Thoughts of A Buddhist Utilitarian

With in the context of game theory literature, rational equates with maximizing self-interest. In the prisoner's dilemma, it is rational to always defect/plea out. This also is the sense in which rationality is used regarding economic markets, in the pop sense understanding. At least in game theory, this has always seemed off to me. The rational thing to do in the prisoner's dilemma should not be to defect - this is seems counter-intuitive to me. Perhaps it's because rational has a different connotation to me - it's about what one should do, what the smart/best thing to do. Granted if the smart thing to do is to maximize one's interest then yes this seems to fit. I have no problem saying that defecting maximizes self-interest - that is accurate but rational carries with it so much more. However if 'rational' is more akin to what one should do, then we get closer to moral ought and unless one is a Randian, moral rightness and maximizing self-interest are not equivalent and will diverge.

I'm not sure if I'm desiring a more precise usage of the word 'rational' so that it's baggage of sanity and smartness gets distanced from selfishness, or if I just want to find another word or concept that narrows in on the smart, right thing to do. As much as the later option seems tempting, it would require reconditioning my vocabulary, explaining the distinction to others (which I do enjoy doing), but also abandoning the word to the forces of equivocation which has already way overstepped it's bounds in the current media and political climate. For now, I'm opting for the former: to confront the usage of 'rational' and asking in what sense it is being used.

This is not a Depeche Mode vs. Metallica debate, but more of a philosophical one. Surprise knowing me right?

Everything counts is one of the theses of the larger project I'm writing on. I've been trying to think of how to have a relatively concise explanation of this project in order to actual hold conversations about it without referencing the blog posts or getting side tracked on many of the details, which is one of the struggles I have with writing. As the main upshot is terms of our moral responsibility, I think I can jettison the metaphysics of it from the brief explanation and that can be brought up later as needed. The upshot is that almost everyone's actions, nearly all of them, participate in some kind of collective action, which carries some moral responsibility.

This can be seen in eating, whether from restaurants or grocery stores, where our money goes to support the businesses (employees, profits, financiers, loans, etc.), transportation of the food from near and most often far, suppliers of the food (fellow citizens and companies and people from other countries). Similarly for paying and using utilities, driving & gas. Some of this involves supporting, indirectly, totalitarian regimes, wars and violence and potentially even genocide. Almost everything is part of the global web and thus can be described in some sort of collective action. The only way to avoid the interconnected web or globalism is to be completely isolated alone or in a commune, living off the grid but in all ways, so living off the web.

As a sort example that gets into part of the metaphysics, consider the following two cases where the surrounding circumstances are identical:
Case 1: a person kills their spouse
Case 2: a person, a Nazi soldier, kills a Jew in the early 1940s.
Both cases are an act of murder. However case 2 is part of the Holocaust. Murder carries moral responsibility that is present in both cases; however case 2 carries additional moral responsibility for participation and contribution to the Holocaust. Similar actions can have different consequences and that carries different amounts or kinds of moral responsibility.

Also consider a person hitting their spouse. In one case this could be in terms of an argument turning violent. In another case this could be in terms of a D/s relationship where such actions have prior consent. Context matters, and affects the descriptions of actions and the moral responsibility that goes along with it.

I'm going off too far on a tangent here, the point of this post was not to be a positive account of everything counts but an assault on the idea that nothing matters.

There are multiple ways to approach the concept of nothing matters.

Defensive: agree that at the end of the universe, where there may or may not be a restaurant, things will turn out the same regardless of what we do; however, that all the suffering and happiness that occurs along the way to sentient beings does matter and that our actions do have an effect here. That some things do matter.

