Phil Robertson is being criticized for a thought experiment in which an atheist’s family is raped and murdered. On a talk show, he accused atheists of believing that there was no such thing as objective right or wrong, then continued:

I’ll make a bet with you. Two guys break into an atheist’s home. He has a little atheist wife and two little atheist daughters. Two guys break into his home and tie him up in a chair and gag him.

Then they take his two daughters in front of him and rape both of them and then shoot them, and they take his wife and then decapitate her head off in front of him, and then they can look at him and say, ‘Isn’t it great that I don’t have to worry about being judged? Isn’t it great that there’s nothing wrong with this? There’s no right or wrong, now, is it dude?’

Then you take a sharp knife and take his manhood and hold it in front of him and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if [there] was something wrong with this? But you’re the one who says there is no God, there’s no right, there’s no wrong, so we’re just having fun. We’re sick in the head, have a nice day.’

If it happened to them, they probably would say, ‘Something about this just ain’t right’.

The media has completely proportionally described this as Robinson “fantasizing about” raping atheists, and there are the usual calls for him to apologize/get fired/be beheaded.

So let me use whatever credibility I have as a guy with a philosophy degree to confirm that Phil Robertson is doing moral philosophy exactly right.

There’s a tradition at least as old as Kant of investigating philosophical dilemmas by appealing to our intuitions about extreme cases. Kant, remember, proposed that it was always wrong to lie. A contemporary of his, Benjamin Constant, made the following objection: suppose a murderer is at the door and wants to know where your friend is so he can murder her. If you say nothing, the murderer will get angry and kill you; if you tell the truth he will find and kill your friend; if you lie, he will go on a wild goose chase and give you time to call the police. Lying doesn’t sound so immoral now, does it?

The brilliance of Constant’s thought experiment lies in its extreme nature. If a person says they think lying is always wrong, we have two competing hypotheses: they’re accurately describing their own thought processes, which will indeed always output that lying is wrong; or they’re misjudging their own thought processes and actually there are some situations in which they will judge lying to be ethical. In order to distinguish between the two, we need to come up with a story that presents the strongest possible case for lying, so that even the tiniest shred of sympathy for lying can be dragged up to the surface.

So Constant says “It’s a murderer trying to kill your best friend”. And even this is suboptimal. It should be a mad scientist trying to kill everyone on Earth. Or an ancient demon, whose victory would doom everyone on Earth, man, woman, and child, to an eternity of the most terrible torture. If some people’s hidden algorithm is “lie when the stakes are high enough”, there we can be sure that the stakes are high enough to tease it out into the light of day.

Compare Churchill:

Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?
Lady: Well, for five million pounds…well…that’s a lot of money.
Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
Lady: (enraged) What kind of a woman do you think I am‽
Churchill: We’ve already established what kind of a woman you are, now we’re just haggling over the price

The woman thinks she has a principle, “Never sleep with a man for money”. In fact, deep down, she believes it’s okay to sleep with a man for enough money. If Churchill had merely stuck to the five pounds question, she would have continued to believe she held the “never…” principle. By coming up with an extreme case (5 million Churchill-era pounds is about £250 million today) he was able to reveal that her apparent principle was actually a contingent effect of her real principle plus the situation.

In fact, compare physics. Physicists are always doing things like cooling stuff down to a millionth of a degree above absolute zero, or making clocks so precise they’ll be less than a second off by the time the sun goes out, or acclerating things to 99.99% of the speed of light. And one of the main reasons they do is to magnify small effects to the point where they can measure them. All movement is causing a little bit of time dilation, but if you want to detect it you need the world’s most accurate clock on the Space Shuttle when it’s traveling 25,000 miles per hour. In order to figure out how things really work, you need to turn things up to 11 so that the effect you want is impossible to miss. Everything in the universe has been exerting a gravitational effect on light all the time, but if you want to see it clearly you need to use the Sun during a solar eclipse, and if you really want to see it clearly your best bet is a black hole.

Great physicists and great philosophers share a certain perversity. The perversity is “Sure, this principle works in all remotely plausible real-world situations, but WHAT IF THERE’S A COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS SCENARIO WHERE IT DOESN’T HOLD??!?!” Newton’s theory of gravity explained everything from falling apples to the orbits of the planets impeccably for centuries, and then Einstein asked “Okay, but what if, when you get objects thousands of times larger than the Earth, there are tiny discrepancies in it, then we’d have to throw the whole thing out,” and instead of running him out of town on a rail scientists celebrated his genius. Likewise, moral philosophers are as happy as anyone else not to lie in the real world. But they wonder whether they might be revealed to be only simplifications of more fundamental principles, principles that can only be discovered by placing them in a cyclotron and accelerating them to 99.99% of the speed of light.

Sometimes this is even clearer than in the Kant example. Many people, if they think about it at all, believe that value aggregates linearly. That is, two murders are twice as much of a tragedy as one murder; a hundred people losing their homes is ten times as bad as ten people losing their homes.

Torture vs. Dust Specks is beautiful in its simplicity; it just takes this assumption and creates the most extreme case imaginable. Take a tiny harm and aggregate it an unimaginably high number of times; then compare it to against a big harm which is nowhere near the aggregated sum of the tiny ones. So which is worse, 3^^^3 (read: a number higher than you can imagine) people getting a single dust speck in their eye for a fraction of a second, or one person being tortured for fifty years?

Almost everybody thinks their principle is “things aggregate linearly”, but when you put it into relief like this, almost everybody’s intuition tells them the torture is worse. You can “bite the bullet” and admit that the dust specks are worse than the torture. Or you can throw out your previous principle saying that things aggregate linearly and try to find another principle about how to aggregate things (good luck).

Moral dilemmas are extreme and disgusting precisely because those are the only cases in which we can make our intuitions strong enough to be clearly detectable. If the question was just “Which is worse, a thousand people stubbing their toe or one person breaking their leg?” neither side would have been obviously worse than the other and our true intutition wouldn’t have come into sharp relief. So a good moral philosopher will always be talking about things like murder, torture, organ-stealing, Hitler, incest, drowning children, the death of four billion humans, et cetera.

Worse, a good moral philosopher should be constantly agreeing – or tempted to agree – to do horrible things in these cases. The whole point of these experiments is to collide two of your intuitions against each other and force you to violate at least one of them. In Kant’s example, either you’re lying, or you’re dooming your friend to die. In Jarvis’ Transplant Surgeon scenario, you’re either killing somebody to harvest their organs, or letting a whole hospital full of people die.

I once had someone call the torture vs. dust specks question “contrived moral dilemma porn” and say it proved that moral philosophers were kind of crappy people for even considering it. That bothered me. To look at moral philosophers and conclude “THESE PEOPLE LOVE TO TALK ABOUT INCEST AND ORGAN HARVESTING, AND BRAG ABOUT ALL THE CASES WHEN THEY’D BE OKAY DOING THAT STUFF. THEY ARE GROSS EDGELORDS AND PROBABLY FANTASIZE ABOUT HAVING SEX WITH THEIR SISTER ON THE HOSPITAL BED OF A PATIENT DYING OF END-STAGE KIDNEY DISEASE,” is to utterly miss the point.

So let’s talk about Phil Robertson.

Phil Robertson believes atheists are moral nihilists, or moral relativists, or something. He’s not quite right – there are a lot of atheists who are very moral realist – Objectivists, as their name implies, believe morality and everything else up to and including the best flavor of ice cream, is Objective – and even the atheists who aren’t quite moral realist usually hold some sort of compromise position where it’s meaningful to talk about right and wrong even if it’s not cosmically meaningful.

On the other hand – and I say this as the former secretary of a college atheist club who got to meet all sorts – there are a bunch of atheists who very much claim not to believe in morality. Less Wrong probably has fewer of them than the average atheist hangout, because we skew so heavily utilitarian, but our survey records 4% error theorists and 9% non-cognitivists. When Friendly Atheist says he “doesn’t know a single atheist or agnostic who thinks that terrorizing, raping, torturing, mutilating, and killing people is remotely OK”, I can believe that he doesn’t know one who would say so in those exact words. But I’m not sure how, for example, the error theorists could consistently argue against that position.

And what Phil Robertson does is exactly what I would do if I were debating an error theorist. I’d take the most gratuitiously horrible thing I could think of, describe it in the most graphic detail I could, and say “But don’t you think there’s something wrong with this?” If the error theorist says “no”, then I congratulate her for definitely being a real honest-to-goodness error theorist, and unless I can suddenly think up a way to bridge the is-ought dichotomy we’re finished. But if she says “Yes, it does seem like there should be something wrong there,” then we can start exploring what that means and whether error theory is the best framework in which to capture that intuition.

On the other hand, if I were debating Phil Robertson, I would ask him where he thinks morality comes from. And if he suggested some version of divine command theory, I could use an example of the graphic-horrifying-extreme-thought-experiment genre even older than Kant – namely, Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. If God commands you to kill your innocent child, is that the right thing to do? What if God commands you to rape and torture and mutilate your family? And it wouldn’t work if it were anything less extreme – if I just said “What if God told you to shoplift?” it would be easy to bite that bullet and he wouldn’t have to face the full implication of his views. But if I went with the extreme version? Maybe Robertson would find he’s not as big on divine command theory as he thought.

But this sort of discussion would only be possible if we could trust each other to take graphic thought experiments in the spirit in which they were conceived, and not as an opportunity to score cheap points.

[EDIT: This post was previously titled “High Energy Ethics”, but I changed it after realizing it was unintentionally lifted from elsewhere]

Since the creators seem to be restricting themselves to the literary world, I hope they won’t mind if I fail to resist the temptation to steal their technique for my own field of interest. Disclaimer: two of these are widely-known philosophy jokes and not original to me.

Parmenides goes up to the counter. “Same as always?” asks the barista. Parmenides nods.

Pythagoras goes up to the counter and orders a caffe Americano. “Mmmmm,” he says, tasting it. “How do you guys make such good coffee?” “It’s made from the freshest beans,” the barista answers. Pythagoras screams and runs out of the store.

Thales goes up to the counter, says he’s trying to break his caffeine habit, and orders a decaf. The barista hands it to him. He takes a sip and spits it out. “Yuck!” he says. “What is this, water?”

Gottfried Leibniz goes up to the counter and orders a muffin. The barista says he’s lucky since there is only one muffin left. Isaac Newton shoves his way up to the counter, saying Leibniz cut in line and he was first. Leibniz insists that he was first. The two of them come to blows.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel goes up to the counter and gives a tremendously long custom order in German, specifying exactly how much of each sort of syrup he wants, various espresso shots, cream in exactly the right pattern, and a bunch of toppings, all added in a specific order at a specific temperature. The barista can’t follow him, so just gives up and hands him a small plain coffee. He walks away. The people behind him in line are very impressed with his apparent expertise, and they all order the same thing Hegel got. The barista gives each of them a small plain coffee, and they all remark on how delicious it tastes and what a remarkable coffee connoisseur that Hegel is. “The Hegel” becomes a new Starbucks special and is wildly popular for the next seventy years.

Socrates goes up to the counter. “What would you like?” asks the barista. “What would you recommend?” asks Socrates. “I would go with the pumpkin spice latte,” says the barista. “Why?” asks Socrates. “It’s seasonal,” she answers. “But why exactly is a seasonal drink better than a non-seasonal drink?” “Well,” said the barista, “I guess it helps to connect you to the rhythm of the changing seasons.” “But do you do other things to connect yourself to that rhythm?” asked Socrates. “Like wear seasonal clothing? Or read seasonal books? If not, how come it’s only drinks that are seasonal?” “I’m not sure,” says the barista. “Think about it,” says Socrates, and leaves without getting anything.

Rene Descartes goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a scone,” he says. “Would you like juice with that?” asks the barista. “I think not,” says Descartes, and he ceases to exist.

Jean-Paul Sartre goes up to the counter. “What do you want?” asks the barista. Sartre thinks for a long while. “What do? I want?” he asks, and wanders off with a dazed look on his face.

William of Occam goes up to the counter. He orders a coffee.

Adam Smith goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a muffin,” he says. “Sorry,” says the barista, “but those two are fighting over the last muffin.” She points to Leibniz and Newton, who are still beating each other up. “I’ll pay $2 more than the sticker price, and you can keep the extra,” says Smith. The barista hands him the muffin.

John Buridan goes up to the counter and stares at the menu indecisively.

Ludwig Wittgenstein goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a small toffee mocha,” he says. “We don’t have small,” says the barista. “Then what sizes do you have?” “Just tall, grande, and venti.” “Then doesn’t that make ‘tall’ a ‘small’?” “We call it tall,” says the barista. Wittgenstein pounds his fist on the counter. “Tall has no meaning separate from the way it is used! You are just playing meaningless language games!” He storms out in a huff.

St. Anselm goes up to the counter and considers the greatest coffee of which it is possible to conceive. Since existence is more perfect than nonexistence, the coffee must exist. He brings it back to his table and drinks it.

Ayn Rand goes up to the counter. “What do you want?” asks the barista. “Exactly the relevant question. As a rational human being, it is my desires that are paramount. Since as a reasoning animal I have the power to choose, and since I am not bound by any demand to subordinate my desires to that of an outside party who wishes to use force or guilt to make me sacrifice my values to their values or to the values of some purely hypothetical collective, it is what I want that is imperative in this transaction. However, since I am dealing with you, and you are also a rational human being, under capitalism we have an opportunity to mutually satisfy our values in a way that leaves both of us richer and more fully human. You participate in the project of affirming my values by providing me with the coffee I want, and by paying you I am not only incentivizing you for the transaction, but giving you a chance to excel as a human being in the field of producing coffee. You do not produce the coffee because I am demanding it, or because I will use force against you if you do not, but because it most thoroughly represents your own values, particularly the value of creation. You would not make this coffee for me if it did not serve you in some way, and therefore by satisfying my desires you also reaffirm yourself. Insofar as you make inferior coffee, I will reject it and you will go bankrupt, but insofar as your coffee is truly excellent, a reflection of the excellence in your own soul and your achievement as a rationalist being, it will attract more people to your store, you will gain wealth, and you will be able to use that wealth further in pursuit of excellence as you, rather than some bureaucracy or collective, understand it. That is what it truly means to be a superior human.” “Okay, but what do you want?” asks the barista. “Really I just wanted to give that speech,” Rand says, and leaves.

Voltaire goes up to the counter and orders an espresso. He takes it and goes to his seat. The barista politely reminds him he has not yet paid. Voltaire stays seated, saying “I believe in freedom of espresso.”

Thomas Malthus goes up to the counter and orders a muffin. The barista tells him somebody just took the last one. Malthus grumbles that the Starbucks is getting too crowded and there’s never enough food for everybody.

Immanuel Kant goes up to the counter at exactly 8:14 AM. The barista has just finished making his iced cinnamon dolce latte, and hands it to him. He sips it for eight minutes and thirty seconds, then walks out the door.

Bertrand Russell goes up to the counter and orders the Hegel. He takes one sip, then exclaims “This just tastes like plain coffee! Why is everyone making such a big deal over it?”

Pierre Proudhon goes up to the counter and orders a Tazo Green Tea with toffee nut syrup, two espresso shots, and pumpkin spice mixed in. The barista warns him that this will taste terrible. “Pfah!” scoffs Proudhon. “Proper tea is theft!”

Sigmund Freud goes up to the counter. “I’ll have ass sex, presto,” he says. “What?!” asks the barista. “I said I’ll have iced espresso.” “Oh,” said the barista. “For a moment I misheard you.” “Yeah,” Freud tells her. “I fucked my mother. People say that.” “WHAT?!” asks the barista. “I said, all of the time other people say that.”

Jeremy Bentham goes up to the counter, holding a $50 bill. “What’s the cheapest drink you have?” he asks. “That would be our decaf roast, for only $1.99,” says the barista. “Good,” says Bentham and hands her the $50. “I’ll buy those for the next twenty-five people who show up.”

Patricia Churchland walks up to the counter and orders a latte. She sits down at a table and sips it. “Are you enjoying your beverage?” the barista asks. “No,” says Churchland.

Friedrich Nietzsche goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a scone,” he says. “Would you like juice with that?” asks the barista. “No, I hate juice,” says Nietzsche. The barista misinterprets him as saying “I hate Jews”, so she kills all the Jews in Europe.

Imagine that somebody wrote:

Some of my friends support Ron Paul. I think that’s wrong. After all, he’s a libertarian, and Wikipedia says a libertarian is a person who believes in free will. But free will is impossible in a deterministic universe. Ron Paul’s belief in free will is clearly why there are so few Swiss people among Ron Paul supporters, since Swiss people are Calvinists and so understand determinism better.

This is sort of how I feel reading Why I Am Not A Rationalist on Almost Diamonds.

I’m having trouble not quoting it in full:

I’m not a rationalist because I’m an empiricist. I find no value in “logical” arguments that are based in intuition and “common sense” rather than data. Such arguments can only perpetuate ignorance by giving it a shiny veneer of reason that it hasn’t earned.

I boggle that we haven’t sorted this out yet. I particularly boggle that atheists of my acquaintance promote rationalism over empiricism. The tensions between basic rationalism and empiricism parallel the tensions between church theology and the philosophy of science. We have no problem rejecting church theology as not being grounded in evidence. Why do so many atheists praise rationalism?

Let me stop here and make it clear that I’m not rejecting logic or critical thinking. Goodness knows that I’ve spent hours just this summer helping people share useful heuristics that will, in general, help them get to the right answers more often. I’ve led workshops and panels on evaluating science journalism and scientific results. When I’ve spoken to comparative religion classes in the past, I’ve talked about religious skepticism with an emphasis on the basics of epistemology.

