Author Archive for Ben Samuel Nelson

/// What follows is a piece which presents a series of examinations of utilitarianism from Harwood’s seminal essay, “Eleven Objections to Utilitarianism”, along with my demonstrations of how these objections are unsound. Previous installments address such topics as integrity, justice, promise-keeping, supererogation, average and total utilitarianisms, and rule utilitarianism. As the objections get more and more serious, my replies have grown in length. My apologies. ///

7. Utilitarianism requires us to enter the experience machine.

Most readers are by now familiar with the film “The Matrix” (just as most philosophers are tired of references to it in introductory philosophy classes). A central feature of the film was the concept that people could, without their knowledge, live in a world that was entirely virtual. Robert Nozick, in “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”, famously asks us to imagine a device called the “experience machine”. The experience machine is, in almost all respects, akin to the apparatus featured in The Matrix, with the sole exceptions being that for Nozick, a) people would have a choice as to whether or not they could enter the machine, and b) the machine would be programmed to provide nonstop pleasure to the participant(s). It would simulate happy experiences in virtual reality, allow the participant to achieve their greatest dreams, and so on. Let’s also suppose that everyone else on the planet has already entered such a machine. Suddenly, Joe awakes, as part of a normal procedure of setting up the details of the virtual life to come.

Nozick argues that utilitarianism requires Joe to enter the machine, for it would ultimately create happiness in him. However, Nozick contends that this is wrongheaded; people are in some sense alienated from their goals if those goals are not satisfied in reality. Thus utilitarianism is false.

This is a serious objection, and not just a charicature of hedonism. What is impressive is that the qualitative aspect of experience is kept the same in the example. If the example had involved lobotomy, or morphine injections, it would misfire, because they would diminish our capacity to experience which is necessary for the enjoyment of things. It would, for example, destroy the ability to commit to enjoyment, among other things which the utilitarian ought to concern herself with. Moreover, it doesn’t (as an accusation) say anything about what Joe would, in fact, choose. Rather, it relies upon our intuitions concerning what he ought to choose.

1. The first reply that needs to be made is that the consequences of leaving the experience machine are dire. As we have seen, there is such a thing as enjoyment, which appends itself to experiences of happiness that we have. It is important to note that one form of enjoyment is nostalgia, where we enjoy the acts we do through hindsight.

If Nozick has any viable intuitions here, it is that very good virtual experiences would involve the desire for the authentic achievement of one’s goals. Let’s grant him that. (If we refuse to grant him that, the objection to utilitarianism would be automatically defused; but that’s hardly interesting.)

Now let’s imagine a person wakes from the experience machine. How would they feel? How would it feel to realize that all which one finds meaningful has been a lie? We all know the experience of waking from very good dreams, and feeling distraught at the realization that they are false (before the memories of them fade in the process of waking). If this same sense were generalized to a sufficient portion of one’s life, then it would surely be an excruciating experience. Yet even this comparison may not capture quite the psychological impact of it. Perhaps the best analogue would be to the cases of refugees whose families and homes were destroyed in war. Surely these are not enviable positions to be in.

But in order for the Nozickian argument to carry, they would not seem to be enough to compel us not to enter the machine. Perhaps, they would argue, the participant’s pain in that brief moment would be outweighed by a lifetime of good future experiences in the machine. Let’s grant them that the machine produces great horror upon waking, but that is but a moment in time, and the memories of the subject were wiped upon re-entering the machine. Are the participants obligated to continue with it?

Before settling on a good reply to Nozick, I should consider a few replies which I think are insufficient.

The creed, “agency is an incorrigible value”, has had the power to deal with some objections so far. However, it does not seem to have much power here. An incorrigible value is trumped by an intrinsic value, and the only thing of intrinsic value is happiness. And Nozick’s example is a critique of precisely this: hedonism. Indirectly, it may play some role, though, in that agency produces enjoyment and its related concepts.

Enjoyment, and nostalgia, can be inverted: their twins are regret and embitterment. And these are precisely the things a person should avoid in a contented life, but which are inevitable results of the experience machine. The moment of misery upon waking creates a sense of embitterment which seeks to countermand every single happy experience created by the machine. However, the counterweight of bitterness only applies for the length of time in which a person is outside of the machine, which is a comparatively short period of time. Thus, this still may not be enough to save utilitarianism. However, it should be noted that the sting of bitterness present here is exquisite, which even a calamatous instance like that of the refugee doesn’t necessarily have to suffer.

