Hedge(hog)ing Your Bets: Animal Consciousness, Ethics and the Wager Argument

I want to begin fleshing out an argument I've been mulling over. It’s far from a comprehensive thesis. Rather, I want to use this blog to sketch out some preliminary ideas. The argument takes off from the notion that whether or not animals are conscious informs the importance of human-animal interaction and dictates the course of animal ethics.

A hedgehog struggling to remain conscious... 

I want to explore the idea that treating animals as if they are conscious carries moral weight from the perspective of a cost-benefit analysis. The “wager argument” starts with the premise that we have a choice to treat animals either as if they are conscious or as if they are not. I will assume for now that consciousness includes the capacity to feel physical and emotional sensations, such as pain and pleasure, from a familiar first-person perspective (I’m strategically evading the problem of defining consciousness for now but I’m fully aware of its spectre- see below).

Animal's wagering. Not what I'm talking about.

The argument looks something like this: you are better off treating animals as if they are conscious beings, because if they are indeed conscious beings you have done good, but if they are not conscious beings then you have lost nothing. Alternatively, if you treat animals as if they are not conscious, and they are, you have caused harm. It is better to hedge your bet and assume animals are conscious.

To paraphrase Pascal, the argument says “if you gain you gain much, if you lose you lose little”. With Pascal’s wager your gain is something like eternal life, and the loss is avoidable annihilation. Some might include in the avoidance or progression to hell (though Pascal himself never mentions hell). For us, the gain is a better world, or the avoidance of a worse one.

Pascal.  I'll wager he Blaised his way through academia... (sorry).

Here's the argument in boring step-by-step premises:

P1 An animal is a being that is conscious or is not conscious.
P2 We may treat an animal as if they are conscious or as if they are not conscious.
P3 Treating a conscious being as if it is conscious or as if it is not conscious bares morally significant differences.
P4 Treating an animal as if it is not conscious and it is conscious will (practically) bare morally significant harm.
P5 Treating an animal as if is not conscious and it is not conscious will bare no morally significance difference.
P6 Treating an animal as if it conscious and it is not conscious will bare no or negligible morally significant difference.
P7 Treating an animal as if it conscious and it is conscious will (practically) bare morally significant good- or at the very least will bare no moral significance.
P8 We ought to behave in a way that promotes morally significant good, or at least avoids morally significant harm.
C We ought to treat animals as if they are conscious.

Note that by “practically” I mean that it does not necessarily follow as a logical result, but follows as a real-world likelihood.

The argument assumes that whether we think an animal is conscious or not makes a big difference to the way we ought to treat them. It also assumes that treating them as not conscious will lead to harm. How we flesh out "harm" is going to depend on our moral framework, and I think this argument most obviously fits into a consequentialist paradigm.

Regardless I think the idea pretty intuitive. If you believe your dog has the capacity for physical and emotional sensation, you are likely to treat her differently than if you think her experience of the world is much the same as a banana. Within medical testing, we may afford those animals we believe to be reasonably attributed consciousness with greater caution regarding harmful experiments. We may altogether exclude conscious beings from butchery, or at least any practice that might be painful. More radically, we may believe that any being we regard as conscious should be afforded the same sort of moral attention as humans. What matters is a “significant difference”- and this needs examined.

The premises obviously need to be elaborated upon, and I already have my own serious criticisms. Two in particular stand out: the problem of treating consciousness as simple and binary; and the assumption in premise 6 that treating animals as if they are conscious, when in fact they are not, will not result in morally significant harm (e.g. think of potential medical breakthroughs via “painful” animal experimentation or the health benefits of a diet that includes animal protein). I do believe the wager argument has strength to fight back against such criticisms but I don’t think it will come away unscathed. In the near future I’ll look at the argument in a little more detail and start examining these criticisms.   

Things that are (probably) magic

There are some philosophical questions that seem utterly unanswerable from within a naturalistic framework. These are questions that science just doesn't appear to have the capacity to investigate. These are things that, at least from where we're currently standing, appear to be magic.

1. Consciousness: Why is there anything at all that it feels like to be a person, or a dog, or a bat? Where does subjectivity fit into the naturalistic framework?
2. Free Will: Naturalism commonly assumes a causally deterministic universe (or at best, a quantum undeterministic universe, which is hardly an improvement). How then can we freely choose to act?
3. Morality: How can anything possess inherent value? What does it mean for something to be right or wrong if all that exists is the physical world?

There's an obvious sense in which all three of these "magic things" are linked. Moral action, at least under most systems, requires a degree of free will, and free will would seem to require a degree of conscious awareness. So maybe we should say that there's just one magic thing, perhaps a transcendent soul of some description.

