Of course, in real life, it would take far too long and be far too costly to actually calculate all this. Still, we can probably agree that some actions are more right or more wrong than others. Indeed, Courts frequently award damages which take account of the 'wrongness' of the misdeed.
The sit-com 'The Good Place' is set in the After Life- where infinite computing power is ubiquitous- and thus every action on earth can be evaluated in terms of 'shadow prices'.
The NYR says-
Michael Schur’s initial premise, in true sitcom fashion, was a kind of joke. What if life was, ethically speaking, a sort of video game — if every action had a point value, positive or negative, and the goal was to rack up the highest score? This is where “The Good Place” started. In the show’s first episode, during Michael’s orientation session, you can read dozens of scored behaviors, positive and negative, on his celestial presentation board: everything from “pet a lamb” (+0.89 points), “remember sister’s birthday” (+15.02) and “save a child from drowning” (+1,202.33) to “stiff a waitress” (-6.83), “disturb coral reef with flipper” (-53.83) and “poison a river” (-4,010.55).This isn't actually very different from the way we think of our economy ought to function. Those who wish to present themselves to us as heroes often claim to be 'effective altruists' helping thousands or millions or billions of people. There is a sort of gigantism to our moral economy. We are told that we can save a child, or a species, or an entire ecology, by setting up a standing order for a few dollars a month payable to a specific charity, or by buying a different type of car, or even by giving up an item in in one's diet.
The problem here is that if it is true that we can do a disproportionate amount of good by quite small 'first order' actions, surely we can an also do almost infinite amount of good by concentrating on 'second order' gestures (i.e. actions that prompt others to perform first order actions) or 'third order' accomplishments (e.g philosophising in a manner that persuades others to do second order good which in turn has a big multiplier effect on first order altruism) and so on ad infinitum.
Clearly, there is a danger that 'higher order altruism' might substitute for, or crowd out, first order good actions. Indeed, the net effect may be negative. People may give up productive jobs so as to become 'chuggers'- charity muggers. Economists may stop doing the math to figure out ways to do stuff more cheaply and instead concentrate on measuring the effectiveness of other people doing useful stuff- which can have a perverse effect if it changes the incentive structure. Teachers may stop teaching in order to concentrate on gaming the evaluation mechanism. The Environment may turn to shit as everybody concentrates on raising environmental awareness by jetting off to Conferences about how to reduce one's carbon footprint.
In the sitcom 'the Good Place', the big twist in the tail of Season 1, is that the apparent goody-goodys turn out to be fakes. The silent Buddhist monk is actually an imbecilic small-time crook. The British-Pakistani philanthropist literally died of jealousy of her even more successful sibling, and even the handsome Senegalese philosopher, Chidi, turns out to have been damned by his Burdian's ass like indecisiveness.
However, by a heart warming reversal of expectations, this bunch of losers somehow form genuine emotional connections and start helping each other in a first-order manner even though this involves excursions into 'third order' philosophy.
At the beginning of Episode 6, Chidi holds up a book: a thick academic paperback with one of those devastatingly quiet covers (earth tones, Morandi still-life) that make you feel as if you will never be allowed to leave the library again.
Eleanor reads its title aloud — “What We Owe to Each Other” — and gasps.
“I saw this movie!” she says. “Laura Linney cries in a lake house because Jude Law left her for his ex-wife’s ghost.”
Eleanor has hit the nail on the head! What we owe each other, over and above our contractual obligations, is something ghostly- like the fake Good Place (which turns out to be a Swedenborgian Hell of extreme deviousness) itself. It is 'meta-metaphorical' and ontologically dysphoric rather than anything concrete or 'at home in the world'.
The NYT article continues-
The NYT article continues-
This synopsis, of course, is incorrect. The book is actually a dense work of philosophy by the Harvard emeritus professor T.M. Scanlon. It introduces an idea called “contractualism.” As Chidi explains it to Eleanor: “Imagine a group of reasonable people are coming up with the rules for a new society. ... But anyone can veto any rule that they think is unfair.” (“Well, my first rule would be that no one can veto my rules,” Eleanor responds, to which Chidi counters, “That’s called tyranny, and it’s generally frowned upon.”)