What about supererogation? It would say, as would objective utilitarianism, that the person has no hope of behaving virtuously in the supererogative sense. But this is barely the point, as I’ve admitted that virtue is ultimately a means to an end, just like anything else. And it was unreliable anyway.

What would the person do? Would they go back into the machine? Likely not. But that’s not the point, Nozickians would insist: the point is that utilitarianism requires them to go back. Their actual choice afterwards is irrelevant.

We must wonder, what experiences did the person have in the machine, such that they would want to go back? Nozick’s example involves virtual reality, where the experiences are identical to real experiences. Knowing what we know — that agency is incorrigible — we may suspect the drive for authenticity would have demanded experiences that were contingent upon perceived authenticity while in the machine — it would be part of the person’s goal. Thus, it seems as though the participant’s goals, desires, and preferences aren’t being satisfied; and that this would be a way out. Indeed, a number of utilitarians have taken this route, exclaiming that ‘true satisfaction of goals’ is an aspect of happiness alongside length, intensity, purity, and so on. But I don’t believe that this position works, either. For there is a difference between a goal and the state of affairs which the goal maps onto. The goal is critically tied to a person’s intention and perceived experience, while the state of affairs is objective. And only goals are significant, because they’re a part of the person’s experiences, and the actual state of affairs is not necessarily available to the participant.

We can postulate that the person would, if they entered the machine, lead a happy life. What we can’t postulate is that the person would KNOW they would lead a happy life if they entered, or even that it would be reasonable to believe it, because of the circumstances of their waking. If we were given the same knowledge as he, then we couldn’t advise him to re-enter the machine. Because he would run the risk of future rediscovery of this world-crushing incident.

Now let’s presume that Joe is sound of mind, and change the experiment slightly: Joe was born and raised in an ordinary life, and was offered the opportunity to enter the machine, and is assured that he will never wake. If he is sound of mind, the outcome would be the same, the difference being that the negative consequences are provided by Joe’s imagination, and not through firsthand revelation.

A clever interlocutor might say (as Brian Berkey did recently), “Aha! But what about our obligation to know? It would seem that insofar as Joe doesn’t know that his future in the machine is happy, he would be in violation of his agentic duties!” The obligation to know can be defended radically, as with W.K. Clifford, who wrote: “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”. It may also be defended modestly, by saying something like, “Believing in the truth tends to produce good, but not always”. I support the latter sort of view, because of the ‘dying mother’ example we encountered in the promise-keeping objection.

Second, the Nozickians are the ones fighting an uphill battle on the epistemic question, because it is manifest to the waker that the possibility of waking up again and again in the future is very real, given that he is presently experiencing wakefulness. The best evidence available to Joe tells him that he is, and in the future will be, in deep trouble. Asking a person to re-enter the machine is like asking a refugee to withstand another war on new soil.

That would be wrong.

2. Another interesting avenue for escape arises through the examination of the self. It may be that we need to understand the notion of the self as (at the very least) the coherant connectedness of memory and consciousness across time. Recall that Joe’s memory would be wiped if he were to enter the machine. If so, then he would be cutting ties to his past self. In a sense, the Waking Joe and the Sleeping Joe would be entirely different people. I don’t know the extent to which this consideration makes much of a difference to the Nozick objection, but ultimately, it has some impact.

8 and 9. The axiology objections.

At first glance, Harwood’s essay provides us with two objections as if they were separate. They are: (8) Utilitarianism wildly overstates our duties to animals; and (9) Utilitarianism panders to bigots and sadists. However, in fact, they’re just variants of the same confusion.

The first argument is a rephrasing of the old accusation, that utilitarianism is the philosophy of pigs; for utilitarianism seems to provide no distinction between the “higher pleasures” (presumably, drinking tea and listening to NPR) and “lower” ones (which don’t require enumeration here).

I think that this argument is propelled by the intuition that certain pleasure-seeking activities are evil, sinful, etc. Some acts really aren’t that great to perform. Still, the entire point of utilitarianism, from Bentham’s view, was to show that some acts tend to produce less happiness, and some produce misery in others, and so they are to be avoided. So certain “lower” acts would produce less happiness, and so, should be avoided.