The problem isn’t logic or critical thinking. The problem is a tendency to view those skills as central to getting the right answers. The problem is a tendency to view them as the solution. They’re not, and the idea that they are is in distinct contrast with the way humanity has actually grown in knowledge and understanding of the world.

Rationalism is, at heart, an individualist endeavor. It says that the path to getting things right lies in improving the self, improving the thinking of one person at a time. It’s not surprising that the ideology and movement appeal largely to the young, to men, to white people, to libertarians. It focuses primarily on individual action.

That’s not how we’ve come to learn about our world, though. It’s not how science or any other field of scholarship works. Scholarship is a collaborative process. And I don’t just mean peer review and working groups, though those are important as well.

Scholars add to our knowledge of the world by building on the work of others. They apply tools and methods developed by others to new material and questions. They study the work of other scholars to inspire them and give them the background to ask and answer new questions. They evaluate the work of others and consolidate the best of it into larger theoretical frameworks. Without the work of scholars before them, scholars today and evermore would always be recreating basic work and basic errors.

All too often, I find rationalists taking this repetitive approach. They think but they don’t study. As a consequence, they repeat the same naïve errors time and again. This is particularly noticeable when they engage in social or political theorizing by extrapolating from information they learned in secondary school and 101-level college classes, picked up in pop culture, or provided by people pushing a political cause. Their conclusions are necessarily as limited as their source material and reflect all its cultural biases.

As best I can tell, it is conflating a misunderstood version of rationalism (Descartes) with a misunderstood version of rationalism (Yudkowsky) and ending up with something unrelated to either, in the most bizarre possible way. But since there are commenters there who seem to agree with it, better nip this in the bud before it spreads.

II.

Rationalism (Descartes) is not simply the belief that sitting and thinking is more useful than observation. Descartes-style rationalism is complicated, but involves the claim that certain concepts are known prior to experience. For example, it is possible to understand mathematical truths like 1 + 1 = 2 separately from our experience of observing people add one apple to another. It is also possible to know them more completely than our knowledge of the external world, since our external senses can only tell us that all additions of one plus one have equalled two so far, but our reason can tell us something we have never observed – that it is necessarily true that everywhere and for all time 1 + 1 will equal two.

This so obviously gets bogged down in definitions of what is or isn’t “prior to experience” or a “concept” that philosophers today have mostly moved on to bigger and better things like hitting people with trolleys. It has nevertheless gotten a mild boost of interest recently with Chomsky’s claim that some features of human language are innate, and evolutionary psychology’s claim that certain preferences like fear of spiders may be innate. You can learn much more than you wanted to know at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

But in no case does the debate ever resemble Almost Diamonds’ naive conception of some people thinking they have to study the world and other people sitting and speculating in armchairs and playing at self-improvement because they don’t want to get their hands dirty in the real world. In fact, Descartes himself was a devoted experimentalist – probably too devoted. His intense interest in anatomy combined with his belief that animals lack souls made him one of the most prolific vivisectionists of all time. We can thank him for such useful pieces of scientific information as “If you cut off the end of the heart of a living dog and insert your finger through the incision into one of the concavities, you will clearly feel that every time the heart shortens, it presses your finger, and stops pressing every time it lengthens.” One can accuse the author of this statement of a lot of things, but “not willing to get his hands dirty” isn’t one of them.

Likewise, Leibniz, the other most famous partisan of rationalism of all time, also made notable contributions to physics, geology, embryology, paleontology, and medicine. Either he was out exploring the world, or he had some armchair. Particularly ironically for Almost Diamonds’ thesis, he was one of the most prominent advocates of research as a collaborative endeavor, and founded various scientific discussion societies around Europe as well as calling for a giant international database of all scientific findings. All of this was entirely consistent with, and informed by, his rationalism.

The people on r/philosophy also do a good job of explaining this mistake in that blog’s conception of rationalism (the people on r/badphilosophy do an, um, less good job)

III.

But I think Almost Diamonds is mostly talking (also talking?) about rationalism (Yudkowsky), ie internet rationalism. After all, she mentions “the rationalist movement” and says they’re about “understanding cognitive biases” and “appeal largely to…libertarians”.

This is even more wrong.

At least rationalism (Descartes) is sort of about some kind of disconnect with empirical evidence. In the context of rationalism (Yudkowsky) this is about the same level of error as expecting Ron Paul to be a philosopher preaching free will just because “libertarianism” can mean something in metaphysics. Rationalism (Yudkowsky) and rationalism (Descartes) share a name, nothing more.

Almost Diamonds says:

I’m not a rationalist because I’m an empiricist. I find no value in “logical” arguments that are based in intuition and “common sense” rather than data…I boggle that we haven’t sorted this out yet. I particularly boggle that atheists of my acquaintance promote rationalism over empiricism.

Meanwhile, the founding document of rationalism (Yudkowsky), the Twelve Virtues of Rationality, states:

The sixth virtue is empiricism. The roots of knowledge are in observation and its fruit is prediction. What tree grows without roots?…Do not ask which beliefs to profess, but which experiences to anticipate.

It adds:

You cannot make a true map of a city by sitting in your bedroom with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper according to impulse. You must walk through the city and draw lines on paper that correspond to what you see. If, seeing the city unclearly, you think that you can shift a line just a little to the right, just a little to the left, according to your caprice, this is just the same mistake.

This makes the same point as Almost Diamonds.

Now, granted, some movements can have Official Founding Beliefs that they don’t follow. Many rationalists take the Virtues very seriously (one just let me know it is hanging on the wall of his group house) but perhaps like some of Jesus’ more lovey-dovey commandments or the inconvenient parts of the Constitution, they are honored more in the breach than in the observance?

I don’t think so. Rationalists have taken this idea and run with it, which is why we are so obsessed with things like making beliefs pay rent in experience, discussion of “Bayesian updating”, and even making monetary bets on our beliefs to train ourselves to make sure they conform to real world outcomes. It’s why the rationalist proverb, upon being given a cool theory, goes “Name three examples”.

A typical (okay, I lied, highly extreme) example is Gwern, who consumed pretty much every chemical and then carefully recorded its effects on his sleep, emotions, performance on cognitive tests, et cetera and then performed Bayesian analysis on it. There’s obviously something wrong with that, but it’s not lack of empiricism!

Diamonds:

All too often, I find rationalists taking this repetitive approach. They think but they don’t study.

Twelve Virtues again:

The eleventh virtue is scholarship. Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own. Each field that you consume makes you larger. If you swallow enough sciences the gaps between them will diminish and your knowledge will become a unified whole. If you are gluttonous you will become vaster than mountains.

And in accordance with this, I will put the rationalist movement up, mano a mano, against any other movement on the entire Internet in terms of the quality of scholarship and empiricism.

Like, holy @#$%, we have Luke Muehlhauser, who can’t write a simple life hacks post on productivity without fifty-seven different journal article citations, and who writes at great length about how to study a field of research effectively, the best textbooks on every subject, software tools for efficient scholarship, etc, etc, etc.

We have a community-wide survey that collects information on one hundred thirty-six demographic categories, for over fifteen hundred community members, and then a tradition of obsessively arguing about the implications of the results for several weeks every year.

We know that 20% of rationalists over the age of 35 have Ph. Ds. 54% have either a Ph. D, an MD, or a Master’s!

And not to toot my own horn, but there’s a reason this blog’s series of impromptu literature reviews is called “Much More Than You Wanted To Know” and has investigated the literature on things like marijuana legalization and SSRI effectiveness, fifty or sixty studies per review, to a degree that’s gotten some coverage on major news sites including Andrew Sullivan’s blog and Vox.

And…wait a second! The author of that blog knows Kate Donovan! How do you know Kate Donovan and still accuse rationalists of “not studying”?!?! DO YOU EVEN HAVE EYES?

Finally, Almost Diamonds says:

Even in the modern rationalist movement, which speaks more to collecting evidence than classical rationalism, I have yet to see any emphasis on epistemic humility.

But the Twelve Virtues says:

The eighth virtue is humility. To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty. Who are most humble? Those who most skillfully prepare for the deepest and most catastrophic errors in their own beliefs and plans. Because this world contains many whose grasp of rationality is abysmal, beginning students of rationality win arguments and acquire an exaggerated view of their own abilities. But it is useless to be superior: Life is not graded on a curve. The best physicist in ancient Greece could not calculate the path of a falling apple. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse. If you compare yourself to others you will not see the biases that all humans share. To be human is to make ten thousand errors. No one in this world achieves perfection.

Really? “Yet to see any emphasis on epistemic humility”? The most important mission statement of the rationalist movement says that one of the movement’s twelve founding principles is humility, then waxes rhapsodic about it. Seriously, we’re the people who keep calling ourselves “aspiring rationalists” to remind ourselves that we’re not nearly as rational as we should be yet! We’re the people who obsessively calibrate with Prediction Book et cetera to remind ourselves just how high our error rate is. We’re the people who keep a community-wide keep a mistakes repository (with Gwern once again going above and beyond). THERE ARE FORTY ONE DIFFERENT POSTS ON LESS WRONG TAGGED ‘OVERCONFIDENCE’!

Almost Diamonds dislikes rationalism because she believes in an emphasis of empiricism over armchair speculation, careful scholarship over ignorance, and epistemic humility. But she’s just described the rationalist movement almost to a ‘T’! She’s attacking the rationalist movement for not living up to her ideal philosophy which is…the precise philosophy of rationalist movement!

This is mean, but I’m going to say it. Almost Diamonds describes the rationalist movement in a way that even the most cursory glance at any rationalist site or document would disprove. Her opinion seems to be based entirely on a distorted idea of the dictionary definition of the word “rationalism”.

It’s almost like she’s, I don’t know, sitting in an armchair speculating about what rationalism must be, rather than going out and looking for evidence.

ಠ_ಠ

IV.

Also, can I just mention that one of the commenters on that blog says that the problems with the rationalist movement are a lot like the problems with frequentist statistics, and what would really help them is if they investigated Bayesianism? I swear I am not joking. I swear this is a thing that happened.

V.

But aside from all this, I do think there’s an important point that needs to be made here. That is – given that empiricism and scholarship is obviously super-important, why is it not enough?

The very short answer is “A meta-analysis of hundreds of studies is what tells you that psychic powers exist. Critical thinking is what helps you figure out whether to trust that result.”

The longer answer: rationality is about drawing correct inferences from limited, confusing, contradictory, or maliciously doctored facts. Even the world’s most stubborn creationist would have to realize the truth of evolution if you could put her in a time machine and make her watch all 3 billion years of life on Earth. But more rational people can realize the truth of evolution after reading a couple of good biology textbooks and having some questions answered. And Darwin could realize the truth of evolution just by observing the natural world and speculating about finches. There’s something I do better than the creationist and Darwin does better than me, and it’s not “have access to data”.

Life is made up of limited, confusing, contradictory, and maliciously doctored facts. Anyone who says otherwise is either sticking to such incredibly easy solved problems that they never encounter anything outside their comfort level, or so closed-minded that they shut out any evidence that challenges their beliefs.

Given this state of affairs, obviously it’s useful to have as much evidence as possible, in the same way it’s useful to have as much money as possible. But equally obviously it’s useful to be able to use a limited amount of evidence wisely, in the same way it’s useful to be able to use a limited amount of money wisely.

I recently reviewed thirty-five studies on racism in the criminal justice system, a very controversial topic. But I would suggest that almost nobody would change their opinion about this based on simple number of studies reviewed. That is, if a person who has read five studies and believes the system is racist encountered another person who has read ten studies and believes the system is fair, she would not simply say “Well, you’ve read more studies than I have, so I guess you’re right and I’m wrong.” She would probably say “That’s interesting, but I need to double-check the methodologies of those studies, make sure they mean what you think they mean, make sure you haven’t specifically selected only studies that prove your view, and make sure you haven’t fallen into one of a million other possible failure modes.”

The part where you have read 5 studies but I have read 10 is the empiricism that Almost Diamonds would say is the only meaningful skill that exists. The part where we want to make sure they’re good studies and I understood them right is rationality. I would trust the opinion of a rational person who knows one study far more than that of an irrational person who knows fifty. If you don’t believe me, I invite you to check out the hundreds of studies published in creation science and homeopathy journals every year.

Or what if you’re working in an area where you don’t even have hypotheses yet? It’s your job to explain or predict something that’s never been explained or predicted before. Sure, you’ve got to have a background level of expertise and scholarship, but no matter how many x-ray crystallographers you have somebody has to be the one to say “You know, our data would make sense if this molecule were in the shape of a helix.” What if you’re trying to predict the future – like in what year fusion power will become a reality, or whether a stock is going to go up and down – and you’ve already reviewed all of the relevant evidence? What then?

If somebody says that rationality is all nice and well, but not really important because you can just use the facts, then this is the surest sign of somebody who doesn’t possess the skill and doesn’t even realize there is a skill there to be possessed. They have inoculated themselves with the cowpox of doubt, trained themselves on easy problems so long that they’ve dulled their senses and forgotten that problems that require more thought than just looking up the universally-agreed-upon scientific consensus in Wikipedia even exist.

There is one paragraph for which I will give Almost Diamonds credit: she is partly right when she says rationality is fundamentally an individual endeavor. I mean, only in the sense martial arts is an individual endeavor – you can train with lots of people, you have to train with lots of people, you’ve got to learn the craft from others and stand on the shoulders of giants – but in the end you’ve got to punch the other guy yourself.

Thousands of scientists have worked their entire lives to get you the evidence in favor of evolution. But thousands of creationists have worked their entire lives to obfuscate and confuse that evidence. Thousands of scientists have studied the criminal justice system, but many of them aren’t very good at it, many of them disagree with one another, and very likely none of them have worked on the exact subsubproblem that you’re interested in. Other people can present the facts to you, but in the end you’re the one deciding what and who to believe. Just like everybody dies alone, everybody decides on their beliefs alone. And rationality is what allows them to do that accurately.

If you’re investigating a problem even slightly more interesting than evolution versus creationism, you will always encounter limited, confusing, contradictory, and maliciously doctored facts. The more rationality you have, the greater your ability to draw accurate conclusions from this mess. And the differences aren’t subtle

A superintelligence can take a grain of sand and envision the entire universe.

Einstein can take a few basic facts about light and gravity and figure out the theory of relativity.

I can take a bunch of conflicting studies and feel sort of confident I’ve at least figured out the gist of the topic.

Some people can’t take a movement that emphasizes on its founding document “OUR VIRTUES ARE EMPIRICISM, SCHOLARSHIP, AND HUMILITY” and figure out that it considers empiricism, scholarship, and humility to be virtues.

The clincher was that the rare times I felt like I really understand certain thinkers and philosophies on a deep level, it’s rarely been the primary sources that did it for me, even when I’d read them. It’s only after hearing a bunch of different people attack the same idea from different angles that I’ve gotten the gist of it. The primary sources – especially when they’re translated, especially when they’re from the olden days before people discovered how to be interesting – just turn me off. Singer is a known person who can think and write clearly, and his book was just about the shortest I could find, so I jumped on it, hoping I would find a more sympathetic portrayal of someone whom my society has been trying to cast as a demon or monster.

And I don’t know if this is an artifact of Singer or a genuine insight into Marx, but as far as I can tell he’s even worse than I thought.

I.

What really clinched this for me was the discussion of Marx’s (lack of) description of how to run a communist state. I’d always heard that Marx was long on condemnations of capitalism and short on blueprints for communism, and the couple of Marx’s works I read in college confirmed he really didn’t talk about that very much. It seemed like a pretty big gap.

But I’d always dismissed this as an excusable error. When I was really young – maybe six or seven – I fancied myself a great inventor. The way I would invent something – let’s say a spaceship – was to draw a picture of a spaceship. I would label it with notes like “engine goes here” and “power source here” and then rest on my laurels, satisfied that I had invented interstellar travel at age seven. It always confused me that adults, who presumably should be pretty smart, had failed to do this. Occasionally I would bring this up to someone like my parents, and they would ask a question like “Okay, but how does the power source work?” and I would answer “Through quantum!” and then get very annoyed that people didn’t even know about quantum.

(I was seven years old. What’s your excuse, New Age community?)

I figured that Marx had just fallen into a similar trap. He’d probably made a few vague plans, like “Oh, decisions will be made by a committee of workers,” and “Property will be held in common and consensus democracy will choose who gets what,” and felt like the rest was just details. That’s the sort of error I could at least sympathize with, despite its horrendous consequences.

But in fact Marx was philosophically opposed, as a matter of principle, to any planning about the structure of communist governments or economies. He would come out and say “It is irresponsible to talk about how communist governments and economies will work.” He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord. There might be some very light planning, a couple of discussions, but these would just be epiphenomena of the governing historical laws working themselves out. Just as, a dam having been removed, a river will eventually reach the sea somehow, so capitalism having been removed society will eventually reach a perfect state of freedom and cooperation.

Singer blames Hegel. Hegel viewed all human history as the World-Spirit trying to recognize and incarnate itself. As it overcomes its various confusions and false dichotomies, it advances into forms that more completely incarnate the World-Spirit and then moves onto the next problem. Finally, it ends with the World-Spirit completely incarnated – possibly in the form of early 19th century Prussia – and everything is great forever.

Marx famously exports Hegel’s mysticism into a materialistic version where the World-Spirit operates upon class relations rather than the interconnectedness of all things, and where you don’t come out and call it the World-Spirit – but he basically keeps the system intact. So once the World-Spirit resolves the dichotomy between Capitalist and Proletariat, then it can more completely incarnate itself and move on to the next problem. Except that this is the final problem (the proof of this is trivial and is left as exercise for the reader) so the World-Spirit becomes fully incarnate and everything is great forever. And you want to plan for how that should happen? Are you saying you know better than the World-Spirit, Comrade?

