APPENDIX:

OSFA: THE GENERAL PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY BEHIND

THIS SOCIAL THEORY:

[ABSTRACT: an Explanation and Defense of the Consequentialist ethical theory behind the social perspective in the book (claiming that the ultimate principle for judging a social system is 'how close this system comes to OPTIMIZING THE SITUATION FOR ALL'.)

This moral theory (OSFA) says that the principle 'GGGN' (promote the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number) is the sole ultimate axiom of ethics; all other valid moral rules (including 'Respect Valid Rights') are valid insofar as they can be seen as corollaries of this axiom.

The moral theory is defended against several kinds of common objection; but then certain remaining difficulties are accepted. The theory is finally accepted as explicating IMPORTANT moral rules, as the best simplification available of 'the spirit' of valid social ethics.]

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I. THE ROLE OF ETHICAL THEORY:

Assessing social policies morally is maddeningly complex; we might hope to simplify the job by working out a General Ethical Theory. To understand this project, let's first ask what role a General Theory plays in other fields of thought.

I/A:Geometrical Theory

Consider the plane geometry you were exposed to in high school.

Several concepts were introduced:

Axioms - Self-evident truths.

Theorems - Derived statments that have been or have yet to be proved (i.e., derived logically from axioms/postulates).

Corollaries - Deductions from propositions already proved true.

Geometry is usually taught in a misleading way: they teach you the axioms and postulates first, and then show how the theorems and corollaries are deduced from these first principles. (Remember? One axiom said that two lines or numbers or angles that are both equal to a third line/number/angle are equal also to each other. And a typical theorem says that, in any right triangle, the squares of the two sides add up to equal the square of the hypotenuse).

In real history, though, that's not the order in which things happened. After all, many theorems in plane geometry were well-known before the system was worked out by Euclid. Anyone fiddling with two straight sticks can prove one theorem for himself: as one angle gets larger or smaller, the opposite angle changes in exactly the same way. [i.e. vertical angles are always equal.] Likewise, anyone could draw diagrams of right triangles and prove the theorem about `square of the hypotenuse', as a universal truth, for himself. No reference to the axioms is needed.

Euclid didn't discover many of the theorems. Also, he didn't discover the axioms: after all, they're supposed to be self-evident and obvious. Then what was his famous discovery?

He showed that, using rigorous rules of logic, all the known theorems about lines, points, and plane figures could be deduced, from a small set of "self-evident" simple truths, the axioms/postulates. So Euclid's theory could prove the truth of all the known corollaries--which wasn't necessary, since there were proofs of their truth already available.

More importantly, Euclid's theory could rigorously prove the truth or falsity of any general claim made about lines, points, and plane figures, even of claims not yet thought of. (And the proofs would "work out" empirically; actual figures roughly corresponding to theoretical definitions would always be shown to verify the proved theorems). Also, the theory could `explain' the already-known corollaries, could show elegantly why they must be true. Indeed, it is its ability to explain the known corollaries that validates the theory.

This was a great step forward intellectually, offering the hope that in some other fields of study, a theory (a set of simple, self-evident axioms) could explain the bewildering forest of known facts in that field, besides proving and interpreting new and interesting facts.

From now on, we'll simplify the discussion by labelling theorems and corollaries as `corollaries'.

I/B: Roots of Utilitarianism: The Special Need for Ethical Theory:

In the land of the Hebrews, valid moral rules were thought to be revealed by a just and benevolent God. Jahweh declared the main rules of life to Moses: Don't murder or steal or have sex with another's wife, etc. But in the Jewish tradition there were also any number of other moral imperatives somehow backed by divine authority: rules, for instance, about how to cook, what to eat, how far you may walk on the Sabbath. The elaborate array of moral requirements was very difficult to teach to the young; moreover, there was a puzzle about what to do when two of the requirements clashed with each other. And people couldn't help wondering why God cared whether they ate pork, etc.

To oversimplify Jewish history: along came Jesus, a rabbi who could expound the complexities of the Law in a learned and thoughtful way. Moreover, Jesus spoke as `one with authority':"Of old it was said, `Help those who help you ... hurt those who hurt you' ... But I say this: whoever hates his brother is a murderer." So Jesus did not just try to explain the given tissue of conventional moral standards; he first corrected some, and then tried to explain the valid remainder.

How did Jesus' general explanation work? He cited (as the axioms of his moral theory) two of the accepted moral norms: 1) Love God with your whole being; and 2) Love your neighbor as yourself. In his careful, rabbinical way Jesus made clear, firstly, that `neighbor' included all mankind, even Samaritans, enemy aliens. Secondly, he explained that `loving' included caring for others' welfare enough to actively help them when they're in trouble. (His nastiest curse was aimed not at murderers or idolaters or adulterers, but at people who refused to help the needy!) After all, your love for yourself includes an active and anxious care for your own future welfare; so loving others `as yourself' must also include such active care. Thus, his second commandment could be rephrased in this way: Care for the well-being of all; promote (as well as you can) the well-being of every person.The role of the first Axiom (to love God wholeheartedly) is puzzling. `Love' here can't include `help', because nothing could count as helping God, who has everything already and needs nothing. (Some people think that God needs to be worshipped, that He stands taller when He is praised, like some vain adolescent. But Jesus clearly thought that God wants to be praised solely because it benefits man to praise Him).

St. Paul actually reduced the two axioms to one: "This is the (theory explaining) the Whole Law and all the prophets: love your neighbor as yourself." The first axiom (love God) seems to provide no moral content, only the motive for the second one, (love and help people). All other specific moral rules can be deduced from the second axiom.

One can see Jesus's intellectual project as explaining all the complex rules of the Mosaic Law by viewing them as corollaries of one axiom: `Love and Help People'. To see how thoroughly he carried out this project, consider his answer to the Pharisees who cynically criticized him for curing people on the Sabbath. (Curing a blind person involved `work' of a sort: Jesus would spit on the earth and collect the mud on his finger and rub that mud on a blind eye. And Jews were forbidden to work on the Sabbath! Thus the criticism.) First, Jesus advanced a conventional, unoriginal answer: "Which of you, if your ox fell into a pit, would not [feel permitted to] pull it out, even on the Sabbath?" That answer sounds as if he's going to say that a light duty to God (keeping the Sabbath free from work, free for worship) is outweighed by an important duty to human welfare (rescuing valuable farm animals).

Then comes the startling part of Jesus' answer:

"The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath."

One plausible interpretation of this cryptic remark would go like this: the duty not to work on the Sabbath is a corollary of the duty to worship God on the Sabbath, which is itself a corollary of the duty to Love and Help People! Now, when a mere corollary "Don't work" clashes with the Axiom `Love and Help People' (from which the corollary derives its validity)--such a clash should obviously be resolved by following the Axiom and suspending the corollary!

As noted earlier, Jesus obviously thought that God commanded worship for the benefit of man, not to gratify God's vanity; it's hard to imagine any other interpretation of the startling statement: "The Sabbath is made for Man."

Jesus came up with an incredibly elegant theory to explain and simplify the vital area of moral standards for living: the theory has only one axiom! Obviously this makes the theory easy to teach to the young (as compared to the sixteen axioms/postulates of Euclid). A one-axiom theory also solves another problem: suppose we worry that axioms 1, 2 and 5 might imply a 'yes' answer to some detailed question in the relevant field, while axioms 3, 8, and 11 might imply a 'no' answer. (In other words, the theory might be implicitly and unobviously inconsistent.) That potential disaster is ruled out by a one-axiom theory!

Jesus,then, proposed a super-elegant, one-axiom theory explaining the complex detailed rules of morality: a field of thought far more important than plane geometry! What a fantastic intellectual achievement, if successful! (To agree with Jesus, you'd have to believe in the validity of all the moral rules Jesus accepted, and in the validity ("truth") of the one or two axioms.)

Logical Insights Gained from Jesus' One-Axiom Theory:

Luckily, as philosophers we don't care here whether Jesus' theorizing succeeded, since his project was theological (depending on "God said so!") not philosophical. We care only for certain logical possibilities illuminated by the attempt.