Mill wasn’t entirely satisfied with Bentham’s quantitative view. Thus, Mill famously produced his doctrine of qualitative utilitarianism, whereby particular values are better or worse than one another because certain values somehow become a “part of” happiness with experience. The rank-ordering of values can be accomplished on the basis of opinions from competent judges, who have tested this and that pleasure and can rank them one after the other. Mill did not exactly disagree that Bentham had produced an adequate reply, but sought to supplement Bentham’s argument by showing the place of particular values, in order to make the doctrine seem more palatable.

I think Bentham’s original account was satisfactory. I must confess to being mystified both by Mill’s account, which contains outright bizarre claims (what does it mean for a thing to be a “part of” happiness?), and by the accounts of those critics who carry on with objections which are not only explicitly dealt with by a classic utilitarian, but are dealt with by the original utilitarian himself.

Why, though, is it better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied? First, I wouldn’t quite go that far; if asked whether I would rather be a tortured man or a happy pig, I would probably and quite naturally reply, “a happy pig”. Such exaggerated examples, which are meant to shock us into disavowal of a doctrine under scrutiny, don’t quite have the rhetorical force that’s being looked for when they make the case against them quite so costly. I think that the aphorism, though, could be rephrased and agreed to, if we were to say that “it is better to be a blasé Socrates than a happy pig”. Second, with the doctrine of enjoyment at our disposal, we can say that the person is able to have more experience of happiness than the pig is able to. Third, we might say that the human being is more capable of discerning pleasures than the pig, which would both mean that conscious pains are more sharp and horrible, and conscious pleasures are greater.

I think part of the confusion arises over utilitarianism’s commitment to the thesis that happiness is the only intrinsic value. Sometimes, this point is glossed over by critics, who declare (as Harwood does) that “utilitarianism insists that there is only one moral value, satisfaction”. This is not true. Rather, from what I understand, there is only one thing of intrinsic value, and this thing applies to explain the genesis of both moral and non-moral values. There are plenty of instrumental values, and as we’ve seen (with Bentham), they may be rank-ordered in order to produce moral guidance on the basis of however they produce happiness.

Similarly, we are told that the pleasure of bigots and sadists are not of intrinsic value, and so, hedonism is mistaken. However, I deny that the pleasure of any animal is without intrinsic value. But I declare that this proposition, when considered in context, amounts to nothing; for the worth of particular kinds of acts are evaluated separately from the worth of the happiness which they originate from. The experience of pleasure of the lion who eats a baby, and of a bigot who protests the funerals of hate crime victims, are activities that produce intense and personal misery in many others. They are immoral and unjust. But it is no contradiction to say that the pleasure of the sadistic act has intrinsic value, and then to say that it is grossly immoral. All that is asked is that the reader understand that that which is valuable is not necessarily that which is morally significant.

Over at X-Philosophy, posts are centered around the Knobe effect like tornados around Kansas. The Knobe effect is essentially the idea that moral intuitions muddle with peoples’s attributions of intention to the acts of others. (I’ve offered some philosophical objections there previously. Rise from your grave, Kohlberg.) For various reasons, the effect is quite puzzling.

Recently, Clayton has attempted to explain the Knobe effect. I would like to respond to it. Before I do, I should warn the reader that my commentary here will probably seem like unintelligible abstractions unless they take a gander at his paper first. Luckily, Clayton’s paper is short, relatively self-contained, and straightforward.

Clayton argues that the Knobe effect may be understood by way of two distinctions. The first is in terms of selective/collective treatment of reasons. A person may evaluate a reason for acting on a case-by-case basis, or they may evaluate them all at once. [Implicitly, we know that reasons can either recommend a certain action ("pro"-reasons), or they can provide reasons not to act ("con"-reasons).] The second distinction is in terms of conformity/compliance. Conformity is when a pro-reason is merely consistent with the greater goal, and compliance is when a pro-reason provides impetus for the greater goal. The conformity/compliance distinction only applies to reasons which have been examined selectively (though it is not immediately clear why).

He seems to argue that, for a case in which the goal is decided in favor of some pro reasons, one cannot treat con reasons selectively, because the cons taken selectively would have provided motivational weight against the goal (thus undermining the motivation to pursue the goal). So a person must treat con-reasons collectively; thus, there is no conform/comply distinction in such a case. “To respond selectively to them, she’d have to conform or comply with some of [the con-reasons] without conforming or complying with the others… Blight could not conform to their demands without giving in to them and deciding against starting Project Z.” Moreover, the conform/comply distinction is what explains the Knobe effect for the Benison case; some reasons (care for the environment) take a back seat relative to the overall goal, but are consistent with it, and so, conform to it without complying.