I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is baaaasically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”

II.

Conservatives always complain that liberals “deny human nature”, and I had always thought that complaint was unfair. Like sure, liberals say that you can make people less racist, and one could counterargue that a tendency toward racism is inborn, but it sure seems like you can make that tendency more or less strongly expressed and that this is important. This is part of the view I argue in Nature Is Not A Slate, It’s A Series Of Levers.

But here I have to give conservatives their due. As far as I can tell, Marx literally, so strongly as to be unstrawmannable, believed there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable.

Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.

And:

It is evidence that economics establishes an alienated form of social intercourse as the essential, original, and natural form

Which Singer glosses with:

This is the gist of Marx’s objection to classical economics. Marx does not challenge the classical economists within the presuppositions of their science. Instead, he takes a viewpoint outside those presuppositions and argues that private property, competition, greed, and so on are to be found only in a particular condition of human existence, a condition of alienation.

I understand this is still a matter of some debate in the Marxist community. But it seems to me that if Singer is right, if this is genuinely Marx’s view, it seems likely to be part of what contributed to his inexcusable error above.

You or I, upon hearing that the plan is to get rid of all government and just have people share all property in common, might ask questions like “But what if someone wants more than their share?” Marx had no interest in that question, because he believed that there was no such thing as human nature, and things like “People sometimes want more than their shares of things” are contingent upon material relations and modes of production, most notably capitalism. If you get rid of capitalism, human beings change completely, such that “wanting more than your share” is no more likely than growing a third arm.

A lot of the liberals I know try to distance themselves from people like Stalin by saying that Marx had a pure original doctrine that they corrupted. But I am finding myself much more sympathetic to the dictators and secret police. They may not have been very nice people, but they were, in a sense, operating in Near Mode. They couldn’t just tell themselves “After the Revolution, no one is going to demand more than their share,” because their philosophies were shaped by the experience of having their subordinates come up to them and say “Boss, that Revolution went great, but now someone’s demanding more than their share, what should we do?” Their systems seem to be part of the unavoidable collision of Marxist doctrine with reality. It’s possible that there are other, better ways to deal with that collision, but “returning to the purity of Marx” doesn’t seem like a workable option.

III.

There was one part that made me more sympathetic to Marx. Singer writes:

Marx saw that the liberal definition of freedom is open to a fundamental objection. Suppose I live in the suburbs and work in the city. I could drive my car to work, or take the bus. I prefer not to wait around for the bus, and so I take my car. Fifty thousand other people living in my suburb face the same choice and make the same decision. The road to town is choked with cars. It takes each of us an hour to travel ten miles. In this situation, according to the liberal conception of freedom, we have all chosen freely. Yet the outcome is something none of us want. If we all went by bus, the roads would be empty and we could cover the distance in twenty minutes. Even with the inconvenience of waiting at the bus stop, we would all prefer that. We are, of course, free to alter our choice of transportation, but what can we do? While so many cars slow the bus down, why should any individual choose differently? The liberal conception of freedom has led to a paradox: we have each chosen in our own interests, but the result is in no one’s interest. Individual rationality, collective irrationality…

Marx saw that capitalism involves this kind of collective irrationality. In precapitalist systems it was obvious that most people did not control their own destiny – under feudalism, for instance, serfs had to work for their lords. Capitalism seems different because people are in theory free to work for themselves or for others as they choose. Yet most workers have as little control over their lives as feudal serfs. This is not because they have chosen badly, nor is it because of the physical limits of our resources and technology. It is because the cumulative effect of countless individual choices is a society that no one – not even the capitalists – has chosen. Where those who hold the liberal conception of freedom would say we are free because we are not subject to deliberate interference by other humans, Marx says we are not free because we do not control our own society.

This is good. In fact, this is the insight that I spent about fifteen years of my life looking for, ever since I first discovered libertarianism and felt like there was definitely an important problem with it, but couldn’t quite verbalize what it was. It’s something I finally figured out only within the last year or so and didn’t fully write up until Meditations on Moloch. And Marx seems to have sort of had it. I read the relevant section of Marx when I was younger, where he was talking about how capitalists would compete each other into the ground whether they wanted to or not, and I remember dismissing it with a “capitalists have not competed each other into the ground, for this this and this reason”, dismissing the incorrect object-level argument without realizing the important meta-level insight beneath it (something I have since learned to stop doing). If Marx really had that meta-level insight – really had it, and not just stumbled across a couple of useful examples of it without realizing the pattern – then that would make his fame justly deserved.

But two things here discourage me. First, Marx seems so confused about everything that it’s hard to parse him as really understanding this, as opposed to simply noticing one example of it that serves as a useful argument against capitalism. I notice Singer had to come up with his own clever example of this instead of quoting anything from any of Marx’s works. Second, the insight does not seem original to Marx. Tragedy of the commons was understood as early as 1833 and Malthus was talking about similar problems related to population explosions before Marx was even born. John Stuart Mill, writing twenty years before Das Kapital, had already explained the basic principle quite well:

To a fourth case of exception I must request particular attention, it being one to which as it appears to me, the attention of political economists has not yet been sufficiently drawn. There are matters in which the interference of law is required, not to overrule the judgment of individuals respecting their own interest, but to give effect to that judgment: they being unable to give effect to it except by concert, which concert again cannot be effectual unless it receives validity and sanction from the law. For illustration, and without prejudging the particular point, I may advert to the question of diminishing the hours of labour. Let us suppose, what is at least supposable, whether it be the fact or not—that a general reduction of the hours of factory labour, say from ten to nine,*119 would be for the advantage of the workpeople: that they would receive as high wages, or nearly as high, for nine hours’ labour as they receive for ten. If this would be the result, and if the operatives generally are convinced that it would, the limitation, some may say, will be adopted spontaneously. I answer, that it will not be adopted unless the body of operatives bind themselves to one another to abide by it. A workman who refused to work more than nine hours while there were others who worked ten, would either not be employed at all, or if employed, must submit to lose one-tenth of his wages. However convinced, therefore, he may be that it is the interest of the class to work short time, it is contrary to his own interest to set the example, unless he is well assured that all or most others will follow it. But suppose a general agreement of the whole class: might not this be effectual without the sanction of law? Not unless enforced by opinion with a rigour practically equal to that of law. For however beneficial the observance of the regulation might be to the class collectively, the immediate interest of every individual would lie in violating it: and the more numerous those were who adhered to the rule, the more would individuals gain by departing from it.

So one might apply to Marx the old cliche: that he has much that is good and original, but what is good is not original and what is original is not good.

But it is interesting to analyze Marx as groping toward something game theoretic. This comes across to me in some of his discussions of labor. Marx thinks all value is labor. Yes, capital is nice, but in a sense it is only “crystallized labor” – the fact that a capitalist owns a factory only means that at some other point he got laborers to build a factory for him. So labor does everything, but it gets only a tiny share of the gains produced. This is because capitalists are oppressing the laborers. Once laborers realize what’s up, they can choose to labor in such a way as to give themselves the full gains of their labor.

I think here that he is thinking of coordination as something that happens instantly in the absence of any obstacle to coordination, and the obstacle to coordination is the capitalists and the “false consciousness” they produce. Remove the capitalists, and the workers – who represent the full productive power of humanity – can direct that productive power to however it is most useful. In my language, Marx simply assumed the invisible nation, thought that the result of perfect negotiation by ideal game theoretic agents with 100% cooperation under a veil of ignorance – would also be the result of real negotiation in the real world, as long as there were no capitalists involved. Maybe this idea – of gradually approaching the invisible nation – is what stood in for the World-Spirit in his dialecticalism. Maybe in 1870, this sort of thinking was excusable.

If capitalists are to be thought of as anything other than parasites, part of the explanation of their contribution has to involve coordination. If Marx didn’t understand that coordination is just as hard to produce as linen or armaments or whatever, if he thought you could just assume it, then capitalists seem useless and getting rid of all previous forms of government so that insta-coordination can solve everything seems like a pretty swell idea.

If you admit that, capitalists having disappeared, there’s still going to be competition, positive and negative sum games, free rider problems, tragedies of the commons, and all the rest, then you’ve got to invent a system that solves all of those issues better than capitalism does. That seems to be the real challenge Marxist intellectuals should be setting themselves, and I hope to eventually discover some who have good answers to it. But at least from the little I learned from Singer, I see no reason to believe Marx had the clarity of thought to even understand the question.

I should rephrase that. Hegel is famously boring. His books are boring. His ideas are boring. He was even apparently a boring person – a recent biography of him was criticized on the grounds that “Hegel’s life was really not eventful enough to support a graceful biography of eight hundred pages”. But the phenomenon of Hegel is interesting. I don’t know of any other philosopher with such high variance.

Engels says of Hegel:

One can imagine what a tremendous effect this Hegelian system must have produced in the philosophy-tinged atmosphere of Germany. It was a triumphal procession which lasted for decades and which by no means came to a standstill on the death of Hegel. On the contrary, it was from 1830 to 1840 that Hegelianism reigned most exclusively, and to a greater or lesser extent infected even its opponents.

Such sweeping statements might be expected of the somewhat pro-Hegelian Engels. But even Russell, who mocked Hegel incessantly, admitted that:

“By the end of [the 19th century], the leading academic philosophers, both in America and Britain, were largely Hegelian”

It is fun to see what comes up on a Google search for “Hegel dominated”:

Rockmore in Marx After Marxism: “As Marx was forging his conceptual arms, Hegel dominated the philosophical debate in a way that is now difficult to comprehend.”

A Christian Appraisal Of Contemporary Philosophy: “Near the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hegel dominated all philosophy…after his death his philosophy spread from Germany, overshadowed all else in England, and was widely held in American Universities.”

Tufts course catalog: “At the end of the nineteenth century, a form of Idealism derived from Hegel dominated philosophy.”

Psychoanalysis and Culture: “Freud grew up in a Hegel-dominated cultural universe. Though we have no record that Freud read Hegel, that was unnecessary, for Hegel’s thought defined an important part of the philosophical world in which Freud’s thinking developed.”

Encyclopaedia Britannica: “From 1818 until his death in 1831, Hegel dominated the highest thought.”

A Historical Sketch Of Sociological Theory: “According to Ball, it is difficult for us to appreciate the degree to which Hegel dominated German thought in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It was largely within the framework of his philosophy that educated Germans discussed history, politics and culture”

Or, to merge all of these together, it is “difficult for us to appreciate” and “now difficult to comprehend” how Hegel “dominated”, “defined”, “overshadowed”, and “reigned” in “Germany”, “England”, “American universities”, and “the philosophical world” in “the beginning of the nineteenth century”, “from 1818 until his death in 1831″, “the time from 1830 to 1840″, “the second quarter of the nineteenth century”, “the end of the nineteenth century”, and “the time Freud’s thinking developed” (Freud was born 1856 and would have been in university in the 1870s).

I will take this as evidence that Hegel was really really important for the entire nineteenth century.

On the other hand, it’s hard to find many people who will put in good words for him now. In fact, hilarious pithy denunciations of Hegel are an entire sub-genre. Hegel’s Wikiquote page, among other sources, includes:

“Hegel’s philosophy illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.” – Bertrand Russell

“When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the philosophy of mathematics was plain nonsense. Hegel’s philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious.” – Bertrand Russell

“Among Noah’s sons was one who covered the shame of his father, but the Hegelians are still tearing away the cloak which time and oblivion had sympathetically thrown over the shame of their Master.” – Heinrich Schumacher

“Hegel’s was an interesting thesis, giving unity and meaning to the revolutions of human affairs. Like other historical theories, it required, if it was to be made plausible, some distortion of facts and considerable ignorance. Hegel, like Mane and Spengler after him, possessed both these qualifications.” – Bertrand Russell (are you starting to notice a trend here?)

“While scientists were performing astounding feats of disciplined reason [during the Enlightenment], breaking down the barriers of the “unknowable” in every field of knowledge, charting the course of light rays in space or the course of blood in the capillaries of man’s body — what philosophy was offering them, as interpretation of and guidance for their achievements was the plain Witchdoctory of Hegel, who proclaimed that matter does not exist at all, that everything is Idea (not somebody’s idea, just Idea), and that this Idea operates by the dialectical process of a new “super-logic” which proves that contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A, and that omniscience about the physical universe (including electricity, gravitation, the solar system, etc.) is to be derived, not from the observation of facts, but from the contemplation of that Idea’s triple somersaults inside his, Hegel’s, mind. This was offered as a philosophy of reason.” – Ayn Rand (unsurprisingly)

A book review by Roger Kimball helps round out the picture. Along with presenting the legend that Hegel said that “only one person only understood me, and even he misunderstood me”, Kimball writes:

Like many people who have soldiered through a fair number of Hegel’s books, I was both awed and depressed by their glittering opacity. With the possible exception of Heidegger, Hegel is far and away the most difficult “great philosopher” I have ever studied. There was much that I did not understand. I secretly suspected that no one—not even my teachers—really understood him, and it was nice to have that prejudice supported from the master’s own lips.

Is it worth the effort? I mean, you spend a hundred hours poring over Phenomenology of SpiritThe Phenomenology of Spirit —widely considered to be Hegel’s masterpiece—and what do you have to show for it? The book is supposed to take you from the naïve, “immediate” position of “sense certainty” to Absolute Knowledge, “or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit.” That sounds pretty good, especially when you are, say, eighteen and are busy soaking up ideas guaranteed to mystify and alarm your parents. But what do you suppose it means?

Despite trying really hard to say some nice things about Hegel, just about the best that Kimball can do is:

So why read Hegel? Just as doctors learn a lot about health by studying diseases, so we can learn a lot about philosophical health by studying Hegel.

The phrase “damning with faint praise” seems insufficient here.

Worse, Hegel has been criticized as a racist, a totalitarian, a proto-Nazi, and the kind of rationalist everyone hates – complete with stories about how he proved from first principles that there were only seven planets (not quite true, although he does seem to have made some similar inexcusable scientific errors. He was mocked (with some justice) for believing that his own work represented the final achievement of God’s plan for the Universe, and that the objective progress of history had culminated in the early 19th century Prussian state.

As a result, when I spent four years getting a bachelors in Philosophy, not only did I not receive a word of instruction in Hegel, but I was actively pushed away from him with frequent derogatory references.

I should qualify all this. Part of it is the analytic-continental divide. Hegel ended up well on the continental side of that, so even though analytics have a dim opinion of him, I’m pretty sure he remains studied and well-respected within continental circles. Indeed, the split may have necessitated analytics dismiss him in order to justify ignoring him, given that not ignoring him would mean engaging him would mean reading him would meaning not having the time or energy to do anything else.

But since we’ve already brought in Google as a philosophical authority, we might as well note that it autocompletes “hegel is” into “hegel is impossible to understand”. This seems to be pretty close to a consensus position right now.

II.

I know pretty much nothing about Hegel and am not nearly qualified to have an opinion on the debate about whether his inscrutability conceals deep wisdom or total nonsense. But there are a few points I draw from his rise and fall without being able to judge it philosophically.

I deliberately avoided discussing philosophy in my post How Common Are Science Failures?, first because it’s outside the reference class but second because philosophy can’t even get its act together enough to fail. These sorts of “science failures” are cases where the scientific community unites around a single consensus belief, but later discovers that belief was disastrously wrong. But philosophy can practically never unite around a single consensus belief, and it rarely disproves anything thoroughly enough to admit the error.

Hegel seems like a rare example of a philosophical consensus caught in contradiction. For a good chunk of the 19th century a very large part of the philosophical community agreed Hegel had solved everything, was a genius, was the be-all and end-all of philosophy. Later, at least the British and American communities did a total about-face and concluded that Hegel was a crackpot who, if he didn’t invent the technique of “if you can’t convince ’em, confuse ’em”, at least perfected it.

You can go one of two directions with this. First, you can say that people in the past were very gullible, that this confirms our prejudice that philosophers are silly people who will believe pretty much anything if it is billed as metaphysics and contains some confusing references to being and spirit.

Or you could say that people nowadays are so vapid, so demanding of instant gratification and unwilling to cover large inferential distances, that we’ve lost the ability to understand difficult ideas like those of Hegel.

I am the first type of person by temperament, but trying to become more sympathetic to the second way of thinking. Part of this is because on the rare occasions I do understand something difficult, I am acutely aware of all the people accusing it of being a confusing mass of jargon disguising a lack of real insight – and of how wrong these people are. “Ha ha, look at all these smart erudite domain experts who believe a stupid thing, that just proves smart domain experts lack common sense” now seems like a huge failure mode to me. There’s also a certain intellectual version of Chesterton’s Fence which looks kind of like “Don’t dismiss an idea until you can see why it would be so tempting for other people to believe”. Right now I don’t see the temptation in Hegel or for that matter any of Continental philosophy. That half of the philosophical universe, including many people who display objective signs of brilliance – has decided to just wallow in pointless obscurantism seems to beggar belief.

My inability to be tempted by Hegel brings me to another point: what parts of my thought, right now, are Hegelian? Hegel seems like a classic case where we should read history of philosophy backwards – if almost all philosophical thought for fifty to a hundred years was Hegelian, modernity should be absolutely saturated with Hegelian ideas. That means I might get less gain from trying to read Hegel forward (to see if he has startling insights I didn’t know) and more gain from trying to read him backwards (to see if he is the source of things I assumed unquestioningly, and that negating them – as the contingent opinions of some German guy who thought 19th century Prussia was objectively perfect – would produce startling insights).

