How Economics Solves Moral Problems

In the book I’ve written on morality, a common theme throughout is this; the trick in solving moral problems that have lingered for decades or centuries has been to apply logical reasoning by assigning value to things.  However, sometimes problems come unexpectedly and take a little bit more consideration.  Here's an example.  I know a married couple who recently got divorced. Both are wealthy, and have agreed amicably on an equitable settlement regarding their house and possessions.  There is one exception though - the couple were bought a carriage clock for their wedding by a much valued friend who later died of cancer. 

The clock is not valuable in monetary terms, but it has huge sentimental value to both the husband and the wife, and both are insistent they want it.  It seems that there are no facts that give either of them more entitlement than the other, and it appears that neither will cede any ground to the other.  How can it be decided who gets the clock?

At first this is the sort of stalemate that seems unsolvable in any moral terms.  But it isn't unresolvable.  All we need to do is ascertain which of them wants the clock the most.  Quite naturally, the fairest thing to do is give it to the person to whom it would mean most to keep the clock - because fairness (along with justice and equality of opportunity) is a primary keystone of morality.  So how could the couple decide who wants it the most?  That's not too difficult - the person who is willing to pay the most for the clock wants it the most.  That's how we could assign value to a situation and come up with a moral decision. 

The difficulty with having them each bid for it is that personal feelings might become involved, and thus the winning bid after a series of rounds of auctioneering might have been as much about winning as it was about wanting.  Therefore, to find out their true valuation I suggest they do the following; Have each of them place a sealed bid in a box.  The winning bid gets the clock, but the winner has to give the loser half the value between the winning bid and the losing bid.  So if the husband wins the clock with a £200 bid, and his wife loses out with a £100 bid, the husband keeps the clock and gives his wife £50.  Giving the loser half the value between the two bids is the only way I can think of ensuring that genuine bids are submitted, because the concomitant costs ensures that the bidder won't bid unnecessarily high or unnecessarily low.

It's probably best if I don’t mention this to the couple though – these things can be quite sensitive, and often fractious couples don’t like rational interference!

Why Intelligent Design Fails As A Theory

The theory of Intelligent Design (ID) is huge, particularly in America, and its proponents have attempted to take over from where the much discredited creationism fell off.  Intelligent Design proponents describe the theory as:

"Evidence that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent Divine creator, not an undirected process such as natural selection”

There are literally tens of thousands of papers, websites, blogs, books and articles in which ID is defended by its proponents and derided by its detractors.  But despite the wealth of material, I have never seen anybody conclusively defend ID or rebut it.  That is to say, as far as I know, nobody has demonstrated that ID is correct and nobody has demonstrated that it is incorrect.  This surprises me greatly, because I think it is possible (and not very difficult) to show why ID is philosophically mistaken. 

The philosophical problem with Intelligent Design (ID) is quite straightforward. With something like burglaries, weather systems, skyscrapers, and so forth, I have the sufficient experience to catalogue the empirical evidence they present to me.  I know the difference between a house that has been burgled and one that hasn't. I know when a building firm has erected a building and when trees have been planted.

This cannot be said of ID, because I have no way of distinguishing between a part of nature that is designed intelligently by God and a part of nature that is brought about by nature's physical laws.  This, of course, is compounded by the fact that God no doubt uses the physical laws to do His creating - so for human beings not privy to the divine blueprint, there really is no way to distinguish between designed and not-designed by God.

This leads me to the seemingly unimpeachable conclusion that trying to look for design from within that nature is a bit like fishes swimming deep in the ocean all their lives looking for a thing called 'wetness'.  

Moreover, this is what really leads me to believe that ID is not genuine in its aims - and is instead an instrument for hubris, coterie-ism and mistaken ideology. My above undoing of ID cannot be refuted, and yet not a single ID proponent has ever even faintly acknowledged this.  As such, they are carrying on in spite of a contra-indicator that shows why what they are doing is mistaken.  So I can only conclude at the heart of ID is not honest scientific enquiry, but politically motivated disingenuousness, where lots of money is at stake, making the admission of error all but impossible for most of its proponents.