I want to make two replies. One is to cast doubt on whether or not a selective treatment of con-reasons collapses the conform/comply distinction. The other is to cast the problem in terms of the relevance of goals with subgoals in terms of apathy and defiance.

1. Maybe Clayton means something specific about “selectivity” which I haven’t understood. But from my first reading, I’m not at all clear on why it is that, from a Humean standpoint, the consideration of con-reasons entails that they would definitely motivate a person in a con-direction. Reasons don’t necessarily provide motivation. They provide reasons, which may be taken seriously, or may be dismissed, at the whim of the listener’s fancy. So if Blight selectively treated the con-reasons, then it wouldn’t necessarily matter; she doesn’t have to take them seriously, she just has to consider them. What Clayton might mean is that Blight be selective in the sense that she in fact accepts some reasons, and in fact denies others; but that’s not a comment on selection, which is a process, but rather upon an outcome.

2. It seems to me that a person may cite any relevant condition or consequence which they were aware of at the time of the action as a reason for acting. For present purposes, relevance has to do with the place of action within a wider chain of goals and subgoals. It also seems to me that it is a poor thing to fail to attribute to a person even those minimally relevant things which they have known at the time of the action; and this is what Knobe’s subjects fail to do in the Benison case. So something genuinely surprising seems to be happening in their responses, at least for me — or, is not surprising, then outright wrong.

Relevance comes in degrees. So, if I drive my lawnmower just to annoy my neighbor (the manifest consequence), but fully expect that I’ll cut the grass in the process (the latent consequence), then there will be a rich series of motivations and goals behind the goal of “annoying my neighbor”, perhaps involving an ongoing slapstick feud, but the connections to “cutting the grass” will be weak (it is a mere means to the end). Using Raz’s language, as presented here, compliance would seem to describe the conditions which are more relevant to an action, and conformity would describe the conditions which are less relevant.

If we admit that mere conformity constitutes an intention, as I would like to, then we’re up the creek in our examination of the Knobe effect, it seems, in the Benison case; for while Benison’s consideration of the environment conforms to his overall decision, his de facto intent to do well for the environment does not register with those people who examine the case. And the Blight case may be selective, as I’ve suggested in (1), but clearly it involves neither conformity nor compliance to environmental protection. Rather, it must be characterized as either apathy or defiance towards that subgoal; and it seems that Knobe’s subjects want to treat apathy towards reasons (at least in this case) as intentional. I don’t immediately see how the conformity/compliance distinction helps us in the Blight case — especially since the distinction seems irrelevant in the Benison one, where we are supposed to expect it to do some work.

There may be a way out of this problem if we postulate an ambiguity in interpretation. I might attribute the Knobe effect in the Benison case to an implicit tendency on the part of Knobe’s subjects to examine intention only above a certain threshold of relevance, because it seems more useful to them to interpret the words that way for the purposes of the discussion. Compliance is the theory of intention which people are attracted to, for moral, epistemic, and everyday purposes. (Morally, to make the distinction between doing and allowing; epistemically, because we don’t know the deep-seated knowledge in a person’s mind.) In other words: in the Benison case, our conversational purposes as readers are not morally exhaustive, as our attention is not morally charged; we are focused only on the compliant acts, and unimpressed either way by his amoral apathy, we have no moral desire to interpret any care for merely conforming reasons. But in the Blight case, our conversational purposes are entirely moral, since it is a morally charged issue; so we focus both on her intentional apathy and bad compliant acts. In this way, moral interest acts as a kind of radioactive dye which lights up areas which would otherwise have been hidden. It follows that if we were to ask someone with a plausible and fully-formed moral theory, we would find that they would be willing to attribute some intent to help the environment in the Benison case, although they would likely take pains to say that he’s not behaving virtuously or somesuch.

In some cases, like the Blight case, the subject is aware of certain conditions but fails to give them motivational weight in a decision, such as in situations involving carelessness. I want to require, in moral cases, along with Knobe’s subjects, that apathy to some peripheral condition be considered a part of their intent, in order to explain their decision adequately. Here is the knowledge of so-and-so; here is the flouting of so-and-so; thus, here is the intention to get such-and-such done, in the context of this wider web of goals. I also want to require that conformity be understood as an aspect of a person’s intent.

