Ethical Subjectivism: Part 1

The idea that moral judgement creates morality is allied with my claim that moral agents are self-declared. I haven't yet thought through whether these two propositions are co-dependent; that is, whether one proposition is derivable from the other, or whether they are logically equivalent or independent. I am inclined to believe they are independent propositions, because I do not conceive the criteria for moral judgements in the same light as criteria for moral agents. In various ethical theories, one need not be a self-declared moral agent to make qualifying moral judgements, and morality need not depend on its agents. If, however, one supposes (as I do) that all moral agents are self-declared, it seems reasonable to suppose that moral agents create morality in their judgements.

The conception of ethics implicit in the foregoing denies Ethical Realism and Naturalism. There are no moral facts or built-in morality to be discovered in the observed or natural world. Morality is not a property of things. While in some respects my ethical theory is similar to Kant's in placing emphasis on judgement, it is not Idealist. The world is amoral; i.e., there are no universally right or good things, or the reverse. There are no universally right of good arrangements. There are just moral agents who assign moral value; i.e., make moral judgements. These judgements are always partial and incomplete, subject to revision, and at most general or generalizable.

Conscious Agents
 

What ties moral judgements to moral agents is consciousness - recognition of self or identity - and the ability to act on self-conscious decisions - intentionality. Self-declaration is a primordial intentional act, because it requires identity and acting on that identity (by announcing it). Identity is the primary fact of moral responsibility, because it connects the agent to the act. Intentionality is the primary fact of moral judgement, because it connects the will or decision to the act. In order to form a complete ethical circuit, both intentionality and identity are required; i.e., a moral agent makes moral judgements which are observed in the public world as moral acts when executed.
 

In this schema, acts connect the subjective individual to the objective, material Universe. They are seen differently by the moral agent and observers, for observers are simply presented with a movement within the natural world. Whatever form the act takes, other than events completely internal to the moral agent, they are instantiated by something observable. This is true even if the act is only discovered as electro-chemical activity in the brain. To say that an event is "completely internal" is essentially to say that it is non-material, an evanescent concept or other mental event. I propose that there are such events, because I have them. I think about things and consider alternatives which are never embodied. They are just mental events. This is not a queer thing for a materialist (such as myself) to say, because I assume that all of my mental events are discoverable as activities within my brain. What is difficult is that my concepts and considerations, as well as my sense of self, are not epistemically the same thing as those brain events. We need a different explication of the reality and meaning of concepts, judgements and self than we do of the material stuff. In fact, the very same problem is implciit in scientific study of the Universe, because neither the principles nor connections of thimgs are separately observable, but only occur in the minds of observers. What is required is a theory of Mind which includes explication of intentionality and judgement. The problem for a materialist - by definition a monist who denies the separate existence of spirits, souls, etc - is to characterize Mind without lapsing into some form of metaphysical dualism.

My usual solution to this problem is by analogy to software, a solution which I still defend. Operation of the Mind is analogous to the operation of computer software. What we can observe about a running program is the flipping of switches and different states of the apparatus. I say "apparatus" because software does not require a humanly made processor to function. In principle, it can work on anything that qualifies as a Turing machine. Thus, although neither efficient nor likely, one could run the UNIX operating system on an appropriate set of mousetraps. In the same way, in whatever our human software consists, it usually runs on human brains considered as processors, but could also run on other arrangements. It is that fact which makes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and intelligent Extra-terrestrials (ETs), or any other non-human intelligent lifeform, reasonable proposals. But software running is not all there is, at least not indirectly. As far as I know, computer operating systems are not aware of what they do. It is only I and other intelligent creatures that attribute operations of computers to software. Software itself is an idea, so, if intelligence is a matter of which software the brain runs, that software is in some sense reflexive; that is, it presents itself to itself. This is trick which we call "consciousness."

