Vampire Ethics

After watching the Dracula ballet last night, I got to thinking: if someone got turned into a vampire, is it best for them to be killed or not? On the one hand, we would think of them as a moral abomination now. We think that if we ever reached that point, we would want somebody to off us. So too should we kill the new vampire, for their own sake.

But on the other hand, they are no longer human. The standards for human flourishing (which, although this is controversial, would probably include not killing off friends and family to feed your lusts) are not the standards for vampire flourishing. A human-turned-vampire would be like a rabbit-turned-lion. You may be surprised at what happened, but you should not feed this new being hay if you want it to be happy (and I would prefer happy lions around, if I had to have any at all). This new vampire then should also be judged according to vampire standards. The human would not have liked this new life, but that is irrelevant to whether it is best for the vampire to live.

This then gets at one moral dilemma, similar to if a young person makes a promise that she later regrets when older - "whose" moral standard becomes relevant in deciding whether she should be held to that promise? What about if I say that I would rather be euthanized than be a vegetable in a hospital bed?

Of course, even if it is worse for the vampire, we could still just stake the sucker for our own sakes. We don't want creepy supernatural predators preying off of us, as human beings. So we can fight for the human good, against a world that sometimes just doesn't care about us.

But, at the same time, part of being human is that we can transcend our own local interests for other things in the world. We can identify ourselves with causes that may have no direct human benefit. (The one point on which radical deep ecologists and conservative Calvinists can come together?) So simply doing something because it is a human good is not necessarily the same as doing something just because it is good overall. And we as humans can think about this distinction. So then should we let vampires live out of respect for life (er, un-life) as long as they don't prey on us too much?

This dilemma comes up too in both the Greek and Chinese traditions (and I'm sure many others). We have the debates between the philosophers and rhetoricians in Greece and Rome, where the rhetoricians and sophists favored a purely human-centered life concerned with building human communities. Search for "truth" is secondary to these matters of practice. The philosophers favored finding what is true, even if it goes completely against what people around them took to be good. And part of this could even be for the sake of humans: current values concerning what is "good" can be revised. The Daoists and the Confucians have had similar struggles, with the Daoists focused on the Way of Heaven even when it completely called into question all typical human values while the Confucians focused more on starting with human beings and only dealing with what is relevant to them. Of course, this was not always a pitched battle; sometimes the two sides in both traditions have complemented each other, since human beings are not actually separate from the world in which they live - another tricky ethical point to work through.

Biology and Metaphysics

Again, thinking about nature & stuff: how do biology & sociology differ? On the one hand, there seem to be conflicts and divergences between them. Let us take standards of beauty. To some extent, these are given to us biologically. We are hard-wired to find certain features attractive. Those who are attracted to females like human female breasts and are not looking for peacock tails instead. But at the same time, society can work with that and present differing ideals of beauty. Sometimes these even conflict. The American obsession with thin women goes against what seems to be a overall global trend, which is about 20 lbs heavier (or so I remember from an undergrad psych class. If anyone has the actual scientific data on hand to back this up, that would be appreciated, but the whole point of my writing a blog instead of a journal article is that I don't feel like looking that up to have a chat :p .) On top of that, it would seem that sociology could in turn affect biology: sociological constraints give new standards of fitness for evolution.

But at the same time, sociology is biology.¹ Even as we can talk about these conflicts in ideals of beauty, these conflicts are differing parts of biology. We are social beings by nature, and the social dimensions of beauty and sexuality are written into our genes.

So there is a sense in which it is all biology which is interacting with itself. Some biological features develop and turn around to influence the features already there; some of which gave rise to the "higher order" features in the first place. This feedback loop creates the domain of sociology, which has its own principles and objects as distinct from bilogoy, even though it is also explained by biology.

This seems to be what is going on with the Neoplatonic principle of emanation. There are higher orders of reality, more "real" levels, that give rise to lower levels of reality.² The lower levels, though, do really exist in their own way. (Some indian philosophy has similar stuff, but there seems to be less value give to these lower levels, to the point that they are all equally "mâyâ" or play/illusion.)