I don’t believe that a reason must be a possible defeater in order to be relevant to an explanation of a person’s intent. It may be the case that some description does not and would not have the power to change an action, given the dispositions of the person, their wider goals, etc., but that doesn’t mean that the description is explanatorily idle. I disagree with the claim that, “When we consider those side effects or pros we don’t say the agent brought about intentionally, we recognize that the agent wouldn’t have changed course had those pros not favored her decision.” For sometimes it’s precisely the disposition to suppress the possible motivating content of a particular peripheral goal which is intentional (so long as the subject is consciously aware of doing so). And, anyway, explanations need not be tossed aside as “idle” just because they aren’t the primary moving parts in some phenomenon. To claim so, is to pretend to know the whole story about causes (especially with respect to matters of intent), and that’s not something that anyone has lisence to claim.

I think all of this is supportive of Knobe’s interpretation of the effect, in a way. It’s just that it relies on the pragmatics of the situation more than a principled examination of intentions.

In Sterling Harwood’s essay, “Eleven Objections to Utilitarianism”, he surveys a number of critiques to utilitarianism, and then examines them for cogency. Over the next month, I will summarize all of those objections, along with his answers. I will then evaluate both. During the final week, I will examine any other miscellanious objections which I have encountered and feel like addressing.

Since this is a blog, each post after this one will be in bite-sized packets of three. To anticipate: classical utilitarianism is riddled with absurdity, but utilitarianism in general – as in the body of theories which center around the principle of utility – must be a permanent feature of moral and/or meta-ethical analysis.

I. The aretaic objection: “Utilitarianism is overly demanding.” Because the principle of utility requires us to treat people impartially, it alienates us from our integrity, and forces us to examine a situation from some third-person standpoint. This a) makes duties to our friends (associational duties) impossible, and b) forces us to into the squalor of excessive altruism, where we must give away anything and everything we own (for instance) so long as doing so does not reduce our happiness to low levels.

Harwood’s treatment is fourfold.

i) The “penny saved” rebuttal. He argues that the anticipation of future horrors (i.e., of overpopulation) is reason to amass one’s wealth wisely, so that it accumulates, and so future charity will be more significant.

This seems like a very poor defence. For generally speaking, misery accumulates: protection now will reduce burdens later. The maxim, “Prevention is the cure” seems wise enough in many cases.

ii) The “suck it up” rebuttal. Harwood explains that this objection is simply a reflection of the difficulty of morality. It is simply a fact of the matter that it is hard to be a moral person. We complain about the impartiality requirement, but in fact, being moral is tough. Our resistence arises out of a weakness of will.

And indeed, there is often a time where the moralist must say, “Oh, suck it up already”, to someone who suffers without reasonable cause (i.e., in modest – but not extreme – psychosomatic cases). However, the desire to protect oneself, one’s friends, and one’s family from harm is hardly as trite as the bruising of a kneecap. Harwood is hardly taking the objection as seriously as it deserves here. Personal projects and associations seem to have a genuine moral weight.

This objection from integrity has been offered as a decisive objection against utilitarianism by famous icons in contemporary ethical theory. Bernard Williams (and to a lesser extent, Samuel Scheffler) are theorists who believe that, in some manner or other, utilitarianism as usually conceived must alienate the moral actor from their integrity. Their greivances, as far as I can make out, are that: a) personal integrity must be treated as a value, and does not play a more fundamental role at the level of producing the right; b) utilitarianism alienates the person from the option to do otherwise and still be considered moral.

I would affirm the correctness of a), but find nothing compelling in the objection. Integrity, insofar as it is morally significant, is one of those values which produces happiness. Thus, we have a means of including integrity (and associational duties) as items with moral weight. There can be no fundamental alienation from integrity if it may be included in the theory at least some of the time, so this objection fails.

(b), however, is more interesting. Take a case where an actor evidently has a very clear utilitarian duty to optimize happiness. Let’s say that Jim would increase the happiness of Sally if he bought her iced cream by amount x. Let’s also say that Jim was thinking of buying a model airplane in order to receive happiness y. The two cost the same amount of money. Let’s also say that Sally has had a bad day and that iced cream would give her twice the pleasure as that which Jim would get from buying a model airplane: x = 2y. The question is: if he bought the model plane, would that be moral?

Utilitarianism seems to say, it is better for you to buy the iced cream. Integrity theorists (esp. Schefflerians) say, you have the option to do whatever you want and still be moral; after all, we’re dealing with really small quantities of happiness, here. For them, you can make the non-utilitarian choice, and still be moral. Integrity theorists want to say that utilitarianism can provide no options in the matter, but would also insist that there really ought to be the more egoistic moral alternative (within some bounds).