I don’t know enough Hegel to do a good job of this. One easy target might be the modern belief in human progress or linear history. Fukuyama (“The End of History”) writes:

For better or worse, much of Hegel’s historicism has become part of our contemporary intellectual baggage. The notion that mankind has progresses through a series of primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present, and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slave owning, theocratic, and finally democratic egalitarian societies, has become inseparable form the modern understanding of man. Hegel was the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science, insofar as man for him was the product of his concrete historical and social environment and not, as earlier natural right theorists would have it, a collection of more or less fixed “natural” attributes. The mastery and transformation of man’s natural environment through the application of science and technology was originally not a Marxist concept, but a Hegelian one. Unlike later historicists whose historical relativism degenerated into relativism tout court, however, Hegel believed that history culminated in an absolute moment — a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious

But I find both more unexpected and more plausible David Chapman’s theories that Hegel inspired modern Westernized Buddhism, the hippie movement, and the New Age. He breaks his arguments into a bunch of posts that aren’t really collected in any organized way, but I would recommend An Improbable Re-Animation, Bad Ideas From Dead Germans, and Zen vs. The US Navy. Chapman’s argument isn’t very developed, but just raising the idea is enough to make its evidential support obvious. Hegel’s system was based around the principle that the key principle of the universe was a divine Mind trying to find itself, that everything was interrelated and purposeful, that as this Mind became more self-aware it would be reflected in increasing levels of consciousness among human beings culminating in an ideal utopian social arrangement. This is the daaaaaawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Aquarius…

Philosophy makes for strange bedfellows. Imagine: December 21, 2012. A ray of crystal light emerges from the Temple of Kukulcan in the Mayan ruins, piercing the center of the Milky Way. Humans ascend to a new level of consciousness. And all around the world people throw off their shackles and self-organize into intentional communities exactly resembling early 19th century Prussia.

Related to: Whose Utilitarianism?, You Kant Dismiss Universalizability, Meditations on Moloch

Imagine the Economists’ Paradise.

In the Economists’ Paradise, all transactions are voluntary and honest. All game-theoretic problems are solved. All Pareto improvements get made. All Kaldor-Hicks improvements get converted into Pareto improvements by distributing appropriate compensation, and then get made. In all cases where people could gain by cooperating, they cooperate. In all tragedies of the commons, everyone agrees to share the commons according to some reasonable plan. Nobody uses force, everyone keeps their agreements. Multipolar traps turn to gardens, Moloch is defeated for all time.

The Economists’ Paradise is stronger than the Libertarians’ Paradise, which is just a place where no one initiates force and all economic transactions are legal, because the Libertarians’ Paradise might still have a bunch of Prisoner’s Dilemmas and the Economists’ Paradise wouldn’t. But it is weaker than Utilitarians’ Paradise, because people with more power and money still get more of the eventual utility.

From a god’s-eye view, it seems relatively easy to create the Economists’ Paradise. It might be hard to figure out how to solve game theoretic problems in absolutely ideal ways, but it’s often very easy to figure out how to solve them in a much better way than the uncoordinated participants are doing right now (see the beginning of Part III of Meditations on Moloch). At the extreme of this way of thinking, we have Formalism, where just solving the problem, even in a very silly way, is still better then having the question remain open.

(a coin flip is the epitome of unintelligent problem solving, but flipping a coin to decide whether the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands go to Japan or China still beats having World War III, by a large margin)

The Economists’ Paradise is a pretty big step of the way toward actual paradise. Certainly there won’t be any wars or crime. But can we get more ambitious?

Will the Economists’ Paradise solve world hunger? I say it will. The argument is essentially the one in Part 2.4 of the Non-Libertarian FAQ. Suppose solving world hunger costs $50 billion per year, which I think is people’s actual best-guess estimate. And suppose that half the one billion people in the First World are willing to make some minimal contribution to solving world hunger. If each of those people can contribute $2 per week, that suffices to raise the necessary amount. On the other hand, the $50 billion cost is the cost in our world. In the Economists’ Paradise, where there are no corrupt warlords or bribe-seeking bureaucrats, and where we can just trust people to line themselves up in order of neediest to least needy, the whole task gets that much easier. In fact, it’s not obvious that the First World wouldn’t come up with their $50 billion only to have the Third World say “Thanks, but we kind of sorted out our problems and became an economic powerhouse.”

Let’s get more ambitious. Will there be bullying in the Economists’ Paradise? I just mean your basic bullying, walking over to someone who’s ugly and saying “You’re ugly, you ugly ugly person!” I say there won’t be. How would a perfect solution to all coordination problems end bullying? Simple! If the majority of the population disagrees with bullying, they can sign an agreement among themselves not to bully, and to ostracize anyone who does. Everyone will of course keep their agreement (by the definition of Economists’ Paradise) and anyone who reports to the collective that Bob is a bully will always be telling the truth (by the definition of Economists’ Paradise). The collective will therefore ostracize Bob, and faced with the prospect of never being able to interact with the majority of human beings ever again, Bob will apologize and sign an agreement never to bully again (which he will keep, by the definition of Economists’ Paradise). Since everyone knows this will happen, no one bullies in the first place.

So the Economists’ Paradise is actually a very big step of the way toward actual paradise, to the point where the differences start to look like splitting hairs.

The difference between us and the Economists’ Paradise isn’t increased wealth or fancy technology or immortality. It’s rule-following. If God were to tell everybody the rules they needed to follow to create the Economists’ Paradise, and everyone were to follow them, that would suffice to create it.

That suggests two problems with setting up Economists’ Paradise. We need to know what the rules are, and we need to convince people to follow them.

These are more closely linked than one would think. For example, both Japan and China might prefer that the Senkaku Islands be clearly given to the other according to a fair set of rules which might benefit themselves the next time, than that they fight World War III over the issue. So if the rules existed, people might follow them for the very reason that they exist. This is why, despite the Senkaku Island conflict, most islands are not the object of international tension – because there are clear rules about who should have them and everybody prefers following the rules to the sorts of conflicts that would happen if the rules didn’t exist.

II.

There’s a hilarious tactic one can use to defend consequentialism. Someone says “Consequentialism must be wrong, because if we acted in a consequentialist manner, it would cause Horrible Thing X.” Maybe X is half the population enslaving the other half, or everyone wireheading, or people being murdered for their organs. You answer “Is Horrible Thing X good?” They say “Of course not!”. You answer “Then good consequentialists wouldn’t act in such a way as to cause it, would they?”

In the same spirit: should the State legislate morality?

“Of course not! I don’t want the State telling me whom I can and can’t sleep with.”

So do you believe that it’s immoral, genuinely immoral, to sleep with the people whom you want to sleep with? Do you think sleeping with people is morally wrong?

“What? No! Of course not!”

Then the State legislating morality isn’t going to restrict whom you can sleep with, is it?

“But if the State legislated everything, I would have no freedom left!”

Is taking away all your freedom moral?

“No!”

Then the State’s not going to do that, is it?

By this sort of argument, it seems to me like there are no good philosophical objections to a perfect State legislating the correct morality. Indeed, this seems like an ideal situation; the good are rewarded, the wicked punished, and society behaves in a perfectly moral way (whatever that is).

The arguments against the State legislating morality are in my opinion entirely contigent ones, based around the fact that the State isn’t perfect and the correct morality isn’t known with certainty. Get rid of these caveats, and moral law and state law would be one and the same.

Letting the State enforce moral laws has some really big advantages. It means the rules are publicly known (you can look them up in a lawbook somewhere) and effectively enforced (by scary men with guns). This is great.

But using the State to enforce rules also fails in some very important ways.

First, it means someone has to decide in what cases the rules were broken. That means you either need to depend on fallible, easily biased human judgment – subject to all its racism, nepotism, tribalism, and whatever – or algorithmize the rules so that “be nice” gets formalized into a two thousand page definition of niceness so rigorous that even a racist nepotist tribalist judge doesn’t have any leeway to let your characteristics bias her assessment of whether you broke the niceness rules.

Second, transaction costs. Suppose in every interaction you had with another person, you needed to check a two thousand page algorithm to see if their actions corresponded to the Legal Definition of Niceness. Then if they didn’t, you needed to call the police to get them arrested, have them sit in jail for two weeks (or pay the appropriate bail) until they can get to trial. The trial itself is a drawn-out affair with celebrity lawyers on both sides. Finally, the judge pronounces verdict: you really should have said “please” when you asked her to pass the salt. Sentence: twelve milliseconds of jail time.

Third, it is written: “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” The law-making apparatus of most states – stick four hundred heavily-bribed people who hate each other’s guts in a room and see what happens – fails to inspire full confidence that its results will perfectly conform to ideal game theoretic principles.

Fourth, most states are somewhere on a spectrum between “socially contracted regimes enforcing correct game theoretic principles among their citizens” and “violent psychopaths killing everybody and stealing their stuff”, and it has been historically kind of hard to get the first part right without also empowering the proponents of the second.

So it’s – surprise, surprise – a tradeoff.

There’s a bunch of rules which, followed universally, would lead to the Economists’ Paradise. If the importance of keeping these rules agreed-upon and well-enforced outweighs the dangers of algorithmization, transaction costs, poor implementation, and tyranny, we make them State Laws. In an ideal state with very low transaction costs, minimal risk of tyranny, and legislave excellence, the cost of the tradeoff goes down and we can reap gains by making more of them State Laws. In a terrible state with high transaction costs that has been completely hijacked by self-interest, the cost of the tradeoff goes down and fewer of them are State Laws.

III.

Let’s return to the bullying example from Part I.

It would seem there ought not to be bullying in the Economists’ Paradise. For if most people dislike bullying, they can coordinate an alliance to not bully one another, and to punish any bullies they find.

On the contrary, suppose there are two well-delineated groups of people, Jocks and Nerds. Jocks are bullies and have no fear of being bullied themselves; they also don’t care about social exclusion by the Nerds against them. Nerds are victims of bullies and never bully others; their exclusion does not harm the Jocks. Now it seems that there might be bullying, for although all the Nerds would agree not to bully, and to exclude all bullies, and although all the Jocks might coordinate an alliance not to bully other Jocks, there is nothing preventing the Jocks from bullying the Nerds.

I answer that there are several practical considerations that would prevent such a situation from coming up. The most important is that if bullying is negative-sum – that is, if it hurts the victim more than it helps the bully – then it’s an area ripe for Kaldor-Hicks improvement. Suppose there is anything at all the Nerds have that the Jocks want. For example, suppose that the Nerds are good at fixing people’s broken computers, and that a Jock gains more utility from knowing he can get his computer fixed whenever he needs it than from knowing he can bully Nerds if he wants. Now there is the opportunity for a deal in which the Nerds agree to fix the Jocks’ computers in exchange for not being bullied. This is Pareto-optimal: the Nerds’ lives are better because they avoid bullying, and the Jocks’ lives are better because they get their computers fixed.

Objection: numerous problems prevent this from working in real life. Nerds and Jocks aren’t coherent blocs, bullies are bad negotiators. More fundamentally, this is essentially paying tribute, and on the “millions for defense, not one cent for tribute” principle, you should never pay tribute or else you encourage people who wouldn’t have threatened you otherwise to threaten you just for the tribute. But the assumption that Economists’ Paradise solves all game theoretic problems solves these as well. We’re assuming everyone who should coordinate can coordinate, everyone who should negotiate does negotiate, and everyone who should make precommittments does make precommittments.

A more fundamental objection: what if Nerds can’t fix computers, or Jocks don’t have them? In this case, the tribute analogy saves us: Nerds can just pay Jocks a certain amount of money not to be bullied. Any advantage or power whatsoever that Nerds have can be converted to money and used to prevent bullying. This sounds morally repugnant to us, but in a world where blackmail and incentivizing bad behavior are assumed away by fiat, it’s just another kind of Pareto-optimal improvement, certainly better than the case where Nerds waste their money on things they want less than not being bullied yet are bullied anyway. And because of our Economists’ Paradise assumption, Jocks charge a fair tribute rate – exactly the amount of money it really costs to compensate them for the utility they would get by beating up Nerds – and feel no temptation to extort more.

Now, I’m not sure bullying would even come up as an option in an Economists’ Paradise, because if it’s a zero- or negative- sum game trying to get status among your fellow Jocks, the Jocks might ban it on their own as a waste of time. But even if Jocks do get some small amount of positive utility out of it directly, we should expect bullying to stop in an Economists’ Paradise as long as Nerds control even a tiny amount of useful resources they can use to placate the Jocks. If Nerds control no resources whatsoever, or so few resources that they don’t have enough left to pay tribute after they’ve finished buying more important things, then we can’t be sure there won’t be bullying – this is where the Economists’ Paradise starts to differ from the Utilitarians’ Paradise – but we’ll return to this possibility later.

Now I want to highlight a phrase I just used in this argument.

“If bullying is negative-sum – that is, if it hurts the victim more than it helps the bully – then it’s an area ripe for Kaldor-Hicks improvement”

This looks a lot like (naive) utilitarianism!

What it’s saying is “If bullying decreases utility (by hurting the Nerd more than it helps the Jock) then bullying should not exist. If bullying increases utility (by helping the Jock more than it hurts the Nerd) then maybe bullying should exist. Or, to simplify and generalize, “do actions that increase utility, but not other actions.”

Can we derive utilitarian results by assuming Economists’ Paradise? In many cases, yes. Suppose trolley problems are a frequent problem in your society. In particular, about once a day there is a runaway trolley in heading on a Track A with ten people, but divertable to a Track B with one person (explaining why this happens so often and so consistently is left as an exercise for the reader). Suppose you’re getting up in the morning and preparing to walk to work. You know a trolley problem will probably happen today, but you don’t know which track you’ll be on.

Eleven people in this position might agree to the following pact: “Each of us has a 91% chance of surviving if the driver chooses to flip the switch, but only a 9% chance of surviving if the person chooses not to. Therefore, we all agree to this solemn pact that encourages the driver to flip the switch. Whichever of us will be on Track B hereby waives his right to life in this circumstance, and will encourage the driver to switch as loudly as all of the rest of us.”

If the driver were presented with this pact, it’s hard to imagine her not switching to Track B. But if the eleven Trolley Problem candidates were permitted to make such a pact before the dilemma started, it’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t. Therefore, the Economists’ Paradise assumption of perfect coordination produces the correct utilitarian result to the trolley problem. The same methodology can be extended to utilitarianism in a lot of other contexts.

Now we can go back to that problem from before: what if Nerds have literally nothing Jocks want, and Jocks haven’t decided among themselves that bullying is a stupid status game that wastes their time, and we’re otherwise in the Least Convenient Possible World with regards to stopping bullying. Is there any way assuming Economists’ Paradise solves the problem then?

Maybe. Just go around to little kids, age two or so, and say “Look. At this point, you really don’t know whether you’re going to grow up to be a Jock or a Nerd. You want to sign this pact that everyone who grows up to be a Jock promises not to bully everyone who grows up to be a Nerd?” Keeping the same assumption that bullying is on net negative utility, we expect the toddlers to sign. Yeah, in the real world two-year olds aren’t the best moral reasoners, but good thing we’re in Economists’ Paradise where we assume such problems away by fiat.

Is there an Even Less Convenient Possible World? Suppose bullying is racist rather than popularity-based, with all the White kids bullying the Black kids. You go to the toddlers, and the white toddlers retort back “Even at this age, we know very well that we’re White, thank you very much.”

So just approach them in the womb, where it’s too dark to see skin color. If we’re letting two year olds sign contracts, why not fetuses?

Okay. One reason might be because we’ve just locked ourselves into being fanatically pro-life merely by starting with weird assumptions. Another reason might be that we could counterfactually mug fetuses by saying stuff “You’re definitely a human, but for all you know the world is ruled by Lizardmen with only a small human slave population, and if Lizardmen exist then they will torture any humans who did not agree in the womb that, if upon being born and finding that Lizardmen did not exist, they would spend all their time and energy trying to create Lizardmen.”

(Frick. I think I just created a new basilisk by breeding the Rokolisk and the story of 9-tsiak. Good thing it only works on fetuses.)

(I wonder if this is the first time in history anyone has ever used the phrase “counterfactually mug fetuses” as part of a serious intellectual argument.)

So I’m not saying this theory doesn’t have any holes in it. I’m just saying that it seems, at least in principle, like the idea of Economists’ Paradise might be sufficient to derive Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance, which in turn bridges the chasm that separates it from Utilitarians’ Paradise.

IV.

I think this is the solution to the various questions raised in You Kant Dismiss Universalizability. The reason universalizability is important is that the universal maxims are the agreements that everyone or nearly everyone would sign. This leads naturally to something like utilitarianism for the reasons mentioned in Part III. And it doesn’t produce the weird paradoxes like “If morality is universalizability, how do you know whether a policeman overpowering and imprisoning a criminal universalizes to ‘police should be able to overpower and imprison criminals’ or ‘everyone should be able to overpower and imprison everyone else’?” Everyone would sign an agreement allowing the first, but not the second.

But before we really explore this, a few words on “everyone would sign”.

Suppose one very stubborn annoying person in Economists’ Paradise refused to sign an agreement that police should be allowed to arrest criminals. Now what?

“All game theory is solved perfectly” is a really powerful assumption, and the rest of the world has a lot of leverage over this one person. Suppose everyone else said “You know, we’re all signing an agreement that none of us are going to murder one another, but we’re not going to let you into that agreement unless you also sign this agreement which is very important to us.”

Actually, that sounds too evil and blackmailing. There’s a better way to think of it. Suppose there are one hundred agreements. 99% of the population agrees to each, and in fact it’s a different 99% each time. That is, divide the population into one hundred sets of 1%, and each set will oppose exactly one of the agreements – there is no one who opposes two or more. Each agreement only works (or works best) when one hundred percent of the population agrees to it.