There is a possible study of societies as such. But at the same time, sociology is an "emanation" of biology (as chemistry is of physics and biology of chemistry). Similarly, the search for a Grand Unifying Theoroy of Physics would be a search of a originary principle, motion, force, or whatnot, from which the other features of the physical universe emanate;³ that is, whatever the originary principle is, it is a dynamic one which interacts with itself. Considered as itself alone, it is one. Considered as interacting with itself, as "stumbling as from a drunken slumber" as Plotinus describes the descent of Being from the One, it is regarded as multiple forces, and ultimately as the innermost essence of every existing thing.

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¹ Which is not necessarily to say that human nature is reducible to biology - that is a separate question. But it would seem that, insofar as societies can be studied scientifically and as mired in natural causes, it produced by biology. But if you still don't like this, than take physics and chemistry for the illustration instead.

² One might argue that Neoplatonism would go in the opposite direction, however - from the wholes to the parts. One admittedly cannot simply assume Proclus' entire metaphysical scheme and apply it to modern science. However, if we look at physics as describing the fundamental principles of the world, and so that which unifies it the most, instead of as all the quintillions of atoms rushing around forming everything, there is something to be said for a Neo-Neoplatonism.

³ I have been going through easy examples, in which we merely have concentric circles: physics emanates chemistry, which emanates biology, which emanates sociology. Of course, it could be (and probably is) more complicated. For example, at least restricting ourselves to scientific psychology (which is not in itself a slam against other types), biology would then give rise to psychology, which together with biology would give rise to sociology, or something like that (insofar as there are features of society which are not mediated by direct mental processes).⁴

⁴ Now, where would consciousness fit in? We can see how chemical rules follow from physical ones, and can have an inkling of how sociology follows from biology. However, it is hard to see how consciousness would follow from biology or whatnot except insofar as the latter provides a suitable base of neurons (and by "hard to see," I mean that I don't feel like going through the arguments right now, but I have them). In other words, biology provides the material and formal causes for sociology, but only the material causes for consciousness. It might be that the elusiveness of any Grand Unifying Theory is that such theory does not merely provide unify physics, but would also explain other features of the world; in other words, it would always be underdetermined by purely physical data. This is mere speculation, but it does present a possibility, akin to Spinoza's God.

Essential Futility

I was reading a book on evolution (Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth), and it made the point that an awful lot of nature is futile, if we look at it from the perspective of design.¹ Take trees: they don't actually get any more sunlight by being taller than if all of them were equally short. If every tree were 10 feet tall, they would be just as well off - better even, because they would not have to spend so many resources on what amount to mere stilts. But once one tree grows taller, it blocks the sun for others, and the race is on.

So this seems to be futile - futile because so much energy is expanded simply for the sake of competing with others when everyone would have been better if they hadn't entered into the competition in the first place.² My concern here is in what exactly "futility" is.

My impression is to regard this race as futile because the trees are merely reacting to each other and to their circumstances. Each response is deflected away from what "really" needs to be done and toward those other trees and their contingent actions. If only these trees could get on with living instead of pointless tasks!³

But what would it mean for the tree to get on with the task of being a tree? We might have a picture in mind of trees taking care of real tree stuff, like getting light using as few resources as possible, and not getting distracted by the pine race. But whatever this hypothetical entity is, it is no longer a tree. Trees are what they are because of other trees. This competition they are locked in is just as much a part of them as the need for light in the first place. Conversely, the need to survive by taking in photons and synthesizing them into nutrients is just as much a "futile" race as growing taller than the other trees. The replication of DNA in all of its myriad manners is its own race, in which each set of genes is "competing" against the others.⁴

So there would be no reason to think that the race of the trees against each other is any more or less futile than anything else going on in the trees' lives. There is no core essence to "being a tree." This other race against other trees is not extrinsic to the tree's true nature, a race to be avoided if possible so that it could live a more tree-ish life.⁵

Things are what they are because of their causes, or to put it more mystic-sounding-like, things are what they are not. The tree is what it is entirely because of its relations to other trees, to other plants, to animals, and so on. It is meaningless to dismiss any of this as "futile" as opposed to some other possible existence. If it had a different existence, it would be something else. Taken to the extreme, we have the Buddhist notion of "emptiness" - everything simply is its relations to everything else, with no ultimate underlying substance or essence to anything. There is no core "tree" that can be separated from everything else. There is no firm division between "this" and "not this," between "this kind of thing" and "that kind of thing."