When can Norm A be outweighed by Norm B?

1) First, B might be the axiom from which corollary A derives its validity.

This is the most obvious case: "A is outweighable by B, because A can be derived from B". (A=Don't work on Sabbath/B=Love and Help People.)

2) But suppose it were possible to have a duty-to-worship-God which is NOT just a way to help people lovingly. Still, a slight duty to God (over a small ritual detail) might be seen as outweighed by an important duty to mankind. Here is a logical possibility that modern thinkers tended, until recently, to forget: Norm A might be outweighable by Norm B, even though A is not reducible to B as a corollary. (More on this possibility later.)

Philosophical ethics can't justify a rule or theory by saying "God said so." The medieval theological consensus (among Christians, Jews, and Moslems) that ethics must build on divine revelation collapsed in the Eighteenth Century. (For one thing, educated people thought that, in practice, this gave too much power to arrogant clerics--Popes and Ayatollahs--who claimed to speak for God.)

It's not that God disappeared; among many educated Europeans, deism more or less replaced theism. Deism believes in a world-machine designed by a Divine Mind, but denies that this Mind has revealed itself through Bible or Church, as theists claim. This Mind was assumed to be rational and benevolent, and to stand behind valid moral rules somehow.

Why so? presumably because the thrust or spirit of the moral rules was to be seen as (various ways of) implementing the general norm (which is not uniquely Christian) "Help People."To see how plausible this seems, try this modified maxim:"Ethics is made for man, not man for ethics. " Most Americans, religious or not, would readily accept this principle.

Goal-Norms and Limit-Norms:

When we talk about ethics, we divide norms, or standards of judgment, into two categories: "goal-norms" and "limit-norms." Think of the two types of norms like this:

Goal Norms - What should I accomplish?

Limit Norms - What definite actions should I perform/omit?

Limit-norms: These are the moral rules we tend to think of first: e.g., the Ten Commandments). These are usually negative: e.g., Don't Murder ... Don't steal.... (But the rules could be definite and affirmative: e.g., perform the prescribed ritual on Passover. )

These definite rules prescribe limits on our conduct, no matter what our goals are.

Goal-norms: However, many moral prescriptions don't tell us exactly what to do; they tell us what to get done, somehow. They command us to adopt certain goals as our own. For instance, parents have a general duty to promote the well-being of their children. That means they must adopt-as-their-own-goal a situation where their children flourish; and then they must plan and work to make this situation actual. Planning and working to make situation A happen is implied in adopting A as your goal. If you didn't really try to actuate A, then we'd say you wished A would happen, not that you willed it as one of your operative goals of action.

II. OUR MORAL THEORY: OPTIMIZE THE SITUATION FOR ALL (OSFA)

Here we'll first analyze the Axiomatic Principle that enjoins people to promote the Greatest Good to the Greatest Number(GGGN): what does that really say? Is the principle valid?

Then, in a separate section, we'll analyze the controversial claim in OSFA Theory: that the GGGN principle is the sole ultimate axiom of ethics, from which all other valid moral duties can be deduced.

Explaining the goal-norm of "Help People":

St. James snickers at nominal Christians who say to the poor : "I will: be thou fed!" without actually working to feed them. The pious wish that someone will fare well is not enough; its sincerity must be displayed in real and thoughtful effort. And of course the effort must be backed by study of the other person's real needs: otherwise, 'benevolence' could turn out to be harmful meddling.

All of this is just to start explaining the meaning of the Principle of Utility (as J.Bentham and J. S. Mill later called the special goal-norm of `Help People'.) Is this goal really morally required? Is it the sole ultimate axiom of morality?

These questions still remain open.

"Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you." This line was Jesus' way of explaining how to tell if you were really implementing "Help People". For instance, you might think it would help people to force your religious beliefs on them; but you wouldn't care to have others force their beliefs on you; you'd see this, plausibly, as interfering with your life, not as helping you. So you should not `help' others in this way.

On the other hand, if you take this "golden rule" literally, it might legitimize the cruel attention of the masochist-sadist. "I want others to hurt me, so I should hurt others." Our objection to this interpretation is that we feel sure that, while the masochist somehow wants to be subject to cruelty, this isn't really good for him; and we're absolutely sure that suffering such cruelty would not be good for us! Similarly, the drug addict knows he wants to be supplied with Crack; so he might wrongly think the maxim instructs him to supply others with Crack.

A better interpretation of the Golden Rule would be this: "Do for others what would in fact promote their true, long-run well-being, their true interests," or "Do for others what would count as prudent if they did it for themselves."

Of course, among the people to be helped are people in other countries, and also those who will live in the next century. How to weigh these strangers' interests against the interests of the people you know and care about, your "in-groups" will be discussed later.

The goal-norm we're discussing here could be restated as "Care for and promote the best situation for all people concerned." Or, more briefly, the "Promote the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number."

I'll refer to this principle as "GGGN" hereafter.

Explaining `The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number':

Level One: The Theory of Prudence:

There are two moments in applying the "GGGN" principle: the first moment is deciding what is the "really best" situation for this person and that. This inquiry really should be called a theory of Prudence: asking what situation would be prudent for Sam to seek for himself (and likewise prudent for Mary and others). For instance, most philosophers today agree that "maximizing Fay's good feelings over the long run" by itself no guarantee of promoting Fay's true interests. They'd agree that it wouldn't be prudent for Fay to think just of good and bad feelings in planning her life. Most classical philosophers have thought they could lay down general principles about true well-being for all humans. Western philosophers (including even J.S. Mill) have usually hovered around a slogan like "Active fulfillment" as the criterion for human well-being. What they mean is that people should perform noble activities for their own sake. Philosophers say that knowing the uncomfortable truth is better for you, even if it gives you bad feelings; and protecting a person's dignity is more important than just keeping him contented. (But these thinkers would all admit that these general principles must be modified more or less to suit the special needs and situations of various individuals. )

If mistakes are made at this first level, (deciding what acts and situations and institutions improve a person's true well-being) then the whole application of "GGGN" will be faulty. We could end up really harming those we intend to help.

LEVEL TWO: BALANCING THE INTERESTS OF VARIOUS PEOPLE:

The next moment in applying the Principle of Utility [GGGN] is deciding how to weigh different people's interests, in deciding what actions will do "more good than harm overall" and which policies will do `the most net good possible.' (Practically every public policy produces some harms and some benefits.) This latter phrase is what we mean by `optimizing the situation': doing the most net good possible.

Let's establish one seemingly-obvious point which has, however, been questioned by some economists. Benefit A, provided for one person, is less important than a similar benefit provided for 100 people. Some thinkers say "you can't add different people's interests together: they're like apples and oranges." (Of course you can add these latter items: 2 apples + 3 oranges = 5 pieces of fruit.) And different people's interests can also be added. Suppose you have one rescue boat available, and two boats are sinking, far from each other so you must decide which one to rescue. (You don't know the strangers on either boat,so you don't have to decide whether scientists more important to-be-rescued than firemen.)

One boat contains five people, the other just one (your boat is big enough to bring 5 back safely to shore.) Now, if you rescue the 5 and let the one drown, no one will question your decision. But if you knowingly rescue the one person and let the five drown, you'd have to come up with some special justification, or else you'd be accused of arbitrariness, irrationality, or worse. All other things being equal, five lives are presumed of more importance than one life is. That is why utilitarians talk about maximizing the Greatest (net) Good for the Greatest Number. (What happens if I kill one innocent person to save five? Is the situation improved? We'll discuss that problem later.)

About the name 'Principle of UTILITY': this is an unfortunate label, for many reasons; but historically it has become fixed for a certain family of theories, so we'll sometimes use this label to describe the traditional theory; but the reader should remember that "Do the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number" [GGGN] is our principle.

Implications of this Principle:

The principle recommends that we try to assure basic subsistence for everyone.

Physical survival, and the absence of mortal fears, are prerequisites of well-being.

Instrumental goods: this subordinate goal seems to imply that we should try to set up an economic system that will produce enough goods for universal , decent survival: a system that will distribute enough goods for everyone. Such an economic system could be called an instrumental good: its goodness is derivative, as a means which is separate from its validating goal, which is basic subsistence and comfort for all.