Offensive: Nothing matters isn't self-contradictory in the same way as the statement “this sentence is false” or in the same way that moral subjectivism fails but I do feel that there are similarities. Nothing matters is self-refuting though. If nothing matters, then there is no reason to do what you want, or do what other people expect you to because it doesn't matter. If nothing matters, then the mere utterance, statement of it, or trying to convince others of it doesn't matter. By acting in any way, it demonstrates that something matters. Trying to convince people of this statement shows at least a desire to convince people of the “truth”, get them to do what you want them to, or whatever motive a person might have. If none of this mattered, they won't try to convince others of it. If nothing matters, than even pursuing a hedonistic lifestyle would be moot. By pursuing such a lifestyle, there is something that matters to those seeking it. Perhaps this is a result of a neutered articulation of the principle. Perhaps it shouldn't be nothing matters period, metaphysically and completely, but nothing matters to me, or no person's actions make a difference in the end. Really there needs to be a better explanation of what 'nothing' means (people, actions, etc.) and what 'matters' means (to whom or what, and how completely). Until a better articulation or defense happens, I'll still challenge the higher socio-economic or trust fund exposures of this to put their money where their mouth is and donate a significant amount or all of their wealth to charity. If nothing really matters, then it doesn't matter whether they have money or not!

There are many different approaches within action theory on how to individuate actions, non-actions, and consequences.

I move my finger upwards. I have also contacted and moved a hard plastic object, flipped a switch, and turned on a light. The turning on a light may also frighten a fly, indicate to a stalker that I am home, or set off a bomb next door given certain electrical wiring. Does this constitute one action or many? This is the problem of individuation of action.

“Depending on which theory of act individuation is accepted, these descriptions may all refer to the same action (as in Davidson, 1980), they may refer to different actions that are all generated by the same basic act-token (as in Goldman, 1970), or they may refer to parts of the same overarching action (as in the “componential” views of Ginet (1990), Thalberg (1977), and Thomson (1977)).” (Chant)

I will be following the Davidson approach in which the above example constitutes one action but may be described in multiple ways. Thus multiple descriptions of an action can be equally valid.

While the example above works to illustrate the principle here, another example will be more applicable in later posts.

I hand another person a piece of plastic. I have hereby purchased a hamburger. I have also provided X business a profit, enabled X to stay in business, helped to keep Y people employed by X, provided X incentive to buy more buns, meat and condiments, etc.

This is hardly a new topic but since around this year's National Coming Out Day I've seen a number of examples popping up that make me hopeful about general social progress as well as one of the communities to which I consider myself a part of.

While the interwebz is great for representing oneself as one sees fit and not having to deal with physical identification of gender, race, age, etc., some of this ability is limited in online gaming where actual voice communication is necessary and conveys some of these characteristics. Significant investment in a community can also be made where one wants to be oneself with their online friends and not hide important aspects about oneself.

Online gaming is filled with plenty of immature behavior, especially regarding race and sexuality/orientation, yet lots of mature pockets exist and thankfully I've always found pretty decently mature guilds to be apart of.

The examples of late that have inspired this post have been:
A guildie writing about the recent teenagers committing suicide due to anti-gay bulling and the frequent gay or race related humor used in the guild:
"You do not have to approve of or agree with homosexuality, but I hope you can agree that these six boys did not need nor deserve to die. Joking or not, your words do have an effect on those around you. I implore you to think twice before using the word "gay" or "nigger" or "fag" in jest, because you can't truly comprehend how they are digested by the people you talk to.

I say this today because tomorrow (10/11) is National Coming Out Day. Those of you who know me in real life or on facebook know that I am openly gay. Having raided and played with you all for the past 3 years, I hope you will respect what I have to say and think twice before you speak."

A post on a main WoW site about transgendered-bullying, http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/10/15/drama-mamas-transgender-bullying/, and the open and accepting communities/guilds supporting and welcoming those who are transgendered.

Guilds holding charity events, such as Breast Cancer Awareness: http://thebigbearbutt.com/2009/11/02/announcement-world-of-warcraft-raid-for-the-cure/

An interesting article recently appeared on the Chronicle of Higher Education's website, 'Sex Week' Should Arouse Caution Most of All. I am pleased to see more sex positive events happening on campuses across the country and that this may be part of the first wave of campuses becoming more kink-friendly. There are a few issues with the opinion piece though and I'll touch on just a couple of them.