Note one thing, ID may be true or it may be false - but that misses the point, which is to say; under the rules and procedures of philosophy on which we have based our epistemology, ID cannot be shown to be either true or false.  Lots of people want to prove or, more realistically, cite evidence for Intelligent Design in the universe, and they spend a lot of time, money and energy trying to build formal credentials in an attempt to fuse theology and science.  We don't need pages of text to show that what they are trying to do is unachievable – we need only what I’m now going to say in the rest of this article to show it is unsound. 

Don’t misunderstand me; there may be conditions under which an individual experience - a miraculous healing, a feeling of prognostication, or something of that kind - goes on to provide the personal conviction of evidence that some people are looking for.  And I have no wish to trivialise or belittle people’s personal convictions.  But it has to be said, although that kind of belief is fine at an individual level, such evidence is only anecdotal - it cannot be universally established. 

Here is the main reason why I think inference of Intelligent Design is wrong, and why it fails the most important philosophical test.  Quite simply, we only have our universe with which to interface; therefore, if the universe is the result of a deliberate design strategy from on high, then it stands to reason that the things which we try to explain are merely self-referential within that realm, just as when we try to describe what the human mind is we are analysing something that is contained within itself.

Some physicists look for design in the fine-tuning argument, and some biologists look for design in the complexity of DNA, but I think they are making a mistake.  The universe and DNA (as we see them, not as they actually are) are human constructions formulated in the human mind to express the mind's interpretation of its own interfacing with external reality. So the recognition of 'design intentionality' would merely be the mental artefact describing its expressions in terms of its own mental artefact, which is entirely self-referential, and thereby fails to qualify as philosophical knowledge. 

In other words, we say the universe looks fine-tuned because our conceptualisation of fine-tuning has been attributed to the patterns we observe in nature.  But don't forget concepts of fine-tuning didn't begin as cosmological observations; they began with concepts related to the adjustment of parameter models within the electromagnetic spectrum, with low-end frequencies of things like radio waves, and the high-end frequencies of gamma rays.  Fine-tuning is a human conception, and to call the universe fine-tuned for life is rather like claiming that our legs are designed for trousers because they fit in so well. 

The same problem arises in our biological examinations - we don't have the wherewithal to identify intentionality (observable design) in nature because, like fine-tuning, intentionality is a human construction that began as a reference to our observed models of human action and causation long before we knew about the constituencies of evolutionary biology.

That in a nutshell is why Intelligent Design cannot be successful, and why belief in God must be taken on a rationally based faith.  However, that doesn't mean the subject is brought to a close.  Perhaps the only recognition we have of Intelligent Design is not in the constituent parts of the universe (physics, chemistry, biology) but in the fundamental truths that underwrite creation – the truths that are intrinsically part of God’s Mind.  Of course, we are not going to qualify that as scientific evidence – but I wouldn’t expect to, because science is only one of those subset edifices on which those truths depend. 

To ask for scientific evidence that those primary tenets of reality exhibit design is a bit like expecting that judiciary systems were instigated to create a thing called justice.  Courts emerged precisely because humans identified a concept called justice, just as science emerged because humans identified that there is a world of mathematics and logic and truth that supports our epistemological endeavours by providing rational consistency in nature.  It might be the case that exhibitions of God are found in exhibitions of that rational consistency that acts as a foundation for faith.  But that must be taken on faith, or not taken at all.

What knocks the ID proponent from under his feet is that humans do not have any way to distinguish between a universe that is designed and one that is natural.  Science is a descriptive tool that facilitates the study of patterns imposed on nature’s mathematical canvas – and those patterns do not give us evidence of design.  As soon as you tell me what you mean by ‘design’ you will be forced into anthropocentric pockets of description that are based on your own conception of human design.  Nature is not amenable to those modes of description, because, as I say, there is no method by which a human being can delineate between a divinely designed mathematical pattern and a naturalistic one.  In order to show evidence of design you would need to demonstrate how humans could know the difference.  And that just cannot be done – which is why Intelligent Design fails as a theory.

