a taste for desert landscapes

Suppose the following expresses a strict implication:

If H then O

The letter H is supposed to remind you of “hypothesis”, and the letter O of “observation” (or better, a datum or description of an observation). But H needn’t be thought of as a singular hypothesis in isolation — it might be a large conjunction of hypotheses and assumptions. And O needn’t be an observational claim at all, let alone a “theory neutral” observational claim, if indeed such things exist.

Now suppose we deny that O counts as “evidence for” H, but allow that not-O counts as “evidence against” H. Why would we do such a thing?

Trivially, “evidence against” H is the same thing as “evidence for” not-H. The only obvious reason why someone would say that not-O counts as “evidence for” not-H, at the same time as denying that O is “evidence for” H is that not-O strictly implies not-H, but O does not strictly imply H.

But that is to assimilate “evidence” to “strict implication”.  And that would be sloppy. It would be like Sherlock Holmes wrongly attributing his solution of a crime to “deduction”.

Evidence takes many forms. Perhaps occasionally, some axioms that we are happy to accept imply a theorem that we initially find implausible. In that situation, the axioms function as “evidence” for the theorem. (Strictly speaking, it is the axioms together with the rules of inference we use to deduce the theorem using the axioms as premises.) But that is the exception rather than the rule.

“Professional philosophers” get a lot of practice applying their favourite moral “theory” — i.e. their moral principles plus some other assumptions — to various situations, real and imagined. Does such a theory ever “hit the brick wall” of the real world, the way proper scientific theories do when observations of the world refuse to comply with them? In other words, can a moral theory run into trouble in the same way as a scientific theory runs into trouble when its predictions prove false?

— It cannot. At best, a moral theory hits a brick wall of its owner’s making, namely his own “pre-theoretical” moral intuitions, what we might call his moral ”stomach”. So the philosopher’s moral ideas are in his brain, and they are constrained by his stomach, rather than by the world outside the body of the philosopher.

So instead of getting better and better at making good moral judgements, the “professional philosopher” gets better and better at making internally consistent moral judgments, however cruel, unjust, stupid or narcissistic they may be.

Now a decent, intelligent fellow such as Socrates would see a further danger here: someone who feels that he is getting better and better at something tends to do whatever he does with greater and greater confidence. So the “professional philosopher” typically starts to think: “I’m getting jolly good at this moral-judgement-making business, me!” — And then he starts to think: “Since I am finding fewer and fewer faults in my own moral-judgement making, the moral judgements I am making must be getting better and better!” — Until eventually he starts to think: “Now I must be a moral expert. I am therefore better at making these judgements than ordinary people, and I am qualified to make moral decisions for others.”

But really, all he has become is an ideologue, and worse, a moral “bull in a china shop” — a trigger-happy, over-confident, power-abusing, cruel, unjust, stupid narcissist.

The first motto of all true philosophers is: “know thyself”. The second motto is: “all I really know is that I am ignorant — and every day, in every way, I must remind myself that I am especially ignorant of moral matters, despite my overweening self-esteem.”

The etymology of the word ‘philosophy’ tells us that a philosopher is a “lover of wisdom”. There are at least two reasons why ‘lover of wisdom’ is a fairly good guiding description of what a genuine philosopher does.

Briefly, a philosopher is a lover of wisdom as opposed to a purveyor of knowledge.

I’ll try to explain by first considering the difference between wisdom versus knowledge, and then the difference between restlessly pursuing something as a goal versus claiming to have already achieved the goal, claiming ownership of the valued object, perhaps offering it for sale for a fee. A pursuer is a lover; an owner-seller is a gigolo.

Knowledge consists of facts (or descriptions of facts) and skills. But wisdom is much more fluid sort of thing with a wider scope. To illustrate, a car mechanic has knowledge of cars. He has learned many facts about cars and has various skills that he uses to do things with cars. But “wisdom about cars” is a matter of higher-level judgment about the use of cars, particularly one’s own use of cars. (A person who has wisdom about cars might conceivably shun cars altogether and use a bicycle.) It might be a matter of more basic principle as well.