Constitutive Goods: But consider the talented youth whom we help to get training in performing worthwhile music. The exercise of musical proficiency also has its value derived from that of human well-being; but it is not a means that is distinct from its validating goal: making great music constitutes (is one form of) well-being. Making great music counts as living well.

So if the goal of universal well-being is morally mandated, then we see derivative (corollary) moral duties to promote instrumental goods such as an efficient economic system, and also to promote consitutive goods like music proficiency. The quarrels over Utilitarian theory will be over how far-reaching are such implications of the central principle.

CRITICISMS OF GGGN:

Is GGGN a Form of Collectivism?

Some critics say that Utilitarians think of Society as a Great Person, whose dispensable cells are human individuals. These critics worry about sacrificing `The Individual' to the interests of that `Great Person', Society. But what GGGN advocates, sometimes, is sacrificing the interests of one individual to the interests of many individuals, not necessarily to some abstract collective called Society. When a person refers reverently to THE INDIVIDUAL, he's usually thinking, in childish narcissism, of himself. But all those strangers whose interests he tends to neglect: each of them is just as fully an Individual as he is! Self-styled individualists love to contrast THE INDIVIDUAL (me) with THE FACELESS CROWD; but of course crowds have many, many unique faces; it's only when we feel over-stimulated by the great number of unique faces that our imagination pulls away to blur them..then we complain about the Faceless Crowd!

And the interests of many individuals, as we noted in the rescue case above, are more intrinsically important than the comparable interests of one single individual.

Society as a Group of Individuals:

Immediately the reader may recoil at thinking that he is 'just one' of six billion humans now on earth. But to feel bad about this involves a failure of imagination. When we try to think of the suffering of all humans, our imagination simply refuses: indeed, we'd go mad if we did picture this staggering display clearly. (We can't imagine all the joys and pleasures of all humans either; that might also drive us mad.)

So our imagination substitutes a tamer, understated picture of 'the mass' of humankind, a `nameless, faceless crowd'. When someone says that I'm just part of that crowd, I feel stripped of my individuality. But the `sum' of the value of the welfare of all humans is six billion times as great as that of my welfare, and my welfare has fantastic value. My welfare is `only' 1/ 6 billion of the quasi-infinite value-sum of 'the welfare of all.' But that doesn't make my welfare one bit less valuable than it was before I performed this misguided experiment of the imagination.

Take the value of my welfare as X.

(X * 6 billion)/6 billion = Y. Y CANNOT BE LESS THAN X!

We simply can't imagine the value of the welfare of all (and we shouldn't try); but our reason can deal with the concept. Just remember this: the horrible disvalue of your awful pain and frustration is real; the wonderful value of your human flourishing is real. And ten toothaches in other people are ten times as awful as yours.

Majority Opinions vs. Majority Interests:

A related point: critics often say that Utilitarians are collectivists in a different sense: that Utilitarians believe that the beliefs and interests of the individual must always yield to the opinions of the Majority. But consider Jesus and Socrates: each was passionately devoted to the true interests of his society; but each died because he admonished the false opinions of the majority of their countrymen. Socrates and Jesus thought for themselves; but they didn't think only of themselves.

Valuing the interests of the `Greater Number' in no way implies accepting Majority Opinions as true. In America, for instance, true Utilitarians might well disagree with popular ideas about the Sacredness of Private Property; they would say that the Majority is just wrong about what institutions would actually best promote their own true long-run welfare. (Right-wing thinkers would likewise disagree with the Majority about Free Trade vs. Protectionism; they'd say that the average person is just wrong about which institutions best promote his true welfare in the long run.)

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Is "Promote the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number" Itself

a Valid Moral Duty? (Utilitarianism vs. Egoism)

Consider a healthy person who stands by and lets a baby drown in two feet of water. He refuses to step in and rescue the baby--not because he has a neurotic fear of water, but because it's not his baby. He was in no way responsible for the baby's predicament; so he accepts no obligation whatsoever to care about the baby's survival; he doesn't want to get his good slacks wet. I'd call that man either crazy or wicked or both. When a driver careens recklessly through a school zone, the law condemns his reckless driving as showing a 'wanton disregard for human life:' The driver feels that his getting somewhere on time was more important than the real risk to children's lives.

Now the rescue-refuser also showed a wanton disregard for human life; he ranked his trivial interests as more important than the very survival of the baby.

PROBLEMS WITH THE ABOVE ANALYSIS:

However, most people don't seem to think that a person must give help to strangers whenever the benefit to the strangers outweighs, even a little, the cost to him. (Such help might be praised as generous, but not usually called immoral if refused.) Most people do in fact, spontaneously count as more important the interests of themselves and the people they care about, their "in-group," as compared to the interests of nameless foreigners. (We watch horrors all over the world on the evening news,then go cheerfully to supper.)

Another problem: even if we agreed that it's wrong to refuse help to strangers (or to inflict or risk their harm), we might think that such inconsideration is not irrational. (Indeed, the 'Homo Economicus' presented in many economics courses is called `rational' when he displays no interest at all in other's welfare, except as they can help him. ) It would be too bad if young people think it's reasonable to be ruthlessly selfish.

This might encourage selfishness among some youth; other youth, who are instinctively unselfish, might turn against reason if it seems to endorse selfishness! The bumper-slogan "Indulge in random, senseless acts of kindness!" seems to imply that kindness, though worthy, is irrational--so much the worse for Reason!

I'll try here to explain why Utilitarians could call such inconsideration of strangers' welfare inconsistent and unreasonable.

IS EGOISM CONSISTENT? Evaluate Silmilars Similarly:

There is a logical principle restricting rational evaluations. Consider this aesthetic situation: You want to show that a certain judge of photographs is goofy. So you take one negative and make up two identical prints from it (on the same machine, at the same settings); many people testify that they can see no difference between the two prints. You submit these prints under false names and, sure enough, the jerky judge awards First Prize to one print, (saying it's beautiful) but gives NO prize to its identical clone, saying it's ugly!

You think you've got him; but to be sure, you ask him what differences he saw between the two photos. "Only this difference," he says cheerfully; "one was an ugly photo; the other was a magnificent photo!" You say, "But there must be something about them, some other aspect, which makes you rank them differently!"

"Well," he says, " I let them all pile up, then draw out photos at random. I gave first prize to the first one drawn out, and count as ugly whichever one I draw out 9th." he is now revealed as completely goofy, as incompetent to judge anything. He ignored a basic logical rule for judging, for evaluating anything. Any valid evaluative difference must be based on some separate (and relevant) descriptive difference. And no merely-perspective difference (like 'the one picked out randomly ninth') can count as a relevant difference for justifying an evaluative difference.

This, again, is the principle of judging-logic: We must make similar evaluations of items that are descriptively similar. An evaluative difference can't be the only difference between two items. Nor can a perspective-difference-as-such validate an evaluative difference. What is a Perspective Difference?

Some terms, like 'dog' or 'smooth' don't change their usage with the item's relationship to the speaker/writer. But other terms do have this special 'instability': what's `here' to me may be `there' to you.`This' one from here is `that' one from over there. December 16, 1992 is the same whenever it is spoken of; but December 16 is 'now' today; it was tomorrow yesterday; and tomorrow, Dec. 16 will be yesterday.

Dan Lyons is I/me when I speak, but you/he when others speak. These are like `the one taken out first': they are unstable in a certain way (carrying a built-in reference to the speaker's perspective, just as a round coin can 'look oval from over here'). We'll call these perspective differences. Our logical principle says they can never by themselves, as such justify any kind of evaluative difference.

Examples of applying our logical principle in Different Fields of Evaluation:

1. Suppose I consult an engineering expert; he prescribes an expensive kind of steel for the bridge I need to build. Then I hear of another client who described exactly the same type of bridge-requirements, but the same expert prescribed a cheap form of steel for the second client!

