In my LevelUp debate with Alex O’Connor about morality (video and Q&A below), I objected to his thought experiment in which he hypothesized human beings as immortal and sought to draw truths about morality from this alien context. I pointed out that, because morality pertains to and derives from human beings as they actually are, including their mortality, this approach is illogical and unhelpful.
Here I’d like to elaborate on what’s wrong with Alex’s thought experiment. Specifically, I want to show how it commits a red herring fallacy, distracting people from the facts they must focus on if they want to understand morality and how it can be objective.
I regard this subject as profoundly important because if leading intellectuals don’t come to understand how moral principles are derived from observable facts, our world will continue to be mired in the deadly false alternative of religion vs. subjectivism. Which means: Have faith in and obey an alleged supernatural tyrant who commands people to murder, enslave, love, and everything in between—or do whatever you, your tribe, or your culture feel like doing because there is no such thing as objective morality, so anything goes.
That’s a bad alternative. And that’s why this debate matters.
As I emphasized in both the debate and my follow-up Q&A, thought experiments can be helpful in examining moral matters, but only if they hypothesize scenarios in which human beings have the fundamental nature they in fact have. Otherwise, the hypothetical is not about human beings but about some other kind of beings. When someone poses such a hypothetical and insists that we must address it in order to understand human morality, as Alex did, he is deploying a red herring. We can see this in the exchanges below.
In my initial statement, I explained that values (and thus morality, which is the sphere of chosen values) are grounded in the requirements of life because life is the fundamental phenomena that makes values both possible and necessary. I pointed out that you can pursue values only if you are alive, and you need to pursue them only if you want to live. This observable fact about life, I argued, makes the requirements of human life the standard of moral value—the standard by which we can judge good and bad, right and wrong, how people should and shouldn’t act.
In response, Alex posed the following thought experiment:
I’d like you to imagine an immortality pill that is discovered or invented by scientists. And perhaps, to avoid some kind of overpopulation crisis, everybody is sterilized at the discovery of this miraculous wonder drug, and at least some people take it, and they’ll now live forever. And forget for a moment the sort of physical restrictions on this, the heat death of the universe. There’s probably some way to imagine avoiding this inevitability. These people live forever; they’re not going to die. . . . Does ethics cease to exist? Does it no longer matter how I treat my fellow creatures because the prospect of life and death is no longer on the table? . . .
Take Ayn Rand’s immortal robot but turn it into an immortal person who still has free will . . . can still suffer, still care, still have emotions. If we were suddenly immortal and I were causing somebody that you cared about to suffer in front of you, and you told me to stop, I’d say, well, your moral import is gone because none of us can die anymore, so the suffering that they’re experiencing can’t be called immoral. It might emotively matter to you, but then, of course, if you wanted to start using that as any kind of moral prescription, you’d be jumping over to my side of the fence.
I replied:
What’s the purpose of this thought experiment when we’re trying to figure out ethics for where we are—here in this world—living the way that we are? The first thing I would say to this request is that not a lot hangs on it, if anything hangs on it, because no matter how I answer it, we still are not immortal, and we have to figure out how to live as human beings. Ethics is a practical subject. It’s something that we need because we have to make life and death decisions, and decisions that are going to help us or harm us in life—how to set up relationships, businesses, societies, and all of that. So when we go to a wonderland of sorts and say, “Suppose that’s not the case, but this other thing is the case, what would you do then?”—we’re now really not dealing with ethics anymore. We’re dealing with a different situation.
That said, I’ll answer the question this way: If human beings could be immortal—so there’s no way they could die—and yet they still have feelings and desires and can experience pain and joy, I think ethics would still exist—but in a very different way than it does now. “Right” and “wrong” would not be about keeping you alive; it would be about making life the very best it could be. . . . If you were to take away the life-or-death element, I guess you would just be able to enjoy things forever. . . . It would become about maximizing flourishing.
In that imaginable yet metaphysically impossible context, would it be immoral to gratuitously cause someone to suffer? If maximizing personal flourishing were the standard, then, yes, such behavior would be immoral. To be moral in this context, each individual would have to pursue his own flourishing and respect the moral rights of others to do the same, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. But here’s the thing: All of this is moot because (a) human beings are mortal, (b) life and the possibility of death are what give rise to our need for values and morality, and (c) the nature and possibility of both flourishing and rights are rooted in and derived from these and related facts.
To hypothesize, as Alex did, that people can’t die is to hypothesize a contradiction. It is to hypothesize beings who are simultaneously people and not people. Contrary to the alleged analytic-synthetic dichotomy (which I think Alex accepts, and which I’ll write about separately), just because someone can imagine people being immortal doesn’t make it possible. Nor does the fact that mortality is not part of the definition of man mean that it is not an aspect of human nature. Mortality is an aspect of human nature. And this is the nature from which our need for morality arises.
More specifically, morality arises because:
- Human beings face the constant alternative of life or death.
- Life is conditional—in order to live, we must achieve certain goals or ends (knowledge, food, shelter, self-esteem, freedom, etc.).
- Unlike animals who survive by means of instinctual knowledge (e.g., knowledge of what’s edible or how to build a nest or which creatures are dangerous), we don’t automatically know what is good or bad for our life; if we want to know, we must observe reality and think; we must discover the requirements of our life and act accordingly.
