A moral razor
If something does not inflict unnecessary or unjustifiable harm, it cannot be immoral.
Despite the quagmire of competing frameworks that is "moral philosophy", typical real world moral dilemmas of today play out in a somewhat narrow field of inquiry: "How do we co-exist in peace and comfort?" where pain and pleasure (in all their forms) then become the most common basis for human morality that we have available to us. For instance, behaviors such as mutilation or murder are nearly universally regarded as undesirable on the grounds that they cause pain and inhibit pleasure (in the rare case when they are not considered harmful, it is only very specific cases of mutilation and murder that are looked upon as not harmful or justifiable). It is these fundamentally human and nearly universally agreed upon desires which forms the basis of the moral outline which this razor serves.
If something does not cause harm to anyone or anything, on what grounds could we deem such a thing to be immoral? In my experience, for any and all given examples, whatever must be invoked to condemn a harmless act as immoral can either be easily and directly reduced to a standard of pain and pleasure (an interpretation of "harm") or is inexorably based on something far less real and far less persuasive than pain or pleasure.
The utility of this razor might not seem eminent, but I have found that when confronting actual moral dilemmas it can serve to shave away the unnecessary peripheral (and unpersuasive bits) by focusing directly on the tangible harm that something causes, and asking whether or not that harm is necessary or justifiable. It can also help to put magnitude on the immorality of a harmful transgression and the efficacy of a proposed moral judgment and response. It's not perfectly sharp (no razor is), and after you've used it you may still need to question what constitutes harm, and what might constitute justification for harm, but at the very least this razor helps to more comfortably ignore many of the pesky biases which can make moral questions more confusing than they need to be.
Most notably this moral approach runs contrary to so called objective moral truth (especially the god-based kind) which stem from intangible and unknowable metaphysical suppositions. Much of the persuasive power of many religious systems can be easily reduced to the persuasive power of pain and pleasure (i.e, heaven and hell as incentives) and what is left generally cannot compete with the realities of the human condition in terms of believability; pain and pleasure are parts of the real world which are constantly and brutishly thrust upon you, while hypotheses of god and spirit are highly ethereal.
One objection to this approach might be that "harm" is left totally undefined. If we actually start discussing the specifics of harm though, we will find high degrees of concensus concerning some basic tenets: restriction of freedom, theft of one's property, the loss of one's life, physical injury, psychological torture, etc... If we restrict our moral questions to "what can we agree is undesirable?" rather than "what do we all agree is the most desirable?", we're then able to cover quite a bit of moral ground which helps to answer most kinds of moral dilemmas which we normally confront.
To try it out, take an intuitive moral belief that you hold (including possibly the accompanying moral reaction) and ask yourself "does the thing I condemn cause unnecessary or unjustifiable harm?" and then possibly "is any harm implicit in my reaction (incarcerating a murderer for instance) justifiable or necessary"?
Thoughts?
Despite the quagmire of competing frameworks that is "moral philosophy", typical real world moral dilemmas of today play out in a somewhat narrow field of inquiry: "How do we co-exist in peace and comfort?" where pain and pleasure (in all their forms) then become the most common basis for human morality that we have available to us. For instance, behaviors such as mutilation or murder are nearly universally regarded as undesirable on the grounds that they cause pain and inhibit pleasure (in the rare case when they are not considered harmful, it is only very specific cases of mutilation and murder that are looked upon as not harmful or justifiable). It is these fundamentally human and nearly universally agreed upon desires which forms the basis of the moral outline which this razor serves.
If something does not cause harm to anyone or anything, on what grounds could we deem such a thing to be immoral? In my experience, for any and all given examples, whatever must be invoked to condemn a harmless act as immoral can either be easily and directly reduced to a standard of pain and pleasure (an interpretation of "harm") or is inexorably based on something far less real and far less persuasive than pain or pleasure.
The utility of this razor might not seem eminent, but I have found that when confronting actual moral dilemmas it can serve to shave away the unnecessary peripheral (and unpersuasive bits) by focusing directly on the tangible harm that something causes, and asking whether or not that harm is necessary or justifiable. It can also help to put magnitude on the immorality of a harmful transgression and the efficacy of a proposed moral judgment and response. It's not perfectly sharp (no razor is), and after you've used it you may still need to question what constitutes harm, and what might constitute justification for harm, but at the very least this razor helps to more comfortably ignore many of the pesky biases which can make moral questions more confusing than they need to be.