In my opinion, someone like Jeremy Clarkson has wisdom about cars. He probably has quite a lot of knowledge about cars as well, but his car-knowledge is different from his car-wisdom.

There is no canonical body of knowledge or set of skills to be learned in philosophy. As Wittgenstein said, “The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher.”

I drew another distinction above between owning something (or claiming ownership or achievement of it) and pursuing it as a goal. To illustrate, a rich person who inherits a lot of money owns that money, but he might not love money — he might possibly give it away, or fritter it away. By contrast, consider a person whose life revolves around money, who is preoccupied with money, who pursues money at every opportunity, who changes his “business strategy” whenever new ideas about how to make money occur to him: that would be someone who genuinely loves money. But he might be poor.

In the present context, a “lover” is like a fish swimming upstream, whose constant movement and expenditure of energy in pursuit of his goal is what counts, rather than his reaching the goal, or even getting nearer to it. The downstream current may exceed his swimming speed, so that he is in fact getting further away from his goal: it doesn’t matter, as long as his thoughts and efforts are dedicated to the pursuit of that goal.

Although the love of wisdom and the love of money are very different, because wisdom and money are very different, a philosopher is a lover-pursuer of wisdom rather than someone who already “has wisdom”, still less someone who claims that they have already achieved it. To claim that one has already achieved wisdom is the surest sign that one’s hasn’t.

Thus people who claim to have a special expertise in morals (such as Euthyphro in Plato’s dialogue of the same name) are disqualified from being philosophers on two counts: first, they do not grasp the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and second, they are “purveyors” rather than genuine “lovers”.

Most philosophy students and academics have become so habituated to thinking about morality in terms of rights that a “denial of moral rights” sounds to them like a rejection of morality itself. If you read what follows, please resist that thought.

To understand why I reject the idea of “human rights”, or any other variant of the concept of moral rights, whatever we call it, let us first be clear that I’m completely in favour of a wide variety of legal rights, robustly enforced by a sound legal system. For example, in the UK a pedestrian has a legal right to cross the road at a “zebra crossing”. That right exists by virtue of a legal rule which says that drivers stop (or ‘must stop’) for pedestrians. The rule is explicitly written down in black ink on page 64 of the Highway Code. This rule describes a particular kind of behaviour — namely, stopping for any pedestrian who starts to cross. As a bit of language, it consists of symbols that have to be interpreted. These symbols are quite often interpreted by courts of law (for example, a person wheeling a bike is a pedestrian, but what about someone cycling at walking speed?). The behaviour it describes (and by virtue of the context, thereby prescribes) is habitually observed by most drivers, and real legal sanctions are brought to bear against those that don’t. They get points on their licences. Some go to jail.

That big complicated legal apparatus is necessary just to create the simple little legal right that a pedestrian has to cross the road at a zebra crossing. Much more is required for more complicated legal rights — such as the right to utter one’s thoughts freely (assuming we are speaking of a legislation in which such a legal right exists, as it surely does in a few places like the USA).

My main point here is that rights are carved out by rules, in conjunction with all of the machinery required by rules to work properly, including the physical symbols the rules are encoded in, the interpretation required to assign those symbols a (workably determinate) “meaning”, and so on. Where there are no such rules, there are no rights.

We know where to look to find legal rules that create legal rights — they’re printed in black and white in the statute books. But where do we look for the rules that create moral rights? — Nowhere, because they simply don’t exist, nor does any of the other machinery needed to make rules work properly, i.e. the apparatus that make them genuine rules rather than something spelled out via some variation of Kant’s Ouija board.

People used to talk about “God’s Law” and “Natural Law”, but these were obviously part of a fantasy — a fantasy woven by the mistaken idea that morality and the law are “pretty much the same thing”. This is a backward idea. We might expect such confusion from primitive tribal societies who spend their lives imagining ghosts, and unquestioningly accepting the judgements of hereditary “chiefs” about everything. But we should expect much more from advanced Western civilization.