How might this relate to human life? Let us return to the Prisoner's Dilemma again. If there were a well-defined human nature, we can say certain things are good, and it would be better for everyone if we had some agreement that no one should be a jerk. But given the current considerations, there is no well-defined good. Things are what they are, and what they are is defined by their competition and relations to everything else. Also, in the Prisoner's Dilemma, we see that short-term gains lead to long-term losses. But now we also see that there are even longer-term changes which alter the rules of the game.

How do we put these sundry ethical views together? On one level, maybe we can just acknowledge that different considerations lead to different conclusions, and that there has yet to be a single system to unify all of this. But these different views may not be contradictory. Human beings are what they are, both as biological beings striving to copy their DNA (whether or not they are aware of this) and as rational beings able to look at the big picture. The interaction between these aspects is not a theory to be solved.

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¹ Dawkins himself does not say that it is futile; his view I think at least dovetails with the one I put down here. He just points out that if we were to take as a hypothesis that there were a designer of the universe, many things that would see would be futile from that perspective.

² I won't go into whether this futility is evidence against design. I don't think that the example of trees settles it, but many other examples seem to me to present a rather sound case.

³ To some extent, of course, this is anthropomorphizing them, but there is no need to equate end-directedness to intent; more in another post.

⁴ Some readers but balk at the physicalism here. It seems to me that there needs to be a whole lot of work down to show that nature in any way, shape, or form demonstrates any sort of final cause beyond itself. Saying that it needs to be that way in order for there to be any hope in the world is an admission that any such view is wish fulfillment, pure and simple (not to mention the fact that many people find such a non-goal-oriented view of nature nevertheless inspiring and beautiful gives the lie to the assertion). Now, whether or not human beings can be reduced to such a physicalistic picture is a separate issue, one that is more complicated – all I am pointing out is that by our natures as human beings we have at least one foot in the same world as all of these physical going-ons.

⁵ Granted, trees that are planted all by their lonesome do not grow like trees in a forest, but a) they do not completely become like they would have had they not been the descendants of the other trees in the competition, & b) we can still talk about individual trees in the forest as being products of their environment.

Essentialism and Math

Many times, when we abstract pieces of information out of the world, we are trying to hold that little bit steady in order to have a fulcrum for moving everything else. When ask about what gravity is, we like at all of the things that move by gravitation - that is, everything gravity isn't. The apple that falls is not gravity itself, but what gravity acts upon. We ask what it is to be a cat, taking it as given for the moment that there is some roughly well-defined concept "cat" that interacts with the rest of the world.

Views that try to do away with this are considered sometimes to be incoherent. If I say that there are no individuals, that you are I are are really existent but are mere social constructions, that there are no stable selves, I must assume that there are stable selves in order to say this. I think that it is I who am thinking the thought "There are no stable selves," for example. And any view that denies that there is an ultimate truth takes this denial to be an ultimate truth.

It seems like we have to have two different views at the same time to make statements like these. We look at the world and see stable things, and then we look at the world and see flux. Problems like this abound in philosophy, and I will leave it to the audience to turn up more.

I want to look at mathematical functions & equations as an analogy. A mathematical function, as a function, has a dependent variable and at least one independent variable. Take a line, for example: that classic formula y = mx + b. Let us take in particular the line y = x + 5. x is the independent variable. It is what we control, the equivalent of these stable spots we make in the world. y is the dependent variable, which is everything else that we are explaining. If I set x to 1, y must be 6. If x is 200, y is 205. y is thus explained by x.

This is fine in many cases. y = x² + 2x + 1 makes a fine parabola. y = cos(3x/2 + π) makes a nice little wave. But what about a circle? The equation for a circle with a radius of 1 would be x² + y² = 1. But that is not a function. There is no longer an independent variable and a dependent one; we have to take it in all at once. If x is 0, then this does not explain y - there are the two possible values of 1 and -1. y cannot be the independent variable either for the same reason. No set of independent variables explains everything else.

We can describe a circle using two different functions: y = √ (1 - x²) and y = - √ (1 - x²). But there is no one function which does the job. It is not even in principle possible to describe a circle in a single function - we have to keep going back and forth between these two. If you want to set one variable constant, you can't have a unified grasp of the situation.