When challenged, the expert says, "Well, one of kind of steel is needed for this bridge, another kind for that bridge." Or: "Your bridge needs expensive steel; his bridge does not." If he can cite no non-perspective, descriptive difference between the bridges (e.g., 'one must carry heavy trucks') then this expert is automatically marked as inconsistent and technically incompetent.

2. Suppose I consult a guru who tells me that for my long-term happiness I must get married. Then my identical twin consults him (almost my clone in physical/mental traits and also in situation); my twin is advised not to marry. When the guru is challenged, the only difference he can cite is that I should marry but he (my clone) should not! This is a goofy guru, incapable of competent judgments of what's prudent.

3. Suppose an ethical adviser condemns an adulterous act by Joe, but condones an identical action by Fred, and can cite only `Joe' vs. `Fred' as the difference that justifies his differing moral evaluations. He is an incompetent ethicist!

Here the egoist objects: "Imagine this situation:`You condemn me for having sex with Alice, but you don't condemn yourself for having sex with her.'/`Because, you bastard, Alice is my wife!'

Here a merely-perspective difference does make an evaluative difference."

Answer: No, there is a descriptive difference tied to this perspective difference. The first guy had sex with `someone else's wife'; the second guy didn't. To count as adultery , it doesn't have to be sex with `MY wife.'

Egoist counter to this answer:"OK, 'someone else's wife' is not speaker-relative; but it is an agent-relative term; it means 'the wife of someone other than the sexual agent'. So it is similarly unstable; its identity will vary with the identity of the agent."

Answer to 2d egoist counter: But the identifying label can be rephrased to eliminate also any unstable reference to changing agents. Adultery is having intercourse with any [person such that intercourse with that person is forbidden by a certain kind of general, socially useful rule: the rule that says no person Y may have intercourse with any person now married to X. ]

Perspective Differences: As Such:

Sometimes a perspective difference is tied somehow to a descriptive difference. For instance, "Why did you say that apple 1 was good for me, but not (identical) apple 6?"

"Because apple # 1 was your first apple today; apple #6 would have been the sixth apple you ate in one hour!" Apple #1 could be redescribed as 'the apple coming into an empty stomach', while apple #6 was 'an apple added to a stomach full of apples'. Whenever the perspective difference can be redescribed as a descriptive difference, then it could be a relevant difference justifying some different evaluation.

RELEVANT DIFFERENCES and PERSPECTIVE [VS. DESCRIPTIVE ] DIFFERENCES:

Suppose the reckless driver says (absurdly) that his smallest interest trumps the very survival of the child because he is an Adult, while the other person was merely a child. This difference would not be perspectival, so it doesn't fall under our discussion here. (But common sense says that child/vs./adult, though it is a descriptive difference, is not as such a relevant difference for ranking the importance of various interests.)

[A point of terminology: in some card-games, a 2 of clubs could outweigh higher cards of other suits; it could `trump' them, if clubs has been named as the `trump' suit. So `to trump A' is to outweigh A surprisingly.]

In the Old Testament, the Prophet Nathan heard that King David had arranged for worthy soldier Uriah to get killed in combat, just so David could take Uriah's wife. The respected prophet appeared in the King's court, crying, "I call on the King to judge a certain case!" David graciously consented to this flattering task. "There was a poor shepherd," said Nathan, "who had only one poor ewe. A rich shepherd coveted that ewe, even though he had hundreds of ewes available. So the rich shepherd plotted to get the poor shepherd killed, in order to seize that ewe. How should this rich shepherd be judged, O King?"

"That man must die!" thundered David recklessly, whereupon Nathan fixed the king with a skinny finger of scorn: "YOU ARE THAT MAN!" (In 2 Samuel).The story has a fairly happy ending. Instead of stringing Nathan up, David repented at his newly-realized guilt.) David saw clearly that he could not judge the shepherd as mortally guilty while absolving himself in a relevantly-similar case. He could not say, "That was different; this other case involved ME!"

[To see the cases as relevantly similar, one need not see a wife as no better than a ewe; nor need one suspect the hypothetical shepherd of a more-than-agricultural interest in that ewe.] Nor could David say, "That's different; I'm THE KING!" (Israelite kings were supposed to serve the people, not to oppress!)

What kinds of descriptive differences do count as relevant? Male? White? Human? Upper-Caste? No satisfying general answer has yet been worked out for this puzzle, strangely enough. In American constitutional law, we've just reached arbitrary consensus not to count race, religion, national origin, or gender as in themselves relevant to evaluating and discriminating. All these differences are proper descriptive differences, relevant or not. Also, American law allows no discrimination based just on age. To fire an old person, you must show that he is feeble or senile; this would base the evaluative difference (to be fired or not) on a descriptive difference.

Our point here is much more obvious and less controversial: "He's [ugly / incompetent / foolish / wicked] just because he's over there, or because he's # 5, or just because he's `him', or just because he was born earlier." Such evaluations are obviously goofy.

IMPRUDENCE ABOUT RELATIVE IMPORTANCE of AGENT'S

PRESENT vs.FUTURE INTERESTS:

Imagine this case: Sam will inherit a million dollars if he abstains from alcohol for three more hours, till midnight. His many (recent) friends are throwing an anticipatory party for him, where they drink but he may not. (A puritanical aunt put the no-alcohol provision into her will; jealous relatives who want to break the will have spies at the party, hoping to catch Sam having a premature drink.)

Suddenly Sam says, "I want a beer." His friends soon find out he's not kidding; he demands a beer. (It's not that he's suddenly ashamed for 'selling out' to a tyrannical aunt; he simply wants a beer right now.)

"Don't be foolish," friends admonish. "Think of all the best-quality beer you can afford in three hours, for the rest of your life. You can't seriously judge one cheap beer now as more important than (as preferable to) an ocean of high-quality beer later."

Sam: "What do I care about later?" says Joe; "I want this beer NOW!"

Friends: "But you'll kick yourself later for being so foolish."

Sam: "What do I care about reactions of 'myself-later'?. I want this beer right now!"

The friends might sensibly lock crazy Sam in a windowless bathroom for three hours, till he could drink safely. Sam is manifestly foolish and inconsistent to prefer one cheap beer now, just as NOW, over oceans of great beer later.

RATIONAL DISCOUNTING of MY FUTURE INTERESTS:

Suppose Sam knew somehow that he had a one-in-three chance of dropping dead in two hours, before midnight. Then he'd be rational to 'discount' future beers accordingly. He might say reasonably that a beer tomorrow is worth-to-him-now only 2/3 of the worth of a descriptively-identical beer right now. Indeed, it would be irrational for him not to prefer now the one beer over an identical beer later. He should discount the future beer as less certain. This is a descriptive difference [certainly available/vs. uncertain] tied to the perspective difference [now/later]. Sam should discount the future as uncertain; that would not count as preferring a good now simply as now.

The distant future, for all of us, is innately uncertain: that's why we heed the maxim: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

A song in the 1940's warned young people not to dedicate their lives to success, while passing up the joys of youth. The song said sarcastically:

"Enjoy yourself; it's later than you think!

Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink!

The years go by, quicker than a wink;

Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think!

..You work and slave, you scrimp and save, to be a millionaire;

Imagine how much fun you'll have in your old rocking chair!

ENJOY Yourself ... etc.

The uncertainty in this song was not whether you'll be dead before you can enjoy your earnings, but whether you'll be so old and sick you can't enjoy them.

And Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat scorns people who live only for future fame or for future `pie in the sky when they die':

Some for the glories of this world, and some

Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come;

Ah, take the cash and let the credit go,

Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum.

Economists also tell us there is a rational rate of discounting the future; a lower rate than this rational rate would count as defective, irrational: even if there's no threat of inflation, you should not want to lend out money at no interest (rather than spend it now): a dollar to be paid back ten years from now is uncertain in several dimensions: hence, it is not worth as much as a dollar right now.

Imagine miserly Bill, who cares ONLY for his old-age security; he starves himself now to provide for this;we'd say to him: `Your health & welfare NOW should count also (even if you don't ruin your old age by neglecting hourself now)!" / This example may seem mad; but I did know a well-off ninety-year-old man once who lived a very poor life because he was `saving for my old age'.

