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What If You Aren’t Sure What’s Moral?

photograph of a fork in the path

Today, I woke up in a soft bed in a heated apartment. I got up and made full use of the miracle of indoor plumbing before moving on to breakfast. Pouring myself a bowl of vitamin-enriched cereal and milk (previously delivered to my doorstep) I had to admit it: modern life is good.

Opening up my laptop, my gratitude for modernity diminished as quickly as my browser tabs multiplied. Our phones and laptops are not just tools. They are portals to another world — a relentless world of news, opinion, and entertainment. We’re living through the age of information overload. On average, we now consume 174 newspapers worth of information each day. “I’ve processed more information in the last 48 hours than a medieval peasant would in a lifetime,” reads a well-liked tweet.

And yet, amid this tsunami of information, we seem to have less certainty than ever. Controversy and discord reign. There is little agreement about basic facts, let alone about what is to be done. Is it time to lift COVID-19 restrictions yet? Is American democracy at risk of failure? Are plastics killing us? Should we allow genetically modified foods? Will climate change be simply bad or disastrous? I have my opinions, and I’m sure you have yours, but do any of us know the answers to any of these questions with certainty?

As well as uncertainty about the facts, we continually find ourselves facing moral uncertainty. Moral theories and views divide both public and philosophical opinions. They defy consensus. Is euthanasia morally permissible? Is abortion? Eating meat? Amid our unprecedented access to a wide range of moral arguments and views, all competing for our allegiance, we are left to come to our own moral conclusions. If we are being brutally honest with ourselves, we probably aren’t absolutely certain about all of our moral views.

In these conditions, moral uncertainty is the norm. But, as the Samuel Beckett line goes, “You must go on.” Even if you don’t know for sure what the right moral view is, reality refuses to stop the clock to let you figure it out. You have to act one way or another, despite your moral uncertainty. Being uncertain doesn’t take you off the hook of moral responsibility. Neither does refusal to act. As climate change illustrates, refraining from taking decisions can be just as disastrous as making the wrong decisions.

So, how can you go on under these conditions of moral uncertainty? Let’s take a concrete example. What if you think eating meat is morally permissible, but you’re not totally sure? If you’re willing to admit there’s some chance you could be wrong about the morality of vegetarianism, what should you do? Keep eating meat? Or give it up?

The philosopher William MacAskill argues that if you are morally uncertain about vegetarianism, you should give up eating meat. In fact, even if you think there’s only a 10% chance that vegetarianism is the right moral view, you should still give up meat.

MacAskill thinks there’s an asymmetry in the moral risks you’re running. “If you eat veggie and eating meat is permissible, well, you’ve only lost out on a bit of pleasure,” says MacAskill, “But if you eat meat and eating meat is impermissible, you’ve done something very wrong.” Maybe you should give up a bit of pleasure to avoid the risk of doing something really morally terrible, even if the probability that you would be doing something really morally terrible is relatively low. “The morally safe option,” claims MacAskill, “is to eat vegetarian.”

We can apply MacAskill’s approach to other problems where we face moral uncertainty. Peter Singer famously argued that failing to donate money to help alleviate suffering in the developing world is just as morally wrong as letting a child drown in front of you. Most of us seem to think that Singer’s moral claims are too strong; we don’t think we are morally obligated to donate to charities, even if we think it is morally good – beyond what we are obligated to do – to donate. However, it seems at least possible that Singer is right. If he is right, then not giving any money would be very wrong, as wrong as letting a child drown. But if Singer is wrong, then all I’d lose by donating is a bit of money. Given the moral risk, the appropriate choice seems to be to donate some money to charity.

These two cases might make MacAskill’s approach look appealing. But it can also get strange. Imagine you really want to have a child. You are near-certain that having a child is morally permissible. In fact, you think having a child, bringing a happy person into the world, would be a serious moral good. You also think there’s a tiny (less than one percent) chance that anti-natalism is true. According to the version of anti-natalism you’re considering, by having a child you’re doing something morally terrible — bringing into existence a chain of human suffering that will continue for millennia. If anti-natalism says that having a child is morally wrong enough, then it would be less morally risky for you to simply not have a child. But should you really not have a child in such a case? Even though you believe with near-certainty that doing so would be a morally good thing? That seems like a strange conclusion.

The ethicists Johan Gustafsson and Olle Torpman give an alternative framework for thinking about how we should act under moral uncertainty. When we think of good, moral people, we generally think they are conscientious; they are typically true to what they believe is right. To put it another way, we think that a moral, conscientious person won’t do what they sincerely believe to be wrong. In the child example, your sincere, near-certain belief is that it is permissible, perhaps even a good thing, to have a child. MacAskill’s approach to dealing with moral uncertainty seems to say you ought not to have a child. But how can a moral theory that you don’t believe in matter more than the one you do believe in? For these reasons, Gustafsson and Torpman propose a much simpler approach: act in accordance with the moral view that you are most confident in. In this case, that would mean you should have the child that you want.

This simpler approach to dealing with moral uncertainty might seem straightforward and convincing. But I invite the reader to go back and apply Gustafsson and Torpman’s approach to the two cases discussed earlier, of charity and vegetarianism. Arguably, their approach gives less convincing advice in these cases.