Most notably this moral approach runs contrary to so called objective moral truth (especially the god-based kind) which stem from intangible and unknowable metaphysical suppositions. Much of the persuasive power of many religious systems can be easily reduced to the persuasive power of pain and pleasure (i.e, heaven and hell as incentives) and what is left generally cannot compete with the realities of the human condition in terms of believability; pain and pleasure are parts of the real world which are constantly and brutishly thrust upon you, while hypotheses of god and spirit are highly ethereal.
One objection to this approach might be that "harm" is left totally undefined. If we actually start discussing the specifics of harm though, we will find high degrees of concensus concerning some basic tenets: restriction of freedom, theft of one's property, the loss of one's life, physical injury, psychological torture, etc... If we restrict our moral questions to "what can we agree is undesirable?" rather than "what do we all agree is the most desirable?", we're then able to cover quite a bit of moral ground which helps to answer most kinds of moral dilemmas which we normally confront.
To try it out, take an intuitive moral belief that you hold (including possibly the accompanying moral reaction) and ask yourself "does the thing I condemn cause unnecessary or unjustifiable harm?" and then possibly "is any harm implicit in my reaction (incarcerating a murderer for instance) justifiable or necessary"?
Thoughts?
Comments (36)
There are two huge areas of fuzziness that I think cannot be resolved.
The first is whether the harm is the expected harm or the actual harm. All sorts of confusing situations arise in which one sets out to be kind but accidentally causes pain, and vice versa. One can try to dispel this by talking in terms of expectations, but further problems arise with that.
The second is what does it mean to 'cause' harm. It may be that my decision to buy magazine X rather than magazine Y is the last straw that breaks the back of struggling magazine Y, which then folds, its editor suicides and her family is plunged into misery. Causes are a very fuzzy concept to try to pin down to something as clinical as a razor.
To repeat, I agree with the OP as a broad moral principle, but I don't see it as a razor because it will still leave lots of dilemmas and contrary ouitcomes.
It all depends on what you count as harm to both individuals and societies, and how you would measure different kinds of harm against one another.
Perhaps it harms you?
I like your thought but I seem to get pleasure from the idea.
It also depends on what you mean by "covet your neighbour's wife". Do you merely mean you feel physically attracted to her when she is present? Or do you mean you would steal her from him if you could? Or do you obsess over her as something you desperately want, but cannot have?
If it really does no harm, or perhaps we should say, does less harm than good (since very little can be entirely negative or positive) to society, to you or to anyone else, them it can't be wrong, right?
Well the commandment is nonspecific. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife"
If it causes pleasure for me and no harm to anyone else then it must be ok under this system?
But, if I am a good Christian, or perhaps a virtue ethicist, it is a sin because it transgresses either God's law, or the laws I give myself.
I guess a Christian, or perhaps even a virtue ethicist, would believe that it is necessarily harmful to you. I think a Christian would say that it is harmful insofar as it damages your chances of repentance and redemption, and the virtue ethicist would say it is harmful insofar as it weakens your virtue.
Yes, but under those conceptions of harm, the expected result of contravention would certainly be pain and suffering.
Pain and pleasure say nothing about morality, in my opinion.
I think the idea is that I may appear to be happy, but underneath I am really suffering because I am a sinner, lack virtue, and so on. I need not even be consciously aware of any pain. but some part of me knows I have failed, and this would be the ultimately painful realization, when it comes. The deep, hidden suffering of the 'comfortable'.
So this argument morphs itself to fit any occasion. I think doing something immoral might cause guilt in me, but that guilt does not make the action moral or immoral. It is the rules, the laws I set for myself, or that I believe in that determine the morality of my action and my guilt.
The idea is that guilt is occasioned by conscience, by moral intuition. Under that view it is not merely a matter of opinion as to whether some acts are moral or immoral. The term 'moral' usually carries associations of rule-following, so perhaps substituting the term 'ethical' would make it clearer.
So, then the argument would be that coveting my neighbour 's wife would not be ethical insofar as it leads me away from maximizing my potential for living a good life (in the sense of a fulfilled or eudamonic life).
Whether you accept such a view or not is,ultimately, a matter of faith. There is no possibility of deductive proof or empirical demonstration when it comes to these kinds of questions. Always the element of sensibility is involved. Ethics is like aesthetics.
So my conclusion regarding the coveting bit is that it is not good for me because it treats someone as a means for pleasure and not as being an end, a person with dignity deserving, my respect.
I agree with that conclusion being in the same kind of spirit as Christian or virtue ethics.