Eleanor is right and Chidi is wrong. 'Non-Dictatorship' as a desiderata for Arrowvian Social Choice is itself Dictatorial. Suppose Eleanor always makes what everybody with hindsight would agree are the best decisions. Then nobody would want to veto her rules, if only they had fore-knowledge. It is perfectly possible for everyone to have a veto power without imperilling optimal Social Choice. It is irrational to give a dog a bad name and then hang him by saying 'this is tyranny' or 'this is Arrowvian Dictatorship' or whatever.
Eleanor is right and Chidi is wrong. 'Non-Dictatorship' as a desiderata for Arrowvian Social Choice is itself Dictatorial. Suppose Eleanor always makes what everybody with hindsight would agree are the best decisions. Then nobody would want to veto her rules, if only they had fore-knowledge. It is perfectly possible for everyone to have a veto power without imperilling optimal Social Choice. It is irrational to give a dog a bad name and then hang him by saying 'this is tyranny' or 'this is Arrowvian Dictatorship' or whatever.
The book seeks to explain how human societies might find moral authority without appealing to a deity or inherited laws.
Why bother seeking such an explanation? It is always possible to explain any moral order by appealing to a deity or inherited laws though deities don't exist and inherited laws have no more power to bind than inherited patterns of cat impersonation.
Indeed, it is likely- from what little we know about the evolution of life on earth- that appeals to deities or inherited laws were always rationalizations after the fact.
So the thing is useless. It can only add noise to signal- i.e. turn out to be garbage.
The answer comes from a sort of idealized social negotiation — the process of thinking, in good faith, with a community of other good-faith thinkers.
But we know the result of genuine thinking of this sort. It is that everybody decides that only 'first order' research of a STEM type is worthwhile. University Departments which do other stuff only exist for signalling or screening purposes. They turn out hacks and pen-pushers and sycophants who get by on 'rent dissipation'.
True, there is cross-subsidisation within the University such that people studying shite subjects- like Moral Philosophy or Welfare Economics- cross-subsidise those doing genuine research. However, this is a bit of an own goal because those with Doctorates in shite subjects become administrators and push forward all sorts of bogus programs which crowd out genuine research.
As Scanlon puts it: “Thinking about right and wrong is, at the most basic level, thinking about what could be justified to others on grounds that they, if appropriately motivated, could not reasonably reject.'
Thus the administrators can gain 'interessement' or 'obligatory passage point status' by pretending that STEM research might endanger gender or racial equality, or the sanctity of the Environment, or the True Religion, or the hegemony of the Master Race, or 'Universal Civilization', or some other such shibboleth.
The 'appropriately motivated' STEM subject researcher grows deathly afraid of being called a racist, or misogynist or Dr. Strangelove or whatever and thus meekly goes along with the Stalinism of the Culture Industry.
If what is right is what is optimal for everyone, all things considered, and if debate is a good thing, then antagonomic principles (i.e. the principle that there should be no principles) can't always be wrong. Indeed, if cognitive resources are scarce, it must be the case that antagonomic principles are always optimal if an 'un-principled' mechanism can do just as good a job as a 'deontic' one- something we are inclined to believe because of results from complexity and concurrency theory as well as that of repeated games.
This rules out Scanlon's definition of wrong- '"An act is wrong if and only if any principle that permitted it would be one that could reasonably be rejected by people moved to find principles for the general regulation of behaviour that others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably reject"
Why bother seeking such an explanation? It is always possible to explain any moral order by appealing to a deity or inherited laws though deities don't exist and inherited laws have no more power to bind than inherited patterns of cat impersonation.
Indeed, it is likely- from what little we know about the evolution of life on earth- that appeals to deities or inherited laws were always rationalizations after the fact.
So the thing is useless. It can only add noise to signal- i.e. turn out to be garbage.
The answer comes from a sort of idealized social negotiation — the process of thinking, in good faith, with a community of other good-faith thinkers.
But we know the result of genuine thinking of this sort. It is that everybody decides that only 'first order' research of a STEM type is worthwhile. University Departments which do other stuff only exist for signalling or screening purposes. They turn out hacks and pen-pushers and sycophants who get by on 'rent dissipation'.
True, there is cross-subsidisation within the University such that people studying shite subjects- like Moral Philosophy or Welfare Economics- cross-subsidise those doing genuine research. However, this is a bit of an own goal because those with Doctorates in shite subjects become administrators and push forward all sorts of bogus programs which crowd out genuine research.