This is all a bit tongue-in-cheek, although there's a serious point to it as well. Rather than just discarding these as "magic things" that naturalistic philosophy cannot investigate, it might be better to simply regard them as ill-formed questions. In fact, scientific progress is being made on the subject of consciousness, but only by breaking it up into a number of smaller, related questions about attention, perception, and so on. Similarly, questions about the cognitive implementation of agency are tractable, even if the fundamental nature of free will is not. And whilst we might not be able to determine why something is right or wrong, we can ask more practical questions about how ethical principles should be applied in the world.

So maybe we should just accept that, at least for the time being, some things appear to be magic, and get on with answering the questions that we can answer.

Free Will: No Means No

(by Joe)

When it comes to free will, no means no. Not no, except for really important decisions. Not no, except for choosing to not do something. Not no, except for the internal attitudes that shape our actions. No free will means no free will.

Yet all too often writers for whom I otherwise have a lot of respect fall into this trap. They present a solid argument against free will, or express a concern about someone else's suspect use of free will, then turn right around and commit one of above fallacies. They are fallacious because they make an exception solely in order to support a particular point. These exceptions are never supported, or even acknowledged - they just sit there, spoiling an otherwise good argument.

Most recently I caught Susan Blackmore doing this, when at the end of The Meme Machine she turns round and advocates a kind of meditative practice in order to cope with the vertiginous feeling that comes when you realise that you probably don't have any free will (1999: 242). In general I've got a lot of sympathy for such practice, and I broadly agree with her analysis of the illusory nature of the self that precedes it (ibid: 219-34). But as an answer, or at least a coping strategy, to the free will problem, it is distinctly inadequate. She can't expect me to choose to pursue such a meditative lifestyle, can she? Of course she might simply be hoping to nudge my psycho-memetic systems into behaving in the way that she advocates, which is all well and good, but the simple point remains that it is entirely inconsistent to on the one hand deny freedom of the will, and on the other tell your reader what they should do about it.

Daniel Dennett seems to me to make the same mistake when, in Freedom Evolves and elsewhere, he argues that whilst 'we' don't have any direct volitional control, we are somehow able to choose not to act on the volitions that emerge from our multiple drafts of consciousness. It's been a while since I read Freedom Evolves, and I haven't got a copy handy (so forgive the lack of references), but I recall that something like this formed the centre of his compatiblist account of determinism and free will. In any case, I certainly didn't find his account convincing, for much the same reason that I have yet to find any (physicalist) account of free will convincing - none of them take determinism seriously enough. There's no such thing as partial determinism, unless you introduce randomness, and anybody who denies free will but then tells you how best to cope with this denial is simply being inconsistent.

In fact, without free will the very concept of any course of action being 'best' begins to lose a lot of its worth. How can I have any obligation to act one way rather than another, either morally or rationally, if I'm not able to meaningfully make that decision? Both conventional, rules-based moral philosophy and alternative approaches that emphasise "moral imagination" (Nussbaum 1985: 516) or "ethical attention" (Bowden 1998) suffer from this contradiction. In the first instance agency is removed when we are told that there is only one right answer to a dilemma - we no longer have any meaningful moral choice to make. On the latter view, to be moral is to live in a certain way, to be the kind of person who makes moral decisions - whatever those decisions may be. Here, again, we seem to lack ethical agency - either I am this kind of person or I am not, and when it comes to moral dilemmas I no longer have any choice, I simply act in the way that I must. Yet when I made this point in an essay, the marker insisted that "imagination is in part agential" - in which case, surely, the alternative approach simply collapses into the conventional, only with the critical choice being made prior to a dilemma, when an agent exercises their imagination. In my opinion he had fallen into a version of the trap that I outlined above, denying that morality was about freely willed decisions, but then simply reintroducing those decisions in another guise.

Of course, it is not anyone's fault when they make these mistakes, for they could not have chosen to do otherwise - could they?

• Blackmore, S. 1999. The Meme Machine. Oxford: OUP.
• Bowden, P. 1998. "Ethical Attention: Accumulating Understandings." European Journal of Philosophy 6/1: 59-77.
• Dennett, D. 2003. Freedom Evolves. Viking Books.
• Nussbaum, M. 1985. "'Finely Aware and Richly Responsible': Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature." Journal of Philosopy 82: 516-29.

Reasons and Persons: Moral Immorality

(by Joe)

First off, a quick bit of background. I've decided to try and read Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) over the summer. It's a thick book, and densely written, so it's going to take me a while. To keep me going I thought I'd blog about each chapter here, at least when I think that there's something the interesting to say. The book isn't really about the mind, or at least not its biological aspects, but I still think it's relevant to this blog. Parfit investigates ethics, rationality, and personal identity, all of which I consider to be closely related to cognition and the philosophy of mind. In fact, I think a lot of what Parfit's saying could maybe benefit from a closer interaction with the scientific study of the mind-brain-body(-environment?), which is part of what I'm going to try and discuss here.