It were as if we were trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle of the world. We have to set down a couple of pieces. However, this puzzle is odd in that, whenever we start with any pieces and then add the others, we can never get the whole puzzle. The only way to solve the puzzle is to set it down all at once.

There may yet be a way out. Take the equation r = 1. This describes the same circle, but in different coordinates. "r" is a variable representing radius, so r=1 is the function which captures all points at a distance of 1 from some central spot. Voila - a simple equation for a circle.

But just as it is hard representing a circle in rectangular coordinates, so too is it difficult to represent straight lines with polar coordinates (coordinates which describe shapes in terms of r, the radius or the distance from the origin, and θ, the angle of the line going out from the origin). So again, we can describe circles and spirals (r = θ) and other stuff like that at the cost of describing straight lines, or we can describe straight lines at the cost of describing circular curves. (I suppose we should talk about parametric functions here too, but I'm giving an analogy, not a full mathematical treatise). By making one thing set and settled, we have limited our options of what we can describe, even though at the same time there is something beyond what can be captured through independent & dependent variables.

This is not an argument for anything, but just a thought experiment to show that it is at least possible to say that we use our views of essences and substances, of fixed individual and set kinds, of steady states of whatever sort, to describe the world, even though they themselves are not in the end real constituents of the world. It is coherent to say that everything is dependent on everything else, without any first cause starting the chain. Or I can talk about myself as an individual being, as some set metaphysical reality with this particular "soul," even while at the same time acknowledging that there is some other "function" which does goes in a completely different direction. There may even be some grasp of the universe which must take things all together and not piecemeal (such as Platonic Forms & Neo-Platonic Nous), like how there is a equation for a circle in rectangular coordinates but no single function. But I'm more interested in leaving this as a playground of thought than any settled metaphysical view for now.

Reverse Prisoner's Dilemma

Often times in ethics, we are trying to give a reason why people shouldn't do bad things, and why doing the right thing is actually good for them. One way of doing this is using the prisoner's dilemma: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1899#comic. Basically, if only one person were a jerk, they could get off the hook. But if people start being jerks, everyone will be jerkish to compensate, and everyone ends up worse off.

But what about people being too nice? What sorts of ethical dilemmas does this raise? Let me give an example. I was biking up a (rather steep) hill the other day. Toward the top of this hill is a 4-way stop. Now, as I was nearing this hill, there was a car which had been fully stopped long before I reached the stop sign. They tried waving me on instead of going themselves.

If they had just gone as the rules dictated, without paying attention to me, they would have gone all the way through the intersection before I arrived. I would have slowed down, looked for traffic, and continued going through the intersection without having to come to a complete stop and start up again on a hill. Instead, they waited longer, and I had to completely regain all of my momentum. Everyone ended up worse off because of one person's niceness. (Admittedly, the world did not end for this egregious affront, but it does illustrate the point.)

A possible principle here seems to be this: special consideration for anyone throws off everyone. It doesn't really matter whether this is consideration for oneself or for another. It really ends up being the same, completely regardless of intention. Individuals are parts of some bigger whole because they interact with each other and affect each other; we are social animals and have to rely on others. The whole, in turn, is best off when order is preserved. Individuals may benefit short-term from acting disharmoniously (or from others doing such in mistaken niceness), but such behavior leads to long-term loss for everyone (of course, this “long-term” may be beyond the life of the particular individual, which is why asshole CEOs don't necessarily get what is coming to them, but that is yet another issue). (I would like to tie this to Kant's ethics, in particular to his “kingdom of ends” interpretation of the categorical imperative, but that is a different discussion.)

What is this “order”, though? Of course not every order will do – racist and sexist laws do not achieve what is overall best for everyone, so preserving any order simply for order's sake is not necessarily what is what will preserve the good. And there is not necessarily a single order – a 4-way stop sign arrangement seems to be reasonable and probably not oppressive, but there are other ways of managing residential intersections too. So ethics may be to some extent arbitrary, but that is not the same as saying that anything goes. (This actually was in part the view of the medieval thinker Duns Scotus: there is only one moral law which is necessarily true, i.e. that the first principle must be loved, while everything else is merely a fitting way of ordering the universe). So it might not be possible to find “the” one order to rule them all, but we can study particular ways of living to see which promote the good: which societies seem to give the best life for the most people?