Another valid reason to pursue near-future goods with extra fervor: because our imaginations are weak, we feel less inspired to work and plan fervently for our distant-future interests; so we don't work as efficiently in that line. (If we set aside a large part of our pay for retirement-savings so we can then afford a car, we might not be inspired to work as hard as if we know the extra money will go for a car soon.) Of two equally desirable goods, one should work hardest for the ones he can pursue most efficiently (in this case, near-future goods).

EXCESSIVE DISCOUNTING of THE FUTURE:

However, our crazy Sam was not acting rationally: he was in good health, with no assassins looming. His future was not so uncertain that one beer now was really worth a million better beers beginning a day later! A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but not a hundred birds fairly secure in a cage. When someone discounts future goods excessively, it's because he's discounting them simply as future, not as uncertain. This is unreasonable, inconsistent, because it posits an evaluative difference ('more important') justified by a merely perspective difference as such: "I want this beer far more than [more & better future beers] just as here now!"

We are seldom tempted not to discount distant-future goods enough. Most of us are strongly tempted to down-rate future goods & bads excessively; or rather, to overrate the importance of present goods/bads, far beyond the degree that the actual level of uncertainty would warrant. Crazy Sam is imprudent like us, only to a mad degree.

Young people smoke, knowing this might well leave them with emphysema, which could be considered a fate worse than death. We all overeat, knowing this will shorten our lives and risk a mind-destroying stroke. People cultivate deep tans, knowing the risk of skin cancer (or ugly wrinkles) later. People indulge in promiscuous, unprotected sex, risking sterilizing chlamydia or life-long herpes (which can ruin a baby's brain) or mind-destroying syphilis or fatal AIDS. People drive carelessly (and too many miles!), often after drinking, risking at least a small injury that will leave them with an aching back for decades in the future.

Each year in America, over 3 million people are injured by vehicles, some quite seriously. That turns out to be very few injuries per million miles; but each person drives thousands of unnecessary miles, so his final chance to be injured is not negligible.

Each of these extreme vices may tempt only a minority; but add them all up, and add the thousands of ways that even 'prudent' people put pleasant pleasures ahead of future interests: (for instance, many students simply refuse to work hard enough now to develop the scholastic skills they know will be required for future middle-class careers). All in all, we can see the urgent need to train children better in `pleasure-postponement'.

SUMMARY SO FAR OF ARGUMENT VS. IMPRUDENCE:

It's reasonable for me to prefer a present benefit over a similar far future benefit, to the degree that this present benefit is more certain, or more efficiently produced. That's rating the present benefit higher because of a descriptive quality (e.g., more certain) which is tied to the perspective attribute ('now'). But it's unreasonable (inconsistent) for me to prefer a given benefit right now to a greater benefit much later, just because it's available now: that would involve an evaluative difference ('more important') leaning invalidly on a merely perspective difference as such.

`MINE VS. YOURS':

UNREASONABLY UNSELFISH:

Imagine a very strange situation, with a very strange person (even stranger than crazy Sam!) Joe and Fred are marooned on this island..they are chance strangers, bound to each other by no ties of kin, affection, fellow-citizenship,etc. Joe is completely UNSELFISH, to a bizarre degree. he cares, ultimately, ONLY for the interests of Fred; these interests he promotes thoughtfully and energetically. (He cares for his own interests minimally: only insofar as Fred's slave has to be kept healthy, in order to serve Fred best.)

We'd be puzzled how to interpret Joe's attitude. We might think he was imprinted in childhood with the idea that he is himself a worthless, guilty person who does not deserve to be happy, doesn't deserve to have anyone care about his welfare. If that's the explanation, then (no matter how crazy he is deemed on other counts) he will not come under our logical condemnation of basing an evaluative difference on a merely perspectival difference as such.[He's probably leaning on a factually-wrong claim of descriptive difference.]

But suppose he says, "No, I think I deserve to prosper..I hope I'll prosper by luck, without my working much to promote my prosperity, because my full-time efforts are devoted to helping Fred; I value his welfare infinitely more than mine, SIMPLY BECAUSE HE'S SOMEONE ELSE, AND I'M (merely) ME." This attitude is SO GOOFY that we instinctively tried first to interpret his thinking in the less-crazy way above (as seeing himself as guilty and unworthy of happiness). (Notice that his activities might turn out to work `the greater good for the greater number'..but his attitude still counts as mad, even if it turns out to be `socially useful'.)

We might try to persuade Joe of his folly by saying, "Look, you're a person also; you also deserve to be cared for. Why in the world would you say that the welfare of Fred is far more worthy of your efforts than is your own welfare, just because of `his vs. mine'??!!

DISCOUNTING STRANGERS' INTERESTS:

After all this roundabout discussion, we can now see why Egoism counts as unreasonable, inconsistent. The egoist counts his interests as more important than the stranger's similar interests `just because they're MY interests.' But `mine vs. his' is a merely perspective difference, like `now vs.later'; it cannot validly ground any evaluative difference such as `more important'.

Egoism is not the same as egotism. If someone thinks he should care mainly for his own interests because he is a superior type of being, then she's probably an egotist, but not necessarily an egoist. The position we're criticizing here is the belief that each person (superior or inferior) may/should reasonably look out only for his own interest, simply as his./ However, one reason we confuse the two ideas is this: it sounds so goofy to say, "Even though I'm actually inferior, my own interests are the only things important to me" that we tend to think the egoist means something more intelligible:"I'm superior in some sense; that's why my interests are more important."

OBJECTION:"Surely I'm not wicked to look out first for myself, at least in close cases, where the benefits in question are very similar."

ANSWER: [ REASONABLY DISCOUNTING the INTERESTS of STRANGERS:]

To simplify this discussion, pretend at first that you're on an island filled with strangers. You must choose to help yourself or strangers; you have no special ties (e.g., kin, love, friendship) with any of these strangers.

Now suppose you consult with an angel (who values everyone's interest equally).

"I'm not superman," you say, "I can only manage to promote the interests of one person. I can't even imagine the intense joys and sufferings of dozens of strangers. Who should be that one beneficiary of my efforts?"

The angel asks, "Which person here is the one you understand best (so you can pursue his interests most efficiently)?" "Why, me," you stammer hopefully.

"And which one has interests that you most enjoy working for (so you'll work more efficiently)?" "Why--ME!"

"Well, then, when you pursue your own interests you're pursuing the [ interests you're best qualified to pursue efficiently]." The angel might have added, "Leave the welfare of the whole world to God's management; you just try to help the person you're qualified to help: yourself." (Thus the ancient maxim: "Each for himself, and God for the world.")

The angel goes on to say, "People work best in teams; you should find a group of people who will agree to join with you in working to help each other. You'll get to know them, so you understand their interests better; also, you'll feel affection for them, so you'll work harder and more efficiently to help them. You can justify working harder to help them than to help the other strangers; the interests of these teammates also will be [interests most efficiently promoted by all of you, collectively]."

"Besides," the OSFA-angel continues, "you should seek out one (or two or three) people you can really love intimately. Love is a vital PART of human happiness; if your island-group passed up love, it would have automatically failed to optimize the situation for all. Now one property of real love is that it makes you want to work especially hard to help the beloved. So a vital part of human well-being requires that you NOT, in practice, pursue all strangers' welfare with equal intensity with that of your beloved. Non-intimate friendship is also a vital part of human well-being. So in practice, you'll want to work especially hard to help your friends." Then you awake in the real world, where you don't need to seek out a team of strangers, or lovers, or friends; you find yourself already embedded in a family, a circle of friends, perhaps a church parish, a community, a nation.

Under some circumstances, surely, everyone's interests will be more efficiently promoted by their close fellows than by strangers. Strangers won't understand their needs or feel for them the affection and spontaneous good will that makes efforts to benefit them more efficient. And love and friendship are intrinsic parts of human well-being. So it's reasonable to give some priority in practice to helping your 'in-group'; you would not necessarily be preferring their welfare in itself, just because they're `MY' in-group.

