Philosophy On The Mesa

It took 50 generations of robots evolving from basic light-sensitive wheeled mechanisms to something much more sophisticated—but now the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology can boast of having created four groups of robots who have evolved into light-consuming and communicating entities. Three out of the four groups will alert the other robots when they “find food.” The final group has developed robots who will lie about the food source, telling the others that it is poison, and then eat it all themselves. And if that isn’t enough, some robots have evolved into heroes who will alert others to danger and die saving the others. In The God Delusion Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) calls human altruism a “precious Darwinian mistake.” So does this mean that any evolving, communicating entity will travel along the same path as we humans have? Here is a quote from the original report summary:

 “We conducted repeated trials of experimental evolution with robots that could produce visual signals to provide information on food location. We found that communication readily evolves when colonies consist of genetically similar individuals and when selection acts at the colony level. We identified several distinct communication systems that differed in their efficiency…. Under individual selection, the ability to produce visual signals resulted in the evolution of deceptive communication strategies in colonies of unrelated robots and a concomitant decrease in colony performance. This study generates predictions about the evolutionary conditions conducive to the emergence of communication and provides guidelines for designing artificial evolutionary systems displaying spontaneous communication.” 

So the “liars” were unrelated to the others, while communication went smoothly if the individuals were genetically similar. Without having read the entire report I will jump to the conclusion that the “heroes” came from the genetically similar groups. But does this prove that Dawkins is right (Moriae, weigh in!), or that this is no “mistake” at all—that self-sacrifice will happen, because being a member of a colony fosters genuine selflessness? Then again, maybe the researchers at the Swiss lab have merely reinvented an ant hill…

On Dec,6, 2007 I posted a story from Austria about Matthew Hiasi Pan (”Hearts and Minds of Chimps”) who was about to be sold into an unknown future. Matthew Hiasi is a chimpanzee, and supporters have argued that he should be granted human status, as opposed to being legally classified as a thing. In Austria there are only those two legal options. Some of you may have wondered what happened to him: In mid-January the Austrian Supreme Court decided against Hiasi: He has been found to be a thing, with no rights. His British mentor is taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights. The trouble with the court ruling seems to be that the court has decided against making a distinction between “humanity” and “personhood.” It goes without saying that Hiasi is not a human being, genetically, but being a “person” requires (among other characteristics) the capacity for meaningful communication, a sense of purpose, and self-awareness, characteristics that apes share with us at least to some extent, as the stories of Washoe, Koko, Kanzi and Panbanisha have shown us. Even Kant finally came to the conclusion that there ought to be an intermediate category between a person and a thing (although he didn’t include animals in that category). Apparently it is too much of a challenge for the Austrian Supreme Court to consider the possibility of partial personhood.

More conservative “logic” .

 We’ve been told that teaching teenagers to use condoms encourages more sex. The result of withholding that information is more unsafe sex, more disease, more unwanted pregnancies. That policy is so unsuccessful that many states are rejecting abstinence-only, education funding from the feds.

We’ve been told that giving food stamps to the hungry just makes them lazy. The result is more hunger.

Now we are told by our Office of National Drug Control Policy that giving a life-saving nasal spray (Narcan) to heroin over-dosers will encourage more heroin use.

“Madras [Deputy Director] says the rescue programs might take away the drug user’s motivation to get into detoxification and drug treatment.”

I wonder what the result of that policy would be? 

As Mark Kleiman suggests, perhaps we should just poison the heroin supply. That will scare “em” straight. Oh, but that would be murder.

As usual Stephen Pinker is good on the science; not so good on the moral philosophy. Pinker’s recent article in the NYTimes on the science of morality begins by suggesting that, although most people would judge that Mother Theresa was more worthy of moral admiration than Bill Gates, such a judgement is an irrational illusion.

“Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care….I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks.

In other words, a rational point of view would lead us to judge moral worth based on the consequences of an action–utilitarianism.

But when Pinker describes the lastest research in moral psychology, that research shows why we are not utilitarians.

“Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist, suggests that evolution equipped people with a revulsion to manhandling an innocent person. This instinct, he suggests, tends to overwhelm any utilitarian calculus that would tot up the lives saved and lost. The impulse against roughing up a fellow human would explain other examples in which people abjure killing one to save many, like euthanizing a hospital patient to harvest his organs and save five dying patients in need of transplants, or throwing someone out of a crowded lifeboat to keep it afloat.”

