Ethical relativism and high stakes conflict

Here's a thought experiment that I sometimes give to my students if I'm teaching ethics.

Suppose that you have a fundamental moral disagreement with someone very close to you, say a wife or husband.  The moral disagreement is very high stakes, i.e. it's extremely important to both parties.  Let's also suppose that the disagreement plays out in a situation where the outcome either favors one side or the other (so, not both, not neither).

Here's an example that I use to make things more concrete.

Suppose that you and your partner have a child that, because of some terrible circumstance, is now currently in a persistent vegetative state.  The probability that the child recovers is very low.  The two of disagree as to whether the child's life should be terminated.  One of you wants to terminate, and thinks that it's morally permissible.  The other thinks that it isn't morally permissible, and does not want to terminate the child's life.

Obviously this decision would matter, and the result will favor one individual, and not the other.

Suppose that you find yourself in a situation like this, and suppose also that you're an ethical relativist.  How are you going to resolve this situation?

It seems that a situation like this will be resolved only through conflict, manipulation, or brute force.

Why is this?

Disagreements are resolved by appeal to some third party information or principle that all disagreeing parties recognize as authoritative.  If Joe and I disagree about the score of last night's game, and if we both recognize espn.com as an authority, we can resolve our disagreement by checking the website.

But, if you're a relativist, and you're in a moral disagreement, what can you appeal to in order to resolve the disagreement?  If you're a relativist of the subjectivist variety, then only authority presiding over moral is your own beliefs.

People don't think that relativism is a problem because they can ignore a lot of moral disagreement.  All you need to do is hang out with like minded people and keep everyone else at arm's length.  At that point, it's easy to be "tolerant" and to "agree to disagree."

Things aren't always so easy.  Perhaps it is easy for individuals to avoid disagreement, but it becomes increasingly difficult for ethically diverse groups living in the same space to avoid moral disagreements.  What are you going to do, then?

Consider the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  You had two groups living in the same space that disagreed about how one of those groups should be treated.  This disagreement mattered, and you couldn't just walk away from it.  What are you going to do?  If you're a relativist, you can't try to appeal to some greater moral principle to resolve the disagreement.  This was the approach that Martin Luther King, Jr. took.  This conciliatory approach requires some form of ethical objectivism, and of course King was no relativist about ethics.

So, what do you do if you're not an objectivist about morals?  You fight until you either win or die, I suppose.

What's (ethically) wrong with suicide?

Suicide is a taboo subject.  It's hard to raise without creating the impression upon others that there might be something wrong with your life.  This alone makes me curious.  Why do people have the attitudes that they do about suicide?  I'll have to set that aside for another day.  Today, I reflect on a related subject, the ethics of suicide.

First I should specify on the sort of suicide I'm considering here.  Not all suicide is considered immoral.  In some cultures or time periods, suicide was not only permissible, but considered either obligatory or laudatory.  I'm thinking of Japanese ritual suicide in feudal Japan or suicide bombers in radical Islamist groups.  Some types of suicide is controversial in that there isn't yet any consensus as to whether it is morally permissible.  Here I'm thinking of assisted suicide, usually done in the context of terminal illness.  The type of suicide I consider here is the type most think of when they hear the word 'suicide.'  It is the act of ending one's life in response to what is perceived to be an unbearable amount of emotional pain or suffering.  It is essentially an act of despair.

When someone commits suicide, are they committing an immoral act?  If so, on what basis?  Two dominant ways of thinking about ethics is consequentialism and deontology.  Consequentialist ethics says that the morally of an action depends on the sorts of consequences of the action.  Deontological ethics says that the morally of the action depends on the obligations of the individual committing the action.

So, let's ask the question about suicide from both perspectives.  According to consequentialism, suicide would be immoral if it led to bad consequences.  What sorts of consequences are considered relevant will depend on the type of consequentialism that you adopt.  The most popular is utilitarianism, which considers the net pleasure or pain generated to be the sorts of consequences that are relevant.  So, according to utilitarianism, if the act of suicide generates more net pain than pleasure, then it is considered to be immoral.  We can easily imagine cases in which this is true.  Robin Williams' suicide probably generated more net pain than pleasure, and would seem to be considered immoral from the perspective of utilitarianism.

However, we can, probably just as easily, imagine cases in which the act of suicide would not generate more pain than pleasure.  In fact we could imagine the opposite.  If someone is experiencing a great amount of emotional or physical pain, and that individual is not directly related to anyone else, then his suicide would generate less pain than if his life continued.  For example, imagine a homeless guy in the grip of despair.  He has no family or friends.  His death would not be noticed by anyone other than possibly the local coroner, to whom he would just be considered a "John Doe."  If he were to commit suicide, then a utilitarian would concede that he did not act immorally.

Okay, let's shift to deontology.  Here, instead of consequences, we talk about obligations.  The kinds of obligations we are most familiar with are those that we have towards others.  A woman who is embedded in a social network probably has a variety of obligations.  If she is a mother, she has obligations toward her children.  Likewise, she may have obligations as a wife, daughter, sibling, employee, employer, friend, neighbor, colleague, etc.  For her to commit suicide from this perspective would be considered immoral because she would be violating or shirking these obligations.  