This is no idle point: Charles Dickens created a character who shamelessly neglects her own children, whom she could help competently, in favor of blundering efforts to aid foreign children in need. It's when thinking of possible cases like this that we say, "CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME."

Once again, it is not unreasonable to hold off from trying to help strangers when we don't really understand their problems. This is discounting their interests as less-efficiently-promoted-by us, not just because 'they're them and we're us'. Such reticence does not count as egoism; it is intelligent, morally approved self-interest.

So the assertion that true egoism is irrational can't be discredited by saying that the alternative view allows for no priority in promoting the welfare of myself and my in-group. However, the license to think of yourself and in-group first is limited. If someone is starving, or a baby is dying of easily-remedied dehydration (or vitamin deficiency), you don't have to know much about the sufferer to know he needs a specific kind of help. And fairly inefficient help for people in dire need might do more good overall than would efficient help for well-off friends and family.

Objection: "In a third-world society with high birth-rates, (such as the Gaza Strip) saving the life of a child could mean two hungry children showing up in ten years! "

Answer:That problem must be faced: in such a society, contributing to a birth-control program would probably help more in the long run than feeding those who are now hungry. However, worrying over the Population Explosion does not absolve us from all concern for the needy.

Charity begins at home, but should not end at home.

===========================================

Dialogue Between the Egoist and a Critic (Lyons):

Egoist: "My interests really are most important, but only to me. (Your interests are most important to you)"

Lyons: Perhaps you mean by this that sulfa is medically important for your disease, but not for someone else's? That's not an egoist attitude!

Egoist: No, I mean that my pain, my disease, really is most important, but only to me.

Lyons: What does this mean? Maybe you mean only this: "My pain seems to me (but only to me) most important." That's probably true, but nothing follows about the objective importance of your pain, compared to others' pain.

Egoist:"No, it really is most important..it doesn't just seem so. There's something stronger about my intuition that my pain is most important ...something not captured by 'It seems so to me'.

Lyons: Maybe you mean that your intuition is unavoidable, that you can't reason it away. (It's not like some optical illusions, which you can decide to see in a different way.) But consider the fact that an object looks smaller (it seems to you to get smaller) as it moves away from your eye. That fact is also unavoidable. But you don't go on to say:"The object 'really does' get smaller, but only to me, even though it seems bigger to someone else, as it gets nearer to him.)"

Egoist: But there's something natural and normal about the extra importance of my pain to me.

Lyons: Undoubtedly! Everyone experiences that strong feeling that his pain is extra important. (Even saints feel it, though they don't act on it.) Evolutionary theorists could explain why we all have this feeling; it has proved useful for the maximal propagation of each person's genes. But consider: the 'seeming' shrink in size as an object moves away from the eye ... this seeming also is normal and natural ... if this illusion didn't happen, that would mean something is wrong with your eye! Still we know the object doesn't actually get smaller as it moves away. This is a natural and normal illusion, but still an illusion.

Analogously, the feeling that my pain is specially important is a natural and normal (evolutionarily useful) illusion.

It's also natural and normal and inevitable to feel that my pain now has a far greater importance than my comparable pains in the distant but highly probable future. Present and near-future pains are more vivid to me; my imagination gives them extra emphasis, but my prudent reason should remind me that they don't really have that extra importance just because they're here now.

Analogously, my own pains are far more vivid to my imagination than comparable pains of strangers; but my reason should correct this poignant and inevitable and natural and normal illusion. In both cases someone is hurting.

Each person has no doubt that his own toothache is bad. So he can't consistently evaluate the stranger's toothache as having no disvalue, not without basing an evaluative difference on a perspective difference as such.

Egoist: "Wait a minute ... I do see that I obviously don't like my toothache. But I'm not sure I should jump to the idea that it is objectively bad."

Lyons: Admittedly, that is the one intuition that GGGN must build on: the jump from "I have this negative reaction to my toothache" to "I just see that my toothache is objectively bad." [Here we jump from FACT (I dislike my pain) to VALUE (my pain is objectively bad). But this is an intuition shared spontaneously by everyone if he's not just trying to make a case.

Egoist: "Suppose I said that no one's pain has any objective disvalue; therefore, I would not be irrational if I regularly looked out for strangers, not for myself; only I don't happen to want to do this. Similarly, it's not irrational for me to look out only for myself; and this is what I want to do."

(The egoist would here be slipping into a logically different position, called 'nihilism': the notion that nothing has any real value.)

Lyons: Aw, c'mon! You'd think a person crazy to look out only for strangers, never for himself! And you'd think yourself foolish if you sacrificed a great later interest to an immediate trivial one. You believe that you should give fair weight to your future interests, no matter what you want to do right now. That shows that you think your interests do have objective value, such that they can ground criticisms of evaluations and preferences. If you don't share this basic intuition, then you must give up all prudential criticism of people who lack proper pleasure postponement. You'd have to call 'crazy Sam' sensible!

[Other, more subtle egoist objections will be treated in COMMENTS ON APPENDIX, elsewhere on this web-site..]

However, valuative differences seem to be accepted in pre-reflective ethics, which are based on `merely because it's me vs. her.' (unlike the standards of consistency in all other kinds of evaluation or explanation).

Another inconsistency in common-sense valuation: suppose a person ranks his own interests as far more important to him, just because they're his--and suppose he expresses that relative evaluation by arbitrarily robbing and killing strangers.

Then most ordinary people will condemn him indignantly. But suppose he expresses this 'excessive discounting of strangers' interests' only by refusing to help strangers in need (in less dramatic cases than the infant rescue case); then people will tend to disapprove only mildly; or they'll say that he can't be blamed for this refusal, though one who did help the needy should be praised. (In both types of case, the stranger might die as a result of the agent's egoism.)

It's hard, on reflection, to give that much importance to this distinction: "I didn't kill him, I just let him die." A 19th-century poet satirized this distinction aptly:

Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive Officiously to keep alive.) This seems inconsistent.

And one can explain this commonplace inconsistency in ordinary moral thinking [ disapproving of egoist harming more intensely than egoist refusing help] by noting that people who discuss such moral issues in college classrooms are almost always economically comfortable: they would lose more than they'd gain from a moral rule that demanded sharing with the same vehemence that force or fraud against strangers is condemned. Small wonder that they 'feel' that such a broad moral rule is unwarranted! If, on the other hand, we interviewed the desperate poor, I bet they'd see little moral difference between killing someone and coldly refusing to save his life (when this is possible with little realy sacrifice for the agent).

An analogous situation would be this: suppose we were considering the 'common-sense' attitude toward big boys thumping little boys, and we interviewed mainly the big boys: we'd expect to find a genial tolerance of such thumping; but we shouldn't be impressed by this consensus as expressing an intuitive grasp of moral reality.

A whole family of popular moral maxims focus around this maxim: "How would you like it if someone treated you that way?" Such maxims can be used to check the impartiality of moral intuitions.

Suppose a comfortable person could really imagine what it would be like to starve through no fault of his own, as he watched another person wallowing in luxury (the well-to-do person is perhaps shortening his life by overeating, over-drinking and excessive driving and smoking--in general, by over-spending). Now in fact most comfortable people are simply incapable of imagining this situation realistically. But if they could perform this thought-experiment fairly, they would likely sympathize with the indignant needy person who says "When you prefer your slightest whim to my urgent necessity, you insult my human dignity."

So the common-sense approval of arbitrary self-preference (in refusing help) should not be revered: it has consistency problems ; moreover, it can be readily explained as expressing the very egoism which it pretends to judge objectively.

SUMMARY: The revision of common-sense views proposed above yields a coherent view which common-sense might be able to accept, after fair-minded reflection. It's inconsistent for a person to rank his own interests higher than those of strangers, just as his. Considerable license is given for the individual in practice to look out first for himself and his 'in-group'--but ultimately he should value the stranger's interests as equivalent in importance to comparable interests of his own.

This revised view supports "Greatest Good for the Greatest Number." But can this principle be seen as the sole ultimate axiom of ethics?