This is one type of dilemma not eliminated by my [s]razor[/s] butter knife, but deciding how to deal with these cases is not always a problem. Some people might like to debate what levels of risk of harm to others we should tolerate, and environmental factors (such as the risks posed on a space station) also seem to alter what levels of risk we might or should be willing (or capable) of living with. The only heuristic here is to ask if the degree of risk and the severity of the potentially harmful ramifications are low enough to be acceptable.
Quoting andrewk
Not all forms of harm are immoral, but all forms of immorality are harmful. Probably the best answer I can give to this tricky dilemma using my razor is that this kind of harm is the justifiable kind. After all, it's not as if the business failures of an entire company can be morally pinned on a single discretionary consumer. And it's also true that in our free market society we need ineffective companies to fail because we want companies which perform desirable services. If not buying a magazine can be construed as harm through inaction, it seems eminently justifiable as it would be equal and opposite the harm of purchasing an unwanted magazine.
I'm not willing to discount the possible immorality of inaction, but this particular example isn't quite there. Keep in mind though, this kind of inaction dilemma can also be wielded against most moral frameworks. But the strength of this razor isn't that it solves dilemmas, it's that it simplifies them. In the case of risky behavior or chance of direct or indirect harm, it clarifies what's being wagered against what, and in the case of harm through inaction it applies same as it would to most other dilemmas: "what's the harm, and is it justifiable?".
When we weigh one harm against another to see what's justifiable (along with environmental context), unless there's a clear and simple answer moral arguments of this kind descend into uncharted complexity. Ask someone if they think the 1/30k chance of dying in a car crash (along with the possible risk of killing other people) makes driving in cars immoral or too risky and they will likely tell you no. Ask someone if they think the far more likely chance of dying in a car while DUI makes it immoral or too risky, and they will likely tell you yes. Basically this implies that there's some in-between where inherent risk becomes marginal if it's statistical likelihood is acceptably low (a subjective thing; the classic moral paradox of trading freedom for security) or perhaps if the severity of the outcome is acceptably minimal.
Quoting andrewk
Maybe I'm giving it too much credit to call it a razor, but I do think it is an often forgotten and often required heuristic to simplify moral conundrums. I do agree it leaves many or even all dilemmas intact, but it also shaves away quite a bit of fat that gets in the way of answering them with persuasive power.
It's a good question, and the answer is with great tedium...
After we've hammered out shared values (to go on living for instance) we can then begin to compare one harm against another by looking at how much one kind of harm damages various moral values compared to another kind of harm.
We can actually get pretty deep into economics and political theory using only this value as a goal (although additional agreeable values certainly help, such as freedom of thought, physical freedom, and a chance to earn a living).
It's hard to be precise when we start getting into many and complex varieties of harm, and having a hierarchy of values can be somewhat helpful, but inevitably it comes down to the persuasive power of how a given individual subjectively perceives the various harms in question. We can have a surprising amount of agreement by debate and persuasion concerning what's more harmful, but inevitably there are some dilemmas where no shared position can be had and hence no moral agreement or system can function.
When we cannot agree about what's more harmful, morality breaks down. If we were slave-gladiators set to fight to the death in an arena, would you forgive me for not agreeing that your life is more valuable than my own? :D
Or, as I like to put it, the fundamental ethical articulation of any ethical system is that unnecessary harm or manipulation is wrong. No ifs, ands or buts.
Actually no direct harm that I can think of. And what if she came over one day offering casual sex?
Unless you want to preserve a relationship with your neighbor, you might not want to bang their wife, but it's not you transgressing against them in this case, it's the wife who would be doing the harm (potential, emotional or otherwise).
How come nobody told me that when I was young?
Growing up, people always tended to focus on the "right" rather than the "wrong" in morality and ethics, as if to say "you have to behave in this manner in order to be good"... "Why?", I always wondered...
They could have saved me a lot of confusion concerning what morality was (i.e: not the arbitrary wishes of a sky-daddy) by instead saying "you have to not behave in this manner in order to not be bad". That way when I asked "why?", they could have easily and persuasively pointed to the harm that the behavior in question generates instead of deluding me with their own delusions.
People who tell you that you have a positive duty to do something, that isn't just the converse of a negative constraint, seem to tend to have some sort of agenda.
In this case I lean toward the idea that if someone can keep it in their pants and their mind, I cannot possibly object.
Generally not an attractive agenda at that. Given that there is so much room for disagreement about what we ultimately desire (rather than agreeing on what we do not desire) it seems natural that trying to carve out a utopian vision (let alone trying to implement one) should ironically be a very objectionable and undesirable affair.