Some like to say that because there are genotypic and phenotypic commonalities running through all life, then this is indication of design.  That makes no sense to me. Given that all life is built on the same (bio)chemical substrate this isn't in the least bit surprising.  Hence, it is a mistake to say that 'intelligence' must therefore be running throughout nature.  In fact, often this is only to be guilty of invoking some classification based on human intelligence in designing things.  The human ability to design material artefacts is qualitatively different from any embroidered use of the word in relation to the biological stimulus of movement, reproduction, excretion, nutrition, growth, and respiration.

The Philosophical Test for ID

To use another method of showing where ID falls down, what the ID proponents are trying to tell us is that there are two or more premises that can lead to the conclusion 'Therefore, all life is designed'. I want to say that I do not think there are any examples of two premises that could lead to such a conclusion   The reason I'm so sure of this is because the philosophical trick is not to keep looking for premises in the hope of finding two that logically entail your conclusion - but rather to start with the putative conclusion and work backwards, asking if 'anything' at all could precede the conclusion in the form of logical entailment.  The answer is, no, nothing could qualify.

Here's why; the physical substrate of the universe is a vast object of study that we humans delineate into three conceptual parts - biology, chemistry and physics (actually it's more than three, but I'll keep it at three for simplicity's sake).  This process involves refining objects of study with what's called componential analysis (which is a form of reductionism) where the constituent parts of a biological artefact can be reduced to chemical study, and then reduced further into the simpler proprietary parts of physics. 

I won't even bring to bear the complication that the tem 'life' is a human construct, upon which we have created a descriptive term for the purposes of classification.  The emergence of life is referred to as abiogenesis - which is the point at which the earth's chemistry evolved into a self-replicating system.  The point at which chemistry becomes biology is not an instantaneous moment (and even if it were, it would be an arbitrarily defined human classification).  But let's pretend there is one single point in history when we can say that life began - an A to B event of causation.  The putative conclusion begins with 'Therefore, all life is designed' - and from what I've said it is self-evidentially obvious that there are no philosophical conditions under which one can identify a particular point in history as being the beginning of the design of life.  All one is doing is looking for the transition from chemistry to biology, but they overlap, and they give no exhibition to any kind of process of divine choreography, because they can be reduced to particles that simulate mere possibility as fluctuations in a quantum field. 

Even if God did have to start the process by some kind of intervention that took place as a radical break from chemical normalcy - abiogenesis isn't an object of empirical study for us, and the power of identifying just what the appearance of initial design looks like in the chemical world eludes us further.  That's how I know we can never elicit two premises that will yield the conclusion 'Therefore, all life is designed'.

One more point of clarification, I have not said all this in the hope of showing ID is false.  I don’t know if it is true or false – but neither does anyone else.  What I am saying is, I think ID should be rejected, not because the theories are wrong, but because they cannot be shown to be right – which is rather the point of ID in the first place; to show there is “Evidence that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent Divine creator”.  Ironically that is the one thing it cannot do. 

 

Invasion of the Mind Snatchers

I ended the last blog by saying that one’s mental excellence might be enhanced by giving up some of the things one most enjoys.  This seems a perfectly logical thing to conclude, given that the harder one strives for mental excellence the less one finds oneself partaking in those activities that are generally thought to be simplistically ‘enjoyable’.  I was going to list all the ways that give exhibition to this truth – but here is a much less time consuming way to say the same thing.  A somewhat extreme illustration will serve to make the point clearer. 

Suppose a highly advanced alien race informed our planet that we all must strive for the highest mental excellence in the next five years, after which only the top one million figures of mental excellence would survive and be snatched away from earth to enjoy an existence much better than our current existence.  I don’t imagine many of the people would remain obsessed with sport, nor binge drinking, nor watching soaps and reality TV, nor drug taking, nor celebrity worship, nor going to the bookies, nor chasing financial riches in a greedy way, nor involved in gangs or street crime, nor the vanity of being obsessed with how they look.  They would be studying information, pursuing knowledge, learning to enhance their mental acuity, augmenting their capacity for intelligence, and striving to link all this together in the shape of wisdom.