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett uses the Cartesian Theater to model the reflexivity which suggests dualism. In that model, one sits in the theater and watches all that happens on the stage. That is a very seductive model because, at least for myself, that is how it feels. There is myself and then there is the other: my body and the external world. It feels as if there were two things, not one thing. It is this sort of feeling which makes sense of "out of body " experiences and endless varieties of spirituality, but close examination reveals that cannot be the case. When I look at someone, what I see is an instance of H. sapiens, not a hunk of flesh and, separately, a ghost. All available evidence points to just one thing: intelligent creatures, including me, have brains and operation of those brains is coincident with behavior. Whatever someone else thinks, I do not know it unless it is overtly signalled to me (including via CAT scans). I've come to think of other human beings as similar to myself, probably because I observe that their behavior is similar to mine. I further assume that people have egos similar to mine. All of that is assumption, fancy guess work, which has no directly observable basis in fact. It's a behavioral pattern put together in parts of my feverish brain. The Cartesian Theater is a clever invention of our brains which enables us to see ourselves as having selves as well as seeing the world as would an observer. (The Cartesian Theater is probably essential in the observer model.)
 

This easy dualism of mind and body is, of course, contradicted in our scientific experience of ourselves as subjects of biology. It is also contradicted in principle by Quantum Mechanics to the extent that the observer is part of the experiment. Einstein invented a sort of halfway house a century ago - frames of reference - which allowed a transition from Newtonian absolutism to relativism and uncertainy. In Einstein's relativistic Universe, frames of reference allow calculation from one's point of view while also allowing calculation of other points of view; i.e., there is a fixed method of determining simaltaneity. Quantum Mechanics makes The Other at best a matter of probability, essentially unknowable as a permanent form. In an uncertain world, what and how we see depends interactively on our presence and direction, much like jumping on a large elastic trampoline on which others may also be jumping. Although our brains are busy concocting the easily understood Newtonian world of our living, which encourages mind-body dualism, the reality of our existence seems more likely described by the intracacies of Quantum Mechanics, which assumes a monistic, material Universe. But the theories of Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg et al are only handy stages on which to present the problem. It's the single stuff of the material Universe that causes all the problems with consciousness; consequently with intentionality and moral agents as well. It's just hard to see ourselves as oozing, wrinkling gelatinous stuff that conjures up our dreams, even though what others observe is a representation of that science fiction creature.

I don't know how the stuff in my head does it, but it is a fact that it does it. I firmly believe - despite Prof. John Searle and all the other nay sayers, we will figure it out someday, hopefully within my lifetime. (I prefer the truncated Sicilian saying, 'revenge is best served ...') When that happens, we will be able to build intelligent machines, probably even machines capable of moral judgement and voluntary choice. If and when that happens, the nature of our material substrate will be obvious. It is not obvious now because we have a hard time understanding something we have not yet mastered. We are engineered to think according to the paradigms we have learned and to resist change (which is the power of culture). Any modern child will tell you our Earth is round. Ten year olds can give lessons in geography that Christopher Columbus would have had difficulty accepting. Modern conceptions of geography would seem impossible and incomprehensible to most denizens of Medieval Europe. What would a pre-Renaissance person make of radio, television, X-rays and atom bombs? The difficulty with the reflexive software of consciousness is our lack of knowledge of it, not the impossibility of its operation. So, I take it as a given that the problem of consciousness will eventually be solved by demonstration, whether the initial success occurs by accident or planned experiment.

There is a difficulty in solving the problem by demonstration: disbelievers will continue to be disbelievers. After all, since we know the demonstration machine is just a machine, we conclude that its remonstrations about being intelligent and morally capable are just programmed. Those disinclined to accept machine intelligence will allege the machine has no ability to think or judge independently, whereas those inclined to accept the possibility of machine intelligence will come to a more machine-favorable conclusion. In other words, the Turing Test only works for those willing to accept it. I am one of those disposed to accept the evidence of a Turing Test. I believe History shows most of the disbelievers will eventually come around to accepting the result. Just as there are some people who still believe the Earth is flat, there will always be a few who resist machine intelligence. Acceptance of machine intelligence will come about gradually, not as machines become like humans, but as humans and machines get used to each other. Who or what is morally responsible or intelligent is a matter of acculturation.
 