As far as imperatives go though, not engaging in one specific action is infinitely less constraining than asking people to conform to this or that specific behavioral action (and much much harder to persuasively justify)
To use the example of coveting your neighbor's wife -- even if all three parties concerned are willing, there may be inadvertent harm. (In other words, one cannot presume that voluntary acceptance is sufficient to prevent harm; it is necessary to argue for it, and any such argument will proceed from a conception of the human being).
An old conception of the role of ethics may be useful. Human life is akin to a fleet of ships. For any fleet to complete a successful voyage, three aspects must be addressed:
1) The condition of each individual ship
2) The organization of the fleet
3) The route taken
Similarly, in ethics, one must address:
1) The condition of the individual person
2) Interpersonal relationships
3) The goal of one's life (and of society too).
***
All that said, the razor of minimizing harm is a good first approximation.
I think the distinction between expected and intended harm is also salient: one can expect a certain amount of harm to result from an action without necessarily intending that that harm come about. For instance, a military may bomb an enemy military target with the expectation that some collateral damage will result, and yet intend to absolutely minimize civilian casualties (through extensive surveillance of the target, cross-checking multiple sources of intelligence, using "smart" bombs, etc).
It also seems clear that, even in some cases where some degree of non-consensual harm was reasonably expected to occur, that no moral infraction has taken place. Imagine a woman with an extremely racist father who brings home a black man for dinner, knowing full well that it will likely cause her father some consternation. When she enters with her date, her father clutches his chest and dies of a heart attack, Fred Sanford-style. I would remain to be convinced that the woman has acted unethically in such a situation.
That's more-or-less a statement of liberal ethics. But not everyone is a liberal, as you well know, and no amount of reasoning will convince a non-liberal to become a liberal: one doesn't reason one's way towards value judgments.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
All the grounds of non-liberal ethics. Religious convictions, for example.
As @andrewk points out, this a loose rule of thumb at best. The issue that sticks out to me are the terms "unecessary" and "unjustifiable". Via an act utilitarian calculus, I can justify some pretty horendious things.
I enjoy this comparison because I tend to treat moral systems and judgments as stratagems (where victory is preserving or promoting shared moral values). To apply this razor, as a fleet we can begin by pointing out routes we definitely do not want to take based on our most basic shared values.
When it comes to assessing the individual in terms of their own personal standards of harm and pleasure, we cannot exactly debate strategy. This is apparently the subjective part of morality where only persuasion (persuasion by any cognitive/emotional means) is actually an effective tool for carving out common ground above and beyond the basic. I think typically this is the main role of intuition in morality and ethics, although since the basic really does go a long way, there's quite a lot we can rationally debate before needing to employ it.
Put me in a room with someone who aims to transgress (per my standards) based on theological beliefs and watch me go :D . Reason will only be the appetizer of due diligence (should they choose to swallow it), but the remaining courses will create a roller coaster of emotional sensation intended to nauseate them onto a level platform.
Criticizing religiously founded ethics often involves criticizing their very theological foundation, but there's often room for liberal ethics and secular humanism within religious interpretation. When Jesus said "do unto others", he (un)wittingly(?) constructed pretty much all the space necessary to flesh out a moral system based on our shared values.
If something is "necessary", it implies there are no other options. This is intended to account for situations (for instance) where mutual survival/safety is impossible due to environmental circumstances (I call this a break-down of morality). The "justifiable" part is highly ambiguous though, and purposefully so. Different people will have different standards of justification (which can change with the environment), and so to keep the razor simple I would rather not provide an omni-answer for all moral question by trying to give a formula for any and all "moral justifications". :)
With utilitarian calculus you can indeed justify some horrendous actions, but I would reject them as unjustified and unnecessary. Killing one person to become an organ donor to save five people for instance is a hypothetical which fractures or breaks-down morality in general because when it comes down to it the five people or the mad doctor might be willing to use force to carry it out. Without mutual agreement and consent, (on the part of the victim in this case) all we have is the arbitrary use of force in a survival situation.
To live in this society with it's given laws, we give tacit consent to be incarcerated if we do crime. If we don't then the onus is on us to remove ourselves from the midst of society. If it was permissible to arbitrarily sacrifice the few to save the many in any positive exchange (per utilitarian calculus) then we would all probably decide to separate ourselves from that society lest our own lives be dispensed as the currency of another.