Very likely everyone will strike a deal that each of the one hundred 1% blocs agrees to to give up its resistance to the one agreement they don’t like, in exchange for each of the other ninety nine 1% blocs giving up its resistance to the agreements they don’t like.

Now we’re getting into meta-level Pareto improvements. If a pact would be positive-sum for people to agree on, the proponents of the pact can offer everyone else some compensation for them signing the pact. In theory it could be money or computer-fixing, but it might also be agreement with some of their preferred pacts.

There are a few possible outcomes of this process in Platonic Economists’ Paradise, both interesting.

One is a patchwork of agreements, where everyone has to remember that they’ve signed agreements 5, 12, 98, and 12,671, but their next-door neighbor has signed agreements 6, 12, 40, and 4,660,102, so they and their neighbor are bound to cooperate on 12 but no others.

Another is that everyone is able to get their desired pacts to cohere into a single really big pact that they are all able to sign off upon. Maybe there are a few stragglers who reject it at first, but this ends up being a terrible idea because now they’re not bound by really important agreements like “don’t murder” or “don’t steal”, so eventually they give in.

A third possibility combining the other two offers a unifying principle behind Whose Utilitarianism and Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism. Everyone agrees to some very basic principles of respecting one another (call them “Noahide Laws”) but smaller communities agree to stricter rules that allow them to do their own thing.

But we don’t live in Platonic Economists’ Paradise. We live in the real world, where transaction costs are high and people have limited brainpower. Even if we were to try to instantiate Economists’ Paradise, it couldn’t be the one where we all have the complex interlocking patchwork agreements between one another. People wouldn’t sign off on it. Heck, I wouldn’t sign off on it. I would say “I’m not signing this until I have something that makes sense to me and can be implemented in a reasonable amount of time and doesn’t require me to check the List Of Everybody In The World before I know whether the guy next to me is going to murder me or not.” Practical concerns provide a very strong incentive to reject the patchwork solution and force everyone to cohere. So in practice – and I realize how hokey it is to keep talking about game-theoretically-perfect infinitely-rational infinitely-honest agents negotiating all possible agreements among one another, and then add on the term “in practice” to represent that they have trouble remembering what they decided – but in practice they would all have very large incentives to cohere upon a single solution that balances out all of their concerns.

We can think of this as moving along an axis from “Platonic” to “practical”. As we progress further, complicated agreements collapse into simpler agreements which are less perfect but easier to enforce and remember. We start to make judicious use of Schelling fences. We move from everyone in the world agreeing on exactly what people can and can’t do to things like “Well, you know your intuitive sense of niceness? You follow that with me, and I’ll follow that with you, and we’ll assume everyone else is in on the deal until they prove they aren’t.”

A metaphor: in a dream, your soul goes to Economists’ Paradise and agrees on the perfect patchwork of maxims with all the other souls there. But as dawn approaches, you realize when you awaken you will never remember all of what you agreed upon, and even worse, all the other souls there are going to wake up and not remember what they agreed upon either. So all of you together frantically try to compress your wisdom into a couple of sentences that the waking mind will be able to recall and follow, and you end up with platitudes like “Use your intuitive sense of niceness” and “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” and “try to maximize utility” and “anybody who treats you badly, assume they’re not in on the deal and feel free to treat them badly too, but not so badly that you feel like you can murder them or something.”

A particularly good platitude/compression might be “Work very hard to cultivate the mysterious skill of figuring out what people in the Economists’ Paradise would agree to, then do those things.” If you’re Greek, you can even compress it into a single word: phronesis.

V.

So by now it’s probably pretty obvious that this is an attempt to ground morality. I think the general term for the philosophical school involved is “contractualism”.

Many rationalists seem to operate on something like R.M. Hare’s two-level utilitarianism. That is, utilitarianism is the correct base level of morality, but it’s very hard to do, so in reality you’ve got to make do with less precise but more computationally tractable heuristics, like deontology and virtue ethics. Occasionally, when deontology or virtue ethics contradict themselves, each other, or your intuitions, you may have to sit down and actually do the utilitarianism as best you can, even though it will be inconvenient and very philosophically difficult.

For example, deontology may say things like “You must never kill another human being.” But in the trolley problem, the correct deontological action seems to violate our moral intuitions. So we go up a level, calculate the utility (which in this case is very easy, because it’s a toy problem invented entirely for the purposes of having easy utility calculation) and say “Huh, this appears to be one of those rare places where our deontological heuristics go wrong.” Then you switch the trolley.

But utilitarianism famously has problems of its own. You need a working definition of utility, which means not only distinguishing between hedonic utilitarianism, preference utilitarianism, etc, but coming up with a consistent model for measuring the strength of happiness and preferences. You need to distinguish between total utilitarianism, average utilitarianism, and a couple of other options I forget right now. You need a discount rate. You need to know whether creating new people counts as a utility gain or not, and whether removing people (isn’t that a nice euphemism) can even be counted as a negative if you make sure to do it painlessly and without any grief to those who remain alive. You need a generalized solution to Pascal’s Wagers and utility monsters. You need to know whether to accept or fudge away weird results like that you may be morally obligated to live your entire life to maximize anti-malaria donations. All of this is easy at the tails and near-impossible at the margins.

My previous philosophy was “Yeah, it’s hard, but I bet with sufficient intelligence, we can think up a consistent version of utilitarianism with enough epicycles that it produces an answer to all of these issues that most people would recognize as at least kind of sane. Then we can just go with that one.”

I still believe this. But that consistent version would probably fill a book. The question is: what is the person who decides what to put in this book doing? On what grounds are they saying “total utilitarianism is a better choice than average utilitarianism”? It can’t be on utilitarian grounds, because you can’t use utilitarian grounds until you’ve figured out utilitarianism, which you haven’t done until you’ve got the book. When God was deciding what to put in the Bible, He needed some criteria other than “make the decision according to Biblical principles”.

The standard answer is “we are starting with our moral intuitions, then simplifying them to a smaller number of axioms which eventually produce them”. But if the axioms fill a book and are full of epicycles to address individual problems, we’re not doing a very good job.

I mean, it’s still better than just trying to sort out all individual issues like “what is a just war?” on their own, because people will answer that question according to their personal prejudices (is my tribe winning it? Then it is so, so just) and if we force them to write the utilitarianism book at least they’ve got to come up with consistent principles and stick to them. But it is highly suboptimal.

And I wonder whether maybe the base level, the one that actually grounds utilitarianism, is contractualism. The idea of a Platonic parliament in which we try to enact all beneficial agreements. Under this model, utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics would all be different heuristics that we use to approximate contractualism, the fragments we remember from our beautiful dream of Paradise.

I realize this is kind of annoying, especially in the sense of “the next person who comes along can say that utiltiarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, and contractualism are heuristics for whatever moral theory they like, which is The Real Thing”. But the idea can do work! It particular, it might help esolve some of the standard paradoxes of utilitarianism.

First, are we morally obligated to wirehead everyone and convert the entire universe into hedonium? Well, would you sign that contract?

Second, is there anything wrong with killing people painlessly if they won’t be missed? After all, it doesn’t seem to cause any pain or suffering, or even violate any preferences – at least insofar as your victim isn’t around to have their preferences violated. Well, would you sign a contract in which everyone agrees not to do that?

Third, are we morally obligated to create more and more people with slightly above zero utility, until we are in an overcrowded slum world with everyone stuck at just-above-subsistence level (the Repugnant Conclusion)? Well, if you were making an agreement with everyone else about what the population level should be, would you suggest we do that? Or would you suggest we avoid it?

(this can be complicated by asking whether potential people get a seat in this negotiation, but Carl Shulman has a neat way to solve that problem)

Fourth, the classic problem of defining utility. If utility can be defined ordinally but not cardinally (ie you can declare that stubbing your toe is worse than a dust speck in the eye, but you can’t say something like it’s exactly 2.6 negative utilons) then utilitarianism becomes very hard. But contractualism doesn’t become any harder, except insofar as it’s harder to use utilitarianism as a heuristic for it.

I am not actually sure these problems are being solved, and I’m not just being led astray by contractualism being harder to model than utilitarianism and so it is easier for me to imagine them solved. But at the very least, it might be that contractualism is a different angle from which to attack these problems.

Of course, contractualism has problems of its own. It might be that different ways of doing the negotiations would lead to very different results. It might also be that the results would be very path-dependent, so that making one agreement first would end with a totally different result than making another agreement first. And this would be a good time to admit I don’t know that much formal game theory, but I do know there are multiple Nash equilibria and Pareto-optimal endpoints in a lot of problems and that in general there’s no such thing as “the correct game theoretic solution to this problem”, only solutions that fit more or fewer desirability criteria.

But to some degree this maps onto our intuitions about morality. One of the harder to believe things about utilitarianism was that it suggested there was exactly one best state of the universe. Our intuitions are very good at saying that certain hellish dystopias are very bad, and certain paradises are very good, but extrapolating them out to say there’s a single best state is iffy at best. So maybe the ability of rigorous game theory to end in a multitude of possible good outcomes is a feature and not a bug.

I don’t know if it’s possible for certain negotiation techniques to end in extreme local minima where things don’t end out as a paradise at all. I mean, I know there’s lots of horrible game theory like the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Pirate’s Dilemma and so on, but I’m defining the “good game theory” of the Economists’ Paradise to mean exactly the rules and coordination power you need to not do those kinds of things.

But there’s also a meta-level escape vent. If a certain set of negotiation techniques would lead to a local minimum where everything is Pareto-optimal but nobody is happy, then everyone would coordinate to sign a pact not to use those negotiation techniques.

VI.

To sum up:

The Economists’ Paradise of solved coordination problems would be enough to keep everyone happy and prosperous and free. We ourselves could live in that paradise if we followed its rules, which involve negotiation of and adherence to agreements according to good economist and game theory, but these rules are hard to determine and hard to enforce.

We can sort of guess at what some of these rules can be, and when we do that we can try to follow them. Some rules lend themselves to State enforcement. Others don’t and we have to follow them quietly in the privacy of our own hearts. Sometimes the rules include rules about ostracizing or criticizing those who don’t follow the rules effectively, and so even the ones the State can’t enforce are sorta kinda enforceable. Then we can spread them through a series of walled gardens and spontaneous order divine intervention.

The exact nature of the rules is computationally intractable and so we use heuristics most of the time. Through practical wisdom, game theory, and moral philosophy, we can improve our heuristics and get to the rules more closely, with corresponding benefits for society. Utilitarianism is one especially good heuristic for the rules, but it’s also kind of computationally intractable. Utilitarianism helps us approximate contractualism, and contractualism helps us resolve some of the problems of utilitarianism.

One problem of utilitarianism I didn’t talk about is that it isn’t very inspirational. Following divine law is inspirational. Trying to become a better person, a heroic person, is inspirational. Utilitarianism sounds too much like math. I think contractualism solves this problem too.

Consider. There is an Invisible Nation. It is not a democracy, per se, but it is something of a republic, where each of us is represented by a wiser, stronger version of ourselves who fights for our preferences to be enacted into law. Its legislature is untainted by partisanship, perfectly efficient, incorruptible, without greed, without tyranny. Its bylaws are the laws of mathematics; its Capitol Building stands at the center of Platonia.

All good people are patriots of the Invisible Nation. All the visible nations of the world – America, Canada, Russia – are properly understood to be its provinces, tasked with executing its laws as best they can, and with proper consideration to the unique needs of the local populace. Some provinces are more loyal than others. Some seem to be in outright rebellion. The laws of the Invisible Nation contain provisions about what to do with provinces in rebellion, but they are vague and difficult to interpret, and its patriots can disagree on what they are.

Maybe one day we will create a superintelligence that tries something like Coherent Extrapolated Volition – which I think we have just rederived, kind of by accident. The various viceroys and regents will hand over their scepters, and the Invisible Nation will stand suddenly revealed to the mortal eye. Until then, we see through a glass darkly. As we learn more about our fellow citizens, as we gain new modalities of interacting with them like writing, television, the Internet – as we start crystallizing concepts like rights and utility and coordination – we become a little better able to guess.

Are you a human? If so, congratulations. Your values are human values. As I wrote loooong ago in the Consequentialist FAQ:

Preference utilitarianism is completely on board with the idea that people want things other than raw animal pleasure. If what satisfies a certain monk is to deny himself worldly pleasures and pray to God, then the best state of the world is one in which that monk can keep on denying himself worldly pleasures and praying to God in the way most satisfying to himself.

A person or society following preference utilitarianism will try to satisfy the wants and values of as many people as possible as completely as possible; thus the phrase “the greatest good for the greatest number”.

I grok the value of martial glory. My heart stirs as much as anyone else’s when Achilles goes forth in his god-forged armor, shouting boasts and daring the bravest champion of the Trojans to take him on.

But if some modern Achilles tried that today, he would be shot dead with a machine gun in about three seconds. Or bombed by a drone operated remotely from ten thousand miles away. Moloch has been far less kind to the older and grittier values than it has even to hedonism. The proponents of mysticism, art, martial glory, et cetera are on even weaker grounds than the hedonists. And the ground is only getting weaker.

Whatever your values are, the world being eaten by gray goo, paperclip maximizers, or Hansonian ems is unlikely to satisfy them. I think there’s room for a broad alliance among people of all value systems against this possibility.

And it is not just an alliance of convenience. I predict that human values, lifted to heaven by a human-friendly superintelligence, would end up looking something like the Archipelago – many places for people to pursue their own visions of the Good, watched over by a benevolent god who acts only to ensure universal freedom of movement. Indeed, given a superintelligence to magic away the problems – no inter-community invasion, no competition for (presumably unlimited) resources – it seems to that a plurality of humankind would endorse this scenario over whatever other plans someone could dream up.

It is a minor sin to speculate on what could happen after the Singularity. I’m not saying it will be a world like this. This is something I thought up in ten minutes. It is a lower bound. Something thought up by a real superintelligence would be much, much better.

“Gnon represents the laws of physics and causality. You can’t conquer the laws of physics and causality.” (example)

Horace says: “He is either mad, or writing poetry”. If you encounter that dichotomy with me, please assume at least a 66% or so chance that I am writing poetry.

On a base level you can’t beat the laws of physics. On a metaphorical level, you can.

The laws of physics include gravity. For someone in 1500, the idea that you might be able to travel really far straight up seems like defying – even conquering – the laws of physics. But with sufficient knowledge, you can build rockets. We poetically speak about rockets “defying gravity”.

Rockets don’t literally defy gravity, but “defying gravity” is a pretty good shorthand for what they do. And of course they work on physics, but it does seem like once rockets are good enough in some sense a patch of physical law has been “conquered”.

We can never conquer Gnon in a literal sense. But we might be able to do something that looks very very much like conquering Gnon, in the same sense that making a very large metal object fall straight up until it reaches the moon looks very very much like conquering gravity.

Anyhow, the wrong thing to do would be to worship gravity as a god and venerate staying earthbound as a moral principle.

“If you really believed what you’re saying, you would realize [current progressive value] is just a result of Cthulhu, the blind marketplace of memes.” (example)

This gets into the old philosophical question of “why should we expect our beliefs to correspond to reality at all?”. It tends to be asked a lot by religious people, who mean it in a way like “I think the human mind was created by God to perceive reality, but if you think it was just the result of blind evolution, how do you know it has any truth-discerning value?”

To which the answer is that evolution selected for brains that were at least marginally competent. Brains that could distinguish “lion” from “non-lion” survived; those that couldn’t, didn’t.

There’s no such thing as a “fit animal”, only an animal that is fit for its environment. Likewise, there’s no such thing as a “virulent meme”, only a meme that is virulent to specific hosts.

We say “the human brain is designed to distinguish true and false ideas”, but another way to approach the same idea is “the human brain is designed to be an environment such that true memes survive and false memes die out.”

The overwhelming majority of our beliefs are true, and this should be obvious with a second’s thought. The sky is blue. I am sitting in Michigan right now. 2 + 2 is four. I have ten fingers. And so on.

Morality is really complicated, but if we are to believe moral discussion can be productive even in principle, we have to believe that our brains are less than maximally perverse – that they have some ability to distinguish the moral from the immoral.

If our brains are built to accept true ideas about facts and morality, the default should be that many people believing something is positive evidence for its truth, or at least not negative evidence.

“This meme is virulent”, in the context of “this idea is widely believed” is not proof that the idea is false or destructive. Some memes can be both virulent and false/destructive – and indeed I think this is true of many of them, religion being only the most obvious case – but the burden of proof is on the person making that claim.

“All your human values are just the results of blind evolution and memetic drift – a Molochian process if ever there was one. Enshrining human values against the blind will of the universe would just be the triumph of one part of the universe’s blind idiocy over another.” (Spandrell here)

Yes, this is the The Gift We Give To Tomorrow

I say we use DW-Nominate.

I wrote about DW-Nominate before. It’s the tool political scientists use to calculate Congresspeople’s position on the political spectrum. Whenever you hear an alarmed-sounding voice on a black-and-white attack ad say something like “Senator Schmendrick is the third most liberal senator in Congress,” chances are they used DW-Nominate to calculate “third most liberal”.