As Scanlon puts it: “Thinking about right and wrong is, at the most basic level, thinking about what could be justified to others on grounds that they, if appropriately motivated, could not reasonably reject.'
Thus the administrators can gain 'interessement' or 'obligatory passage point status' by pretending that STEM research might endanger gender or racial equality, or the sanctity of the Environment, or the True Religion, or the hegemony of the Master Race, or 'Universal Civilization', or some other such shibboleth.
The 'appropriately motivated' STEM subject researcher grows deathly afraid of being called a racist, or misogynist or Dr. Strangelove or whatever and thus meekly goes along with the Stalinism of the Culture Industry.
If what is right is what is optimal for everyone, all things considered, and if debate is a good thing, then antagonomic principles (i.e. the principle that there should be no principles) can't always be wrong. Indeed, if cognitive resources are scarce, it must be the case that antagonomic principles are always optimal if an 'un-principled' mechanism can do just as good a job as a 'deontic' one- something we are inclined to believe because of results from complexity and concurrency theory as well as that of repeated games.
This rules out Scanlon's definition of wrong- '"An act is wrong if and only if any principle that permitted it would be one that could reasonably be rejected by people moved to find principles for the general regulation of behaviour that others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably reject"
Indeed, this definition is not just wrong, it is actively mischievous. The weasel words here are 'similarly motivated'.
As an Iyer, I- like all right thinking people- wish to eradicate those evil Iyengars who deny the possibility of a jivanmukta- i.e a person who has solved the problem of the moral economy and is 'saved by works' while yet of this world. Since many Iyengars are female and since Tamil females tend to beat the shite out of Tambram males if they annoy them in any way, the proper way to eradicate Iyengars is to seize any and every opportunity to insinuate that they put garlic into their sambar. This will eventually drive them to apoplexy.
As an Iyer, I- like all right thinking people- wish to eradicate those evil Iyengars who deny the possibility of a jivanmukta- i.e a person who has solved the problem of the moral economy and is 'saved by works' while yet of this world. Since many Iyengars are female and since Tamil females tend to beat the shite out of Tambram males if they annoy them in any way, the proper way to eradicate Iyengars is to seize any and every opportunity to insinuate that they put garlic into their sambar. This will eventually drive them to apoplexy.
It follows that an act is wrong if it fails to exploit an opportunity to insinuate that Iyengars are putting garlic in their sambar.
No one with a similar motivation to mine could reasonably reject this argument.
No doubt, you could argue that some people who want to find principles for the general regulation of behaviour would disagree. They may not know or care about either Iyengars or the heinous nature of the offense constituted by putting garlic in sambar.
But, in that case, they are not 'similarly motivated' at all. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that 'similar motivation' exists across individuals or, indeed, persist over time within individuals. Moreover, we have reason to believe the thing doesn't greatly matter. 'Overlapping consensus' (where motivations are different but the outcome is the same) is good enough for all practical purposes. If you and me agree to share a pizza, it does not matter that my motivation is assuage my hunger while your motivation is to boost your 'FuckJerry' type Instagram following.
Pamela Hieronymi introduced Schur to “What We Owe to Each Other”; Scanlon was her dissertation adviser at Harvard. It was the perfect way to deepen the show’s original premise — that mechanistic notion of an ethical points system. It was richer, Hieronymi argued, to think of morality in terms of cooperative human relationships — the way networks of people, with their interdependencies and conflicts, have to find a way to coexist and sacrifice and treat one another with respect. In such messy human environments, ethical choices rarely map directly onto obvious results. There are no leader boards. The problems can be almost infinitely complex.
Infinitely complex problems don't matter if they cancel themselves out like in Feynman 'Renormalization'. That's why 'messy human life' is improved only by 'philosophy that pays for itself'- i.e. a way of looking at things which results in scarce resources being used more efficiently, or effectively, and thus yielding a surplus everyone can benefit from.
Infinitely complex problems don't matter if they cancel themselves out like in Feynman 'Renormalization'. That's why 'messy human life' is improved only by 'philosophy that pays for itself'- i.e. a way of looking at things which results in scarce resources being used more efficiently, or effectively, and thus yielding a surplus everyone can benefit from.
Schur loved not only the central thesis of “What We Owe to Each Other” but also the book’s title. “It assumes that we owe things to each other,” he told me. “It starts from that place. It’s not like: Do we owe anything to each other? It’s like: Given that we owe things to each other, let’s try to figure out what they are. It’s a very quietly subversive idea.”