How we should act given moral uncertainty is an important question for the discordant moment in which we are living. Whether we have the correct answer to this question remains far from clear.

Jane Austen and Moral Instability

portrait engraving of Jane Austen

“Instability” is not a word many would associate with Jane Austen. Film and television adaptations have cemented her reputation within pop culture; we picture rolling hills, country balls, and restrained drama played out in charming domestic interiors. She seems uninterested in the Napoleonic wars, which were playing out just across the channel, or any of the weighty political matters that concerned the more “serious” writers of her day. She does seem interested in social unity, usually represented by a wedding, which punctuates the end of each narrative. Just desserts are always doled out by the narrator, and we always know which characters to root for. For these reasons, her name has become a byword for moral stability, and her version of the English countryside has come to represent a time when society wasn’t subject to rupture and confusion, as it is today.

If the wide array of contemporary Austen-themed conduct books indicates anything, she’s still seen as a touchstone for moral behavior. Her words have been used to demystify cooking, sex, and everything in between. This flourishing industry casts her as a sweet and world-savvy aunt, and further suggests that her novels can be pulverized into idiomatic quotes without context to serve a unified (if somewhat patchwork) Austenian ethic of the everyday.

And yet, beneath this seemingly tranquil surface lies a battleground for radical and conservative academics. Looking more closely at her works, it’s easy to see why; what at first appears a unified moral vision is anything but.

Attributing a single moral philosophy to Austen is notoriously difficult. There are overarching moral messages that connect her novels, but what may be the subject of mockery in one text is celebrated within another, or even within the same text. The unstable positioning of the Gothic in Austen’s first published novel, Northanger Abbey, is just one example. The novel’s heroine, Catherine Morland, is a voracious reader of pulpy romances, which leads her to commit a series of social blunders. She suspects that her love interest’s father murdered his own wife, in a plot lifted directly from the sensational literature of her day. But even though Catherine’s suspicions are proven false, the widowed gentleman proves to be cruel in other ways, which indicates that there is a glimmer of insight in even the most ridiculous Gothic fiction.

Even Austen’s engagement with class is hardly as black-and-white as it may appear. Often cited as the most fundamentally conservative element of her fiction, social and economic distinction are generally portrayed as the natural state of society, even beneficial to those at the bottom. Members of the landed elite like Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice and Mr. Knightley from Emma especially embody this paternalism. And yet Austen’s final published novel, Persuasion, celebrates the meritocratic royal navy, and denigrates the landed elite as undeserving of their wealth and privilege.

Academics from both sides of the political spectrum have claimed her as one of their own, a conflict which came to a head with queer theorist Eve Kosofky Segwick’s groundbreaking article on Austen, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” in which she explores the cultural history of masturbation through Austen’s Sense & Sensibility. The mere title (the actual paper had yet to be published) prompted conservative academic Robert Kimball to write Tenured Radicals, a pearl-clutching polemic on the moral bankruptcy of leftists in the academy, who dared link a bulwark of old-fashioned English morality like Austen with such a depraved topic. Kosofy’s article, and Austen by association, clearly came to represent something much larger within intellectual discourse. Both Kosofky and Kimball had completely different views of this body of work, which again speaks to Austen’s versatility as a writer and as a moral touchstone.

Like all great literature, her work opens the way for a myriad of interpretations. She was a novelist, not a philosopher, and was therefore not obliged to lay out her understanding of the world in treatise-form. As Thomas Keymer mentions in his book Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics, Austen recoiled from moralizing novels of her contemporaries, like those of Hannah More, for their Evangelical zeal and purely didactic approach to fiction. She herself wrote to her sister Cassandra, “I do not write for such dull Elves As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.” She is not calling for moral and imaginative complacency, but for wide-ranging sympathy and understanding.

Helena Kelly’s 2016 book Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, is described by Google Books as “A brilliant, illuminating reassessment of the life and work of Jane Austen that makes clear how Austen has been misread for the past two centuries and that shows us how she intended her books to be read, revealing, as well, how subversive and daring — how truly radical — a writer she was.” The impulse to claim her as a “secret radical” is perhaps as misguided as Kimball’s attempt to claim her for conservatives, compelling as Kelly’s interpretation may be. We can never completely reconstruct how Austen understood the world through her novels and surviving letters, but we can understand her as a three-dimensional person who may have had radical thoughts while still being a product of her time. When we move past our preconceived notion of her as a fixed moral touchstone, we can engage with her work in exciting new ways, which ultimately sharpens our understanding of how to be a person in an increasingly complicated world.

Voting in the 2016 Election: Impact Versus Intent

This past election cycle has been particularly divisive. In the last week, the response to a Trump victory has sparked protests across the country. Students have walked out of classes at UC Berkeley, and as protests in major cities have been more or less continuous since election day, violence broke out in Portland, OR in the hours between Friday and Saturday morning. Chants outside Trump Tower in New York City have included “Not My President” and “Love Trumps Hate.” In Los Angeles, protestors chant in Spanish and hold signs defending the rights of immigrants and undocumented Americans, a group that has been a focal point of a great deal of divisive rhetoric of the president-elect’s campaign. Opponents of the Trump candidacy have used personal messages throughout protest, rejecting the underlying meaning of a Trump presidency more than any particular policy he might adopt.  

Continue reading “Voting in the 2016 Election: Impact Versus Intent”