"Teaching about polyamory but not about monogamy or abstinence?" Focusing on a topic does not always have to be comprehensive or always portray another side. Teaching about black history does not require covering white or asian history. Covering another side might help illuminate the differences or spectrum of lifestyles or culture but certainly isn't mandatory. Monogamy and white privilege permeates general society already and don't need extra time. I had no idea until after college of kink or polyamory (as opposed to casual sex or just cheating). Good intro presentations on kink or poly should emphasize that bdsm or poly is not for everyone. These events should be and are about creating a safe space and community for those marginalized and sometimes even vilified.

Viewing of pornography is still largely a solo or small group activity. By bringing some of it to large audiences, it allows for frank dialogue about aspects of it, such as the sex activities involved, different relationships between violence and sex, the role porn plays in society, as well as the commercialization or idealization of sex. The Alice in Wonderland musical porn (1976) provides a good juxtaposition with current porn about ideals or attractiveness of female figures/body shape. As with racism and many other "touchy" subjects, we as society must learn how to discuss them in open, honest ways and not hide it in a corner, hoping it will go away. It won't.

Companies seeking out these events are a potential concern. However, students may be seeking these companies out to provide resource for the events and to the student groups. Administrators may seem hesitant or resistant to approving or supporting such events due to their own personal views, or fear of public outcry or legislative backlash pulling funding strings. It's not going to be until many in the profession are willing to engage and stand up internally and externally to these pressures. As I've been thinking for a couple years now, kink/poly or animal welfare is going to be the next sexual orientation movement and I plan on doing my part in making progress.

How We Are Morally Responsible For Factory Farming, Genocide, Elections, and More: A Theory of Collective Responsibility (Intro)

Alternatively titled: Individual Moral Responsibility for Collective Actions: How We Ought Resolve Our Responsibility for Factory Farming, Climate Change, etc.

This overall project has been simmering in my mind for four years, ever since a talk by Ted Warfield called “Eating Dead Animals” and a seminar on collective action by Sara Chant. Warfield rightly pointed out that while the ethicalness of factory farming (FF for short) may not be difficult to determine, the metaphysics of how the moral responsibility regarding FF transfers or falls to consumers is very vague. Animal welfare or rights ethicists, including Singer and Regan, had not answered this question in sufficient depth or clarity. Warfield proposed a number of potential solutions, all of which fail to hold up due to (economic) causation issues*. He briefly suggested that an alternative possibility might be collective agency and collective responsibility, but that we need to think much harder about those issues as the issues are broad and literature on them light.

The answer to this metaphysical issue seemed to come in one article during the collective action seminar, “The Special Composition Question in Action” by Sara Chant**. The article described a method by which collective action is reducible to individual action as well as the criteria by which a set of individual actions would constitute a collective – not any random group of individual actions would do. This account seemed easy and accurate, as well as paving an easy and accurate route along which moral responsibility could travel.

The goal of this project is to articulate this theory of collective action and demonstrate how individual moral responsibility flows along it. The moralness of (collective) actions is left to the standard moral theories, which I believe are all functional with this project.

In upcoming posts, I hope to lay out this project in a detailed first draft. My tentative outline is:
1. Action Description – how an action can be legitimately described in multiple ways
2. Theory of Collective Action – a synopsis of Chant's article
3. Examples of Collective Action – a number of examples that function with the theory of collective action, which will highlight the number of collective actions that we are involved with – the moralness of many of them may be obvious
4. Individual Responsibility of Collective Action – how responsibility of collective action falls to individuals as well as different ways to discharge that responsibility
5. How this plays out for myself – how I am responsible for a number of the examples of collective actions and what I do about it, i.e. how I discharge/meet the obligations imposed by participation.

*Roughly, my purchasing a particular portion of meat (dead animal) doesn't affect whether that particular animal was killed because it is already dead when I purchase it. It's not like I went out to the FF, pointed at an animal, and said kill that and I'll pay you for the meat. This is a past-directed argument. A future-directed argument is that by purchasing the meat, I'm paying someone to pay someone ... to pay someone to kill another animal. How long or short does this causation chain have to be in order for moral responsibility to transfer to the purchaser? Afterall, we can come up with a legitimate causation chain of funding where my purchasing a book may end up funding Al Qaeda.

**Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (2006): 422-441.

I've learned a lot in my current job, and I mean A LOT. A lot about myself, how I work, supervision, how I prefer to be supervised, departmental communication and degrees of functionality. One common threat in all of this is reinforcement, be it positive or negative as well as methods of reinforcement.

While I do enjoy private and, to some degree, public praise and support, this sort of reinforcement only goes a snail's throw with me. I prefer action over words, which should say something from someone who thinks a lot before I act. What I have currently requested is additional resources for myself and to do my job. This is the first time I have gone in to ask for a raise, i.e. salary adjustment, and of course me being me, been prepared with a page and a half of ways I have gone above and beyond expectations. Now this hasn't just been about compensation, but resources to continue building above and beyond on already exists. Our programming budgets were taken away, due to financial need, after a semester on the job. I should be getting to supervise part of the overall budget for my collateral area, and quite likely to be getting some housing programming money which is part of the pool that RAs draw from. Thankfully the RA fund pool is healthy enough for me to likely draw from and I am hoping to use this to enhance our trial Green Dorm and turn it into the first (perhaps quasi) living-learning community / academic topic focused living space. Student Affairs can do a lot with nothing but it can do so much more with even just a little bit.

Now this desire for the resource type of reinforcement might revolve largely on one factor: I am not the only person with my job title and description and there is a qualitative as well as quantitative difference in how we perform. Seeing over two years how there is little to no difference in the sort or amount of verbal reinforcement/praise we receive, the trend pushes one to the lowest common denominator. That is, if it doesn't matter how much beyond the bare minimum (or even occasionally less than) one does, why continue doing more than that? Having this thought stew will quite often lead towards lowering one's standard. I know that the quality of the work of those in this sort of position does have an impact on students and this serves as a powerful internal motivation for those who care; however, there's an extent to which one's internal motivation can last on its own. Mine seems to be around 2-3 years.

I hope to actual get some of the positive, merit-based reinforcement that will help continue what I have been doing. Otherwise, I'll probably get out and do more things around the area, in which it'll be a good last year of adventures in Sarasota. Should be fun either way.

I just realized that the content of this post again highlights that I am a green/emerald. RA training was a good reminder of my "color" and how I function.

Many Utilitarians make a distinction between the rightness (or wrongness) of an action and praise-worthiness (or blame) of an action. The rightness or wrongness depends solely on the consequences of the action - how much good or harm was done. Praise or blame functions on the motive or intended consequences of the action by the actor. Thus a person can commit a morally right act but not be praised for it - A shoving B which coincidentally prevents B from getting hit but A shoved B because A was angry and wanted B to fall and get hurt (B avoids harm even though that was A's intention). Similarly, a person can commit a morally wrong act even though they shouldn't be blamed for it (or perhaps should even be praised for trying something that was quite likely to produce good consequences).

This distinction seems like it could be useful for epistemology, particularly when dealing with "Barn country" counterexamples to the JTB definition of knowledge.

First the background on JTB and Barn country before we get to how this moral distinction could be applicable.

A widely held definition of knowledge is that knowledge = justified true belief (JTB). Thus if a belief is true and justified, then it counts as knowledge. This is how I can say that I know that the sun will rise in the East (or the statement "I know that the sun..." is true), whereas I can not know that the moon is made of green cheese (I can still believe that statement; it happens to be a false belief though).

Barn country counterexamples play on the coincidental truth of certain statements which while true are somehow (supposedly) intuitively not supposed to count as knowledge. (Thus the claim is that knowledge = JTB + something else, i.e. JTB is not enough by itself to provide knowledge.) So what are these supposed counterexamples. Well, first imagine you are going through farm country and there's lots of barns around, you point to a barn and say "I know there is a barn there". It is true, looks very much like a barn and meets other justification standards, and you believe it so voila, knowledge. Now imagine you are going through fake barn country where there's tons of things that look like barns but they are really more like billboards or cardboard cutouts that look like barns. However, it is still farm country and there are some actual barns in the land as well. Additionally, you don't know anything about there being fake barns. As you are going along you point to something that looks like a barn and again say "I know there is a barn there". Sure enough you pointed to one of the few legitimate barns in the area and not one of the billboards that just loo like a barn. Here it is true that what you pointed to is a barn, you believe that it is, and you seem justified just like previously; however, with all the fake barns around, many people want to say this doesn't qualify as knowledge because of how coincidental or lucky one got in pointing to a real barn.

