risks of both.

To defend the strategic version of the thesis, one would need to show the absence of motivational and situational defeaters for the development of AI+ or AI++. The terminology is borrowed from Chalmers, who defined the former in terms of the psychological and social incentives, and the latter in terms of resource limitations and the potential for self-destruction associated with the creation of AI++. I’ll talk about those some other time.

How does one construct a decision tree out of these two theses? Very simply, one takes the first node of the tree to represent a choice between accepting or not accepting the technical version of the Explosion Thesis, with subsequent nodes representing choices between weaker views about the possibility of AI, and, of course, the strategic version of the Explosion Thesis. As follows:

The Unfriendliness Thesis
The technical version of the Unfriendliness Thesis can be defined in the following manner:

The Unfriendliness Thesis_TV: It is possible (conceptually and technically) for an AI++ or AI+ to have values and goals that are antithetical to our own, or to act in manner that is antithetical to those values and goals.

First things first, as I noted the last time, “unfriendliness” is probably not the best term to use here. If we were being more philosophically precise, we might define this thesis in terms of objective and subjective values (or, more simply, “good” and “bad”) since the effect of AI+ or AI++ on those values is what really matters, not their “friendliness” in the colloquial sense. Furthermore, the “us” in the definition is problematic. Who are “we” and why do our values matter so much? By using “us”, the thesis runs the risk of adopting an overly species-relative conception of value. Nevertheless, part of me likes using the label “unfriendliness”. One reason is that it maps onto the pre-existing terms of Friendly and Unfriendly AI. Another reason is that it is more catchy than alternatives like the “Detrimental to Objective Value Thesis”. So I’m going to stick with it for now.

But why is this thesis interesting? Surely what matters when it comes to AI risks is their likelihood not their possibility, particularly given how philosophers speculate about all kinds of bizarre possibilities (Twin Earths and the like). This is where the qualifier of “technical” possibility becomes important. The focus of the technical version of the Unfriendliness Thesis is not on bizarre and far-fetched possibilities, but on what is possible given what we currently know about AI architectures and the relationship between intelligence and morality. Furthermore, it is important to consider these possibilities up front because, as has been acknowledged by Bostrom and Armstrong, philosophers might be inclined to head-off discussion of AI risk by arguing that intelligence and morality are positively correlated: an increase in one leads to an increase in the other. Now, I’m not suggesting that these philosophers would be right or wrong to make those conceptual and technical arguments, quite the contrary, I’m just suggesting that those arguments should be considered independently.

That leads nicely to the strategic version of the Unfriendliness Thesis, which reads as follows:

The Unfriendliness Thesis_SV: It is highly likely (assuming possibility) that any AI+ or AI++ that is created will have values and goals that are antithetical to our own, or will act in a manner that is antithetical to those values and goals.

In other words, given existing incentive structures and methodologies within AI research and development, and given the conceptual possibilities, any AI+ or AI++ that is created is likely to be unfriendly. There are lots of arguments one could offer in favour of this thesis, some of which were mentioned the last time (e.g. the vastness of mindspace argument, or the complexity of human values argument). To those could be added the argument that Yudkowsky mentioned in his comment to my previous post: the fragility of human values argument (though I’m not sure how different that is from the others). Opposing arguments have been presented by the likes of Alexander Kruel, Richard Loosemore and Ben Goertzel. Both Alexander and Richard commented on my earlier post. They tend to feel (if I may paraphrase) that current approaches to AI construction are unlikely to yield any serious form of unfriendliness (or any unfriendliness).

Even if one thinks it is highly likely that an AI+ or AI++ will be unfriendly, one could still be cautiously optimistic. One could think that with the right changes to the existing strategic infrastructure, safe AI+ becomes more likely. This, I presume, is what research centres like Oxford’s FHI, Cambridge’s CSER and the Singularity Institute would like to see happen, and helping to achieve it is a large part of their rationale for existence (though they do not, of course, ignore the other theses I have mentioned).

