Get To Know Yourself

Jonah Bossewitch

PHI 307

Professor Elijah Millgram

October 13, 1994

"This above all,

to thine own self be true"1

William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act ? Scene ?

The investigation of morals is focused on understanding the judgement of an object or an action in a certain way. Two major questions concerning moral judgments are: (1) What justifies the judgement? (2) What motivates or compels somebody to make the judgment? To avoid confusion with any other terms, I will call the thing that compels somebody to judge an object/action in a certain way a Foundational Moral Concern(s) (FMC). For the sake of argument, we will assume that a valid justification exists for my FMC, and attempt to probe some of the other issues that arise once the problem of justification has been dealt with. The questions which this paper addresses are: Do we have a responsibility to know our FMC? Is there a difference between acting in compliance with my FMC and knowing what my FMC is, and acting in compliance with my FMC and NOT knowing what my FMC is? How can I find out what my FMC is?

As mentioned above, we are assuming that we have a valid justification for our FMC. What this means is that the correct way we in which we are supposed to judge objects/actions is the way that is consistent with our FMC. We are not making any claims concerning the nature of this justification. Some possible justifications for our FMC are: Our FMC is self-evident, our FMC comes from an infallible source (i.e. God), to judge morally is nothing more than to judge in accordance with your FMC, our FMC is derived empirically. Regardless of which form the justification takes, the bottom line is the same. Acting in a way that is consistent with your FMC is good, acting in a way that is inconsistent with your FMC is bad.

Now that we know what's good and what's bad, what more to we have left to figure out? To understand this, it is helpful to consider a model of how moral judgements are made. According to Kant2, the first step in making a moral judgement is forming and internal representation of the external object/action that is being judged. He then imagined a set of formal rules take a representation as an input and produce a moral evaluation as an output. In order to make a moral evaluation, all you have to do is match the representation to the appropriate rule, and the rule will then dictate what the appropriate evaluation is. Exactly what form these rules might take is not relevant to this investigation. They could be a set of formal statements, they could be some sort of pattern matcher, or a number of other alternatives. What is important is that whatever form these rules assume, there should exist some meta-rule from which all of the other rules are derived. This meta-rule exactly what we mean by Foundational Moral Concern(s).

It is now clear that even somebody with an accurate representation of the object/action, a set of rules to apply to that object/action, and an FMC to back up their rules might still not know how to evaluate it. Consider the cases in which an application of the rules does not produce a unique evaluation of the object/action, or an application of the rules does not produce any evaluation at all. My rules were supposed to tell me good from bad, and right from wrong. However, in both of these cases it seems my rules have failed me, and I am left wondering what the right evaluation is.

Some might object to these cases on the grounds that any justifiable FMC would always produce a set of rules that produce a unique evaluation for every input. While I will not offer a proof to refute this objection, people certainly do not seem to act as if they are following a set of "perfect" rules. To demonstrate just how common a non-unique evaluation is consider the relatively simple case of Cathy (of comic strip fame). Let's suppose that Cathy's FMC is her own personal pleasure. Accordingly, Cathy has decided to go on a diet since losing ten pounds would give her great pleasure. After eating nothing except for a diet shake and a salad all day she returns home from work famished. At this point she opens the fridge and discovers that there is one last piece of chocolate cake left and it's not the fat free kind. The problem is that Cathy's FMC has also generated this other rule that says "chocolate cake is good." When she forms an internal representation of the cake tries to apply her rules to it she finds two contradictory evaluations. The rule that says that losing ten pounds is good tells her "eating the cake is bad." The rule that says that chocolate cake is good tells her "eating the cake is good." What is Cathy supposed to do. This is an example of what is called a moral dilemma (to use the term loosely). A moral dilemma is a situation for which your moral rules do not provide you with a unique evaluation, leaving you unsure of how you should act. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine a set of rules which is entirely complete. That would mean that they would have to be able to produce an evaluation given any situation and it is clear that there are times when people have absolutely no idea what to do (????).

How can we make an evaluation when our rules break down? There are a limited number of things you can do to make an evaluation once your rules have failed to provide you with one. One thing that might help is making sure that your internal representation is accurate with respect to the object/action. If this does not help, you have two options: (1) Find some method not based on your FMC to choose between competing evaluations (or to generate an evaluation) or (2) Revise your FMC. The trouble with the first option is that, according to our model, nothing outside of our FMC can tell us right from wrong. Of course we can find some method to choose between competing evaluations, such as rolling a die, choosing the one that comes first alphabetically, or choosing the one that we like the most. The problem is that these methods do not guarantee that we will be choosing the correct evaluation. You might argue that a correct evaluation is by definition one that agrees with our FMC and therefore all of the evaluations are equally correct. However, it seems absurd to say it is true that "it is good for Cathy to eat the cake AND it is bad for Cathy to eat the cake". Clearly such an assertion is nonsense for any operational definition of good and bad.