Nowadays, the fact that rights are carved out by rules is routinely overlooked. Why? — The word ‘rights’ is used as a substantive, as if it refers to abstract things, like prime numbers perhaps. Such a thing is thus habitually conceived of as “figure” rather than “ground”, if you follow my metaphor. The more people use the word ‘rights’ like that, and the lazier people get about asking what these abstract things are, the more firmly entrenched our new fantasy becomes. It is one of the many ways in which language bewitches our intelligence.

Even if there were some way of divining abstract moral rules out of thin academic air, a la Kant, and thereby of coming up with fairly determinate moral rights, there would still be countless further problems. Plato had a brush with one of them. (He didn’t have the concept of a moral right, so it was a “brush” rather than a direct hit.) When rights conflict, there has to be some way of deciding between them, in other words of deciding how one right should “trump” another right in this or that set of circumstances. To make that decision, something other than rights must be appealed to. With legal rights, this poses no real problem because we have law courts and a highly structured legislature. With moral rights, we have to refer to some other moral “court of appeal” than rights. But then this other court of appeal is the real place where moral questions are answered.

Plato used that argument to dispose of the divine commands theory, the idea that morality is a mattor of following God’s commands. And it also happens to drive a wooden stake through the heart of all such concepts as “moral rights” or “human rights”. These ideas refuse to die among the general public, of course, because most people are thick. But if philosophers can genuinely leave divine commands theory behind, isn’t it about time we did the same with the concept of “moral rights”?

Plato thought that most of us do not really see objects outside our own heads. Instead, he thought that all we really see are mere representations of things — mental representations that exist entirely within our own minds. According to a famous passage in Plato’s Republic, these representations are like shadows on the walls of a cave, which remain inside the cave, even though they are cast by things outside the cave.

Other philosophers such as Descartes and Kant had similar ideas. Kant thought that what we really observe are not things as they really are ( = ”noumena”) in the world outside our minds, but mere mental representations of those things inside our minds ( = ”phenomena”). To Descartes, the mind is like a unitary “eye” of consciousness that looks at a “screen” of conscious experiences like a moviegoer in a cinema. It is anyone’s guess whether what’s happening on the “screen” is anything like the physical world outside the cinema.

Although this idea is very common among philosophers of nearly every tradition — it probably preceded Plato, and certainly continued long after Descartes — it was so clearly and compellingly expressed by Descartes that it is usually associated with him more than anyone else. The contemporary American philosopher Daniel Dennett dubbed it the “Cartesian Theater” view of the mind, and the name seems to have stuck.

The idea is very widespread, but it is deeply and insidiously mistaken. Remarkably, it survived almost completely unquestioned for centuries. Philosophers only began to cast real doubt on the idea in the twentieth century, when the American Pragmatists, the later Wittgenstein, some existentialists, and a few other distinctively “twentieth century” philosophers began to see the mind not as a “centre of consciousness” so much as “what the brain does” — it actively and directly engages with the world, as part of an evolved animal’s inherited physical equipment.

Here is a typical expression of that newer understanding from Donald Davidson (a recent American philosopher of the Pragmatist tradition): “we have unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences true or false”. In other words, my belief that the cat is on the mat is true if one familiar object (the cat) and another familiar object (the mat) are arranged just as the sentence ‘the cat is on the mat’ says they are arranged. Davidson is expressing nothing more than modest common sense here, but it is remarkable that common sense needs the voice of a great philosopher to be heard.

The most important thing to note here is that it isn’t internal ideas — some sort of conscious experience of the cat or the mat — that are so arranged. It is the actual physical external-to-my-mind cat, and the actual physical external-to-my-mind mat, both of which exist independently of me, outside my head. These are external physical objects rather than internal mental ideas or experiences. Davidson felt it necessary to explicitly say that we have “unmediated touch” with these objects, because the alternative “Cartesian Theater” view is so all-pervasive, and it has been around for ages.