Derek Parfit

Anyway, on with the show. I've just finished reading the first chapter, "Theories That Are Indirectly Self Defeating". One thing that particularly caught my attention was Parfit's notion of "moral immorality, or blameless wrongdoing" (1984: 32). I'm not entirely convinced that the notion is coherent, but he argues that one possible outcome of consequentialism could be that we are morally obliged to make ourselves disposed to act in an immoral manner. He gives the example of Clare, who faced with the choice of saving her child's life or the life of several strangers, will choose to save her child. Under most consequentialist frameworks, she will have acted wrongly - instead of one person dying, several have died - but she only acts this way because she loves her child, and in coming to love her child she may well have acted rightly. Thus we get a situation where she has done wrong, but not in any way that we would blame her for.

The reason that I'm not sure whether this is coherent is that whilst consequentialism might say that, broadly speaking, it is better to save several lives than save one life, it might also say that in this particular situation it is better to act in a way that preserves the possibility of love than to act in a way that does not. So perhaps Clare hasn't acted wrongly? However, coming back to something that I mentioned in my last post, I suspect that it might be more accurate to say that Clare has committed the action that is least wrong. Practical ethics isn't as simple as a binary choice between right and wrong, and often we will have to make extremely difficult moral decisions. In a sense it is this difficulty that characterises truly moral decisions, rather than simply doing what is obviously right. So whilst I wouldn't necessarily choose to use the precise terminology that he does, I think Parfit is on to something quite meaningful when he talks about moral immorality.

He goes on to make a distinction between what we ought morally to believe and what we ought intellectually to believe (Parfit 1984: 43). So whilst Clare ought morally to believe that her love for her child comes before preserving life (as will in fact result in the best possible world), she ought intellectually to believe that what is best is to save the most number of lives. This is a very similar distinction to that made by Joyce (2001), between moral truth and moral fiction. The distinction is that whilst Parfit retains a consequentialist moral realism on both sides, Joyce's dichotomy is between the apparent truth of moral irrealism, which means we should be error theorists about morality, and our pragmatically assenting to some kind of moral fictionalism in order gain some social advantage for ourselves. Joyce characterised the latter as assent rather than belief, but I suggested here that we might be better off viewing it as a separate system of belief, one which we only come to question under certain special circumstances. This would make Joyce's position even more similar to that of Parfit: we ought to convince ourselves to hold certain moral beliefs, even though we consider them intellectually flawed. The only difference is that whilst Parfit thinks we should do this in order to bring about the best possible world (whatever that is), Joyce thinks we should do it to benefit ourselves. In fact, earlier in the chapter Parfit makes precisely this claim, in discussing whether rational egoism might be indirectly self-defeating; he concludes that it is, because it tells us to act irrationally, but that this is not necessarily an argument against it. So Joyce's moral fictionalism is well supported by Parfit's account of rational egoism, even if Parfit doesn't think that, morally speaking, that is the position that we ought to hold.

Joyce, R. 2001. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.

 

Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: OUP. (All references from the revised 1987 edition.)

Embodied Ethics

(by Joe, with credit to Marc Morgan at Trinity College Dublin for inspiring some of these thoughts. Marc is a contributor at socialjusticefirst.)

I used to think that the majority of actions were morally neutral, and that only those things that caused harm or suffering could be classified as 'bad'. In and of itself I wouldn't have said that lying was wrong, or sleeping good. Only when coupled with contingencies such as the lie being malicious, or the sleep necessary to rejuvenate the mind and body, could these things be considered in any way moral. My practical ethics are still largely consequentialist, but I've been reconsidering how I classify things within that framework.

A body.

When it comes to practical, applied ethics (certainly the most important kind of ethics), we need to look at everything in context. Whether an action is good or bad, whether it causes harm, will depend on so many contingent factors that it is extremely difficult to make accurate ethical judgments in advance. The best we can hope for is to establish guiding heuristics that will help us to make moral decisions in the future. With that in mind, let's return to the classic example of lying.

As I mentioned above, I used to say that lying was only immoral if it caused harm. That's still basically what I think, only now I'd be tempted to expand harm to include more subtle effects like the degradation of the liar's moral character, and the long-term instability of a relationship build on deception. So whilst in the abstract lying might be morally neutral, in practice it could almost always wrong. Of course there are going to be exceptions, such as if you're sheltering a refugee from a murderous band of thugs, but my moral compass is beginning to swing distinctly towards the "lying is usually wrong" side of things. 