It is a fundamentally comic idea- but it subverts nothing. The buffoon feels he has a right to the good things of the world- the string of plump of sausages, the buxom maiden- and the comedy arises by his yearning for these things and the various immoral, or downright imbecilic, ways in which he seeks to assert a moral right to them. At the end of the story, the Prince and the Princess have a good laugh- and leave the buffoon to his greasy sausages and blowsy ale-wife- which to him are the summum bonum.
This is 'Attic Comedy'. By the time of Petronius, another possibility exists- the buffoon is now a freed slave- a Trimalchio- who has gone rich as a Sausage King or a Beer Magnate- and is now aping the aesthetic Epicureanism of the elite. But this is
It is a fundamentally comic idea- but it subverts nothing. The buffoon feels he has a right to the good things of the world- the string of plump of sausages, the buxom maiden- and the comedy arises by his yearning for these things and the various immoral, or downright imbecilic, ways in which he seeks to assert a moral right to them. At the end of the story, the Prince and the Princess have a good laugh- and leave the buffoon to his greasy sausages and blowsy ale-wife- which to him are the summum bonum.
This is 'Attic Comedy'. By the time of Petronius, another possibility exists- the buffoon is now a freed slave- a Trimalchio- who has gone rich as a Sausage King or a Beer Magnate- and is now aping the aesthetic Epicureanism of the elite. But this is
in a way, deeply un-American — an affront to our central mythology of individual rights, self-interest and the sanctity of the free market.
We cheer for a Trimalchio who, by superior know-how, or hard graft, has become the Sausage King, but we think it a waste if he and his progeny simply assimilate the pomp and ceremony of European Royalty. We want our Sausage Kings to be lean and mean and to represent an idea that can overturn the Old World.
As an over-the-top avatar of all our worst impulses, Eleanor is severely allergic to any notion of community.
Because she is the smartest person on the show- an Aristophanes who sees more clearly than an Aristotle.
And yet her salvation will turn out to depend on the people around her, all of whom will in turn depend on her. What makes us good, Chidi tells her, is “our bonds to other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity.”
Chidi treats others with dignity but when he sees that his efforts to help them can backfire, he goes into a tailspin of indecisiveness fatal to his own salvation. He needs to be a bit more Eleanor like while Eleanor needs to be a lot less so.
As the show progresses, “What We Owe to Each Other” becomes a recurring character, popping up onscreen at several crucial plot points. This amazed Hieronymi — the last thing she had expected to see was her dissertation adviser’s book featured prominently on a network sitcom.
We cheer for a Trimalchio who, by superior know-how, or hard graft, has become the Sausage King, but we think it a waste if he and his progeny simply assimilate the pomp and ceremony of European Royalty. We want our Sausage Kings to be lean and mean and to represent an idea that can overturn the Old World.
As an over-the-top avatar of all our worst impulses, Eleanor is severely allergic to any notion of community.
Because she is the smartest person on the show- an Aristophanes who sees more clearly than an Aristotle.
And yet her salvation will turn out to depend on the people around her, all of whom will in turn depend on her. What makes us good, Chidi tells her, is “our bonds to other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity.”
Chidi treats others with dignity but when he sees that his efforts to help them can backfire, he goes into a tailspin of indecisiveness fatal to his own salvation. He needs to be a bit more Eleanor like while Eleanor needs to be a lot less so.
As the show progresses, “What We Owe to Each Other” becomes a recurring character, popping up onscreen at several crucial plot points. This amazed Hieronymi — the last thing she had expected to see was her dissertation adviser’s book featured prominently on a network sitcom.
Watching at home, Hieronymi was pleased with the show’s evolution. “What’s going to save the characters is the relationships they have with one another,” she said. “That seems exactly right to me.”
What do we owe each other? The Sam & Diane answer was Love but, as 'Cheers' progressed, we saw that wouldn't do. What we owe each other is only the credit side of the asset we acquire by a systematic type of mocking interest or affection which, having exhausted its baroque comic possibilities, can yield us a genuine pleasure in seeing others move on in, or out of altogether, their lives.In the end, and this is the great Buddhist truth- samsara is nirvana- because we are so little at home in this world, and its span so brief, this is the Good Place and its lies are as of a needy child's.
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