Why did it last so long? Why does it still have such a hold on the popular imagination? The answer is that in effect it assumes the mind is non-physical. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all steeped in a long religious tradition that understands the mind as a non-physical “soul”. The soul is supposed to survive the death of the body (including the brain). Our religious tradition understands the mind as a sort of “economy” whose currency is not brute physical pushes and pulls, but conscious experiences. For example, it is widely assumed that if a person knows anything, then he must be “justified” in believing it — in other words, he must have a conscious assurance that it is true. Non-conscious physical pushes and pulls are not a valid currency in this economy, because it is assumed that there is something deeply problematic about the mental and the physical coming into contact with each other at all. As supposed “centres of consciousness”, our minds are thought not to be in direct contact with the world. Far from having Davidson’s “unmediated touch” with the physical world of everyday objects, our minds can only reach out with enormous difficulty to a world that is quite alien to us. Some think that the difficulty of bridging the gap is so enormous that the mind “never quite makes it” — so we live in a Teletubby world of our own imaginings. The physical world is an alien planet to our mental selves, the idea seems to suppose. As mental rather than physical beings, our proper place is therefore somewhere “above” the messy physical realities of death, sex, chemicals and parasites. Diseases are assumed not to be caused by physical invaders, but are instead the self-inflicted wounds of mental imbalances. And so on.

The idea that our minds do not engage with the world directly has some terrible consequences. Some of them are mere curiosities, of interest mainly to academic philosophers. For example, Thomas Kuhn (the recent American historian of science) said that scientists who work in different scientific traditions “live in different worlds”. The idea here is that each scientist’s world consists of his own ideas. (But as Davidson remarked, “there is at most one world”, and we all live in it.) Kuhn’s metaphor is striking, of interest to people who wonder about science, but it doesn’t affect ordinary people’s lives much. However, the “Cartesian Theater” idea has other consequences that really do have a bearing on ordinary life.

To see why, consider the difference between perception and volition. With perception, the world affects our minds by causing ideas to form in them, whereas with volition it’s the other way round: our minds affect the world through our actions. Although the “causal flows” of perception and volition go in opposite directions, the two are closely analogous.

When applied to perception, the “Cartesian Theater” idea says that we do not perceive things in the world directly, but instead only perceive things internal to our own mental economies — such as experiences of things rather than physical things themselves. Analogously, when applied to volition, the “Cartesian Theater” idea says that we do not desire that things in the world be arranged in any particular way, but instead desire that our own mental economies come to achieve a particular internal state. The almost universal idea here is that we don’t act in order to arrange things in the world, but instead we act in order to get a particular kind of experience, typically called “pleasure” (as if this were a uniform type of experience).

For example, suppose I want to build a tree-house for my children. Someone who believes in Freud’s “pleasure principle” might say that what I “really” want is pleasure — the pleasure of seeing my children enjoying themselves, or perhaps something less innocent than that. A follower of Nietzsche might say that what I “really” want is a sense of power. Instead of wanting to have some bits of wood arranged in a physical location outside my head, both of these approaches assume that my real goal is something “internal” to my own mind.

But I ask you: Do you want the mere experience of your lover being faithful to you? Or do you want your lover to genuinely be faithful to you? Do you want to have an erotic dream? Or do you want the real thing?

To put the idea another way, the “Cartesian Theater” idea says that when we hunt rabbits, we are really hunting pleasure. It is very common throughout the academic world. For example, economists (right across the spectrum from Marxist to libertarian) tend to assume that rational agents are seeking the most money or profit in all of their transactions, because money delivers pleasure, and at root we are motivated to seek pleasure. Or again, psychologists tend to assume that if we seek goals that involve pain, we must be masochists for whom pain is a form of pleasure. And so on, right across the groves of academe.