But, what if we were to consider this woman as a lonely homeless individual?  It seems in this case that she has no obligations, assuming that she has no family, no friends, no job, etc.  In this case, her suicide would not violate or shirk any obligations.  Wouldn't the deontologist concede that she is not acting immorally?  One might respond by claiming that she has an obligation to herself.  What does that mean?  What sorts of obligations do we have ourselves and why?  How does this square with the sorts of personal freedoms that we have?  Do I have an obligations to maintain a certain standard of physical health?  Don't I also have the freedom to act in certain ways that might be detrimental to my health, such as smoking, eating junk food, etc?

This leads us to another perspective on morality, i.e. the religious.  Perhaps suicide is morally wrong because we have some obligation towards God.  What does this mean?  Religious individuals, or at least Christians, are pretty down on suicide.  Some go so far as to say that suicide damns you to hell.  Why?  What is the theological argument against the moral permissibility of suicide?  Again, is it that we have some obligation to God?  In Christian theology, we have lots of obligations to God.  Why this one in particular?  Why is suicide considered a sin?  Notice that not all killing is considered sinful.  God commanded the Israelites to basically commit genocide against the Canaanite nations in the Old Testament book of Joshua.  It would probably be contradictory act if God commanded the Israelites to kill, and all killing is considered sinful.  So, if not all killing is considered sinful, then why is suicide considered sinful?

It might be easy to see why people think that there is something wrong with suicide out of despair.  It's tragic and indicates that the world isn't as it should be.  But it's harder to see why exactly this sort of suicide is morally wrong.  If someone has no obligations and commits suicide out of despair without harming anyone, then how is that individual to be considered blameworthy for what they did?  What is ethically wrong with that/

Privacy and the asymmetry of information

People often consider privacy to be a right, similar to having the right to move around, say whatever you want, and buy whatever you want.  It's what some would call a "negative" right, meaning that it's something that people can't impede you from having.  If I have the negative right of movement, that means that people can't keep me from moving from one city to another city.  Contrast this with a "positive" right.  A positive right is a right to something that imposes a cost to other people.  For example, having the positive right to an education means that you are entitled to something that costs other people money, namely an education.

So, privacy is a negative right.  It doesn't cost anyone any money to give you privacy.

What I wonder about is why people think that this is so important.  There are familiar cases in which society faces a trade off between privacy and security.  Having more privacy across the board may make it more difficult for law enforcement officials to acquire relevant information regarding criminal activity.

Also there are familiar issues associated with social networking.  People raise a fuss about their privacy potentially being compromised on sites like Facebook.  But why does it matter so much?  Again, why do people place what seems to me a disproportionate amount of value on their privacy?

The explanation that makes most sense to me is grounded in the idea that information is a form of social currency.  Having more information gives you a kind of power, and being exposed (i.e. having people gain information about you) somehow diminishes your power.

So maybe privacy is a form of empowerment.  The less people know about you, the more "powerful" you are, perhaps.  It's like a game of poker, where the person who has the most information about their opponent is most likely to win.

Suppose that all information was freely available.  You could find anything you wanted about anybody, including classified government information.  Likewise, anybody could find out anything they wanted about you.  Nobody could hide any information at all.  Would this be a better society?  I'm inclined to think that it would be, but that's just a knee jerk response.

Basically, my gut response is that privacy is an issue only when it's asymmetric.  What I mean is that I'd get upset about my privacy being violated if I didn't have equal information access to the individual getting my information.  If had the same kind of access, i.e. if there was symmetry of information access between myself and some other individual, then I'd be okay with that.  I figure other people wouldn't be, and I wonder why.

An argument for the moral permissibility of psychoactive drugs (The medical type)

There seems to be a weird stigma about using prescribed psychoactive drugs.  These sorts of drugs include antidepressants, like Prozac, stimulants, like Ephedrine, mood stabilizers, such as Lithium, or sedatives, like Klonopin.  Some people hold the belief that it is somehow immoral or unnatural to take these kinds of drugs.  Here's an argument that shows that if you're okay with other sorts of pain-relieving medicine, you should be okay with psychoactive drugs as medicine.

1.  Prescribed psychoactive drugs are relevantly similar to (physical) pain-relieving drugs.
2. It is not a big deal (i.e. morally permissible) to use (physical) pain-relieving drugs in a responsible manner.
3. Therefore, it is not a big deal to use prescribed psychoactive drugs in a responsible manner.

I'm going to expand on the first premise, but let me say something quick about the second premise.  Obviously psychoactive drugs can be abused.  But this is true for any drug out there.  The potential for abuse is not something unique to psychoactive drugs, and is therefore not a good reason to think that it is morally questionable to use them.  The same can be said of potential side effects and possible addiction.

