Desirable Incoherence
- Isaac Cui
- May 25, 2021
- 9 min read
When does it make sense to be incoherent?
I know that sounds like a really abstract question, but it’s, I think, the wider question that I’ve been thinking about recently. I was talking through some of the ethical dimensions of my last post with a friend this last week, and I realized that a central problem I had with his arguments was that I thought they were too coherent — too straightforward.
Let me step back and give some background to this thinking. If you take an “ethics 101” class, you’ll probably learn about three broad schools of ethics. There’s consequentialism, associated with people like Jeremy Bentham, where actions become ethical based on their consequences; deontology, associated with people like Immanuel Kant, where actions are ethical when they adhere to certain rules; and virtue ethics, associated with people like Aristotle, where people are ethical based on character traits, habits, and intents.
(As a side note, look what I saw on a run this week:
)
Anyhow, to get back to the point. In thinking about different systems of ethics, the natural question to ask is which is “best.” So you might, in that class, debate about the merits of each ethical system. This is a practice that seems to me slightly absurd, though. For example, it’s easy enough to make an argument about a deontological system of ethics based on its consequences, and thus argue that deontological ethics are “bad” because they don’t lead to good outcomes. But that would assume the answer to the problem by adopting, first, a consequentialist perspective. The debate is about how to determine what is “good”; thus, asking which of the systems is more or less “good” seems bizarre, because you need some sense of what is “good” to begin with to even try to answer the question.
To be sure, there are values that are framework agnostic. For example, we could rank the different systems based on their determinacy or administrability — do these frameworks provide answers to the questions we have, and can they give us an answer easily? But such arguments also feel incomplete. It’s easy to imagine a highly determinate and administrable ethical system that perverts the idea of “ethics” — say, a system that deems whatever action that pleases you as an individual to be ethical. (Think of the ethics of the Melian Dialogue: “The strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.”)
Put differently, a system of ethics can be assessed as a system, where we would look to traits such as their administrability, determinacy, accessibility, etc., but they also need to be assessed in terms of their ethics, i.e., whether they accord with some notion of “the good.” With consequentialism, we define something we like as a “good” consequence (say, pleasure or avoiding pain) and then try to maximize it. With deontology, we define rules that constitute “good” conduct and say we should follow them. And with virtue ethics, we define certain character traits as “good” (say, honesty or honor), and try to cultivate those within ourselves. Central to why these systems are plausible ethical frameworks, as opposed to mere decision heuristics, is that they have some meaningful grounding in our intuition for what is, in fact, good.
The problem, of course, is that it is really easy to come up with examples of where each moral framework wouldn’t lead to the intuitively right answer. The public humiliation of one individual in front of millions may lead to higher aggregate happiness, but does it make that humiliation ethical? The devout consequentialist would say it does, but I think most wouldn’t. If an axe murderer shows up to your house and asks if your roommate is in, is it ethical to lie and say that she isn’t? The devout deontologist would say that one should not lie, but I think most would find it justified. Should the politician sacrifice their honor and lie, engage in unseemly business, and intimidate in order to achieve good policy outcomes? The devout virtue ethicist would probably deem such a politician a scumbag. But my intuitions, at least, are that politics are an inherently grubby and scummy and dirty business in service of higher ends. (The greatest example — the ballot-box-stuffing, lying, backstabbing, cruel Lyndon Johnson, who also shepherded and signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Medicare and Medicaid.)
In each example, I think, our moral intuitions tell us that the logical consequence of one system of ethics, which might sound otherwise fair, isn’t correct. We might generally care about consequences, but there are inherent values beyond some vague notion of “utility” — sometimes, the individual’s dignity ought to matter more than the aggregate welfare of a group. We might generally cherish rule following, but excessive rule adherence can make us inflexible to the real world in front of us. We might generally cherish specific virtues, but different contexts may call for different virtues (or even the suspension of the expectation of virtuous conduct) — a wife’s virtues are different from a politician’s, which are different from a soccer coach’s, which are different from a soldier’s, even if the same person can occupy all four roles.
I imagine people who are much smarter than I am have figured out ways to defend against these charges from each of the different moral frameworks. I’m not well-versed in ethics, and I won’t pretend to be. Instead, I just want to make an observation about how these arguments operate: they take a certain idea, assume a set of unique facts, and then conclude that the idea is questionable because it cannot stretch as far as to deal with the scenario. If this line of reasoning is persuasive, it’s because what makes a system of ethics “seem right” is a gut instinct, not a rational one. It’s because we have moral intuitions, and we strive to systematize them through certain frameworks. But these examples suggest that at least simplistic ethical systems will fail — that they won’t be able to answer every question, and that we need to adopt some mix of ethical frameworks.
If I had to characterize how I think about ethics, it would be that a good person seeks to cultivate certain habits of mind toward pro-social orientations (e.g., helping others, charity giving, etc.) that are guided by rule adherence (i.e., laws and social norms help us understand what is “pro-social”). But in decisions that are either ambiguous/complex or important, a good person will seek to evaluate what is best from a consequentialist perspective.
This is not a coherent ethical framework. It’s quite a mish-mash. There’s no overarching theory behind it, beyond the idea that we want to generally combine the core aspects of the three frameworks (consequences, rules, and habits). And it leaves central questions unanswered: how does one determine “ambiguous/complex” or “important” decisions? what are the boundaries of “pro-social” orientations, and what rules are relevant considerations?