The answer is that the sanctity of an innocent life is high on the hierarchy of values.
Please provide an example. As it currently stands, I can argue that, for example, it is immoral to wear certain colors because the majority of people might not like those colors. Because these colors are unnecessary, I am causing unnecessary harm by wearing them and, therefore, am doing something immoral.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
But at this point, the razor is effectively useless. Unless you ascribe to some sort of divine command theory that is completely devoid of any human welfare connection whatsoever, everyone agrees causing harm for no good reason is immoral. A razor allows one to divide something into two categories. For example, Occam's Razor allows one to divide competing theories- ideas that are simpler are more likely to be true because unnecessary parts are superfluous at best and dead wrong at worst. However, as you admit, the qualifiers for this razor are vague, thus making it not a razor, but really just the groundwork notion behind morality.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I guess I'll start with the glaring issue, as I have some many nitpicks with the above passage. A runaway trolley is going down a track towards five people who cannot get out of the way in time. You can flip a switch and case the trolley to veer down a different path, but on this path is one person. You can either let the five people die or kill the one person. What is the moral option? If you pick to kill one person, please explain why this logic does not apply to the doctor case. If you pick to let the five people die, explain your reasoning and how it does not prevent us from every taking any consequentialist stance, no matter the cost.
For example, let's say that I'm a new addition to your prison cell-block, and it's expected of me to fight each of my new cell-mates in turn in order to establish my position in the pecking order. In this environment, in order to protect my life and health, it's basically necessary for me to engage in harmful actions. If I had to inflict harm to save my own life, I would call it necessary.
Quoting Chany
In addition to eliminating moral positions not based on human welfare, this razor also ignores moral arguments which seek to maximize positive moral value (which is very difficult to agree on) in favor of focusing on moral arguments which seek to minimize negative moral value (many of which we can very easily agree upon).
Quoting Chany
I don't even think it's a decision that qualifies as falling within the realm of morality. They're amoral dilemmas. What I mean by this is that when mutual survival is not possible, strategies of mutual cooperation oriented around human welfare break-down as each of us values our own lives above that of a random stranger (or tends to). If you happen to find yourself tied alone to track #2 (opposite the 5), would you assent to a moral system that then sanctions your death (at that moment?) If you were one of the five, would you not beg the switch-man to flip the switch? Would you call it moral? What if a mother flipped a switch to save her child which resulted in the death of even more people? What if you were stuck on the track but had control over the switch yourself? It's expected that extreme environments can lead to a moral breakdown making either option or outcome neither moral nor immoral.
Flipping the switch and not flipping the switch are both not immoral decisions (they're amoral per my moral views). When it comes to the transplant dilemma, not kidnapping a vagabond for parts is definitely not immoral, but I would hazard to say that doing so would be immoral because such a practice would break the moral system to which I currently subscribe (by making it intuitively harmful in a way that neuters it's persuasive power).
For me "fairness" is a necessary part of having a functional moral system. It needs to be fair because it needs to be appealing for people to actually employ it. As soon as we start randomly plucking individuals to sacrifice (against their will) for the greater good, people will start deciding they're better off on their own and morality breaks down.
All decisions, to the extent that they are non-random, are ultimately predicated on some value judgments. I don't really see a point in differentiating between "moral" and "amoral" values for the purpose of decision-making. Either way, when we deliberate on a decision, it all comes down to pitting conflicting value-laden imperatives against each other.
What happens when our shared value laden imperatives are at odds with one another?
If morality is a rational strategy of cooperation meant to promote and preserve mutually shared values, how can it exist where our chances of survival are mutually exclusive? What we get are two parties who each think it morally justifiable to kill the other in what I prefer to call a break-down of morality.
In the trolley scenario all we get is a utilitarian count of innocent lives at stake where there is no possible beneficial or mutual compromise between both parties. But in the transplant scenario we're also ourselves responsible for choosing and forcing an arbitrary or random person to play the role of sacrifice. That arbitrary force and selection is what repulses me from assenting to the utilitarian choice in the transplant dilemma. To make that selection would be akin to the trolley villain strapping the single victim to track #2 in the first place in order to actually create the dilemma...
If a moral judgement makes a necessary demand on your life then it's certainly not appealing or beneficial to you, and so becomes mostly useless and irrelevant as a broadly persuasive social norm. If an environment actually necessitated that you forfeit your life, then my entire moral system based on shared values breaks because it loses on of it's strongest appeals (that you value your own life) and literally breaks-down due to the unwillingness of individuals to conform to it.