The system is beautifully elegant. They take a Congressperson’s votes on all the issues and compare them to other Congresspeople’s votes to find blocs of Congresspeople who tend to vote together. Then they do factor analysis stuff to see how many dimensions of “similar voting” there are. They end up with something that looks a lot like the traditional left-right dimension and occasionally a Northern-US-vs.-Southern-US-dimension that doesn’t always matter that much. Then they use Congresspeople with multi-decade careers to bridge the gap between current Congresses and past Congresses, and use dead Congresspeople with multi-decade careers to bridge the gap between past Congresses and even-further-in-the-past Congresses, so that they can compare any Congressperson, living or dead, to any other Congressperson, living or dead. They also get the opportunity to evaluate bills as liberal or conservative, based on whether liberal or conservative Congresspeople support them.

And the neat thing about it is that at no point did they enter into the system that it was supposed to give “left” vs. “right” – or even that it was supposed to come out with only one major grouping. It could have found that actually Democrats and Republicans vote much the same, but men always vote with other men and women with other women, or that the real difference was a religious worldview versus a secular worldview or whatever. Instead they found that our notion of left and right emerges naturally from the data, even if you’re not looking for it, and that this transcends party lines – ie some Democrats are further left than other Democrats, and this has consistent effects. If you really wanted, you could use this to rate whether, say, cutting carbon emissions vs. gun control is a more truly leftist cause, by seeing which bills get more heavily supported by leftists.

And I wonder what would happen if you tried DW-Nominate with moral decisions.

Now there’s a very boring interpretation of that proposal, which is that we hand a hundred people a hundred different multiple-choice questions on moral dilemmas, and then use factor analysis stuff to see if we can divide them into groups. I bet we’d come out with something a lot like “utilitarians vs. deontologists vs. virtue ethics”, or maybe something more like “religious vs. secular” or maybe “people who use all Haidtian foundations vs. people who just use care and fairness”. Actually, forget what I said before, this would already be a quite interesting thing to do and somebody should do it.

But I would be much more interested in a (much harder) naturalistic experiment. What if we took the real decisions people engage in? I’m not even talking about obviously morally charged decisions like whether to have an abortion, I’m talking about things from “what college major should I have?” all the way down to “do I drink alcohol at age 17?” to “do I call my parents tonight like I promised I would, even though I’m very tired?”

A lot of people have to go through very similar decisions, which allows DW-Nominate style ranking. There would be some wiggle room in deciding which two decisions were equivalent (is the person who decides not to call loving parents making the same decision as the person who decides not to call abusive parents?), but let’s say we get a panel of raters to decide among themselves which decisions are equivalent and throw out any they can’t agree upon. This isn’t meant to be Pure And Objective here, only statistically useful.

In the same way that ten thousand Congressional votes, suitably analyzed, naturally group people into two categories that look to our trained eyes like Left and Right, would ten thousand little life decisions, suitably analyzed, naturally group people into two categories that look to our trained eyes like Good and Bad?

If so, it would be pretty easy to tell who the best person was, in the same way we can identify the most liberal member of Congress. We could give them a nice little award. Even better, it would be pretty easy to tell which option on each decision is more moral, for the same reason DW-Nominate can tell us that supporting gun control is more liberal than opposing it.

Suppose that we learned that one factor that naturally fell out of the data included giving money to the poor, supporting one’s aging parents, never committing violent crimes, avoiding ethnic slurs, conserving water and electricity, helping one’s friends when they were in trouble, and everything else we traditionally think of as good moral choices. And suppose this factor was heavily, heavily associated with being pro-life, to the same degree that the “liberal” factor in DW-Nominate is heavily associated with gun control. Would this provide some evidence in the debate over abortion? I’m not sure, but it would sure get me thinking long and hard about it.

I mean, we would probably also find some really silly things . Like that our moral factor loads on not getting tattoos of flaming skulls, ie the decision to get a tattoo of a flaming skull clusters with lots of immoral decisions. Presumably we would want to be able to say that getting a flaming skull tattoo is not itself immoral, but is correlated with immorality. But then we might as well say the same thing about being pro-life. Indeed, maybe everything religious will end out correlated with morality for religious reasons. We’d probably have to sort through this and fight a bunch of interminable correlation vs. causation debates.

But then there are areas where this could really shine.

I think this might solve a problem that Aaronson thought was unsolveable in his proposed algorithms. He said that in a world that was completely backwards – for example Nazi Germany – where everybody thought right was wrong and wrong was right, any moral sorting algorithm will give backwards results because it has to start with majority opinion in some sense. His example was that a PageRank style algorithm where people-believed-to-be-moral are the ones people-believed-to-be-moral believe are moral would fail, because most Nazis would believe that the high-ranking Nazi authorities were moral, and then the circle would complete with the high-ranking Nazi authorities getting to determine who the moral people were.

I think DW-Nominate might go part of the way solving that problem. Consider three different things we might find if we DW-Nominated Nazi Germany:

1. There is a General Factor of Morality, which includes giving to the poor, caring for your aged parents, cooperating with your neighbors, et cetera. People high in this General Factor of Morality are much more likely to oppose Nazi policies and hide Jews in their attics.

2. There is a General Factor of Morality, which includes giving to the poor, caring for your aged parents, cooperating with your neighbors, et cetera. People high in this General Factor of Morality are no more likely to hide Jews than anyone else, or maybe less likely to hide Jews.

3. There are multiple dimensions of morality. One dimension is something like “prosocial in-group patriotism” and captures things like paying your taxes on time, going without luxuries in order to help the war effort, and sending nice care packages to the troops. Another dimension is something like “willingness to go against consensus when it’s the right thing to do” and would include whistleblowing against corruption and being a passive resister to unjust wars. Hiding Jews in your attic might be negatively correlated with the first factor but positively correlated with the second factor. Universally beloved things like giving to the poor and caring for your aged parents might load about equally on both factors, or be a third factor, or whatever.

If Hypothesis 1 were true, that would be super interesting. It would suggest there’s something kind of objective about morality. Also, we could make it do work. Like we could go around to the Nazis, and say “Look, you agree that helping the poor is moral, right? And caring for your aged parents? Well, now that we’ve established what morality is, we have bad news for you. You don’t have it. Moral people are much more likely to oppose you. So stop doing what you’re doing.” This might actually work. Or if it didn’t, then when World War II ended and everyone agreed they should have listened to the General Factor Of Morality, then maybe after ten or twenty iterations of this people would start listening eventually.

If Hypothesis 2 were true, that would also be super interesting, albeit disappointing. It would mean that morality probably isn’t very objective, and that our moral positions are a lot closer to random than we want to believe. If being moral in every other way we can think of had minimal correlation with being moral in the particular way of saving Jews from the Nazis, it would mean that there was no consistent basis to morality and it was just a hodgepodge of popular positions. Or that if there was a philosophically consistent basis, it has little to do with how it’s practiced in the real world.

If Hypothesis 3 were true, that would be very boring, but possibly still worthwhile. Like we could have debates on whether Factor I Morality is more important than Factor II morality, and what to do when they contradict each other, and these debates would probably be more interesting than our current more vague debates on things like “what do you do when your duty and your moral intuitions conflict?”

I don’t really have some grand plan for how this could be used to solve everything or how a utopia could be created around it (although now that I mention it, if we can easily identify the most moral people in a population, they would make good candidates for judges and other high officials, though perhaps not legislators or executives).

I just think it would be fun to study.

Like most right-thinking people, I’d always found Immanuel Kant kind of silly. He was the standard-bearer for naive deontology, the “rules are rules, so follow them even if they ruin everything” of moral philosophy.

But lately, I’ve been starting to pick up a different view. There may have been some subtleties I was missing, almost as if one of the most universally revered thinkers of the western philosophical tradition wasn’t a total moron.

I was delighted to see nydwracu say something similar in the comments to my recent post:

I [now] realize that Kant is not actually completely ridiculous like I once thought he was

I don’t know if it’s just that nydwracu and I have been thinking about some of the same problems lately, but he took the words right out of my mouth.

I’m not a Kant scholar. I’m not qualified to explain what Kant thought, and it’s possible the arguments I express as Kantian here are going to be arguments of a totally different person who merely reminds me of Kant in some ways. James Donald’s objections to steelmanning are well taken, so I will not call this a steel man of a guy who is too dead to correct me if I am wrong. At best I will call this post Kant-aligned.

First, I want to take another look at one of Kant’s most-reviled arguments: that you should truthfully tell a murderer who wants to kill your friend where she is hiding.

Second, I want to talk about how I find myself using Kantian principles in my own morality.

And third, I want to talk about big unanswered questions and the reason this still isn’t technical enough for me to be comfortable with.

II.

Kant gives the following dilemma. Suppose that an axe murderer comes to your door and demands you tell him where your friend is, so that he can kill her. Your friend in fact is in your basement. You lie and tell the murderer your friend is in the next town over. He heads off to the next town, and while he’s gone you call the police and bring your friend to safety.

Most people would say that the lie is justified. Kant says it isn’t, because lying.

I think most people understand his argument as follows: you think “I should lie”. But suppose everyone thought that all the time. Then everyone would lie to everyone else, and that would be horrible.

But Kant’s categorical imperative doesn’t urge us to reject actions which, if universalized, would be horrible. That’s rule utilitarianism, sort of. Kant urges us to reject actions which, if universalized, would be self-defeating or contradictory.

Suppose it was everyone’s policy to lie to axe murderers who asked them where their friends were. Well, then axe murderers wouldn’t even bother asking.

Which doesn’t sound like a sufficiently terrible dystopia to move us very much. So let me reframe Kant’s example.

Suppose you are a prisoner of war. Your captors tell you they want to kill your general, a brilliant leader who has led your side to victory after victory. They have two options. First, a surgical strike against her secret headquarters, killing her and no one else. Second, nuking your capital city. They would prefer to do the first, because they’re not monsters. But if they have to nuke your capital, they’ll nuke your capital. So they show you a map of your capital city and say “Please point out your general’s headquarters and we’ll surgical-strike it. But if you don’t, we’ll nuke the whole city.”

You decide to lie. You point to a warehouse you know to be abandoned. Your captors send a cruise missile that blows up the warehouse, killing nobody. Then they hold a huge party to celebrate the death of the general. Meanwhile, the real general realizes she’s in danger and flees to an underground shelter. With her brilliant tactics, your side wins the war and you are eventually rescued.

So what about now? Was your lie ethical?

Kant would point out that if it was known to be everyone’s policy to lie about generals’ locations, your captors wouldn’t even ask. They’d just nuke the city, killing everyone.

Your captors are offering you a positive-sum bargain: “Normally, we would nuke your capital. But you don’t want that and we don’t want that. So let’s make a deal where you tell us where your general is and we only kill that one person. That leaves both of us better off.”

If it is known to everyone that prisoners of war always lie in this situation, it would be impossible to offer the positive-sum bargain, and your enemies would resort to nuking the whole city, which is worse for both of you.

So when Kant says not to act on maxims that would be self-defeating if universalized, what he means is “Don’t do things that undermine the possibility to offer positive-sum bargains.”

This is very reminiscent of Parfit’s Hitchhiker. Remember that one? You are lost in the desert, about to die. A very selfish man drives by in his dune buggy, sees you, and offers to take you back to civilization for $100. You don’t have any money on you, but you promise to pay him $100 once you’re back to civilization and its many ATMs. The very selfish man agrees and drives you to safety. Once you’re safe, you say “See you later, sucker!” and run off.

The selfish man’s “I’ll bring you back to civilization for $100″ offer is a positive-sum bargain. You would rather lose $100 than die. He would rather gain $100 and lose a few hours bringing you to the city than continue on his way. So you both gain.

But if everyone were omniscient and knew that people who promise $100 will never really pay, or if your decision not to pay could somehow affect his willingness to make you the offer in the first place, the ability to make the positive-sum bargain disappears.

On this model, Kant isn’t being a weird super-anal stickler for meaningless rules at all. He’s being the most practical person around: don’t do things that spoil people’s ability to make a profit.

(and sort of pre-inventing decision theory)

(man, it’s a good thing everyone is omniscient and the future can cause the past, or else we’d never be able to ground morality at all)

III.

A while back I suggested it is wrong to fire someone for being anti-gay, because if every boss said “I will fire my employees whom I disagree with politically”, or every mob of angry people said “We will boycott companies until they fire the people we disagree with politically” then no one who’s not independently wealthy could express any political opinions or dare challenge the status quo, and the world would be a much sadder place.

This is not strictly Kantian. “The world would be a much sadder place” is not self-defeating or a contradiction.

But it could still be framed as a positive-sum bargain. In a world where all the leftists refused to hire rightists, and all the rightists refused to hire leftists, everything would be about the same except that everyone’s job opportunities would be cut in half. If the people in such a world were halfway rational, they would make a deal that rightists agree to hire leftists if leftists agree to hire rightists. This would clearly be positive-sum.

This is easy to say in natural language like this. But when you try to make it more formal it gets really sketchy real quick.

Let’s say Paula the Policewoman is arresting Robby the Robber (she caught him by noticing his name was Robby in a world where everyone’s name sounds like their most salient characteristic). No doubt she thinks she is following the maxim “Police officers should arrest robbers”. But what about other maxims that lead to the same action?

1. Police officers should arrest people
2. Everyone should arrest robbers
3. Paula should arrest Robby
4. Paula should arrest other people
5. Everyone should arrest Robby
6. Everyone should arrest EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD

This sounds kind of silly in this context, but in more complicated situations the entire point hinges upon it.

Levi the Leftist, who owns a restaurant called Levi’s Lentils, finds out that his head waiter, Riley the Rightist, is a homophobe (in Levi’s defense, he thought he was safe to hire him because his name wasn’t Homer). He fires Riley, who ends out on the street.

Candice the Kantian condemns him, saying “What if that were to become a general rule? Then nothing would change except everyone only has half as many job opportunities.”

Levi says “Oh, I see your problem. You think my maxim is ‘fire people with different politics than me’. But that’s not my maxim at all. My maxim is ‘fire people who are homophobic’. If that becomes universalized, it will be a great victory for gay people everywhere, but no one whose politics I agree with will suffer at all.”

In fact, Levi might claim his maxim is any one of the following:

1. Everyone should fire people they disagree with politically
2. Everyone should fire people who are politically on the right
3. Everyone should fire people who discriminate against minority groups
4. Everyone should fire people who are homophobic
5. Everyone should fire people who are mean and hateful
6. Everyone should fire people who hold positions that are totally beyond the pale and can’t possibly be supported rationally

(before I get yelled at in the comment section, I’m not necessarily claiming all these maxims accurately describe Riley, just that Levi might think they do)

(5) runs into this problem where you can never say “fire people who are mean and hateful” without it in fact meaning “fire people whom you think are mean and hateful”. Presumably all the rightist bosses will find good reasons to think their leftist employees are mean and hateful.

There seems to be some sense in which we also want to protest (2), say that if Levi is allowed to use (2), then that instantly morphs to rightist bosses being allowed to say “everyone should fire people who are politically on the left”. But just saying “universalizability!” doesn’t automatically let us do that.

(3) seems even sneakier. It is in fact the maxim promoted by the people who are actually doing the firing, since they seem to have some inkling that universalizability and “fairness” are important. And it sounds totally value-neutral and universalizable. And yet I feel like if we allow Levi to say this, then some rightist will say actually his maxim is “everyone should fire people who want to undermine traditional cultural institutions”, and the end result will be the same old “job opportunities halved for everyone”.

IV.

This is a hard problem. The best solution I can think of right now is to go up a meta-level, to say “universalize as if the process you use to universalize would itself become universal”.

Suppose I am very greedy, and I lie and steal and cheat to get money. I say “Well, my principle is to always do whatever gets Scott the most money”. This sooooooorta checks out. If it were universalized – and everyone acted on the principle “Always do whatever gets Scott the most money”, well, I wouldn’t mind that at all.

But if we say “universalize as if the process you use to universalize would itself become universal”, then we assume that if I try to universalize to “do what gets Scott the most money”, then Paula will universalize to “do what gets Paula the most money” and Levi will universalize to “do what gets Levi the most money” and we’ll all be lying and cheating and stealing from one another and no one will be very happy at all.

(Kant notes that this also satisfies his original, stricter “self-defeating contradiction” criterion. If we all try to steal from each other, then private property becomes impossible, the economy collapses, and the stuff we want isn’t there to steal. I don’t know if I like this; it seems a little forced. But even if contradictoriness is forced, badness seems incontravertible)

As for Levi, he knows that if he universalizes to “everyone should fire people who discriminate against minority groups”, his process is “pick out a political value that’s important to me and excludes a lot of potential employees, then say everyone should fire people who disagree with it”. This is sufficient to assume rightists will do the same and we’ll be back at half-as-many-jobs.

Next problem. Suppose I am a very rich and very selfish tycoon. I say “No one should worry about helping the needy”. I am perfectly happy with this being universalized, because it saves me from having to waste my time helping the needy. Although other people also won’t help the needy, I’m a super-rich tycoon and that’s no skin off my back.

We can climb part of the way out of this pit with meta-universalizability. We say “If I say things like this, everyone will only act on maxims that benefit them personally and appeal to their own idiosyncratic characteristics, rather than the ones that most benefit everyone.”

But I worry that this isn’t enough. Suppose I’m not just a tycoon, I’m a super-rich and powerful tyrannical king. I come up with maxims like “Everyone do what the tyrant says or be killed!” Candice the Kantian warns “If you do that, everyone will come up with maxims that benefit them personally, and the moral law will be weakened.”

And so I kill Candice for disagreeing with me.

If you are so much stronger than other people that you are immune to their counter-threats, you can get away with doing pretty much anything under this perversion of not-at-all-like-Kant we’ve wandered into.

We might have gotten so far from Kant at this point that we’ve stumbled into Rawls. Put up a veil of ignorance and the problem vanishes.

V.

What about utiltarianism?

I would love to universalize the maxim “Do whatever most increases Scott’s utility”.