Perhaps the worst damage that this terrible “Cartesian Theater” idea does to ordinary lives is in the area of love and sex. For example, a large proportion of people who get married end up getting divorced. The ones who initiate divorce are usually people who have decided that they have “fallen out of love”. They usually check whether they are “still in love” by examining their own “feelings”. But as artists from Shakespeare to Chris Rock remind us, love always involves “negative” emotions, including feelings that are incompatible with the very feeling that is supposed to signal the continued presence of love. No married couple has ever lived together for any stretch of time without some such negative “feelings”. A much better test of love than introspected “feelings” is the extent to which two people’s lives are actually intertwined — how much they routinely do together, especially how often they have sexual intercourse (with each other). If all you do is look at the screen in the “theater”, much of what you see will be illusory.

In my view, the “Cartesian Theater” idea is hopelessly misguided, all the more poisonous and damaging for being so widely held. Apart from a narrow strand of academic philosophy, and a slightly broader strand of common sense, it remains an unquestioned bit of religious dogma. Essentially, it is the idea that the mind is isolated from the physical world because it is “spiritual” rather than physical. It is a hugely mistaken view of what we are, and why we do things. It has corrupted philosophical thought for centuries, and continues to wreak untold havoc in everyday life all over the world.

It is time to get ourselves out of this “Cartesian Theater”. We must walk out into the daylight, blinking and disoriented, and know the place for the first time.

Like my hero David Hume, I have a serious problem with technical philosophy.

A lot of people don’t like to admit that, because if you have a problem with technical philosophy, the real problem might be that you are an idiot. (”Frankly, you are an idiot”, as Dr Peter King of Pembroke College Oxford reminded me in a private communication.) A lot of technical philosophy is allowed to pass for no better reason than that people tend to be defensive about their self-image, and so tend to be reluctant to ask: “What are you talking about?” (— “What? You don’t understand this technical stuff? — Why, you must be an idiot!”)

The ability to do technical philosophy is much like the ability of teenage X-Box users to reach the upper levels of Halo III. You need to find it interesting enough to put a lot of time into it. That involves a sort of “active idleness”, in which you squander time and resources to do something busily.

Some people embrace technical detail because they think arcaneness signals depth. But generally, acrcaneness signals lack of expanations instead.

No one doubts that technicality is sustainable in linguistic systems that have a foundational structure. For example, in any branch of mathematics (or in physics, say, or logic) new terms are formally introduced using stipulative definitions, and claims are established by showing that they can be derived from axioms or basic principles using rules of inference. There is no limit to the precision or abstractness of the terms that can be embedded in such a “foundational” structure. Quite a lot of scientific language has that structure. (Although some doesn’t: evolutionary biology, for example, is essentially the rigorous tracing of a narrative — literally “natural history”.)

However, most discourse does not have that foundational structure — and wherever it doesn’t, terms acquire meaning through custom or regular use. Claims are tentatively accepted as hypotheses rather than being “proved” by being derived from more basic claims. (If they do not seem like hypotheses at first sight, that is simply because they are not currently subject to scrutiny.)

Custom/use is much vaguer than stipulative definition. The precision of a term whose “meaning” is fixed in that way is limited in various ways — by the extent of agreement among users of the term, by degree of abstractness (i.e. how immediately a claim can be confirmed by observation), and so on.

Nearly all philosophical speculation uses discursive language that does not have the foundational structure described above. Technicality cannot be sustained in such a discursive medium. So again, like Hume, I’m inclined to think that the real problem lies not in “my problem with technical philosophy”, but with those who do not see that there is a serious problem with technical philosophy. They see a foundational structure where none exists.

Personally, I think it is “ironic” that this came up recently in a discussion about Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein couldn’t stand Hume, and so didn’t read much of his work, but the two great philosophers converged on roughly the same position: Hume with his distrust of “the abstruse reasonings of philosophers,” and Wittgenstein with his hostility towards “scientism”.

This intense distrust of technicality in discursive language is also found in the writings of Edmund Burke, who used the term of abuse ‘oeconomists and philosophers’ to condemn those whose judgements were so far removed from common sense and observation that they should not be relied on for political decision-making.

The Guardian bookshop has a pro-evolution book on offer at the moment, and the first line of the blurb goes like this:

Why Evolution is True focuses on the hard evidence that proves evolution by natural selection to be a fact.