(Optimize the Situation for All)

OSFA as a COMPREHENSIVE THEORY:

A thinker could accept GGGN as a true and valid moral principle, while still saying that there are other valid moral duties which are not derivable from (not reducible to) GGGN, as a corollary is reducible to its axiom. [Corollaries of GGGN will disapprove of actions as harmful: open adultery is called wrong as doing more harm than good to people, overall.]

Many moral corollaries could be derived from GGGN whether or not it is the SOLE ultimate axiom: e.g., "We should work to develop an efficient and just economic system."

Whereas one might think that telling lies or killing humans is simply wrong, not just wrong-as-net-harmful; but classical Utilitarian theory says that every single valid moral rule can be seen as a corollary logically dependent on the principle of Utility; any rules not so deducible do not count as really valid. And we'll consider "Optimize the Situation for All" (OSFA) also as a proposed moral theory with only one axiom: this restatement of GGGN (allegedly) `contains' the whole moral law : Optimize the situation for everyone.

Suppose Act A would do more good than harm; but act B would create still greater net benefits than A would. Strictly speaking, OSFA calls for performing B, not A. (OSFA theory says the rescuer should rescue the boat with 5 people, not the boat with only one.)

GGGN (says the OSFA theory) is the 'spirit' behind specific moral rules such as "Don't commit adultery." When a specific moral rule clashes with OSFA, obviously the axiom must prevail. And when two moral rules clash with each other, we jump to OSFA to decide which rule is 'trump': suppose I'm in a situation where I must either lie or betray a confidence; then I ask if the lying or the secret-betrayal--in these specific circumstances--would have better consequences overall.

Philosophers would recognize at once that I am discussing Act-Utilitarianism here (ACT-OSFA); later we'll discuss Rule-OSFA.

THE ATTRACTIVENESS of OSFA-Theory:

--OSFA says we are not bound by arbitrary moral rules, even if they are hallowed by custom; morality is made for man, not man for morality.

--OSFA enables us to teach our children one simple moral principle, then teach them to derive moral corollaries from it.

--OSFA guarantees that there won't be any tragic conflicts of valid moral rules, where a person is in the wrong whatever he does. What an intellectual boon!

--And OSFA is intuitively plausible as a comprehensive moral theory: suppose there is a God, and Sue faces judgment. Suppose it turns out that Sue broke some 'valid' rules (moral technicalities)--but she spent her whole life studying carefully how to benefit humans (herself and others), developing her talents so she could do good, and laboring tirelessly to benefit people in fact, without meddling recklessly in others' affairs, and respecting all usefully-accepted moral rights.

Sue's 'lawyer-angel' might say to God, "Sue may not have been completely moral; but she was a true friend to humankind." Could a just God condemn Sue? If a moral rule is somehow `valid' without benefiting humankind, can it be very important morally?

Considerations like this should lead us to take OSFA Theory very seriously, even though it's presently out-of-fashion among many professional philosophers writing in English.

PROBLEMS with OSFA THEORY:

If a certain kind of act is wrong just as harmful, then it is wrong only when it is harmful.

From now on, by 'harmful' we'll mean 'in the net harmful; it does more harm than good, in the long run, counting everyone's interests equally'; by 'useful' we'll mean `what does more good than harm, etc..']

ABSOLUTE MORAL RULES?

Many people think that some kinds of conduct are wrong always, in every situation; they think that we're bound to obey some moral rules `whatever the consequences'. Followers of one famous philosopher said FIAT JUSTITIA, PEREAT MUNDUS: we should act justly even if the earth perished as a result.

Such beliefs in moral absolutes probably originate in theology, where they make perfect sense. A God might see clearly that a rule without any exceptions is more useful for all, in the long run, than a rule allowing 'sensible-seeming' exceptions.

Consider, for instance, the issue of whether Joe can remarry after his wife has deserted him and lived for years with another mate. Common sense seems to say that even if divorce & remarriage in general are harmful, no good is done in this case by commanding Joe to live on in painful celibacy: his marriage can't be repaired.

But God might see that if he lets people remarry when 'necessary', very shortly they'll be remarrying when convenient. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile. So God might sensibly forbid married people to remarry ever while their spouse is alive.

Such absolutism might make perfect sense if God has revealed moral rules to humankind. But in philosophy we can't lean at all on "...because God said so."

So it would be silly in philosophy to say that poor Joe must never remarry; we humans don't have enough evidence, outside of Revelation, that the rule without exceptions has better consequences overall than a rule with 'sensible' exceptions.

I submit that there are (knowable just by human reason) no valid absolute moral rules; no rules that say validly that we must always do X, 'whatever the consequences'. Imagine for a moment an absurdly improbable case: If we don't kill innocent Fred, a monster will surely set off an H-bomb in New York harbor; if we do kill him, we somehow have an iron guarantee that New York is safe forever (from this monster).

Fred should volunteer to die, to save millions of innocent lives. He'd be unreasonable to count his own survival as more important, just because it's his, than the survival of millions. If he--understandably, though deplorably-- refuses to volunteer, he should be killed. (Even if he has a right not to be killed, that right is outweighed by the rights of the millions to be saved from death.)

If even the rule "Don't kill innocent people" could have some exceptions, is sometimes trumped by necessity, then of course any weaker rule can be outweighed by necessity in some situations. In Social Philosophy, any moral rule can be outweighed by Necessity.

Some thinkers could make a rash jump from this point. They might half-consciously think only of Jesus' model where Norm A ('Don't work on the Sabbath') is trumped by Norm B ('Help people') because Norm B is the axiom, and A is only a corollary derived from A. [Remember? Jesus could break the Sabbath rule to help people because 'keep holy the Sabbath' was a mere corollary of the Ultimate Axiom "Love your Neighbor as Yourself (i.e., Help People)".]

All specific moral rules can be outweighed by 'necessity' (by considering the disastrous consequences if no exception to the rule is made). Since all rules can be outweighed by consequential considerations, (these thinkers might reason) they must all be seen, automatically, as mere corollaries of a Consequence-Norm: Optimize the Situation For All. So these thinkers would hold that the non-absolute character of moral rules proved the truth of OSFA Theory: all these outweighable rules must be derivable from the GGGN principle.

But that assumption ignores another logical possibility. Remember that Jesus could have said instead that a slight, separate duty to God ('Worship, don't work on the Sabbath') could be outweighed by a serious duty to man ('Save the ox, heal the human')--even if the second duty were not seen as a corollary of the first.

So a rule could be outweighable by a consideration of consequences,even if it is not reducible to (derivable as a corollary from) a consequence-axiom (GGGN).

Consider two separate stories about a lifeboat predicament.

[A] Joe is the only sailor on a lifeboat full of passengers. He must take command; he has to survive if anyone is to survive. The boat is too low in the water; one person must go over the side. A philosopher on board suggests that they draw straws to see who dies. But sailor Joe realizes they don't have time for such a routine; so he gives the youth sitting next to him a quick rabbit-chop and heaves him over the side. Here the duty "Don't kill a person arbitrarily, without giving him a fair chance" is outweighed by the duty "Save nine people from immediate drowning"; the duty not to kill is trumped by obvious and immediate Necessity-- the necessity is made all the more obvious by remembering that if nothing were done, the unlucky youth would have drowned anyway, with the others.

But here is a slightly different case:

[B]: Same lifeboat, same situation: only now sailor Joe realizes they would have time for the drawing. However, he still knocks the youth out and throws him over the side. Joe has calculated that going through with the drawing would involve [ten minutes of agony for 10 people, followed by one agonized death]; whereas his policy involved only one painless death. So it seems that GGGN calls for his brisk, high-principled killing.

But the killing in [B] doesn't seem as obviously right as the killing in situation[A]. The killing in [B] had better consequences than not-killing; but it wasn't necessary to prevent a disaster.

At first sight, Joe's treatment of the youth seems unfair; this seeming unfairness should have counted for something, shouldn't just be ignored in the calculation. [In case [A], the unfairness was swamped by the urgent necessity; not so in case [B].]