With the background laid out, the moral distinction can help JTB with fake barn counterexamples by saying that knowledge really is just JTB and luck does factor into the truth of the statement but justification could be praised or blamed depending on the epistemic state of the agent, perhaps more precisely what sort and how much justification the agent has.

Analogy
Moral rightness/wrongness <> epistemic truth
Moral praise/blame <> epistemic justification

To reiterate, with knowledge = JTB, the truth of the belief can be lucky just as one can be lucky with the moral rightness of ones actions. One might term it epistemic luck to be analogous to moral luck. How much justification one has can determine how much one is praised or admonished for their knowledge.

This sort of analogy can be useful in explaining how our ancestors can legitimately be said to have known things even if they weren't correct in the reasoning of causation. For example, people thousands of years ago knew that the sun would rise in the east even if they thought this because of a beliefs about the balance of the 4 elements or the life cycle of a deity.

We do a little survey of various aspects of diversity among the RAs and professional housing staff, and present the results to first year students so they can see how varied we are under the surface. One of the parts is about spirituality/religion and one person replied that they were a soft atheist. Neither J nor I being familiar with this term, I googled it. The distinction between hard & soft atheism seem to trade on an epistemic vs. metaphysical difference. Hard atheism claims that "there are no gods" is a true statement (or that "there is at least one god" is a false statement) - this is a metaphysical claim. Soft atheism doesn't make the metaphysical claim about the truth value of either statement but is simply not believing in any deity. This is a statement about belief not the nature of reality.

J and I have yet to discuss the merits of such a distinction, but the distinction seems applicable to any religion. Since high school I have discussed different ways of self-identifying/definitions of atheism and agnosticism. An atheism might self-identify as such by claiming that there are no gods. Alternatively, they might identify by claiming that they do not believe in any gods. An agnostic might identify as such by claiming that it is (metaphysically) impossible to prove or disprove the existence of god (human or logical limitation). Alternatively, they might identify as such because they don't know or have a belief of whether or not a deity exists. Thus depending on what definition is used, it might make sense to self-identify as an agnostic atheist, agnostic christian, or in my case, agnostic deist. Here the metaphysical claim could be that it is impossible to prove or disprove... (agnostic) yet one believes (epistemic) that there are no gods, believes in the Christian deity, or believes in a deistic deity.

While it is likely irrational to be a metaphysical atheist and an epistemic Christian (or anything other than an epistemic atheist), this distinction between metaphysics and epistemology can be instructive in articulating what sort of spiritual/religious claim or position one is taking. Is a person a metaphysical Christian or just an epistemic one?

Articulation has always been a concern for me. In both personal and professional realms, I can formulate well thought out arguments and try to communicate as effectively as possible by including explanations. However, I have felt that there has been a significant barrier between my thoughts and actually expressing them through words or writing. For example, this post is clear in my mind, yet I have difficulty putting it to words.

A primary reason why articulation seems difficult is striving for precision and clarity. Precision can include a fair amount of detail which can get in the way of clarity. The desire for both stems from my philosophical inclinations and was reinforced during grad school.

During RA camp, I had a significant breakthrough in my thoughts about articulation due to a conversation with J. The reason why articulation is important to me is that I care about the impact that my communication has. I try to provide as much relevant information as possible but this leads to the tension between precision and the impact my communication has with students. The difficulty is finding the right balance. What I realized is that I care more about the impact than maintaining a high level of precision. Really I shouldn't be surprised by this, being a utilitarian after all. While I still care plenty about precision and including sufficient detail, I'm not going to strive for it at the cost of impact.

Now the tension isn't quite precision vs. impact, but precision vs. impact vs. time. With enough time, communication can both be highly precise and impactful. Given realistic time constraints, precision or impact must be sacrificed to some degree. I choose for precision to take the greater hit.