Tag Archives: Ethics

Being Paid What You’re Worth

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Robert Reich is an economist who was Secretary of Labor in the 90s and is now a Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He’s also a blogger who knows what he’s talking about (unlike some of us). I doubt he would mind this extended quote from RobertReich.org:

“Paid-what-you’re-worth” is a dangerous myth.

Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker got paid $35 an hour in today’s dollars. Today, America’s largest employer is Walmart, and the typical Walmart workers earns $8.80 an hour.

Does this mean the typical GM employee a half-century ago was worth four times what today’s typical Walmart employee is worth? Not at all. Yes, that GM worker helped produce cars rather than retail sales. But he wasn’t much better educated or even that much more productive. He often hadn’t graduated from high school. And he worked on a slow-moving assembly line. Today’s Walmart worker is surrounded by digital gadgets — mobile inventory controls, instant checkout devices, retail search engines — making him or her quite productive.

The real difference is the GM worker a half-century ago had a strong union behind him that summoned the collective bargaining power of all autoworkers to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members. And because more than a third of workers across America belonged to a labor union, the bargains those unions struck with employers raised the wages and benefits of non-unionized workers as well. Non-union firms knew they’d be unionized if they didn’t come close to matching the union contracts.

Today’s Walmart workers don’t have a union to negotiate a better deal. They’re on their own. And because fewer than 7 percent of today’s private-sector workers are unionized, non-union employers across America don’t have to match union contracts. This puts unionized firms at a competitive disadvantage. The result has been a race to the bottom.

By the same token, today’s CEOs don’t rake in 300 times the pay of average workers because they’re “worth” it. They get these humongous pay packages because they appoint the compensation committees on their boards that decide executive pay. Or their boards don’t want to be seen by investors as having hired a “second-string” CEO who’s paid less than the CEOs of their major competitors. Either way, the result has been a race to the top.

Professor Reich doesn’t say anything about the effects of globalization in this post, but it’s obviously a factor. Our economic bottom isn’t in West Virginia or Mississippi anymore, it’s in Guatemala and Bangladesh. Even so, a strong labor movement would help slow down the race to the bottom and to the top.

There’s a question worth asking, however: Would it be better from an ethical point of view if workers in places like Guatemala were paid more at the cost of American workers being paid less? In other words, are we in rich countries automatically entitled to a better standard of living than people in poor countries? After all, for a worker in Guatemala, our race to the bottom is his or her race to the middle. If work can be performed just as well but more cheaply in Guatemala, why should it be performed in California?

I don’t know the answer to that question. Although it’s clear we should slow down the race to the very top (it’s gotten completely ridiculous), I’m not sure what should be done for the rest of us. Maybe the answer is to provide a reasonable minimum income for those of us in the rich countries, while doing more to improve the lives of those at the bottom. 

Update:

For example, as suggested here:  Considering a No-Strings-Attached Basic Income for All Americans

A Guide to Reality, Part 11

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In chapter 6 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, Professor Alex Rosenberg offers an explanation of what he calls “nice nihilism”. The point he wants to make is that, although we should all be ethical nihilists and recognize that morality is an illusion, nihilism is nothing to worry about. We humans have evolved to be nice to each other, on balance, so we can continue to behave ethically despite giving up the idea that any of our ethical beliefs are true or correct.

Rosenberg begins with an account of human evolution, beginning a few million years ago when our ancestors left the African jungle and moved to the savanna. 

savanna2

Scientists believe that our ancestors began consuming more protein on the savanna (see striped animals above). This dietary change had certain biological effects, including increased fertility:

[There were] more mouths to feed over longer periods, but mothers prevented from providing for older offspring by the demands of younger ones; males living longer and so having still more offspring, putting further strains on available resources; and those offspring needing literally years of protection and nourishment before they could fend for themselves [118].

Living on the savanna also meant our ancestors had to compete with other predators and scavengers and avoid being eaten themselves. To make a long story short, the key to survival was cooperation, including the division of labor.

Rosenberg admits that reconstructing the very early history of the human race is somewhat speculative, but he invokes game theory to help explain why cooperation won out. Game theory, supported by computer simulations, has revealed that “tit for tat” and “fair and equal” strategies have the most favorable outcomes over time and, as he points out, human evolution was not an overnight phenomenon.

Still, he wonders whether biology and game theory can alone account for the widespread existence of norms like fairness, equity and cooperation:

But how does natural selection get people to adopt such norms? How does it shape such adaptations? … This problem looks like it’s too hard to be solved by genetically-based natural selection. Maybe if there were genes for playing tit for tat, they would be selected for. But at least in the human case, if not in animal models, such genes seem unlikely [134].