The decision tree associated with this thesis follows a similar pattern to that associated with the Explosion Thesis. The first node in the tree represents the choice between accepting (or not) the technical version of the Unfriendliness thesis. The other nodes trace out other possible combinations of views. The endpoints this time are given names. ‘Optimism’ is the name given to the view of those who reject the technical version of the Unfriendliness Thesis because they think that as intelligence goes up, so too does morality. “Deflation” is the name given to those who, although accepting the possibility of unfriendly AI, deem it highly unlikely, given current incentives (etc). The view is called “Deflation” because it seeks to burst the bubble of those who think that various doomsday scenarios are likely unless we make decisive changes to the strategic infrastructure. “Cautious Optimism” is the name given to those who think that unfriendly AI is probable given the current infrastructure, but avoidable if the right changes are made. And “Doom” is the name given to those who think unfriendly AI is unlikely to be avoided.

A final note: the binary representation of possible responses to the later questions in this decision tree is obviously flawed since there is a spectrum of probabilities one could attach to the various theses. Hopefully, the reader can make the necessary adjustments for themselves so that the decision tree better represents how they think about the probabilities.

4. Conclusion
So there it is, my revised version of the framework and overview. Once again, I’ve tried to organise the dialectical terrain around a few core theses. In this case there are two — the Explosion Thesis and the Unfriendliness Thesis — but each comes in two distinct versions — a technical version and a strategic version. One’s attitude toward the various theses can be represented as choices one makes on a decision tree, the endpoints of which constitute distinct and recognisable views about the technological singularity and its associated risks. My hope is that this improves on the previous version of the framework, but I accept it may not.

Book Recommendations ♯7: The Ethics of Voting

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(Series Index)

Things have been quiet on the blogging front over the past few weeks. But I have been doing a lot of reading over the Christmas period, and hope to start back with gusto at the weekend. In the interim, I thought I might fill the gap before more substantive blogging with a new book recommendation. I’m hoping to reinvigorate this series this year.

The book I want to recommend is Jason Brennan’s The Ethics of Voting, which I first heard about over on the New Books in Philosophy podcast. As we all know, there are certain propositions about voting that tend to be widely-believed in modern democratic societies. Indeed, they border on constituting the “sacred cows” of contemporary political discourse. These propositions include:

(1) You ought to vote, i.e. there is a moral (and in some countries legal) duty to vote.

(2) Every adult should be entitled vote, i.e. the principle of “one person, one vote” applies irrespective of intellectual, rational and moral virtue. (There are, perhaps, some accepted restrictions in some countries for prisoners, though the push is very much against this, particularly in Europe)

(3) People should not buy and sell their votes.

To be sure, there is a great deal of cynicism and apathy about these propositions. Many people fail to vote, and many argue that votes are “bought” and “sold” all the time. Nevertheless, I suspect most think that these propositions represent ideal or preferred states of affairs; that the failure to live up to them represents a corruption or degradation of the political process. Certainly, one encounters social groups that encourage people to vote all the time, without telling them exactly who to vote for. Thus, for example, non-partisan campaigns that encourage the youth vote are common in many countries. The suggestion from these campaigns seems to be that the act of voting is itself desirable, irrespective of its content. (The cynic may question this: since youth voters, in particular, tend to favour more certain candidates one could argue the motives behind such campaigns are not strictly impartial, but that’s by-the-by).

The nice thing about Brennan’s book is that it subjects each of three propositions given above (along with several more) to a sustained critique. In a patient yet concise manner, Brennan argues that there is no moral duty to vote; that it is not desirable for certain people with intellectual, rational and moral vices to vote; and that it is permissible for people to buy and sell votes. These are iconoclastic claims, and Brennan’s attempt to defend them is, I dare say it, in the best traditions of philosophy. It provides much food for thought, even if one isn't ultimately persuaded by what he has to say.

Another commendable feature of the book is its style. Every argument and proposition is presented with  clarity (formal arguments and propositions throughout), and the necessarily theoretical background is sketched out for the reader. One needn’t always agree with what Brennan says, but one can at least admire the way in which he says it.

On a final note, the book receives some pretty negative reviews over on Amazon, which should always be taken with a grain of salt, but I will conclude by saying that I agree with Chad Flanders's comment in his review of the book for NDPR: "Sometimes Brennan seems to revel too much in being contrarian, which nonetheless is what makes reading the book so much fun."