What makes me believe that you or any person I encounter is intelligent or morally worthy? Would the average person pass the Turing Test? I think we are trained from birth to accept others like us as fully human, whereas strangers are not. That simple piece of learning is the basis of racism, sexism and tribalism, discriminations that work on every scale from the nuclear family to the human species. For example, I have observed that mothers usually bind more strongly to daughters than sons, fathers usually bind to sons more than daughters, and same sex siblings bind more strongly than opposite sex siblings. Interactions between different sex siblings tend to be more stereotypical than the more fluid emotions displayed among same sex siblings. Differential sexual behavior starts almost from birth, and is deeply imbedded by the time a child reaches puberty. Adult sexual behavior is often impossible to change, which explains why women have not yet been completely liberated. Culture contains and transmits socially expected (approved) behavior, assuring the continuation of successful pre-existing patterns. From that point of view, almost all of us, almost all the time, are just programmed organisms. I really do not have any greater assurance for accepting people as conscious, self-determining beings than for machines. In the end, does this distinction matter?

There is a further problem in identifying conscious beings: self-conscious beings must have a way to connect themselves to the external world. In principle, one could be aware of oneself when anesthetized (but that never happened to me when I was put under). That idea is an extension of what happens in the dentist's office: novocaine temporarily removes sensation of a part of the body, but I am still there. So, generalizing, we could have a conscious being which is unattached to any  physical mechanism of communication to an external world. Such a being could not have any sense of its physical self (body), thus no conscious control over the doings of its body. For that creature, there is no Cartesian Theater, no reflexive feedback, because there is nothing to see. Yet, if this is an entirely material world, there must be some physical basis and manifestation for this creature. That hypothesis implies observers could examine the physical creature and discover it's consciousness. For example, were it like a computer chip, we could record the instructions that pass through it, and compare its sequences to known intelligent software. Without dualism, our conscious being is always represented in something physical; even if it is unaware of it. Of course, if a conscious being is aware of its physical body, self-declaration is made all that easier, even if there is little or no conscious control of the body (as in paraplegics). In that sense, it is always capable of self-declaration.
 

I proposed the test for moral capability was, quite simply, self declaration. This test is not infallible, as a machine could be programmed to say 'I am intelligent' and 'I am morally responsible.' People can be programmed similarly. So we are at an impasse, because every test of a putative moral agent or intelligent creature relies on the credulity, training and prejudices of the test givers. This brings us back to Turing's idea, which is commonly called the Duck Test: 'if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it is a duck.' More discerning examiners might add qualifications such as quacking before accepting the conclusion or granting a greater degree of probability, but the principle is the same. Examiners look for a range of characteristics that qualify the examinee. That's how we decided that duck-billed platypuses are Monotremes, not ducks or mammals, and that Homo sapiens has several extant relatives. Who are the examiners? Why, the self-appointed, of course, who conduct an unfair procedure in which they choose the examinees, make all the rules, judge all the evidence, grant all the grades, and consider all the appeals. That's the way it is among H. sapiens in all their activities such as school, mating and employment. We accept that as normal. Why should it be any different when evaluating intelligent or moral non-humans?

Starting with the Self

My reason for spending so much effort on the problem of consciousness is that it is central to two problems: moral responsibility and the social nature of  ethics. The matter of responsibility seems to me straightforward, as we normally assign moral responsibility to the one who does something when that agent is capable of making a choice. (In this context, "does" implies both acts of commission and omission.) Responsibility goes along with  being aware of  what one does as well as what one chooses; i.e., being conscious and making a judgement. We don't assign moral responsibility when both those things are not present, although we can use the word "responsibility" in a more general and inclusive sense. Moral responsibility is a particular kind of responsibility.
 