Given concerns of meta-univeralizability above, I might end up instead wanting to universalize “Do whatever most increases global utility”.

This seems certain, maybe even provable, if you throw in the veil of ignorance accessory.

Utilitarianism has a lot of the same problems universalizability does. A very stupid utilitarian would automatically condemn Levi for firing Riley since now Riley is unemployed and this lowers his utility. More sophisticated utilitarians would have to take into account the various society-wide effects of Levi setting a precedent here. I think that’s what Mill’s rule utilitarianism tries to do and what precedent utilitarianism tries to do as well. The problem is that it’s really hard to figure out what rules and precedents have how much weight. Universalizability kind of plows through some of those objections like a giant steamroller. It probably prevents a couple of little incidents where you could steal something or kill someone to gain a little extra utility, but it more than makes up for it in vastly increasing social trust and ability for positive-sum deals.

I’m not sure whether consequentialism is prior to universalizability (“universalize maxims because if you don’t you’ll end up losing out on possible positive-sum games and cutting your job offers in half”), whether universalizability is prior to consequentialism (“be a consequentialist, because that is a maxim everyone could agree on”), or whether they’re like a weird ouroboros constantly eating itself.

I think maybe the idea I like best is that consequentialism is prior to universalizability is prior to any particular version of utilitarianism.

Because if universalizability is prior, that would be an interesting way to explore some of the problems with utilitarianism. For example, should we count pleasure or preferences? I don’t know. Let’s see what everyone would agree on.

Does everyone have to donate all of their money to the most efficient charity all the time? Well, if you were behind the veil of ignorance helping frame the moral law, would you put that in?

Does everyone have to prefer torture to dust specks? You’re behind the veil of ignorance, you don’t know if you’ll be a dust speck person or a torture person, what do you think?

I think this is a good point to remember the blog tagline and admit I am still confused, but on a higher level and about more important things.

Several groups played Fermat’s Last Stand simultaneously and got somewhat different experiences out of it. I’m basing this log on my own group’s progress, but adding some of the best features of the other groups’ campaigns and smoothing over some hiccups to make a sort of Platonic ideal. If anyone from the other groups didn’t finish yet, then for goodness’ sake don’t read further!

Credits and acknowledgements are at the bottom.

Prologue

Centuries ago, brilliant mathematician Pierre de Fermat came up with a proof so elegant that the God of Truth himself, mighty Aleithos, grew jealous. Taking inspiration from Fermat’s failure to fit his discovery in the margin of his notebooks, Aleithos afflicted the genius with the curse of macrographia: handwriting so large that his equations could never fit on any conceivable writing surface. Worse, when he tried to dictate his findings, his listeners were stricken with the same affliction. Constantly boasting of his proof but unable to publish it, Fermat was driven from land to land, until he eventually left civilization entirely and sailed across the sea, disappearing from history.

Recently, a shipwrecked man with curious features appeared in the court of Origin, saying he was the last survivor of a great civilization beyond the ocean, long since destroyed by plague. Centuries ago, his people had taken in Fermat and worshipped him as a god. And in their greatest temple, upon a titanic gold obelisk the size of a mountain, he had at last written his Theorem out in full. The man disappeared before he could say any more, but left behind a cloak in which were found a series of maps and directions written in a strange language.

Now people from all over the world are heading -yward, hoping to discover Fermat’s Last Obelisk and win unimaginable wealth and wisdom.

Fermat’s Last Stand

Years ago, Princess Cerune and a hardy band of adventurers crossed Mount Improbable and solved the paradox that had trapped Bertrand Russell and his kingdom in a magical sleep. Upon awakening, Russell implicated the mysterious Bayesian Conspiracy in his downfall, and urged the Princess to gather more information on their activities.

Now Cerune shows up in Summerglass, looking for a new party to travel with. Her quest for the Conspiracy is taking her to the great city of Origin, which sits at the confluence of the rivers Ordinate and Abcissa in the center of the Cartesian Plain. At the very center of Origin stands the infinitely tall ZAxis Tower, and at its base lives the Wizard of 0 = Z, legendary omniscient ruler of Origin. According to rumor, the Wizard will answer one question from any petitioner, and Cerune intends to ask him for information about the Bayesians. But the way to Origin will be long and hard, and she needs companions for the road ahead.

Six local philosophers take up her call. Markas, a physicist with a shadowy past. Chance and Carver, two ethicists whose values are in constant conflict. Alison, a radical feminist Marxist fleeing an embarrassing past as a princess. Cornelius, a hedge fund trader possessing the power of the free market. And Vivace, a local seminary student who gained mysterious powers after being bitten by a radioactive Jesuit.

But as they discuss their plans at a local tavern, others overhear their conversation, especially the part about “omniscient wizard will answer one question from any petitioner.” Daniel Dennett, a friend of Cerune’s from their last adventure, asks to join the party, explaining he has a particularly difficult puzzle to set before the Wizard:

Blaise Pascal, also an old friend of Cerune’s, disagrees with Dennett’s approach, explaining the problem he thinks they should get the Wizard to answer:

And suddenly a newcomer intrudes. Friedrich Nietzsche, who happens to be passing through Summerglass, explains that everyone is wrong, and tells the party the conundrum they ought to ask instead:

After some discussion, all three agree to join the party, which has now swollen to ten people. They stock up on supplies and leave Summerglass, heading -xward to Origin.

Their first obstacle is the Slough of Anarchy. This swamp was previously the Slough of Despotism until Cerune’s last adventure, when she and her companions killed the Leviathan who was oppressing the native people. But when the natives asked the regicides for help forming a replacement government, the few words of advice they gave – to avoid violence and oppression – got elevated into unbreakable laws and the Slough turned into a minarchy with avoidance of state force as its only guiding law. As a result, the whols swamp has become a lawless realm of bandits and con men, and Cerune & Co barely manage to make it alive to its capital of Malmesbury, where the former Hobbesgoblins (now just goblins) eke out a frontier existence.

Even worse, each night they fall asleep they are visited by some kind of apparition, a figure who angrily accuses them of summoning him, strikes at them with a powerful Prismatic Spray spell, and then disappears to parts unknown before our heroes can so much as counterattack. Distressed, Cerune splits from the party and decides to go to Origin on her own, while the others decide to press on and prove her wrong.

Their luck reaches its nadir the second night in Malmesbury, when their nocturnal visitor arrives and demolishes an entire floor of their hotel with his Prismatic Spray. But this time the party manages to corner him and force him to identify as Sir Isaac Newton. He describes the destructive Prismatic Spray spell as an incidental discovery in his attempts to puzzle out the nature of light:

This clue allows our heroes to finally work out how they are accidentally summoning him: Pascal sleeps on his large square shield each night, and one Pascal x square meter produces a Newton. Pleased that they have puzzled out the mystery of his summoning and freed him from these sudden accidental teleportations, Newton gives them a powerful artifact, the Prism of True Seeing, which he says will allow them to dispel magical illusions.

Encouraged by this victory, the party successfully kills a few alligators the next day and gets back in the black. Paying off their creditors, including the owner of the hotel damaged by Newton, they continue onward. But this requires navigating the complicated Slough railway system, an infrastructure dominated by scams and fly-by-night companies trying to separate unwary travelers from their money. The good news is that the city is full of Reputation Agents, businesses which for a price will inform you which other businesses are legitimate; the bad news is that some of the Reputation Agents are themselves illegitimate or bribeable, forcing the party to seek out an endless chain of Meta-Reputation Agents. Although they successfully solve several game theoretic problems and construct a framework for ensuring legitimate commerce in a minarchist society, they totally drop the ball on the object-level problem and end up on a train that breaks halfway through and strands them in the middle of the jungle, doomed to be eaten by snakes unless they can find some sort of railway engineer.

Markas puzzles out a solution to this problem that shares several features with the party’s last stroke of genius. They place Pascal on a square-meter object to summon Newton. Then they push a cart into Newton at one meter per second; Newton, surprised, pushes back, transforming him into James Watt (1 Watt = power required to push an object at 1 m/s against opposition of one Newton). James Watt is able to fix the train, allowing them to continue onward.

They are just about to reach Origin when Nietzsche, who has been growing gradually more erratic, turns on them, hoping to prove his worth as a superior being to the Wizard by overpowering and defeating his comrades. There is a climatic battle in the train car, and Nietzsche is defeated just as they pull into Origin. The party rushes into the hustle and bustle of the city, hoping to avoid awkward questions about Nietzsche’s death.

The great city of Origin is even more crowded than usual. Some of the crowd are treasure-seekers heading -yward on their way to seek Fermat’s Last Obelisk; others are failed treasure-seekers heading back +yward after having been attacked or capsized by the dreaded Mathematical Pirates, who seem to be unusually active in the -yward seas. There is a long queue for people trying to meet the Wizard, but the party rejoins with Cerune, who is impressed they have made it this far, and finds she has obtained an appointment at the ZAxis Tower that very morning.

The Wizard of 0=Z is a form of blazing fire in the center of a vast audience chamber. His speech seems to shake the very earth, and all who see him are struck with terror. Dennett is the first to approach, and asks the Wizard how the brain thinks; the Wizard explains that it is made of res cogitans, a substance with the property of thinking. Next Pascal asks how the heart feels emotions; the Wizard explains it is made of res sententia, a substance with the property of feeling. The Wizard continues in this matter, giving each of the travelers’ philosophical quandaries a Mysterious Answer, until finally Cerune asks him where she can find the Bayesian Conspiracy. Unable to deflect her question, the Wizard sets her a condition: he will only answer her question after she has brought him the broom of the Wicked Witch Of The Negative X Coordinate.

So the party – now minus Dennett and Pascal – travels -xward to the supposed castle of the Wicked Witch. But when they reach the -x coast, the “castle” turns out to be a cottage in a pleasant little village, and the “Wicked Witch” turns out to be Simone de Beauvoir, who invites them in for tea.

de Beauvoir explains that she used to work as the Wizard’s maid, but that while hanging around him and his friends she began to pick up some magic. She learned she had a talent for it, even enchanting the Wizard’s broom to clean on its own. When she realized none of the other magicians of Origin could perform such feats, she demanded a seat among them as a great thaumaturge. The people of Origin refused, saying women should stay in their place and not try to do mens’ work. Enraged, she took her magic broom and left Origin along with a group of like-minded women to form this commune on the -xward coast. She is disappointed that most of the women in Origin continue to accept their oppression without comment, and hopes to one day lead a revolution among them.

She and Alison immediately hit it off, and everyone decides to join forces to cut the Wizard down to size. de Beauvoir, during her time with the Wizard, got the impression that a lot of his much-vaunted “magic” was mere illusion. She suggests the party head back to Origin and try to blow his cover.

So Cerune and the six philosophers head back to Origin, where they sneak into the ZAxis Tower under cover of night. They look at the Wizard through Newton’s Prism of True Seeing, and see not a form of fire but a rather ordinary-looking man. When they confront him, he attacks them with fire, stones, and wild beasts, but the Prism of True Seeing allows the party to recognize all of these attacks as illusion, and they stand their ground.

Finally, defeated, the Wizard admits he is no Wizard at all. He is Rene Descartes, previously a philosopher in Origin. While investigating radical skepticism, Descartes had realized that all his sensory perceptions were being controlled by an all-powerful deceiving demon who had mastered the art of illusions. Descartes offered the demon a partnership, and together they took over Origin using Descartes’ cleverness and his former tormenter’s dark powers.

Cerune and her friends are ready to expose Descartes, but he points out that before his rise to power, Origin was poorly ruled and in the midst of a generation-long civil war. He claims that removing him would create a power vacuum that would plunge the city, now prosperous, into further bloodshed. After some discussion among the party’s two ethicists, they agree and leave the Wizard in power, but not before making him promise to call off his grudge against Simone de Beauvoir.

Sadly, the Wizard has no idea where to find the Bayesian Conspiracy, and Cerune is not willing to give up on her quest. In the libraries of Origin they find rumors of a second omniscient entity who answers the questions of travelers: the Turing Oracle. They decide to journey -yward to Cyberia, where the Oracle is said to hold court.

This journey takes them to the -yward coast, where makeshift camps of treasure-seekers dot the landscape, and signs of the devastation wrought by the dreaded Mathematical Pirates mark nearly every town and settlement. Our heroes fall in with a band of treasure-seekers traveling -xward, and they start discussing the puzzling clues on the supposed map to Fermat’s Obelisk. They are able to successfully decrypt some of the ciphers, which reveal the location of the fabled land of Terra Fermat as being beyond Omelas in the Sea of Speculation. Leaving the giddy treasure-seekers to pursue their discovery, the characters push on to Cyberia.

There they are told the Turing Oracle is no longer open for visitors. They break in anyway, but the Oracle explains through tears that the source of her power has been stolen. When legendary computer scientist Alan Turing died, he uploaded his consciousness into a wearable ultracomputer placed around his corpse, the Shroud of Turing. This turned him into a superintelligent man-machine hybrid, and allowed him to cybernetically communicate his will to followers around the world. Now, all communication from Turing has gone dark, suggesting that the Shroud of Turing has been stolen. The Oracle says she will answer the party’s questions if and only if they can recover the Shroud of Turing and restore her power.

Unfortunately, no one knows where Alan Turing has been buried, and therefore where the Shroud – and any clues to its disappearance – would be likely to be. Finally Cerune tracks down a local historian, who explains his hypothesis that Turing was buried in a church sitting on St. Cathol’s Rock in the middle of the Holy Sea – a claim he calls the Church-Turing Thesis. Believing this sounds plausible, everyone charters a boat and heads toward St. Cathol’s Rock.

The church, when they reach it, has been abandoned by all its former caretakers except a single monk who remains holed up in the library trying to finish a great masterwork on theology. Our heroes identify him as Thomas Aquinas through conversations like the following:

Vivace: Wait, are you Thomas Aquinas?

Aquinas: OBJECTION ONE: It would seem that I am not Thomas Aquinas. For the name “Thomas Aquinas” signifies a certain individual in medieval Europe on Earth, and this is neither Earth nor medieval. OBJECTION TWO: Further, Thomas Aquinas is a Saint, but men cannot be sainted until after their deaths, and I am still alive. ON THE CONTRARY, Scripture says in Exodus 3:14, “I am who I am”. I ANSWER THAT one may be Thomas Aquinas in two senses. First, one may be the literal personage of Thomas Aquinas, and thus be the medieval European monk. But creatures may in their essence resemble Thomas Aquinas more or less closely, and to those who partake the genus of Thomas Aquinas most closely, we can say by analogy that they, too, are Thomas Aquinas. REPLY OBJECTION ONE: I am Thomas Aquinas in the analogical, but not in the strict sense. REPLY OBJECTION TWO: The original Thomas Aquinas is dead, and therefore eligible for sainthood. Insofar as I resemble him, I am also a saint.

Vivace: Do you always talk like that?

Aquinas: OBJECTION ONE: It would seem I must always talk like this. For all creatures must behave according to their natures, and it is in the nature of Thomas Aquinas to analyze questions through logical disputation. OBJECTION TWO: Further, things strive to the perfection of their natural ends, replacing what is less good with what is more good. A properly ordered soul would not desire to reject what is better for what is worse. But I am a saint. Therefore I cannot reject a better mode of speech for a worse. ON THE CONTRARY, St. John Chrysostom condemns “those who use flowery language, not to inspire compunction, but to win vain praise.” I ANSWER THAT it is possible for me to stop talking like this. For to determine my proper actions, we must look to my proper end, and the proper end of humans is the glory of God. The end of speech, especially of religious speech, is to encourage proper reverence for the Divine, and any manner of speaking which does not compel the listener, or irritates them into departure, frustrates this end. REPLY OBJECTION ONE: It is not speaking this way qua speaking this way which is in the nature of Thomas Aquinas, but rather a desire for the glorification of God, from which speaking this way naturally proceeds. But if speaking this way were to fail to glorify God, it would be in the nature of Thomas Aquinas to speak otherwise. REPLY OBJECTION TWO: Speaking this way is good not in and of itself, but because it partakes of a greater end, namely the glorification of God.

This naturally annoys some of the harder-headed characters like Markas and Chance, who begin murmuring about the uselessness of theology and angels dancing on pinheads and such; Aquinas responds by defending the legitimacy of his chosen field:

Aquinas is originally reluctant to disclose the location of Turing’s grave, arguing that disturbing the dead is a sin and that the Turing Oracle’s prophecy reeks of witchcraft; Vivace is able to match him Bible quote for Bible quote and eventually wear him down. He directs everyone to the crypt of the church, where they find Turing’s gravesite. It has indeed been broken into and despoiled, its Shroud gone. The only clues are a green feather and a protractor. Markas very reasonably decides that people who have parrots and protractors are very likely Mathematical Pirates. The latest reports place the Mathematical Pirates around Omelas, so they continue south toward that great subcontinent of fabled wealth, eventually getting caught in a storm and shipwrecked on its +yward shore.

They stumble into a village in the hills nearby, only to find it has been struck by tragedy. The main export of Omelas is benthamite, a greenish metallic substance composed of pure utility. But yesterday morning the village’s menfolk went into the benthamite mines for their daily labor but did not return. Now the women and children fear something terrible has happened. They ask our heroes to go investigate; the party’s ethicists say they have no choice, and Cornelius agrees, motivated by the prospect of obtaining some of the world’s most valuable commodity.