There is an interpersonal dimension of morality that includes emotional responses and reactive attitudes that often conflict with purely rational calculation, a view which is supported by MRI research in brain activity.

The moral goodness of Mother Theresa’s activity is not an illusion. It is the product of a well-functioning brain that responds to caring activities regardless of outcomes.

Aside from this peculiar account of moral illusion, Pinker’s essay is full of important information about the science of  morality.

Economists and social scientists have been devoting lots of attention to happiness lately. See especially Layard’s work. Here and  here.

The data seems to show that there is little connection between material wealth and reported levels of happiness (beyond the threshold where basic material needs are satisfied) and that the percentages of people afflicted with depression, panic attacks and anxiety are rising even as we become wealthier.

Oliver James takes the argument one step further. Not only does capitalism fail to make us happier; he claims it is making us mentally ill! Relying on data that suggests a higher incidence of mental distress in inhabitants of competitive societies,

“He [James] tracks how “selfish capitalism” generates insecurity and inflates comparisons; how a winner-takes-all competitiveness merely creates losers and a pandemic of low self esteem, with its compensatory pathologies around celebrity and status.”

The explanation is not implausible on its face, but the big question is why, if consumerism is so bad for us, we continue to slog away on the treadmill. It’s not as if the Nordstrom Police show up at our door step every morning and carry us off to the mall for a day of bone-wearying, debilitating shopping.

Throughout much of human history, people who could afford them, have been attracted to “bright, pretty things.” Pace Aristotle, perhaps an XBox is the highest good for human beings even if it makes us sick.

On the campaign trail Mike Huckabee makes repeated references to “vertical politics”. (See here)

Lots of people have been wondering what that means. David Domke, co-author of The God Strategy: How Religion Became A Political Weapon in America, has one hypothesis:

“This is definitely dog-whistle politics — that is, a message delivered in coded terminology and targeted to a particular subcultural group.  Conservative evangelicals often talk about the need to prioritize their vertical relationships with God first and foremost before worrying about horizontal relationships among people. It’s the individualized “get right with God” approach of conservative Protestantism.”

I don’t know if Domke is right about this but, if he is, it perfectly illustrates the dangers of a Huckabee presidency.

People who are willing to sacrifice their moral obligations to other persons are morally compromised. Morality is inherently interpersonal, inherently horizontal.

It is especially important to acknowledge the moral authority of other persons in democratic political relationships. Citizenship expresses the mutual obligations citizens have toward each other. We are accountable to each other, and democratically elected leaders are part of that system of mutual accountability.

As private persons in a liberal democracy we have a variety of other interpersonal commitments as well that may conflict with our role as citizens. But when we elect a President we expect that person to put the nation first, to give priority to his or her horizontal relationship with fellow citizens.

A candidate who admits he can’t adopt such a priority is disqualified from holding the office.

As the election season begins, we are likely to hear a lot about family values from the Republicans, which usually means preventing gays and lesbians from forming them.

Throughout much of Europe, “family values”  means actually helping families flourish.

Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber has an interesting discussion of paid family leave for fathers.

Robotics enthusiast David Levy predicts that in the not too distant future we will routinely make love with robots.

“Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans,” Levy writes, “while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach us more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.”

Levy goes on to imagine a world of robot prostitutes, or “sexbots,” which would offer people a chance to practice their technique before entering a human relationship. “With a robot prostitute,” he writes, “the control of disease is implicit — simply remove the active parts and put them in the disinfecting machine.”

No doubt this possibility stimulates the imaginations of inflatable doll enthusiasts but I think most of us will carry on in the old fashioned way.

For one thing, if robots are to be attractive as sexual partners, then they would have to have most of the features of personhood. But if they will be so similar to persons, why would sex with them not be subject to taboos against prostitution, sexual exploitation, adultery, etc.?