Making a choice, even making a choice intelligently, is not the same thing as making a choice knowingly. Choices are simply taking one of several alternatives. Computers do this over and over in programs. "If this or this or that, do a, b or c." That's a choice, but the intelligence of such a choice belongs to the programmer, not the machine. Nature allows of unintelligent choice right from the start. It is a Quantum Mechanical idea, a denial of the Newtonian clockwork Universe, that an untold number of choices have been made since the Big Bang. Where we find an electron, a quark, a photon or any other fundamental entity is a matter of probability. Consequently, chemical reactions do not follow determined paths but have probabilistic results, particularly in organic reactions. The  fact of chemical probabilty reaches a peak in biochemical reactions which are typically characterized by metastable intermediate states and several possible products. Depending on circumstances, things could go one way or another. This makes every biological entity, even the simplest virus, a complex intertwining of probabilities (or, inversely, improbable states, depending on your point of view) which decrease Entropy, so require a net input of energy to maintain status. The sorts of choices made by the organic reactions in our bodies do not determine our moral choices, but the fact of choice, of alternatives, in the Universe is required in order for there to be any moral choice. Voluntary choice assumes there are, in  fact, alternatives.
 

It is possible to make intelligent choices which are not moral choices. In fact, a creature could make intelligent choices throughout its lifetime without ever making a moral choice. Intelligence is not, ipso facto, self-conscious or moral. We already have machines which are extremely intelligent by ordinary human standards, but do not appear to be aware of what they are doing or have intentions about their doings. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) uses some of the most advanced supercomputers in the world to simulate climate change and solve weather problems. Those computers run software which can model and predict environmental change in both the distant past and future. Aircraft and other manufacturers have computers capable of designing airplanes, cars, rockets and railroad trains, as well as computers and potato peelers. All of those machines perform tasks far beyond the abilities of any human individual, even most groups of individuals. Tasks that once took a lifetime, such as calculation of Napier's logarithms, are now accomplished in great precision in a few seconds or less. Most people don't credit these machines with intelligence, because they are just programmed, even though people who have accomplished the same or lesser feats are considered geniuses. For example, there are many recognized autistic geniuses capable of doing mathematical calculations, memorizing telephone books and effortlessly learning and playing music far beyond the abilities of ordinary people. That people usually recognize intelligence in a prejudicial manner is not a reason to deny that thousands of machines have it. Whether any entity is intelligent is a matter of definition, because intelligence is usually identified with entities capable of skilled performances, where "skill" is the prejudicial variable.

What this discussion purports, then, is that we live in a Universe filled with alternatives - choices - and that we are surrounded by intelligent machines and organisms. Because of rampant human species bias, most people do not recognize the true state of affairs regarding intelligence and choice. We shouldn't be surprised to find both choice and intelligence in our environment. With respect to choice, we should be surprised when there isn't an abuindance of it. While intelligence is more a matter of definition than choice, the ordinary use of the word indicates there is a lot more of it demonstrated in nature than people care to admit. (Pet owners are quick enough to declare their familiars very intelligent and loving. Is this a projection or a fact?)

Consciousness is far more problematic than choice or intelligence, because it is essentially personal, not public. I am certain of my own awareness, but how do I determine yours? This is really the same problem as machine intelligence. Suppose a piece of running computer software was found to be intelligent. How could I ever directly experience that intelligence? I cannot load the software in my brain and observe it as an alter ego. I cannot crawl into the machine or (as of this writing) attach it to myself to it so as to share the experience. In other words, I have no way of knowing what it is to be, or even to be like, a machine running that software. For the same reasons, I have no way of knowing by direct experience what it is like to be you. Even Siamese twins joined at the head do not share experience; they have separate personalities. So the sense of self is elusive and probably forever trapped in one's own brain.

Suppose, to the horror of everyone else, I made a clone of myself. It would be a perfect clone in every detail, including a 1:1 match of brain matter. Two questions arise. Would this clone be a duplicate me? Would I share an identity with it?  The second question is easily answered: of course not! I would see my clone as a duplicate self, but not me; i.e., the copy might appear to be the same, but it would be made of different stuff. I cannot conceive of any way my clone would somehow share in my identity, because neither the clone nor I inhabit the other's body. Despite similar or even identical overt interactions with the world, my clone is not me. The fact of our material composition, the occupancy of a particular volume of space-time, makes my identity unique. It is interesting to note this would not be true, if we were entirely composed of stuff like photons which are capable of co-existing in the same space-time, so give rise to interference patterns. A photonic identity, at least in principle, could cohabit with its clone (hence experience the other?), but in this case it is probably difficult or impossible to separate the two. (Two identical waves add up to yield the same wave, possibly amplified, but are otherwise indistinguishable.) It would seem the structure of our Universe prevents sharing identities.
 