I remarked that I think almost every word in that sentence is misleading, dishonest, wrong, shallow, or just plain stupid.

— To which A.N. Other replied: “Please elaborate”.

— What’s wrong with it? — Let me count the ways… Briefly, to me it looks irredeemably confused between theories, facts, and reasons, and it misguidedly supposes that science is looking for certainty rather than explanations.

To elaborate, I should first make it clear that I think the theory of evolution is a very good theory — it’s so good that I believe it. That is, I think the theory of evolution is true. In other words, I think that in its larger details, it accurately describes evolution, which is a process that actually happened, and is still happening.

I suppose there are alternative ways of understanding “facts”, but the most obvious way is to take a “fact” to be a state of affairs that makes some claim or other true. So if the sentence ‘the cat is on the mat’ is true, what makes it true is the fact that there is a warm, furry, four-legged thing reclining on a inanimate, rectangular, fibrous thing with the word ‘welcome’ written on it.

Similarly, supposing that the theory of evolution is indeed true, we have a theory (i.e. the theory of evolution) and a separate thing, the fact (i.e. the actual process of evolution) that makes it true.

Armed with that uncontentious understanding of “truth” and “fact”, let’s examine the claim made by the blurb:

The first word is ‘why’. This word normally asks for — or provides — a reason, in other words a belief and/or desire that justifies a claim or motivates an action. So a fine title for a book might be Why Everyone Should Believe the Theory of Evolution. But Why Evolution is True is confused on two counts. It seems to suppose that a fact (evolution) is true rather than a theory (the theory of evolution), and it seems to suppose that what makes it true is not a fact but a reason. That has the makings of an epistemological nightmare!

Next, we have ‘hard evidence’. What, I wonder, makes evidence “hard” as opposed to soft? I strongly suspect that this author takes the evidence in question to be a “firm foundation” for evolutionary theory. But really, it is various observational tests and other epistemic “virtues” that count in favour of hypotheses, rather than their being “based on” foundations. The central hypotheses of evolutionary theory are indeed explanatorily powerful, very simple and general, remarkably fecund (in the sense that they prompt fertile new lines of inquiry) and so on. So there is good evidence for believing them. But is this evidence “hard” in the sense of acting as a foundation for the theory, or in the sense of delivering great predictive accuracy? — No! — It’s just about as “soft” as it gets, although there’s a lot of it.

Finally, it is claimed that this supposedly hard evidence “proves” evolution as a fact. The use of the word ‘prove’ here reinforces the sense that the evidence works like axioms supporting a theorem in mathematics. But the real evidence for evolutionary theory is nothing like that — nor does any other branch of science feature that distinctively “mathematical” structure.

I suspect that the reason why the author or publisher stamps his feet by using words like ‘proves’ is that he has completely “missed the point” of science in general. It does not deliver certainty, nor should anyone expect it to. It is a speculative, tentative project whose aim is to draw back the curtain on things we mostly cannot see directly. It is a dizzying, risky attempt to understand nature, not to lock it in a half-Nelson by filing things away under “proved”.

When I first read Wittgenstein, his frequent accusations of ”scientism” irritated me. No more. I now see that the mass psychosis of our current age is a worshipful attitude to people who call themselves “scientists”, but who would not recognize a genuinely scientific explanation if it jumped up and bit them on the bum. It’s probably another tragic consequence of the collapse of religion.

A philosophical friend asks:

Imagine if an advanced life form was discovered on another planet.

We learn that it has the potential to end our own existence (by some manner or other: war, disease, colonisation, etc.).

Bear in mind that the threat is only potential. Indeterminate. This life form may threaten our own existence (for various discerned reasons) and it may not. It’s fifty-fifty.

Let’s make it more interesting by saying that this life form might just as easily enhance our own existence (a new Jerusalem, no less). But it’s fifty-fifty.

Either we’re doomed. Or good times are coming.