On this blog we frequently talk about ethics—so when I came across a blog discussion about the ethics of blogging, I thought I’d share it here. Is it ethical to have different personas on various blogs expressing different views? Is it ethical to try to boost the hits on a blog by being provocative? Recently we had a “troll” posting an irrelevant comment, but as trolling goes, this was a minor blip. I have visited blogs without password rules where comments are being posted that are extremely provocative and in some cases slanderous, despite the warnings posted on the blogs that such posts will be removed. In addition, I have seen people’s aliases being hijacked by anonymous posters with an agenda. Fun and games? Infantile behavior? Mean-spirited individuals, or just irritants without a life ruining other people’s innocent late-night cyber friendships? Probably all of the above, but a more nefarious agenda seems to be to artificially boost the blog hits—for the simple purpose of getting recognized as an active blog, or for financial gain (advertising $), as described in Wil Wheaton’s blog (yes, Ensign Crusher is blogging! For you Star Trek trekkers).

It’s a Klondike in the Blogosphere right now—there are rules of ethics, but in many cases the game is all about how to circumvent the rules. As much as I probably wouldn’t vote for Kant as president (see Dwight, below), he did have a good point about the Good Will that shines by its own light, like a jewel: Your intention will make or break the moral value of your action. Do you want to be controversial because you have concerns and ideas that, thanks to the Internet, you can now share with the world? Do you post under several aliases so you, like Kierkegaard, can make philosophical points from several different angles and not just because you’re insecure or have a personality disorder? Go for it—if your ideas fly, good for you. If they don’t, then at least you got to share them, and if other people should find them offensive, then at least you’ve got a dialogue going, and maybe everybody can learn something. But if it is to (1) slander individuals or groups or (2) to aggrandize yourself/your blog, using other posters or bloggers as a “means to an end,” then you (everything else being equal) are being unethical. Same rules as in real life. Fortunately our little corner here has been fairly well-behaved up until now, but the cyberworld is big and wild. If you’re blogging or commenting on one of the sites haunted by trolls, “don’t’ feed them.” Happy Holidays…

Isn’t this exciting! We have a new movie getting folks all upset, again. I’m referring to The Golden Compass, based on a series of books (His Dark Materials) by Philip Pullman. The last time I saw this kind of concern over the religious impact of a movie was when The Chronicles of Narnia came out, but that was a different crowd voicing their concerns. The Golden Compass (which I must admit I have neither read, nor seen yet) supposedly advocates atheism, although the author, a British “self-proclaimed atheist,” says he was just telling a story. In particular, Catholic groups worry that parents might take their kids to see a cute movie with talking animals, and be inadvertently exposed to an anti-religious message, thus being indoctrinated with atheism. Now flip to the The Chronicles of Narnia discussion a few years ago (fabulous Wikipedia article), where some media commentators voiced concerns that children would be exposed to a story of sacrifice reminiscent of Christ when watching a cute movie with talking animals, thus being indoctrinated with Christianity. There were also Christian groups worrying that Narnia would convert children to paganism. All this worry about stories, in a time of a Culture War—what luxury, that we can take time out for these kinds of concerns when terrorists are at our gates, and our climate seems to be going haywire, for whatever reason.

           So let’s enjoy the luxury and put this in perspective: We are, with the phrase coined by Alasdair MacIntyre, “storytelling animals.” Stories have been the favorite way to express world views, as far back as we can trace myths and legends, and sometimes these world views collide. Good stories generally have several levels, the plot level, and the level of deeper meaning(s). Is it possible to enjoy a well-told plot while disagreeing with the message? Of course it is—it is one of those nicely challenging cultural moments where one’s brain actually gets a workout. Can it be dangerous for gullible minds to be exposed to stories that may sway them in a new direction? Yes indeed, that’s what we call propaganda. Sometimes the danger is in the eye of the beholder, and sometimes we have to resort to the theory that there actually is an underlying set of good values that we should all subscribe to, and that some stories are harmful in themselves if they espouse a lack of respect for other human beings (that ought to be another blog thread).

But the bottom line is that stories are great vehicles for discussing cultural values. There are stories kids shouldn’t be exposed to, because they don’t understand them yet, or because the stories are downright obnoxious—but stories with multiple levels, told well, can be wonderful opportunities for adults to have real conversations with kids about the deeper things—and in addition, the adult may get something out of it, either as a confirmation of one’s own set of values, or a challenge to them. But maybe that’s one reason why “concerned” groups harp on movies—it’s a hassle to have to explain them to their kids…