Moreover, understanding that mental excellence is not just about knowledge and intelligence, they would strive for excellence in morality; they would try their hardest to master love, grace, kindness, generosity, forgiveness, understanding, patience, compassion and solicitude. Given this fact, if we believe the height of human potential to be the sorts of things that we have continually raised above the bar throughout human history (things related to the power of the mind that I just described) then it could be said that a lot of our human activity involves selling ourselves short. 

Perhaps, instead of Invasion of the Body Snatchers we should hope for Invasion of the Mind Snatchers!

Tournament Economics

I decided to start blogging.  Being a writer of books, I find I end up with lots of scraps that won't make it in the books, but that would be good candidates for the blog format. 

I'm not overly interested in sport - so it's perhaps unexpected that my first 'Philosophical Muser' blog should be about sport.

The lionisation of sports stars and sports teams, and generalised sport fanhood, is a mental commitment that usually stifles the development of real excellence of mind.  In much of Europe the national obsession is football - which is probably an unhealthy obsession in excess, just like almost all sport obsession is.  I suppose the corollary issue is that sport is something of taste, so how do we measure quantity to find what is excessive and what isn't?  There is one way - by assigning value using an economic template.  The sorts of sums of money involved in football constitutes crazy money.  I know this because when one talks in terms of tens of millions, it's obvious to me that the money could be spent better elsewhere. 

Ah, but wait, you may say - if sport gives people great pleasure, and people wilfully follow it at some personal cost, who is anyone to say the money could be better spent elsewhere?  That is the wrong question.  The right question would be - if the vast sums of money associated with sport were diminished and put into more worthwhile uses, would the diminution that greatly compromises the quality of sport be worth it against the gains obtained from the increased resources in other uses?  Let's say the benefactors and businessmen behind sport and its media outlets got together and agreed to charitably take 75% of the crazy money out of sport and invest it in projects that helped the needy.  Yes the quality of sport would decrease, but not by very much, and the enjoyment levels would soon equilibriate again.  More so, the quality of life for those in need would increase greatly.  Sport involves huge sums of money that generates rewards that would not be greatly diminished with much of the crazy money taken out.  In the global sense, where one is measuring quality of life and well-being, sport (and many other things, of course) sucks up a lot of money and provides relatively little in return.

Once again, that is not a wild speculation - it is based on the economic principle that market economies quite naturally shape rewards, contribution and demands commensurably.  With a small degree of flexibility, the price of a bunch of bananas, or a mobile phone, or a lawnmower, or a scarf, or the fees of bricklayers, plumbers, removal men, etc reflects the demand and willingness to pay a particular sum for the goods or services.  That is why (save for anomalies) the market generally isn't over-saturated or in great scarcity of the products consumers buy and the services people need.  Sport doesn't have this 'invisible hand' (to use Adam Smith's term) to regulate its dispensations - it can extend globally and amount to a huge over investment which robs us of a great many resources and denies the more valuable and worthwhile alternative uses.  Because of this, irregularity in the market economy doesn't provide the optimum number of sports stars as it does goods supplies, bricklayers, plumbers and removal men. 

Does all this mean people should give up their love of sport?  Not necessarily - it gives them pleasure, and the crazy sums of money involved aren't going to change for the better anyway.  And remember, this wasn't a post about how to live your life, it was the expression of a truism based on economic facts.  Compounding this is the fact that money isn't the same as wealth - money buys you the things you want and need, but it is the assets that money buys that gives quality of life.  You don't create wealth just by giving someone millions of pounds.  You create wealth when you start a company that fulfils the demands of the consumer with the supply of a particular product that adds quality or well-being to people's lives.  You create wealth when you streamline a company of its extraneous staff.  You create wealth every time you close down an entity that sucks up more resources than it provides.  You create wealth when you invent new things, or synthesise two concepts in innovation, or construct new theories that generate prosperity when actioned. That is why the crazy money in sport is doing much less good than that crazy money could do elsewhere.

Next time I will tell you why your mental excellence might be enhanced by giving up some of the things you most enjoy.