Okay, now on to the first premise.  We're all okay with using pain relievers like Ibuprofen, Tylenol, and Aspirin.  We're also okay with lots of other symptom repressing drugs like antihistamines, antacids, or various cold/flu medicines.  We are we okay with using these kinds of drugs?  Here's my guess.  Pain is a mental state.  It exists to alert the body that it is somehow in harm's way.  Once an individual has placed her body out of the potential source of danger, then the pain has served its purpose.  It is no longer useful at that point.  Many times, however, the pain still lingers even though we've taken the corrective measures.  This pain is not only superfluous, but can act as a detriment to our living our lives.  As a result, we take the sorts of pain relieving drugs mentioned above.

Emotions are also mental states.  They also serve as alerts to the individual.  They respond to stimuli in a similar way as pain does.  Negative emotions indicate external stimuli that may be psychologically harmful to the individual.  Once an individual has acknowledged such emotions and has taken the necessary steps to address the stimuli and has taken corrective measures, the emotion has served its purpose.  Like pain, however, negative emotions can also linger.  And, like pain, such emotions can be not only superfluous, but also harmful.  Psychoactive drugs repress negative emotions, like pain-relieving drugs repress the sensation of pain.

If you agree that this is a reasonable assessment of emotions, and if you are okay with taking pain-relieving drugs, then you should be okay with taking psychoactive drugs if you need them.  Now, it is important to note that it is only permissible to take such drugs to deal with superfluous negative emotions.  It is not okay to take such drugs in lieu of addressing the stimuli that is causally connected to the pain.  But this is also true of pain-relieving drugs.  It is obviously not okay to take pain-relieving drugs in lieu of actually dealing with the source of the pain.

Perhaps this is why the stigma exists.  It may not be clear if an individual has really dealt with the source of negative emotions, whereas it's usually pretty clear when an individual has dealt with the source of physical pain.

Physical versus Psychological Harm

The concept of harm plays a central role in moral and political theorizing.  We generally tend to believe that every person has the right to be free from harm inflicted by other.  But exactly counts as harm?  This is a tough concept to analyze.  I'm not going to pretend to give anything close to a complete analysis here.  I just want to think about it a little bit and maybe make a few sketches.

Okay, so let's think of life as dynamic.  Either things are moving forward, or things move in circles.  Life moves forward by growing, learning, adapting, achieving goals, etc.  Things move in circles via some kind of maintenance, like the nitrogen cycle, homeostasis, etc.  The idea is that there is some kind of action or movement, and the right kinds of movement are considered good.

So with that metaphor, we might consider harm to be either an impediment to this kind of movement, or movement in the wrong direction.  For example, oxygen deprivation is considered harmful because it impedes the respiratory and circulatory process in the body.  Degenerative diseases are harmful because it reverses the growth process.

So if we have the notion of harm as either impediment or regression, then we can make a further distinction.  For persons, harm can be either physical or psychological.  This distinction is pretty self-explanatory.  Physical harm is harm done to the body.  Psychological harm is harm done to the mind.

In most societies, we try to legislate against harm.  For instance, aggravated assault is a kind of physical harm, and it is illegal in most societies.  In general, we think that harm is morally bad.

What I want to note here is that psychological harm is worse than physical harm.  In fact it seems true that a lot of physical harm is bad only because it also inflicts psychological harm.  This seems particularly true when it comes to harm inflicted by another person.  For instance, two guys fighting in a boxing ring inflict harm on each other.  But we don't think that this kind of physical harm is morally bad.  However, two guys fighting in a parking lot is considered bad.  Why?  Because we think that there is also some psychological harm involved.  In this case it the exertion of dominance by one over the other.

So it seems that much physical harm, at least the physical harm inflicted by persons, reduces to psychological harm.  If we want to legislate against harm, then we should be legislating against psychological harm.  But note that there is not much in terms of laws against pure psychological harm, i.e. psychological harm without physical harm.  For instance, there are laws against child abuse, but this is child abuse primarily understood as physical abuse.  I'm not aware of very many cases where a child was taken from his/her parents solely because of what the parents said to the child, even though such words can deal irreparable psychological harm to the child.  Likewise, there are no criminal laws against adultery.  Adultery is another example of psychological harm that is not physical harm.

Why is this?  Well the easiest and most obvious answer is that it is difficult to enforce laws against pure psychological harm, especially when such harm is inflicted through speech.  If a child accuses her parents of psychological harm through emotionally damaging criticism, what evidences can she provide?

To further corroborate this point, we already do have some laws against pure psychological harm.  These are laws related to libel and slander.  More recently, states have passed laws against bullying and cyber-bullying in particular.  Libel, slander, and cyber-bullying are all instances of pure psychological harm.  These laws are considered enforceable because evidence can be mustered for this kind of harm.  This is the interesting about technology and psychological harm.  As technology advances more and more communication becomes of the type that can be preserved and documented.  We communicate via text, video chat, social media, email, etc.  All of these can be recorded and saved.  Thus evidence of psychological harm can be preserved, and laws prohibiting forms of psychological harm can be enforced.

So it'll be interesting to see how technology affects our legislation regarding psychological harm.  What will also be interesting to see is how this interacts with our concern for privacy.  Being able to access these forms of communication is often seen as an invasion of privacy, but it also enables society to control instances of psychological harm.