Would the clone be a duplicate me? Would it think itself to be me? The answer to this question is not so clear, but probably depends on the cloning of memory. The question can be transformed into this one:  if a perfect copy of a brain were made, would it run the same? I think the answer depends on how memories, thus experiences, are stored. If memory is stored as a permament imprint, as in hard drives and flash memory, the clone probably would be off to a running start as a duplicate me in every respect as of creation time. In that case, initially, it would duplicate my activities. If, however, memory is stored more transiently, as in RAM chips, then the clone might start off tabula rasa, unless the cloning process had some way of copying my memory into the clone's memory. In this last case, the clone would have to be "up and running" before the memory copy could be made. As of this writing, it is not clear what sort of memory mechanism is used in human brains. We do know that brain damage or death is irreversible, which suggests a dynamic rather than passive (offline) memory mechanism. The dynamic nature of human memory is also suggested by the fact that the memory content changes over time. We not only lose our memories, but we filter and adjust them. I am pretty sure my memory only recalls patches of experience, not all of it. Those considerations militate against making a true clone, a complete copy of anyone. Moreover, the clone would begin an individual existence immediately after replication, which means it would no longer be a clone but only a near replica, a simulation. Thus, the most reasonable assumption to make about human identity is that each of us is unique in this Universe.
 

It might be objected that clonal identity depends on one's point of view. At least initially, observers would think my clone and me have the same identity; i.e., they look, feel and act like me. Those observers prevented from seeing the process of clone creation, who only discover the duplicates at the moment of clone operation, would be confronted with completely identical twins. It would be natural for those observers to say the the clones have the same identity. Moreover, probably each clone would say that it had the observed identity, because each of the clones would separately have the same sense of itself. Nonetheless, there is an assymetry in the situation because my sense of myself cannot be the same as my clone's sense of  itself. What is me is rooted in my physical being, so I always observe the clone as another, not me. This difference will eventually become obvious to third party observers, because the history of each clone will depart from the starting point. Since clones cannot occupy the same space-time, their physical presences follow different world-lines which inevitably leads to different life experiences and different personalities. This fact is observed in identical twins, who always have different personalities, although the public is often confused about who is who. (Seeing people as different is a matter of acculturation, of getting used to distinguishing fine details.)

As unique individuals without a reliable cloning mechanism, it seems difficult or impossible to experience what it is to be another. Recently, biological naturalists have laid claim to empathy in primates as an evolutionary basis for morality ("I feel your pain."), but that claim suffers the same difficulties as cloning. Empathy is a feeling I have, which must be a simulation of what I believe is your state of feeling, because I cannot directly experience (emulate) your feeling. I can estimate what it is to be like you, but I cannot be you. In my personal experience, empathic feelings are the result of cues others provide. If you cut your finger, I can feel what it is like to cut my finger. If you are delighted by the taste of chocolate, I can feel what it is like to have a piece of chocolate in my mouth. But, if you have just hit a home run in Fenway Park, I have little idea of how to share that exhilarating feeling. I have been in Fenway Park only once, a long time ago, and I rarely hit home runs the few times I played baseball. In other words, empathy doesn't function for me when I don't have a comparable basis in experience. That there are feelings of empathy, of shared experiences, simply indicates the commonality of those lives.
 

The foregoing discussion points to a locus of moral judgement in the self. Moral responsibility attaches to moral judgement; i.e., responsibility is the inescapable correlate of judgement. Thus, to assign responsibility is to determine who made the judgement. Responsibility is both personal and social in nature. To the extent one remembers rendering a judgement, one thereby assigns personal responsibility; i.e., the assignment of responsibility to oneself is coterminous with judgement. For the moral agent, judgement and responsibility always point to the same thing, the conscious self. In the social world, judgement and responsibility are different things. Judgement always inheres in the individual. Every decision, even group decisions (e.g., juries), is made by an individual. On the other hand, socially assigned responsibility is less exact, as it may afix to several individuals who made similar, but not the same, judgement or to no one at all. Socially assigned responsibility is the public correlate of private judgement; it connects public morality to private judgement. Without socially assigned responsibility there is no meaningful social morality, regardless of the status of judgement within each individual.