We could call this kind of approach "embodied ethics", in that it emphasises the "in the world" nature of moral judgments. Another sense in which ethics should be considered embodied is that it is very much a product of our evolved and biological nature. To a large extent, things are essentially right or wrong to the degree that they facilitate a way of life that is guided by our evolution. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that everything we've evolved to do is inherently right, but only that evolution has guided the way in which we make ethical considerations, as well as defining the things that matter to us. So ethical discourse must be underwritten by an understanding of our biological, embodied nature.

Finally, ethics is embodied because the mind and the self are embodied. As I've written about elsewhere, the potential for the extension of the mind and perhaps even the self has serious ethical implications. More generally, an understanding of morality demands an understanding of the mechanics behind the human mind, and an understanding of how it interacts with the world. Otherwise our ethics will be too abstract to be meaningful - this is why the ethical debates that philosophers sometimes have can seem so odd and out of touch. I'm still working on the full details, but from now on I'm going to try and make sure that my ethical theorising is firmly embodied, in all three of the ways that I've outlined here.

The Invisible Self

(by Joe)

"What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don't form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges - at certain times and places - that being which says "I." Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief of the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are."

My copy of the book looks like this.

There is a muddy area where my philosophical research and my political beliefs meet, and the above quote, from The Coming Insurrection (Invisible Committee, 2009: 31-2), sums it up nicely. The Coming Insurrection was written in 2007 by an anonymous collective (calling themselves 'The Invisible Committee') based in France, and it is clearly strongly influenced by the philosophy of that country, most notably the situationist movement of the 1960's, but also continental philosophy more broadly. It is pompous, vague and quite rightly criticised by many in the left-libertarian circles that I inhabit - Django over at Libcom described it as "a huge amount of hyperbole and literary flourish around some wafer-thin central propositions". Nonetheless, the approach towards the self expressed in the above extract appeals to me. 

Put very crudely, I think that the self is an illusion or an abstraction, a "narrative center of gravity" that helps guide our lives and our interactions with others (Dennett, 1992). The mechanisms behind this formation of the self have evolved for a reason, and for pragmatic reasons we shouldn't strive to eliminate it entirely, but to focus on it too much is unhealthy and unhelpful. Such a focus has, since the enlightenment, led to a heightened sense of individualism throughout the western world, one which I think is at the heart of our capitalist, consumerist and ultimately selfish culture. We can overcome this individualism by studying what the self truly is, and perhaps eventually realising that it doesn't truly exist. 

There is an obvious link with Buddhist philosophy here, one which I am currently trying to learn more about. There is also a somewhat less obvious link with embodied cognition, and in particular the extended mind hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). If the self is an illusion constructed by our mind, and that mind is embedded in, or even extended into, its environment, then the self can be thought of as a product of that environment. This could have quite serious consequences, not only for metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, but also for ethics and political philosophy.

Which brings us back to The Coming Insurrection. In the passage I quoted, they describe the sense of "inconsistency" that we feel when we realise that whilst the self is composed of our interactions with things in the world, those things "obviously are not me". The self is invisible, and however hard we try to look for it we can never find it. David Hume expressed a similar feeling when he wrote that "I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception"(A Treatise of Human Nature: Book 1, Part 4, Section 6). We are what we do, and what we do is interact with the world. The focus on the individual over the last few hundred years has clouded that fact, and created an entity, the solid, 'real' self, that does not in fact exist. In coming to understand that who we are is so heavily dependent upon who others are, I hope we might eventually be able to learn to behave more compassionately and co-operatively with other people, as well as with our non-human environment. Satish Kumar embodies this hope in the phrase "You are, therefore I am" (Kumar, 2002), a play on Descarte's "I think, therefore I am", itself a perfect slogan for enlightenment individuality.

There is also an element of the absurd that is recognised, I think, by both Hume and the Invisible Committee. We are confronted with on the one hand an unshakable conviction in the existence of the self, and on the other with convincing evidence that no such thing exists. Similar absurdity can be found in our struggles with free will, moral realism and even scepticism about the external world. In each case a pragmatic route must be found, one that allows us to go on, but at the same time acknowledges the truths that we have learned about the world. In the case of the self, I think that this means accepting that we are a lot closer to the world around us than our privileged, first person view-point makes it seem, and that in order to survive in such a world we must understand and respect our place in it.

There's a lot more I'd like to say about a lot of things here, but I'll save it for future posts. Otherwise we might get complaints about the lack of monkeys!

Here you go.

Clark, A. & Chalmers, D. 1998. "The Extended Mind." Analysis 58: 7-19.

Hume, D. 1739.  A Treatise of Human Nature. Book 1, Part 4, Section 6: Of Personal Identity.

Dennett, D. 1992. "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity."

Invisible Committee, The. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles, LA: Semiotext(e). 

Kumar, S. 2002. You Are Therefore I Am: A Declaration of Dependence. Totnes, UK: Green Books.