Frightening Ideas

An old post by Steve Landsburg offered three examples of actions by one person that another objected to but that did no physical damage. He asked whether the psychic cost to the objector should be considered relevant to public policy, whether the answer was the same for all three and, if not, why not. The first of the three was someone reading pornography and someone else being upset by the knowledge that pornography was being read. The third was someone raping an unconscious victim in a way that did no physical harm.¹ Why, Steve asked, do we have different reactions to those cases and is the difference justified?

Discussing reactions to the post with my daughter, I commented that the people who were angry about it, mostly online, struck me as either stupid or evil. Either they were too stupid to see that he was actually raising an interesting puzzle or they saw that he was doing so but pretended not to in order to have an excuse to attack someone they disliked or disagreed with.

Her response was that I was wrong, that my mistake was not realizing the degree to which many other people were different from me. To me, ideas are real, important, and sufficiently interesting that my reaction to an argument that appears to prove some frightening or ugly conclusion is to be neither frightened or angry but intrigued. Lots of people don’t react that way; if they see the conclusion of an argument as frightening or ugly it isn’t surprising if they skip over the fact that it raises an interesting puzzle and assume that whoever offered the argument must agree with its conclusion.

That started me thinking about other arguments which I find intriguing despite the fact that their implications are disturbing. None of them has the same emotional loading as an argument about rape but all of them have implications that strike me as more serious, in various directions, than the implications of the argument Landsburg made. Here are four examples:

1. Moral nihilism:

I have sketched elsewhere my view of the nature of moral philosophy, intuitionism. I read Michael Huemer’s book on the subject in part in the hope that he could offer an adequate rebuttal to the best argument against that position that I knew of, since I didn’t have one. I still don’t, although he thinks he does.

The argument is simple. I have moral intuitions — I perceive some acts or outcomes to be good or bad. My preferred explanation is that they are perceptions of a (non-physical) truth. An alternative explanation is that they are beliefs that got hardwired into my brain by evolution because having those beliefs resulted in increased reproductive success in the environment in which my distant ancestors evolved. That explains the same data, my intuitions and their similarity to other people’s intuitions, without requiring any additional assumptions, since I already believe in evolution and recognize that some characteristics of how the brain processes information are best explained in that way.

If that argument is correct, not only is there nothing wrong with raping an unconscious victim, there is nothing wrong with doing anything to anyone—right and wrong are merely illusions. I find it impossible to believe that conclusion but I have no adequate argument against it.

Unless you count this one.

2. This is a simulation:

Assume that the growth in wealth and technology that has occurred over the past century continues into the far future. In the world of a thousand years from now, an obvious form of entertainment, the equivalent of movies, books and video games, is simulation—Sim City on steroids—and in that world they will have the wealth and technology to simulate people, and worlds full of people, down to the neuron. A period of history of particular interest and so particularly likely to be simulated is the period when mankind made the great technological leaps that made possible the world of a thousand years hence. There will be thousands, millions, perhaps billions of simulations of that period, fully populated with simulated people who believe they are real.

What are the odds that you and I are in the one real version of the present instead of one of the millions of simulated ones?

3. There is no reason to expect the future to resemble the past. At all.

Consider the inductive hypothesis, the claim that the future resembles the past. It is essential to all of science, indeed to virtually all of our attempt to make sense of reality. Without that assumption, the fact that stones fell down when we dropped one yesterday gives us no reason to expect that, if we drop another stone today, it will fall down instead of up.

Do we have any reason to believe the hypothesis? It is true that it has held, so far as we can tell, through the entire history of the universe. Unfortunately, that argument is circular. In the past, the future resembled the past—each day, stones fell in the same direction. But unless we already know that the future is going to resemble the past, the fact that the inductive hypothesis held in the past is no evidence that it will hold tomorrow.

4. Why Robert Bork was not a libertarian:

Reading attacks on Steve’s piece, it occurred to me that I had seen the same point before from the other side in an old article by Robert Bork. The article explained, among other things, why he was not a libertarian. Bork’s argument, in my words not his, goes as follows:

When I pollute the air I am injuring other people, so it is legitimate for the legal system to respond by penalizing me. What makes it an injury is not the fact that I affect the air but that the effect does harm; one could imagine an effect, such as a change in the ratio of two stable isotopes of trace gases in the atmosphere, that would not matter to anyone and so would not be seen as an injury or a proper subject for legal action.

Harm, however, is ultimately subjective, since it depends on the preferences of the harmed individual. When I smell the roasting ribs from my neighbor’s barbecue, that isn’t harm because I enjoy the smell. When the smoke from the barbecue makes me cough that is harm, because I don’t like coughing, and would be harm even if the smoke had no adverse effect on my health. From the point of view of economics, “harm X” simply means “lower X’s utility.”

Suppose that, instead of polluting my neighbor’s air, I engage in behavior that he disapproves of: read pornography, use contraceptives, work on Sunday. That too causes him disutility. Since the defining characteristic of harming someone is lowering his utility, I am harming him. Since I am harming him, my activity is just as much a legitimate target for legal action as my polluting his air would be. Hence the libertarian principle that I have a right to engage in what Mill referred to as self-regarding actions, actions that only affect me, is either false or empty. Either I don’t have a right to read porn if doing so offends others without otherwise affecting them or their offense counts as an effect of what I am doing so my reading porn isn’t really a self-regarding action and there is no reason in principle why it shouldn’t be banned.

It is a persuasive argument by an intelligent man for a conclusion I do not want to believe, hence interesting.

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1. The post was inspired by the Steubenville rape case, where the rape was digital penetration and the victim was unaware it happened until several days later.