For convenience, it is simpler to call "socially assigned responsibility" just "responsiblity." That is because we almost always use the word "responsiblity" in the social sense (third person): 'he was responsible for this,' 'she was responsible for that.' Most often, when we do use responsibility in  the first person, it is a form of annoucement to the public, including oneself: 'I am responsible for it.' In this sense of responsiblity, it is just the public side of judgement.

There is, however, a further implication of responsiblity which is not necessarily present in judgement: that judgement results in performance. In the private mode, the moral agent must acknowledge moral responsiblity as soon as the judgement is made, because it is the judgement which creates moral value, whether or not the judgement is executed. On this accounting, value does not reside in performance, but in the decision. On the other hand, what the public sees is performance, from which it infers value if also judgement can reasonably be determined. To understand this paragraph, there are several points which need to be expanded.

Unless one subscribes to some form of moral realism or naturalism, things and events have no intrinsic moral value. The point of ethical subjectivism is exactly that moral agents create moral value in their judgements. Moral value is not found anywhere in the public world. When someone says 'sugar cane is good,' that good is not to be found in the cane or its extract or in the field in which it grows. When the first Conquistadores arrived in Peru, did they know that potatoes were good by looking at them? In fact, potato leaves can be posionous, so the Spanish at first avoided the plant. Potatoes were an acquired taste for Europeans. Descendants of the Mexican tomato became the key ingredient in pizza, invented a century ago in New York City. Pizza became a big business, some four centuries after Hernando Cortez decimated the Aztecs. Did Europeans know tomatoes were good when they arrived in Mexico, or even shortly after they tasted their first? If so, how come it took four centuries to develop pizza, long after tomatoes became a staple of Spanish and Italian cuisine? Value is something created by each individual, not discovered in nature or other individuals.

Its the same with people and their acts as with tomatoes and potatoes. We learn about them by our experience with them. Did anyone know that Hitler and Stalin would become monstrous criminals when they were born? Even V.I. Lenin - no fool in judging political character - did not discover the sort of person Stalin truly was until it was too late in his remaining life to stop him. Moral realists claim that 'you know it when you see it,' and biological naturalists claim that people have some sort of built-in evaluation mechanism for determining good and right. In the former case, there is some property - the old-fashioned term was "quality" - of things or events called "good" or "right," whereas in the latter case there is a natural mechanism which identifies the same things. What those sorts of theories avoid is the simple fact that people very often disagree about good and right, so there must be some defect in the perception or mechanism of ethical value; otherwise, according to those theories, all of us would immediately come to the same conclusions. For myself, I have yet to see any mark in things that identifies them as "good" or any guideline that ensures an act is "right."
 

All that leads me to believe that value is assigned when I make a judgement, no sooner or later; i.e., a moral agent assigns whatever moral value there is in its judgements. If I decide peanut butter is good, then it is. If, later on, I decide peanut is bad, then it is. There's no arguing with the judgement; it is what it is. Of course, people can always inquire what I meant by saying "peanut butter is good," and I might oblige with an explanation. But, if I refuse the question, others are left with the words, with the mere fact of my opinion: 'he says peanut butter is good.' In this last case, whoever repeats the statement will be at a loss of any explanation, other than the fact of my utterance of particular words. While we usually don't accept this sort of behavior in adults, it is accepted in and among children. If an infant utters "goo-goo," older people learn to associate the sounds with a look on the face, waving arms, giggles or other behavior. We learn the infant  behaves a certain way when it makes the sound, and assign that behavior as the significance (meaning) of the utterance. When we are children, such behavior is shrugged off as, 'that's the way that one is.'

Thus, moral judgements - the source of value - are not only located within individuals, but are uniquely personal. We don't really know what they mean except by our interactions with the person making them. It is always possible that they don't mean anything at all.