It also maybe isn’t even a very desirable moral framework. It leaves little to no space, for example, for self-interested considerations, given its emphasis on “pro-social orientations” and consequentialist analyses for difficult issues. More fundamentally, it leaves no space for the “good things in life” — those aspects of life that may not seem explicitly moral, but that certainly seem good, such as those pleasurable experiences of good food, friends, art, music, and so on. In other words, it seems very likely to me that a good moral framework will include not only a mish-mash of different ethical ideas, but will also include opportunities to derogate the moral framework — to ‘turn off’ the morality switch so that, rather than compelling us to be “moral saints,” we can enjoy life. (If you think about all the things you’ve done in the last week, how many of them were ‘ethical’ or ‘unethical’? In my mind, much of what I do is rather ethically neutral, with perhaps unethical implications from being complacent.)
A central implication of this argument, I think, is that we need some kind of incoherence when thinking about morality. There must be a balance between intuition and reason. Reason alone would dictate that we choose one internally consistent framework; the physicist in me loves the elegance of a simple ethical system, whether it’s maximizing utility, following rules, or cultivating a few virtues. But our intuition tells us that it would be absurd to take any such system to its extreme. It’s like Justice Scalia once said of his own judicial philosophy: “I’m an originalist and a textualist, not a nut.” He understood that originalism, full-throated, would lead to all kinds of drastic policy changes. As a result, he cast over himself a veil of reasonability — for most of his career, he identified as a “faint-hearted originalist” — emphasizing that he’d temper the implications of his interpretive philosophy with broader value commitments to stability, rule of law, and so on. We can debate how successful he was at doing so, but the broader point is that there’s a powerful intuitive pull toward ‘reasonable’ decision-making over the dictates of ideology and systematic, logical thinking.
I think it also follows from this argument that we must always be skeptical of our own actions and motivations. The value of strict adherence to a moral framework is that you have to follow a set of decision-criteria before you come to a conclusion. If we’re going to accept that the choice of moral framework needs some flexibility, then we also need to maintain vigilance in when and why we choose to use certain approaches to ethics. An intuition-based ethics can easily slide, through motivated reasoning, into justifying whatever it is we want. Doing so would obviously be wrong; there are of course times in which our intuitions lead us astray. For it’s usually easier to do what is convenient or comfortable rather than what, upon reflection, is right.
One of Shklar’s observations, which I’ve found myself increasingly gravitating toward, is about the limits of rationality — about how reason and arguments and logic just don’t seem to shed much light on many aspects of our lives. Cruelty, she says, is one such example; it’s why, in her telling, philosophers don’t think much about cruelty, even as writers and poets do all the time. Philosophy doesn’t find much interesting about cruelty. It seems base — not only in its effects (cruelty debases both the person who inflicts it and the person who receives it) but also in the analytical sense (cruelty is basic — it’s simply, unquestionably bad). Shklar’s conclusion is to turn to stories, which she thinks enlighten us by drawing our attention to patterns that logic and reason can’t discern.* With moral judgment, I think I’d buy a similar argument: that practice (whether in actual life experience or in observing patterns of behavior, imagined or otherwise) will go much further in helping us than trying to reason our way to an optimal solution. For I think, with morality, some amount of incoherence is not just inevitable but desirable.
* Many of my friends know that I do not read fiction books. I have also claimed to dislike philosophy. Many readers, I assume, are therefore laughing at me when reading this post, which is clearly very philosophical and concludes with a defense of story-telling, which fiction plainly ought to be part of (although I maintain that reading history can achieve similar goals). I’ve previously eaten crow with regard to political theory while citing Shklar. It’s fitting, I think, that I’m going to again eat crow — this time on the ‘avoiding fiction’-bit — by citing Shklar. For the record, my flatmate has already given me a fiction book to read, so I’ll probably dive into that soon after I finish Shklar and a book on the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment.
* * * * *
Rose: I had a lot of heart-warming times this week, catching up with old friends and spending time with new friends. I was on a call with a retiring staff member from Pomona, where we celebrated his impact on the college and all of our experiences. I met up with a friend from high school, and we walked together to Primrose Hill and Camden Market. I had a very long catch-up call with a close Pomona friend, as well as a Zoom dinner with another Pomona friend who’s in the UK. And a few Marshall friends came down from Oxford, so we got lunch with them — we had Chinese food (xiaolongbao, truly glorious). Here’s some pictures from the week:
Bud: I think the weather really is about to get better! It’s been weirdly cold and dreary for late May (at least to me — maybe it’s normal for this island, but a damp 50 degrees seems abnormal). But I keep seeing headlines about the “sizzling” 20-degrees centigrade (~70 degrees F) days that are a’coming.
Thorn: Our BLM reading group met for the first time in a while this last week, and I feel like I asked many, many dumb questions! It was still a really enjoyable time, and I learned a lot, but I felt a bit bad for likely annoying the other folks in the group.
Gratitude: I’m grateful that I’ve been able to maintain at least some longer, deeper relationships. Chatting with/hanging out with high school friends this week, and keeping up with Pomona friends, helped make me feel a bit less transient and rootless. It helped me feel a bit more virtually and ~spiritually~ grounded.
Future Topics: I will write about meritocracy soon, because I do want to go back to thinking about it. Also, Shklar on hypocrisy and authenticity.
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