It isn’t clear why Rosenberg doubts the existence of a strong genetic basis for cooperation. On the contrary, there is some recent evidence that human infants have a built-in sense of fair play (The Atheists Guide was published in 2011). Instead, Rosenberg argues that core morality (the morality that’s common among world cultures) has come about partly through a process of “cultural natural selection” (134).

Again, I’m not sure what Rosenberg means by “cultural natural selection”, since earlier he suggested that “core morality is almost certainly locked-in by now” (108). Obviously, purely cultural practices are learned, not transmitted genetically. There is no set of genes that transmits the rules of baseball. Maybe he’s merely pointing out that there is no genetic basis for specific moral rules or practices, like keeping promises or tit-for-tat. Instead, he asks:

What kind of a device could nature have hit on in the course of our evolution that could guarantee to others that we will act in accordance with norms of niceness, fairness, equity and much of the rest of the moral core? It would have had to be a device that overrides the temptation to cheat, cut corners, free-ride when the opportunity occurs [136].

His answer is emotion. Emotions are “hardwired by genes we share” and “get harnessed together” with norms that are adaptive in our environments. They “motivate enforcement” of core morality and also morality’s local variations. For example, he argues that different norms will develop in pastoral vs. agricultural communities. Shepherds have to protect against rustlers, since their animals are easy to lead away. Farmers don’t have a similar problem, since a rustler can’t lead away a herd of wheat. As a result, herding communities develop strong emotions regarding theft and the need for revenge, while farming communities don’t (maybe they develop strong emotions regarding their plots of land, but Rosenberg doesn’t say). Some important combinations of norms and emotions enhance fitness in all environments, however; the norms in those combinations become part of core morality.

I don’t think it’s important for our purposes to understand exactly where the obscure boundary is between genetic and cultural transmission of norms and emotions. His thesis is that there is a strong relationship between morality and emotion, and that natural selection has played an important role in the evolution of both. In particular, the emotions of shame and guilt have been especially important in getting people to choose long-term benefits (e.g., remaining part of a community by behaving nicely) over short-term ones (e.g., enjoying candy you stole from your little brother).

Pointing out the strong connection between morality and emotion isn’t new with Rosenberg or isn’t an especially scientistic view. That connection has been emphasized by most philosophers, some of whom have argued that morality is a kind of cultural emotionalism: morality promotes or should promote behavior that makes people happy or feel good in the long run, and discourages or should discourage behavior that doesn’t. It’s also been pointed out that emotions aren’t usually irrational. People often get angry over things that aren’t that important from other people’s perspective, but angry people can almost always say why they’re angry, and there is usually some validity to their reasoning.

The last issue Rosenberg addresses in chapter 6 is why there is so much bad behavior if morality has been programmed into us. The obvious answer is that there is always variation in traits that are subject to evolution. With morality, most people end up in the middle, with saints on one side and sociopaths on the other. The chapter ends with the reminder that, although core morality evolved into its present form and has contributed to the reproductive success of human beings, that doesn’t make it right or true, since ethical beliefs are neither true nor false. 

One question Rosenberg should have considered in greater depth is whether accepting ethical nihilism would make people behave less ethically. His answer is that we shouldn’t worry about the nihilists who may be lurking in our midst because they’ve also been programmed via natural and cultural selection to behave ethically (for the most part).

But some studies have shown that after being exposed to the idea that they lack free will and therefore aren’t responsible for their actions, people tend to become more selfish or dishonest. Being exposed to new philosophical ideas can clearly affect behavior. It’s been reported that one philosopher, Saul Smilansky, refuses to teach his students about free will and determinism because he’s afraid that their sense of responsibility will be affected. So it isn’t clear at all that the widespread adoption of ethical nihilism by itself or as part of scientism would leave society’s moral behavior untouched. This might be a case in which we couldn’t handle the truth.

Next installment: Whether we should let consciousness be our guide.

A Guide to Reality, Part 10

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Chapters 5 and 6 of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality are all about morality. In chapter 5, he lays out what he calls the “bad news”: there is no “cosmic value” to human life and moral questions have no correct answers. Rosenberg explicitly endorses ethical nihilism:

Real moral disputes can be ended in lots of ways. by voting, by decree, by fatigue of the disputants, by the force of examples that changes social mores. But they can never really be resolved by finding the correct answers. There are none….All anyone can really find are the answers that they like [96].

To be completely consistent, Rosenberg would probably have to admit that there is no “bad” anything, not even news. Since, on his view, “physics fixes all the facts” and there is nothing truly good or bad in the world at all. After all, one quark is just the same as another.