The accusation is subtle. It is not that utilitarianism cannot ever tell a person to do an altruistic act; for that would be a just plain goofy reading of utilitarianism, and unintuitive no matter what ethical point of view you’re coming from. Equally (I think), they’re not saying that, strictly speaking, utilitarianism is anti-egoistic. Rather, they aim for a modest claim — they think that utilitarianism destroys the idea of moral choice, or of merely permissible behavior, especially (for Scheffler) where there are low levels of happiness involved.

We can find an excellent rejoinder in another defence which Harwood covers.

iii) The epistemic rebuttal. He invokes Kurt Baier (and, it turns out, Henry Sidgwick), in arguing that people are simply better judges of their own desires, which makes some degree of egoism acceptable.

Ultimately, this is the lynchpin which secures the defence of utilitarianism. The thought-experiment presented in (ii b) is predicated on knowledge that we don’t normally have. It should not be a surprise that a scenario which effectively postulates omniscience will produce unintuitive results.

Indeed, beyond the fulfillment of basic needs, what we know about human happiness is limited to those with whom we are most intimately familiar; and our knowledge makes any of our duties far more clear. On this view, we do have options. They arise out of uncertainty about the best means of achieving the utiliarian goal. Strike out the uncertainty, and one’s moral choices are far more limited. (This is not to suggest that having moral choice is a blessing, incidentally. Social psychology has made clear that our minds derive less satisfaction from a state of affairs when we are given more choice of alternatives.) In other words: knowledge of preferences demands familiarity.

But this is likely not enough to convince a non-believer in utilitarianism. So here is another argument that is not mentioned by Harwood. There is a difference between happiness and enjoyment. Enjoyment is the reflection upon happiness, the meditation upon it such that it produces more happiness. To enjoy one’s own personal projects is to amplify one’s happiness beyond the levels one would ordinarily have. Enjoyment is, at some level, an ad hoc choice.

Two conclusions arise: one, all other things equal, to produce happiness in others without choosing to do so, is to tacitly subscribe to a rule which says, “No enjoyment”. This will eventually, after precedent etc., fail to optimize utility. Here, of course, I am invoking rules. But I should clarify that I’m still within the sphere of act-utilitarianism. Properly understood, a rule is merely a cognitive device that governs a certain exceptional kind of act. The act is the thing we care about; rules just help us get there. In this sense, enjoyment propels happiness.

Two, in principle, an ad hoc choice is not knowable to an outsider, it is only known to the agent themselves. In this sense, it is both unpredictable and, for all intents and purposes, secret.

iv) The pride rebuttal. He argues that there is significant value to not simply feeling like a charity case.

This is true in Western cultures. But the real question is, “WHY might this be true, consistent with utilitarianism?”. It may be explained, I think, by the fact that agency is an incorrigible value – that is to say, one’s sense of self and of personal powers inevitably tends to provoke a primordial respect for agency in the abstract. In certain cultural climates, and in people whose senses of self are appropriately developed, this respect for agency may lead to a sense of dignity, and to the demand to be the power which sustains their own life. Thus, agency is incorrigible. Utility must be organized around it, because of the kind of beings that we are.

[Edit: In some cultures, such as ours, this rightly leads to a division between positive and negative responsibility. Doing a bad action seems as though it is somewhat worse than allowing a bad action. Utilitarianism has been accused of favoring a strong thesis of negative responsibility: where the bad consequences that arise out of your creative striving are equally bad as those you allow to happen. But if we take agency to be incorrigible, it will modify our moral calculations along the lines of the "enjoyment" thesis, in such a way that the wrongs associated with agency will seem more wrong, and the rights associated will seem more right.

It is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the consequences of an action are agent-external, or merely situational. But the actions of persons affect the behaviors of other persons: these are social consequences. Still, if consequentialist considerations of actor-internal factors seem ad hoc or unconvincing to the reader, I should note that the same principle applies to non-intentional behaviors as well: namely, our habits. Later on, we'll understand more about the role of rules in utilitarianism. But suffice it to say right now that the bad consequences which arise out of rule violation center in large part around our habits. If we accept this latter thesis, then it is only a short step before we accept the thesis about intentions. For both habits and intentions are agent-internal.]