- We have free will, the choice to think or not to think; thus we can choose either to activate our rational faculty and go by reason—which involves making decisions based on all the available and relevant facts (including our emotions, which are certain kinds of facts)—or to default on that vital necessity and thus act merely on the basis of emotions or desires and suffer the consequences.
The first of those four facts is the most basic. The constant alternative of life or death is the fundamental reason we need values and, by extension, morality, which is a code of values. Thus, if in the process of trying to understand the nature of morality, you hypothesize that “people can’t die but they’re still people,” you thereby sever your thinking from the basic fact that gives rise to the need and possibility of values. Your thought experiment then amounts to a series of floating abstractions—ideas detached from reality. Such a thought experiment is illogical and unhelpful because it disconnects your thinking from the world in which we actually live and from the nature that we actually have.
After I indicated as much in our debate, Alex posed a follow-up thought experiment—which was merely a variant of his original one and equally detached from reality. So I again pointed out why this is unhelpful toward the goal of understanding morality. The conversation proceeded as follows:
Alex: If you want a more imaginable, conceivable example, then suppose instead of living forever, everybody is immortal up to a point, and everybody knows their death date. Everybody on their 25th birthday gets killed, and they know there’s no way to avoid it for whatever reason. They know the time, the place, the date that they’re going to die, 100%. And they know they can’t die before, and they know they’re not going to live any longer. This doesn’t require this sort of strange vision of immortality and sort of universal conquest and avoiding the heat death. It seems to me that as long as it is even possible to say that there is such a thing as value and ethics in either of those situations, we cannot say that in principle ethics is about life.
Craig: You are posing fanciful thought experiments that do not happen and, as far as we know, cannot happen. You’re treating a metaphysical impossibility as the environment in which we need to investigate ethics. I think that’s the wrong way to go about it. So I want to give you a hypothetical. Suppose we lived in this world, and suppose human beings were mortal, and suppose that they could either live beautiful, happy lives if they acted in certain ways, or miserable lives if they acted in other ways, or simply die if they didn’t succeed in achieving their values. And there was a moral code that said the right way to live is in a way that enables you to live a beautiful, flourishing life—in harmony with other people, leaving each other free to do their own thing so we can trade with each other and all of that. So you’re given that alternative or any other alternative in this same world. You’re given the alternative of, “people should be forced to do things against their will,” or “people should suffer as much as possible,” or anything like that. Which of those alternatives would you choose?
Alex: The first.
Craig: See, if we’re here in this world, thinking about the real facts that are before us, and we have a bunch of young people here from all over the world, what they need to know is: “How am I supposed to act in this life?” They’re not jonesing for: “How am I supposed to act in those made-up worlds.” Made-up stuff is fun. Harry Potter is fun. But it’s not the thing we need to focus on.
Alex’s thought experiment(s) diverts your attention away from the facts you need to observe and integrate if you want to understand what morality is and how it can be objective. His hypothetical not only fails to clarify anything that matters toward answering the question at hand; it also obfuscates fundamentally important issues—such as why people need values in the first place.
To see this from yet another angle, consider some analogies. Alex’s thought experiment in a nutshell is: “Suppose people can’t die. Does morality still exist? If so, then morality can’t be about life.” That’s like saying:
- “Suppose people can’t get sick. Does medicine still exist? If so, it can’t be about keeping people healthy.” Agreed. In that case, medicine would have to be about something else, such as optimal performance.
- “Suppose engines can’t malfunction. Is engine maintenance still a thing? If so, then engine maintenance can’t be about avoiding engine malfunction.” Agreed. In that case, if engine maintenance did exist, it would have to be about something else, perhaps maintaining engine aesthetics.
- “Suppose fish can’t swim. Do their fins still serve a purpose? If so, their purpose can’t involve propulsion.” Agreed. In that case, their fins would have to serve some other purpose—or perhaps no purpose.
- “Suppose babies can’t fail to live and thrive. Is parenting still necessary? If so, it can’t be about helping babies to live and thrive.” Agreed. In that case, if parenting were necessary, it would have to be about something else.
What hangs on such hypotheticals? What do they help us to understand about engine maintenance, medicine, fish fins, or parenting?
Nothing at all.
If you engage in thought experiments that fundamentally change the nature of the things you’re trying to understand, you sever your thinking from reality on the matter at hand. If you are trying to address the question, “What facts of reality give rise to our need for values or morality?” and if you accept the stipulation, “While thinking about this, let’s suppose people can’t die,” then you are no longer thinking about people, and you are no longer focused on the actual context in which our need for values and morality arises. Alex and others are free to do this, but they are not free to understand morality by doing so.
Mortality is an aspect of human nature. Human life—along with its capacity to end—is what gives rise to our need for values. If our nature were different, our needs would be different, and morality would be different (if it existed at all). But our nature is what it is. And our need for values and morality arises from it accordingly.
We can pursue values only because we are alive; and we must pursue them if we want to live. This is the factual basis for morality.
For elaboration on why human life is the standard of moral value, see “Secular, Objective Morality: Look and See” or Rand’s essay “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness. For a concise presentation of the “is–ought dichotomy,” see “The Is–Ought Gap: Subjectivism’s Technical Retreat.” For an overview of how Ayn Rand solved the is–ought problem, see “How Morality is Grounded in Reality.” And for a book-length treatment of all of this, see Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It.
Our LevelUp Debate
Follow-Up Q&A