Rosenberg explains that nihilism isn’t the same as relativism or skepticism. It’s not the case that ethical views can be correct at some times and not at others, or that we can never know for sure which ethical views are right or wrong. Nihilism doesn’t even mean that “everything is permitted”, since nothing is morally “permitted” or “forbidden”:

[All moral judgments] are based on false, groundless presuppositions. Nihilism says that the whole idea of “morally permissible” is untenable nonsense. [Nihilism] can hardly be accused of holding that “everything is morally permissible”. That, too, is untenable nonsense [97].

Nothing at all is morally valuable in itself  (“intrinsically”) or even as a means to something that is.

Notice, however, that Rosenberg isn’t a nihilist about everything. At least, he gives the strong impression that he believes some ideas are true and some are false, and some beliefs are justified and some aren’t. But it’s generally accepted that truth and justification are “normative” concepts just as much as “right” and “wrong”, i.e., they are value-laden. True statements are those which “correctly” describe some state of affairs, while justified beliefs are those that have “good” reasons for believing them. But physics has nothing to say about correct descriptions or good reasons.

In the rest of chapter 5, Rosenberg offers an argument for the truth of ethical nihilism. He begins with a version of the famous question Plato asked in his Euthyphro dialogue: If our favorite moral rule (whatever it happens to be) is both morally correct and favored by God, is it correct because God favors it or does God favor it because it’s correct? Some Christian theologians have tried to deal with the question by invoking the Trinity or by claiming that the question presupposes a misunderstanding of God’s nature, but most people would probably agree that God favors moral rules because they are correct, not the other way around.

Rosenberg, of course, isn’t really interested in a theological version of the question. He brings it up because he thinks it presents an important challenge to his own scientistic position.

He next argues that there is a core set of moral principles common to all cultures. These principles are so common and so obvious, in fact, that they are rarely discussed. For example, we all agree that parents should protect their children; self-interest is acceptable until it becomes selfishness; and it’s wrong to punish people at random. Rosenberg thinks this core morality is the product of millions of years of human evolution (which sounds right to me, too).

He then asks a Euthyphro-like question: did evolution result in our core morality because it’s the correct morality, or is it the correct morality because it resulted from evolution?

Is natural selection so smart that it was able to filter out all the wrong, incorrect, false core moralities and end up with the only one that just happens to be true? Or is it the other way around: Natural selection filtered out all but one core morality, and winning the race is what made the last surviving core morality the right, correct, true one [109].

This question seems more difficult to answer than the theological version. Rosenberg, in fact, argues that the question has no answer. On one hand, evolution is blind, so there was no way for evolution to “know” which morality is correct. Furthermore, evolution has resulted in common views and practices that don’t seem ethical at all, like patriarchy and xenophobia. For that matter, the fact that religion is so common implies that evolution is good at generating false (but useful) beliefs.

On the other hand, just because our core morality resulted from evolution doesn’t make it right. Lots of things have evolved that we’d be better off without (like using the same anatomical feature to eat and breathe). More fundamentally, Rosenberg suggests that there is nothing morally right about having children who tend to survive and have other children, which is the principal thing natural selection makes happen.

But if our core morality isn’t correct because it evolved, and it didn’t evolve because it’s correct, the reasonable conclusion to draw is that our morality isn’t correct at all. In other words, morality isn’t true. It’s merely useful:

Scientism cannot explain the fact that when it comes to the moral core, fitness and correctness seem to go together. But neither can it tolerate the unexplained coincidence. There is only one alternative. We have to give up correctness…

Scientism starts with the idea that the physical facts fix all the facts, including the biological ones. These in turn have to fix the human facts – the facts about us, our psychology and our morality…The biological facts can’t guarantee that our core morality (or any other one, for that matter) is the right, true or correct one. If the biological facts can’t do it, then nothing can. No moral core is right, correct, true. That’s nihilism. And we have to accept it [113].

We might immediately object that the biological facts might not justify morality, but the social facts do. Rosenberg claims that lower-level facts, like the biological, determine higher-level facts, like the psychological. That may indeed be true (I think it is anyway), but isn’t it likewise the case that psychological facts determine social facts, which in turn determine ethical facts? If there are ethical facts (if ethical evaluations can have truth values – which is, by the way, a controversial view among philosophers), aren’t those facts determined by lower-level facts as well?

Those who think ethical statements can be true or false would probably argue that evolution has generated morality, but moral disagreement occurs because we simply haven’t figured out what all the ethical facts are. We know some ethical facts (it’s wrong to hurt people at random and other elements of Rosenberg’s core morality) but not others (is paternalism good in some cases? how about euthanasia?). 

I’ll end for now with the comment that philosophical arguments, even interesting ones like Rosenberg’s, hardly ever destroy the opposition. They almost always lead to more arguments. 

In our next installment, we’ll proceed to chapter 6, in which Rosenberg argues that nihilism is nothing to worry about, since nihilism can be nice. 