Cases like [B] made some thinkers say that there are valid moral duties which are not reducible to GGGN as corollaries, even though they could be trumped by urgent necessity. These thinkers say that some actions (like killing the youth without a drawing) are just wrong (or wrong-as-unfair); they're not merely wrong-insofar-as-they're-harmful. A rule could be trumped by necessity, without being reducible to mere Utility.

There might be at least 3 independent axioms:

(1) Optimize the Situation for All;

(2) Prevent Disasters (this could be labeled 'Necessity'); and

(3) Treat people fairly.

Perhaps they have different weights:

Fairness(3) outweighs Optimizing (1)(so Joe shouldn't have killed the youth so briskly in case [B]); but Necessity(2) outweighs Fairness(3) (so Joe perhaps did right to kill the youth without a drawing in case [A].

Suddenly we realize how bold and sweeping is the claim made by OSFA Theory: the claim that all valid moral rules can be seen as corollaries of the GGGN principle; that NO moral rule which can't be derived logically from GGGN can count as valid. Suppose one case can be found where a rule seems valid even though it is not reducible to a mere corollary of GGGN, [as case [B] made us think that Fairness stands valid apart from GGGN]; then there might be many other separate axiomatic rules also, and the sweet simplicity of OSFA theory would be undermined.

The COMPLEXITY HIDDEN in OSFA Theory:

At first sight (intuitively, before any high-level theorizing) there seem to be at least four different types of moral rule connected with consequences, with optimizing the situation:

(a) Promote Good Consequences ;

(b) Don't hinder good consequences;

(c) Don't cause bad consequences;

(d) Prevent bad consequences.

And perhaps we should think of a separate 5th type:

(e) Prevent Disasters.

(c) can sometimes be outweighed by (e), but perhaps not by (a).

It might well be OK to kill one innocent person to save hundreds of lives [(c) trumped by (e)]; but it would seem much more dubious even to coldly break the leg of an innocent person just to provide college scholarships for hundreds of other people!--even if that would `promote good enough consequences' to seemingly outweigh just one broken leg [(c) vs. (a)].

So it turns out that the seemingly super-simple one-axiom theory OSFA actually involves 4 or 5 independent axioms, with different weights, which often conflict with each other.

The theory is not that elegant, after all, not that simple for teaching children how to avoid wrongdoing. [But even so, I'd maintain it's the least bad moral theory; GGGN can `explain' all IMPORTANT moral rules as its corollaries.]

DOES the END JUSTIFY the MEANS?

The most obvious objection to OSFA Theory is the claim that it endorses ruthlessness, that it says that a noble end (promoting welfare of all) justifies any evil means [since any moral rule not derivable from--and reducible to--GGGN principle counts automatically as invalid]. We immediately remember Stalin's cold remark justifying his slaughter of millions: "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs."

The Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church felt justified in torturing heretics to betray their comrades, in order to wipe out the contagion of heresy: after all, heresy dooms the soul, not just the body; and (St. Paul says) "The sufferings of this world are not worthy to be compared with the glories of the next!"

(Ironically, the earlier killing of Jesus was justified by saying "It is expedient that one man should die for the sake of the people.")

Harry Truman supposedly said that he never lost a night's sleep over his slaughter of the civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, once he decided this killing was necessary--even though many of his advisors spoke against the project. More recently: to protect world oil supplies, and to slow down Saddam's attempts to develop atomic weapons, we buried alive thousands of Iraqui teen-age conscripts and caused the death of tens of thousands of children by destroying Iraq's water-system--while deliberately leaving Saddam's regime in power (presumably to counter threats to world peace from Iran). Few journalists or citizens here have shuddered at such ruthlessness, as they should have, even if it really was necessary. We have bombed Iraq, fairly pointlessly, several times since then.

KILLING:

In almost every non-primitive society, there is a special taboo against killing fellow humans. In ancient Greece, a killing was thought to leave an invisible 'miasma' on the killer's hands, requiring ritual purification. And the medieval Catholic Church banned soldiers from the priesthood, even if they killed justly; hands soiled by human blood should not handle the Holy Bread.

It seems wrong either to reject this taboo as invalid, or to see it as simply outweighable by necessity. Perhaps we can imagine far-fetched cases where the necessary killing of an innocent person can be justified; still, killing seems to be simply wrong in itself, not just as 'causing ultimately more harm than good'. If OSFA can't explain this insight, too bad for OSFA as an adequate moral theory. However, there may be good GGGN reasons for instilling the myth of an absolute taboo against killing (if this is so, then we can see the taboo as a sort-of-corollary of GGGN.) The awful truth about humans is that we have no strong instinctive block against killing other humans who are seen as enemies or aliens. "Homo Lupus homini", says an ancient maxim: "Man plays the Wolf towards other men." But Conrad Lorenz claims that wolves are instinctively inhibited from killing other wolves; compared to humans, he says, wolves are positive gentlemen. Lorenz claims that only the brown rat shows a human-like eagerness to kill others of its species: we should change the maxim to "Man is rat to man."

And Lorenz has an explanation for man's ruthlessness; the wolf all along had dreadful jaws and teeth and claws; without an inhibiting instinct, wolves would have wiped themselves out long ago.

Man on the contrary, until 'an hour ago' (in evolutionary time) was basically weaponless: no fangs, no claws. So, to survive as a species, we did not need to develop an instinctive horror of killing other humans; so we didn't develop this inhibition .

Then, just in the last 'hour', we suddenly developed longbows, guns, cannons, machine-guns, land-mines, poison gas, tanks, bombers, missiles, H-bombs, germ warfare. There hasn't been time to develop corresponding genetic inhibitors to limit this new violence.

When faced with the horror of human slaughter, early human societies developed moral taboos in order to minimize at least murder within the society. And the sages of Western society (especially Socrates and Jesus) pointed out the inglorious ugliness of killing even foreigners.

It seems that modern man is more queasy at least (than more primitive peoples are) about face-to-face killing . (We're horrified to see the respected role that human sacrifice played in ancient Aztec society; and we were horrified to hear that Saddam was gassing Kurdish villages inside his own country. And our blood is chilled by the brisk genocide going on in Yugoslavia and Africa. Even present-day law-and-order buffs would shrink at the drawing-and quartering of live criminals that was once a routine penalty in Europe.)

But the techniques of killing have advanced far faster than the moral objections to killing. The man who would shrink from bayonet combat had no problem about living on Guam, flying B-52s high above Vietnam and dropping 30-ton bombs on invisible targets by computer-calculation, sometimes hitting Thailand by mistake.

The Soviet Union has fewer than 300 cities larger than 100,000 people. Yet Americans approved of building over 10,000 H-warheads, just so Russia wouldn't be Number One in that respect. (The Soviets built just as many.)

The average human shows an unseemly readiness to kill his fellows at long-distance, or to cheer on those who will. Consider these anecdotes about ordinary Americans' attitudes about war:

--said in a church: "Life is cheap in the Orient....

--"We have to use napalm and stuff like that, because The Other Side isn't Christian: they won't fight fair."

--When asked if she knew what napalm was, one Christian lady -- who had watched TV news and read newspapers every day for years -- said she thought it was a tranquilizer. When she discovered that it was jellied gasoline designed to burn people slowly, she blinked rapidly, but gamely came back with this: "Well, we have to use methods like that to fight Godless Communism; but God will make it up to those people we kill, in the Next Life."

--Years ago, the U.S. bombed Libya, killing a couple of adults and one little girl. Some college boys here put up a triumphant sign: USA 3/ LIBYA 0 !

--A brilliant, urbane Asian-American scientist said his company produced phosphorus. I jokingly hoped that didn't include WHITE phosphorus (a terror-substance designed to burn its way slowly, for several days, through a living human body; TV news regularly carried pictures of smoking children.) The scientist gave me a cool, amused look and said, "White phosphorus is one kind of phosphorus, isn't it?"

--A decent, devout, loving husband and father mused that we might, in the end, have to "Nuke China". I asked him to burn a live dog for me; he recoiled in horror. I just wanted to see if he was serious about incinerating one-fourth of the human race. He wasn't serious; but he voted for leaders who did unthinkable things to the Vietnamese people. What does it matter if he was seriously malicious or not?