This brings us to the second option, revision of your FMC. At this point, it makes sense to ask, if our FMC is justified, why would we ever want to revise it? The answer to this question depends on the nature of the justification for our FMC. Perhaps our FMC is time dependant, and what was justified in the past is no longer justified now. Or, perhaps this new situation is actually an indication that our FMC was not actually justified even though we thought it was. In other words In any case, it is clear that any complete theory of justification needs to account for valid reasons to alter your FMC. We would criticize an engineer for designing a robot that could not adapt to its environment. Species that fail to adapt soon become extinct. Even our fundamental scientific beliefs are subject to revision. Altering our FMC does not mean that it was not justified previously. It simply means that something new has come up that the old system could not handle, and consequently our FMC may no longer be justified, given this new piece of information. This line of reasoning suggests that adaptability is important, and its importance is derived independent of our FMC. That is, adaptability is not good because our FMC evaluates it as good. Adaptability is good for a different reason that applies not only to our FMC. For now, we will simply accept the assertion that adaptability is good without justifying it any further.

What responsibilities does being adaptable impose? Once we accept the importance of adaptability, there are some things that we should do, not because our FMC compels us to, rather because our belief in the importance of adaptability compels us to. To illustrate this point it is helpful to consider an example. Suppose there is a student who is writing a computer program that can make moral judgments. The student gives the program a FMC, as well as writes a function that generates a set of moral rules given a FMC. What does the student need to do make the program adaptable? Actually, the student wants more than just to make the program adaptable. To adapt to a situation is just to change in some way that eliminates the problem. The student really wants the program to improve, or to change in a positive way. All that this means is that the student does not want the program to revise its FMC arbitrarily. Any change in the FMC should be something that makes the FMC better, where better is defined by the student. The first thing that the student must do is to write a function that generates a new FMC, which we will call FMC'. To implement the condition that the FMC is only replaced if FMC' is better the student writes a separate compare function. The compare function takes FMC' and FMC as its input, and outputs "Revise" if the FMC' is better than FMC, and outputs "Don't Revise" if FMC is better than FMC'. In order to improve the program must have access to its FMC. If the program did not have access to its FMC it could not compare FMC to FMC' to determine if the change is a change for the better.

Returning to the example of Cathy and the piece of German chocolate cake we find that if Cathy wants to revise her FMC she had better know what her FMC is before she changes it. When Cathy is tempted by the cake and her moral rules fail to tell her what she should do, she has two choices. She can choose to forget about her FMC and do whatever she wants to, or she can try to revise her FMC. Remember that her original FMC was "if X gives me pleasure, then X is good". This principle gave her contradictory evaluations for eating the cake, since both losing weight and eating cake would give Cathy pleasure, but she won't lose weight if she eats the cake. Now let's say that Cathy stumbles across FMC', "if X gives me immediate pleasure, then X is good". By adopting FMC' Cathy has eliminated the contradiction. Specifically, since eating the cake will give her immediate pleasure, but she will not lose weight for a while. However, suppose that Cathy had thought of a different revision FMC'', "if X gives me healthy pleasure, then X is good". In this case, Cathy has also eliminated the contradiction since losing weight is a heathy pleasure and enjoying a piece of cake is not. The difference is that if she revises her FMC to FMC' she should eat the cake, and if she revises her FMC to FMC'' she should not eat the cake. How should she decide which revision to make?

Consider what might happen if Cathy has no knowledge of her FMC and tries to revise it. She will be incapable of comparing the new FMC with the original FMC. We have assumed that some FMCs are better than others, so revising without first making sure that the revision is an improvement is essentially like tossing a coin to decide what is good and what is bad. It is impossible to determine if the revised FMC is an improvement without knowing what the original FMC is. Ultimately it is your moral authority that will decide whether or not the revision is good. For the computer program the moral authority is the programmer who has written the compare function. For Cathy the moral authority might be God, herself, her community, another person, or some other principal. Both Cathy and the computer program need to communicate to their authority the original FMC and the proposed revised FMC. The only way for Cathy to communicate this information is if she is aware of it herself. The value that we place on adaptability has given us a morally independent reason to know our FMC.