Whatever You Do, Please Don’t Watch This Movie

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It was Friday night and I was open to some mindless cinematic entertainment. That’s my excuse. But having wasted almost two hours of my life watching Olympus Has Fallen, the only thing I can do to partly redeem myself is to warn anyone who might be open to some mindless entertainment not to make the same mistake I did.

If only my curiosity about how they would end this thing hadn’t gotten the best of me.

The premise is that a bunch of well-armed, oddly-motivated Koreans take over the White House with the help of an ex-Secret Service agent who has “lost his way” (that’s an understatement). Their goal is to somehow reunite North and South Korea while destroying the United States. Lots of people are killed in the attack. Furthermore, the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – the three people who know the passwords that will blow up all of America’s nuclear missiles – happen to be at the White House and end up as hostages in the presidential bunker. There’s only one intrepid Secret Service agent left standing. Not only does he kill every bad guy he meets, he rescues the President and the President’s son, after which he stops the countdown to nuclear catastrophe with only seconds to spare.

It’s stupid, exceedingly violent, poorly-written and cliche-ridden, but it’s only a big-budget action movie. What bothered me was the idea that some people’s lives and suffering are much more important than everyone else’s. The President gives up secret codes, jeopardizing the whole country, in order to protect two people. The Speaker of the House (the Vice President is a hostage too) orders the Army and Navy to withdraw from South Korea, accepting the idea that he’s probably starting a war, in order to save the President’s life. Bodies are strewn all around the White House and the District of Columbia, but the President and his Secret Service pal crack jokes as they walk outside. The brain trust in the Pentagon’s command center is so happy when the President is rescued that they all stand and applaud, despite the fact that they’ve presided over the worst breach of security in the nation’s history, during which scores of innocent people were maimed and killed and the lives of millions of others were unnecessarily put at risk.

Really, if you’re a senior official who’s taken hostage, consider yourself expendable. You can be replaced.

By the way, Netflix claims that 900,000 people have given this epic an average rating of 4.2 out of 5, meaning the average viewer really liked it. Some people loved it. From the comments, some people even took it seriously. I’d tell you to judge for yourself, but that would be wrong. 

On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Maudmarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen

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On the Genealogy of Morality (more often translated as “On the Genealogy of Morals”) is Nietzsche’s attempt to explain why many of us subscribe to Judeo-Christian morality, and why we’re wrong to do so.

The book is divided into three treatises. In the first treatise, Nietzsche argues that there was an ancient distinction between “good” and “bad”. “Good” referred to the powerful, i.e. the nobility; “bad” referred to the weak, i.e. the slaves. Then Judaism and Christianity popularized a new distinction, replacing “bad” with “evil”. “Good” people were now those who followed strictures like the Golden Rule and evil people were those who didn’t. Judeo-Christian morality embraces ideas like compassion for the weak in place of respect (including self-respect) for the strong. It is “slave morality”.

The second treatise describes the origins of punishment in the ancient relationship between creditor and debtor and the subsequent creation of the guilty conscience. God was erected as the ultimate creditor to which we owe absolutely everything. We are not worthy. We feel guilt. Nietzsche says that having a guilty conscience is a kind of sickness. We should accept the fact that we all have a fundamental “will to power” or, what he says is an equivalent phrase, an “instinct for freedom”. If we suppress our will to power, if we do not act as we will, our internal energy bursts forth in other ways. We become sick. We suffer. 

According to Nietzsche, bad conscience should really be wed to “the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to the beyond, to that which is contrary to the senses, contrary to the instincts, contrary to nature, contrary to the animal — in short, the previous ideals which … are hostile to life, ideals of those who libel the world” (section 24).

Not everyone recommends reading the third treatise. It is an extended rant concerning the ill effects of religion as practiced by the “ascetic priest”. To quote Nietzsche: “the ascetic ideal and its sublime-moral cult, this most ingenious, most unsuspected and most dangerous systematizing of all the instruments of emotional excess under the aegis of holy intentions, has inscribed itself in a terrible and unforgettable way into the entire history of man” (section 21). But not all is lost: “It is from the will to truth’s becoming conscious of itself that from now on — there is no doubt about it — morality will gradually perish” (section 27).

Nietzsche apparently believes that the will to power or instinct for freedom is such a large part of human psychology that it is foolish to deny it. In order to live good, healthy lives, we need to create our own morality, one that meets our need for power and freedom, if we are capable of doing so. This does not necessarily mean that we must treat other people badly. We just have to remember that we should always come first. It isn’t surprising that this philosophy appeals to some people, since it is awfully one-dimensional. Fortunately, cooperation, compassion and even altruism are natural too.  (4/2/12)