The mines are dark, and the characters are likely to get eaten by grues. But they manage to fight off the grues (as well as their even scarier sisters, the bleens) and make it to the bottom of the mineshaft, where the village men are cowering. These villagers explain that they dug too greedily, and too deep, and awoke a chthonic being from primordial time – a Utility Monster. The monster has declared that it is trying to sleep and that the noise of footfalls bothers it, and politely asked everyone to keep quiet. Because its needs vastly outweigh those of all other beings, the menfolk of the village, good utilitarians all, have chosen to remain in the bottom of the mineshaft and starve to death rather than risk waking the monster up again by leaving.

Carver and Chance get into a long and heated debate about whether this is really the right thing to do. Unfortunately, the noise from the debate itself wakes the enraged monster, who decides to teach them a lesson by eating everybody. The party members flee and end up lost in the subterranean tunnel system (although they do end up gathering a few benthamite nuggets for their troubles). Finally, they find a corridor that looks sort of man-made, and follow it to the surface. They end up exiting a manhole and just barely avoiding getting hit by a trolley on a huge urban thoroughfare. They have stumbled into the City of Omelas, capital of its namesake subcontinent and one of the great metropolises of the world.

The City of Omelas, they soon learn, is surrounded by a protective bubble, a force-field that allows no one to enter or leave. Their sudden appearance is met with shock, interest, and fear, as they apparently wandered in through a previously unknown hole in the city’s defenses. While the City Guard starts filling in the sewers, Cerune and Co decide to have a talk with the King and figure out why they are being kept in the city and what they can do to get out. They head to the Royal Palace, even though the city’s transportation system does not exactly inspire confidence.

Nevertheless, they make it to the Royal Palace with only a few dilemmas and even fewer deaths, and request an audience with King Jeremy I. The King is just as anxious to see them as they are to see him, and so our heroes are ushered into the throne room and treated to a stirring rendition of the Omelas National Anthem:

The King is sympathetic to their story, but tells them that letting them out of Omelas is completely out of the question. No one goes in or out of Omelas on account of the Sorcerer, the shadowy enemy who is besieging the city. The Sorceror knows the True Names of all things and so controls all things. If the force field protecting the city is suspended even for a tiny fraction of a second, the Sorceror will seize upon the breach and raze Omelas to the ground.

Alison asks how exactly Omelas produces such an unbreachable force field anyway, at which point King Jeremy becomes angry and expels them from his presence.

So they head off to the force field, looking to see if they can find any weaknesses or any routes out of there. There are none – but when Chance places his hand up against the field, he hears what sounds like an infinitely sorrowful voice, saying simply “Find me”. He conjectures that it is someone involved in creating the force field, and after bribing a bunch of guards, soldiers, and policemen with the benthamite nuggets they took from the Utility Monster’s lair, our heroes gain access to the force field generating station.

There they find a young child forcibly restrained and being horribly tortured in a variety of different ways. Vivace rushes in to free the child, but just before he can unlock the restraints, the child shrieks at him to stop. Surprised, they hold back and wait as he explains his story.

He is (he tells them), Prince John Stuart, the son of the king. When the Sorcerer attacked Omelas, the Omelasian wizards said that they could form an unbreakable magical defense around the city, but that the ritual required a commensurately awful sacrifice – the torture of an innocent child. Unwilling to ask any of his subjects to make such a terrible sacrifice yet unwilling to let his city fall, the young Prince volunteered himself. When his father the King objected, the Prince snuck out of the palace at night, offered himself to the wizards, and by the time the King learned what had happened the force field was already in place and could not be disrupted without terrible repercussions.

But John Stuart is now reaching the end of his ability to bear such pain, and when he gives in the force field will fall. He promises Cerune and her friends that he will risk briefly suspending the force field to let them out of the city if they promise to defeat the Sorcerer for him. They agree to this deal and sneak out to the city walls, where the Prince keeps his side of the promise and flickers the force field just long enough to let them escape. Despite the danger, the Sorcerer’s forces do not spot the flicker, and the city remains safe for the time being.

Sure enough, they see a great war-camp surrounding the city on its -xward side, and in its center a great dark tower. They enter the camp pretending to be mercenaries, and the ruse works well enough: they are hired and brought before the Sorcerer to swear allegiance. The Sorcerer asks the names of his latest recruit, and they all tell him – except Alison, who remembering the story about the Sorcerer controling things by speaking their True Names, gives a pseudonym. Sure enough, the Sorcerer demonstrates his power to control those soldiers whose names he knows, and he orders them to continue his effort to besiege Omelas.

While he is talking, his daughter enters the room. He introduces her as the Princess Mary, but makes no remark upon her complexion, which is completely gray from her skin to her eyes to her lips to her hair. Mary begs her father for more books on neuroscience, but the Sorcerer angrily orders her away, and it seems their relation is not at all a happy one.

The Sorcerer dismisses them, and the still-free-willed Alison helps the others shake off the Sorcerer’s control. None can think of anything they have learned that would help them assassinate the Sorcerer, but Markas has meanwhile fallen madly in love with the beautiful albeit monochrome Princess Mary, and proposes the idea of breaking into her room and stealing her away from her obviously abusive father. Although his plan is clearly emotionally motivated, it isn’t a bad idea – they need to figure out if the Sorcerer has any weaknesses, and his uncanny daughter seems like the best person to ask

So they break into the Sorcerer’s tower that night, bribing the guards with their last few pieces of benthamite, and find Mary’s room. Mary, in tears, tells our heroes her story. When she was born, an astrologer said that the day she fully understood the color red, her father’s kingdom would fall. Her father, alarmed, used his magic to place a curse on Mary, turning her gray and preventing her from seeing in color. This gave Mary a permanent and unrelenting hatred for her father, and she spends her days studying optics and neuroscience, trying to learn to understand the color red despite her inability to see it. Markas tries to get her to run away with them, but Mary declines, saying her quest for knowledge – and revenge – comes first:

But Markas gives her the Prism of True Seeing. In an instant, the curse is dispelled, and Mary is able to see red for the first time. Overjoyed, she promises to help the characters in their quest to overthrow the Sorcerer. She tells them his secret: the Sorcerer is an accomplished philosopher of language, whose inquiries into the meanings of words have allowed him to discover their True Names and use them to gain power over them. But his magic can be nullified through the use of his own True Name: Saul Kripke.

And so while Mary goes forth to start a mutiny among the soldiers, our heroes confront Kripke directly in his throne room. At first Kripke seems invulnerable, but Cerune and the others manage to dispel his magic by working his True Name into a song about his identity and his work:

With the Sorcerer’s magic defeated, Mary is able to organize an uprising among his soldiers. They come in and arrest him, and Alison convinces everyone to declare the Sorcerer’s newly liberated realm, which comprises the entire -xward part of the Omelas subcontinent, to be a People’s Republic. Mary, abandoning her royal garb, gets herself installed as Premier, a peace is struck with the City of Omelas, and although Cornelius grumbles, the entire affair seems to be going well – until a rider comes from further up the subcontinent claiming that a village is on fire. With most of the military being occupied in protecting the fragile peace and evacuating their siege camp, the seven characters agree to investigate the attack and spread the good news of the liberation on the way there.

When they reach the coast, they stumble unaware into exactly the people responsible – a landing party of Mathematical Pirates. The pirates, sated with the last day’s plunder, are not hostile – instead asking if the party’s mathematicians can solve a certain dilemma they have gotten themselves into. This Markas does with little effort, impressing the buccaneers – maybe a little too much. At a word from the first mate, Infinitely Long John Silver, the Mathematical Pirates draw their swords, telling our heroes that they have been conscripted as the newest members of the pirate crew. Faced with the prospect of facing dozens of bloodthirsty pirates armed with highly advanced theorems and lemmas, and hoping to recover the stolen Shroud of Turing, they accept this with good grace and allow themselves to be marched to a secret rendezvous point.

There, they are taken on board the ship Hypatia’s Revenge and brought before Captain Pierre Simone de Laplace, who declares them to be Official Mathematical Pirates. There is great rejoicing, the grog is brought out, and everyone joins together in a raucous mathematical pirate shanty:

The party, Captain Laplace tells them, have come at an especially auspicious time: the Mathematical Pirates are just about to leave known waters to sail far to the -ymost side of the world in search of Terra Fermat, drawn by the legend of the mountain-sized golden obelisk stating a simple and intuitive proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Laplace brings out the Shroud of Turing, and says that its ultracomputational powers provide the last link in the puzzle by allowing him to solve the cryptographic locks protecting the obelisk’s treasure chamber. But any hopes of stealing the Shroud and returning to Omelas are dashed when Laplace declares they set forth that very night. The Hypatia’s Revenge strikes forth into uncharted seas, and our heroes are lone among hundreds of cutthroat albeit extremely erudite buccaneers.

Not wanting to be drawn into such a foolhardy adventure, Chance suggests trying something desperate. Some of the other Mathematical Pirates don’t seem to share Laplace’s single-minded obsession with Fermat’s Last Obelisk. Perhaps if they murdered the captain, his replacement would be more amenable to abandoning the Shroud and returning to a friendlier coast? This leads to a bit of research trying to determine how exactly a dead captain is replaced, information which Markas finds in the Pirate Code under the heading “Laplace’s Law of Succession”. This law declares that if Captain Laplace is killed, whoever among the crew wins a trial of mathematical skill will succeed him. Markas is confident he can win that contest and take control of the pirate ship, resolving all their worries.

So our party breaks into Laplace’s chambers late at night, intending to kill him in his sleep. Unfortunately, his parrot notices and wakes the Captain up with his habitual cry: “Prime factors of eight! Prime factors of eight!” The captain, seeing that the seven assailants have him cornered, grabs the Shroud of Turing and teleports away to parts unknown using the ninth-level Logician spell Infinite Egress. Meanwhile, a horde of angry pirates breaks into Laplace’s quarters and asks what the party has done to their captain. Swords and protractors are drawn, and the situation looks grim.

Just as Markas and Infinitely Long John Silver are about to begin an extremely deadly mathematical duel, they are interrupted by a sudden hail of cannonfire. While distracted by the attempted mutiny, the Mathematical Pirates have allowed themselves to be caught unawares by their arch-enemies, the Empirical Pirates. Ambushed and without a captain, the Mathematicians are easy prey for their Empiricist brethren. Seeing which way the tide is turning, the party joins with the Empiricist attackers, and Markas personally sends Infinitely Long John Silver to Davy Hilbert’s locker.

The party hopes the Empirical Pirates will be somewhat less set on foolhardy quests than their Mathematical colleagues. Markas calls for a parley with the Empiricist leader, famed natural-philosopher-turned-privateer Captain Hooke. But Hooke, having captured Laplace’s trove of clues and maps to the great treasure, is equally set on its capture. Abandoning his own ship because of damage taken during the fight, he loads the remaining Empirical Pirates onto the Hypatia’s Revenge and continues its voyage to the edge of the world.

After many days at sea, the ship reaches the shores of a strange land, filled with dense jungle and smoking volcanoes. Hooke says that his pilfered documents declare it to be the legendary Terra Fermat, and the Empirical Pirates and adventurers disembark. They push through the jungle, barely avoiding a host of colorful poisonous animals, until they come to a city of ruined ziggurats, strange idols, and a temple built into a volcano. The door to the volcano temple, disconcertingly, is wide open. Hooke leads the landing party inside.

The crew starts very quickly getting picked off by various nefarious traps that have been built in to the temple passages, and there are a series of odd puzzles and complicated mechanisms that fling those without the proper passkeys into lava, further decimating the group. By the time they reach the holy of holies, it is down to Captain Hooke, a few trusted lieutenants, and our plucky heroes, lost on in a strange land terribly far from home.

The center of the temple is filled with unimaginable riches in the form of gold, precious jewels, and works of primitive but disconcerting art. Yet there is no sign of the obelisk. As they push aside diamonds and emeralds looking for any hint of the Theorem’s whereabouts, Captain Hooke gets felled by a mysterious arrow. So too do the few remaining pirate lieutenants. Before their attacker can kill the original seven, Chance casts the spell Arrow Impossibility Theorem, preventing arrows from being fired within a certain radius, and Cornelius casts No-Ghost Theorem, dispelling invisibility enchantments around people and objects.

There stands revealed Captain Laplace, previously hidden from view by his Veil of Ignorance spell. In his Villain Monologue, Laplace explains that Fermat’s Last Obelisk is likely just a myth, a tale told to scare undergraduates. He himself had fanned the legend, posing as the original “shipwrecked sailor” who spread the story. His goal was to “crowdsource” certain odd riddles he had picked up from ancient texts, by inspiring a cottage industry of treasure-seekers desperate to solve them. When the party had unwittingly played into his hands by deciphering the clues, it had allowed him to pursue an entirely different treasure spoken of only in the oldest and mustiest books, a treasure beyond the very comprehension of the fools who chattered about Fermat’s Last Obelisk.

He picks up a strange, glimmering sphere from the treasure chamber and tells the characters that it is the Eye of Aixitl, the most powerful computing device in the world – and as if to punctuate his point he throws the Shroud of Turing – which he had used to access the temple before Hooke had even arrived – on the ground derisively. In all they had done, he says, they had been the puppets of himself and of the other Secret Masters – puppets of the Bayesian Conspiracy.

Laughing maniacally, he declares: “You will always remember this as the day you almost caught Captain Pierre Simon de Laplace!”. Then he casts Infinite Egress and vanishes, cryptically telling his parrot to stay behind and take care of the witnesses.

The parrot morphs into a hideous and enormous hell-creature, Laplace’s Demon, and brutally attacks the party by concentrating the heat from the volcano into scorching projectiles. Alison, who has been fighting off a poison she contracted in the jungle, quickly falls to its onslaught, and Cornelius and Carver perish as well. The others fight back with everything they have. Markas uses Tegmark’s Ultimate Ensemble to flit among universes, making it impossible for him to die. Vivace casts Summon Bonum to call an angelic host to his defense. And Chance turns to Nietzschean metaphysics and casts Eternal Recurrence, allowing his party’s spells to repeat an unlimited number of times.

Laplace’s Demon responds with his own grimoire of Logical and Empirical spells, casting Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Cloak to disguise his location from view by declaring his speed, and Cantor’s Diagonal Slash to deal a different amount of damage each round. The increasingly desperate heroes counter with new spells of their own: Sieve of Eratosthenes to block attacks that deal non-prime amounts of damage, and Inverse Communion to turn their enemy’s flesh and blood into bread and wine.

After a truly epic battle the demon collapses with a fall that shakes the temple to its foundations. A wall falls over, showing the four surviving adventurers a sight not beheld for centuries.

In the heart of the volcano stands a golden obelisk the size of a small mountain, covered with vast hieroglyphic markings. Vivace uses his last few points of Will to cast a spell that allows him to translate the inscription. It reads:

No three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value of n greater than two. I have a discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this colossal golden obelisk is too small to contain.

Wounded, angry, and dejected, the four survivors limp out of the temple and back through the jungle. On the coast they discover even worse news: before departing entirely, Captain Laplace had taken the time to torch their pirate ship, leaving them stranded on the island.

Vivace struggles valiantly to try to mantain the virtue of Hope, while the more secular Markas has no such compunctions. Not only, he says, are they stranded on a desert island. Not only has their entire quest been playing into the hands of the Bayesian Conspiracy. Not only are three of their party dead, and Laplace escaped. But Fermat’s Last Theorem, the most beautiful result in all of mathematics, has been lost forever.

Cerune disagrees, saying that no knowledge is ever truly lost, and that just as the Theorem might one day be rediscovered, so they must not lose hope that their quest might bear fruit:

The story of Cerune, the Bayesian Conspiracy, and all the rest will be continued in a third and final adventure in this campaign, Maximum Entropy Prior. ETA is approximately “several years”.

Credits

Utmost thanks to everyone who worked to make this a reality / extremely compelling fantasy.

My special eternal gratitude goes to everyone who helped create the music. I accept full blame for the lyrics, but the vocals, recording work, and occasional instrumentals were handled by a whole crew of people. Buck Shlegeris and his band were responsible for the amazing “Mathematical Pirate Shanty”. Parts in “Philosopher Kripke” were voiced by myself and by Leah Libresco. And everything else was produced and sung by Michael Blume and by my lovely girlfriend Alicorn, who between them took all the other male and female parts.

Ari Rahikkala solved a few technical problems, Ezra B hacked together a sort of karaoke version of “Hymn to Him” for an emergency, and Nisan helped coordinate recruitment and publicity.

Grudging acknowledgement also goes to the players, named here in a haphazard combination of real and online names according to preference. Markas was voiced by David S, Carver by Sam B, Cornelius by Joe M, Chance by Berry, Alison by Ozy Franz, and Vivace by KarmaKaiser.

There were also several simultaneous runthroughs of Fermat’s Last Stand run by different DMs. None of them really communicated with me and I am not sure whether or not they actually took place. But if Charlie, Karl, falenas108 and gyukuro actually did their adventures like they said they would, they deserve major Virtue Points as well, as do their (supposed?) players Pleeppleep, Aretae, Romeo Stevens, Rick JS, Nathan from LA, tster75, Tarn Fletcher, JohnWBH, Ben from Oxford, Slow Learner, Avantika, and Thomas Eliot.

The readerships of Slate Star Codex, Less Wrong, and Unequally Yoked helped come up with some spell names and generally encouraged the creative process.

The Bayesian Conspiracy was stolen from Eliezer Yudkowsky and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (read it! No, seriously, read it!), large portions of the plot were stolen from The Wizard of Oz, songs were stolen from their respective sources, the Omelas Transit Authority symbol was stolen from Leah and portions of the Mathematical Pirate Shanty were stolen from various sites with mathematician/pirate jokes that somehow actually already existed because the Internet is amazing.

If you liked this adventure, you may want to read the prequel as well, or use the associated Dungeons and Discourse Rulebook to create an adventure of your own.