Ideology is incorrigibly interesting. For apathy is not an option in ethics, semantics, and society, since all three are essential to social life. All correspond to some social habits, and each are compelled by our nature; and habits, being a part of everyday life, tend to be hard to ignore. Admittedly, questions of ideology are sometimes at the fringe of ethics and institutional analysis both. Still, while they should not compel the attraction of everyone, and where ideology intersects with ethics, it ought to (and usually will) inspire some interest. And anyway, anyone who is interested in the creeds that buttress institutions will find ideology to be fascinating.

The semantics of ideology are an essential part of the study of ideology itself. Indifference toward lexical semantics by any scholar of ideology is sure to dupe us all; for it will lead to a divide between people who are largely in agreement, and muddle together those who have deep disagreements. This is an interpretive and ethical mistake. It is also a scientific mistake: for, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould, “taxonomies are theories of order” (cited in The Annual Review of Sociology (1994), “Societal Taxonomies” by Gerhard Lenski).

There are at least two possible practices which lead to the aformentioned dooms. Both arise out of disputes over how to formulate the concept of “ideology”. The first practice involves a flight from philosophical social science and into mere description. The second practice involves conflation of political ideology with other forms of ideology.

1. There is an enticing view which tells us that an ideology is nothing more than how an ideologically charged word is collectively understood. It states that meaning is power; that all social structures are just the roles and expectations that have found a way to crystallize into meanings; that a word is a fortress, a flag, which people use to represent themselves to others, and around which they rally. And there is much truth to this view.

But our discussion over ideologies ought to be principled, not just a contest of folk usage. To use John Kvanvig’s language, the study of ideology must be “value-driven”, not as a simple game of gathering popular linguistic preferences; it ought to be partially prescriptive, not merely descriptive. A political ideology is a set of plans for governmental order, the sort that one may find in a manifesto. To secure a clear idea of what should be a part of such a manifesto, we need to filter out popular ideas which have no bearing on the philosophies represented by a particular ideology. Rather, we must prescribe the meaning of an ideology (or set of ideologies), and construct plausible meanings of an ideology out of historical context and precedent as they are understood by informed persons.

2. The concept of “ideology” is indeterminate with respect to the scope of its content. On my last perusal of political science articles, the term (it was hoped) would be used to describe a great pot full of ideas. “Liberalism”, for instance, is not to be taken as a certain kind of creed with a nest of characteristic plans for state and society, but rather, a whole worldview, which includes the various and sundry vexes and affiliations that a person has in their social life: views on parenting, on education, etc. This sentiment finds folk popularity in many quarters; George Lakoff, for instance, seems to associate maternalism (as a metaphor) with liberalism.

I take this to be a step in the wrong direction, although with the best of intentions. We need to be a bit more incisive, and develop a taxonomy of ideologies. There are, for my purposes, at least three kinds of ideology: those which treat of wordly wisdom, or the social facts that people hold in their lives; the part which gives rise to social ideologies, which pertain to issues of social identity, household management, everyday life, and so on; and the part which holds certain political or collective plans, which may ideally be captured in the form of a manifesto. Only the last sort can be understood as “political ideology”. And if there are interesting correlations which may be observed between the three, then fine; if, for instance, it may be observed that self-titled socialists tend to have a certain view of economics, then we may associate their political plans with their scientific worldview. But as far as political ideologies themselves go, our discussion ought to be limited.

Such a taxonomy is not of merely idle interest. For instance, with the above tools at hand, we may examine the work of Karl Mannheim in a new light. He, writing in the Marxist tradition, understood ideology to be a pejorative term which was used to describe ostensibly irrational beliefs about social life: a set of ideas that “conceals the present by attempting to comprehend it in terms of the past” (cited in George Ritzer’s “Classical Sociology Theory”). He was evidently speaking of social philosophy, or worldly wisdom, not political ideology.

My worry is that, without making sense of the differences between these sets of ideas, it will inspire the kind of generalizations that make ideological discussion needlessly toxic. If my political ideology (that is, my plans for reform or status quo) are so-and-so, it does not necessarily entail that my economic and social ideologies are such-and-such. To take the Lakoffian example, although I may support welfare, I may justify the practice in many different ways: through cold utilitarian terms, virtue ethics, distributional justice, perhaps even perfectionism, not just some maternalistic ethics of caring. Sure, many advocates of welfare also likely do so out of sympathy; but this is a connection that needs to be shown, not inferred, and which may be wrong. Without separate categories, there temptation for conflation is too great.