Luckily (or not), we have the ability right now to eliminate this life form. In fact, we have just one chance to exterminate it (for reasons I won’t go into), but we must act now or that chance will evaporate.

To eliminate this life form (which is actually no different to us – it’s almost as if it’s us from around 65 years ago (pre-nuclear)) – we nuke their planet so as to kill its entire population of 6 billion.

What to do?

———————————————

Good question. Here’s my answer:

Are we wondering what to do from a “moral” standpoint, or from a “prudential” standpoint? In other words, are we wondering what’s best for everyone concerned, or wondering how best we can further our own interests, and hang the rest of them?

From a moral standpoint, in other words assuming everyone’s interests should be given due consideration, it doesn’t matter whether they all die or we all die — as long as we’re all equally sentient, equally reluctant to die, and equal in number. But taking action that we know will kill 6 billion (of them) would be worse than doing nothing, which merely might or might not kill 6 billion (of us).

Why worse? — When we act rationally, we should take account of two things: the desirability of the goal, and the likelihood of achieving it. The undesirability of the result of 6 billion dead is the same whether they die or we die, from the presumed moral standpoint, but the likelihood of achieving the two results are different. If numerical measures of these things are available (and they usually aren’t) then a potential course of action has an “expected value” — what you get when you multiply the desirability of the goal and the likelihood of achieving it. For example, a lottery ticket that gives you a one-in-three-million chance of winning a million dollars has an “expected value” of 33.3 cents. So it isn’t worth parting with a dollar for such a ticket, although it is worth parting with 30 cents for it.

If we count the death of each alien or human as “minus one”, then the expected value of taking action that will certainly kill all of them is minus six billion. The expected value of not acting — with a mere fifty-fifty chance of all of us getting killed — is minus three billion. Minus three billion is bad, but it is not as bad as minus six billion. So if we take account of everyone’s interests, we should not kill these aliens.

Now let’s think about it from a “prudential” standpoint, in other words considering our own interests in isolation, with the aim of acting out of pure self-interest. Again, we have to weigh the pros and cons against each other. The likelihood of us all getting killed by them versus all of us getting something very positive from them is stipulated to be the same — fifty-fifty. But I’m not convinced that we are really able to imagine that. Our estimates of the desirabiltity or otherwise of their “gift”  depend too much on what we are able to imagine them giving us.

In my opinion, it’s very hard to imagine aliens giving us anything so positive that it cancels out the negativity of instant death. Knowledge beyond anything we have so far dreamed of? — Big deal! — The world is already full of knowledge that I haven’t acquired yet as an individual, because it takes too much effort to acquire it. Eternal life? — Impossible! Eternal youth? Extended life? — These are undeniably attractive, and I’m trying to imagine an alien life form bringing these things, but I’m finding it awfully hard…

Given that it is so much easier to imagine all-too-familiar negative consequences than positive consequences, from the purely self-interested, amoral standpoint it seems rational to “press the button”. It seems to me that in fact almost all life on Earth has evolved to follow a similar rule: “if in doubt, kill it, and if you can’t kill it, run away from it!” Immoral though killing aliens surely is, and unbecoming as running away seems, it’s probably “rational” from that purely self-interested viewpoint. Alas, natural selection rarely misses a trick.

All of the above is stipulated on our knowing practically nothing about these aliens. But as I have tried to illustrate, that is a very difficult exercise. Can we really imagine an “advanced” life form that doesn’t threaten our very existence? If they’re that advanced, surely they’re that dangerous too?

If we had some clear indication that they had malicious intentions, it might be a good idea to wipe them out first, even from the moral standpoint. Why? — We might not just be doing ourselves a favor, but a favor to the “next planet on their conquest list”. If they’re trying to kill us, they’re probably “comfortable with killing”.

After months of inactivity, and the grand total of exactly one genuine unsolicited comment, I’ve re-started this blog in new webspace. Please note the new address. You can easily access the blog by visiting www.bowmangraphics.co.uk , then clicking the “My blog” button under “LINKS”.

I hope you will feel free to contribute.