J.D. Vance vs. the Pope

The Myth of Moral Absolutes

[The Institute for Arts and Ideas asked me to write this piece, which was originally published here. They also asked me to promote it, which is what I’m doing now. But go check out IAI.tv. They publish good stuff.]

The United States is busy slashing foreign aid, and Britain is following suit. Last year US aid amounted to nearly $72 billion, comprising 1.2% of the federal budget. About half of this money went to disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, and to combat diseases like HIV/AIDS and influenza. The rest went to economic development, peace and security efforts, education, and things like that.

Vice-President J.D. Vance defended the cuts in a Fox News interview, saying, “there’s this old school concept—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community. And then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world.” A bunch of other Christians, such as UK politician Rory Stewart, immediately jumped up to object that Vance sounded less like a Christian and more like a tribal pagan. Vance retorted that Stewart needed to get straight about the correct ordo amoris, or order of loves. Then Pope Francis weighed in that “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Luke 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Let’s put the theology aside (although I’m inclined to defer to the Pope’s grasp of theology over Vance’s). The United States is a pluralist society founded on principles of religious liberty, so any religious appeals to justify public policy are prima facie inappropriate. However, the debate between Vance on one side and Pope Francis and Rory Stewart on the other does in fact represent a deep schism between classes of moral theories, just in theological clothing.

Agent-neutral vs. agent-relative moral theories

Moral theories divide into agent-neutral and agent-relative. An agent-neutral moral theory is one according to which everyone has the same duties and moral aims, no matter what their personal interests or interpersonal relationships. Agent-relative moral theories deny this. Egoism is the poster child for an agent-relative theory—my only moral duty is to advance my own interests, and your only moral duty is to advance yours. We have fundamentally different aims. Utilitarianism is the classic agent-neutral view—each of us has the exact same duty, namely to produce as much global happiness as we can with each of our actions. We have the same aim.

Immanuel Kant’s deontology is agent-relative. For Kant, we have specific moral obligations to others on the basis of our interpersonal relationships with them. For example, suppose I promise to buy you lunch. My promise imposes a moral duty on me to actually follow through and buy you that lunch, even if there is someone hungrier who would benefit more from the meal. I don’t owe people at large a free lunch, I owe you one. Similarly I’ve made commitments of care to my family to provide for them, which generates real moral obligations to my family in particular.

Vance’s assertion (in the same Fox interview) that agent neutrality is some leftist inversion of true morality strangely ignores the resurgence of utilitarianism in the guise of “effective altruism.” EA is a popular view among libertarians and tech bros, who are not your stereotypical left-wingers. However, Vance is certainly correct that most people have powerful agent-relative intuitions. As David Hume wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature, “A man naturally loves his children better than his nephews, his nephews better than his cousins, his cousins better than strangers, where everything else is equal. Hence arise our common measures of duty, in preferring the one to the other. Our sense of duty always follows the common and natural course of our passions.”

While Hume may be right, agent-neutral intuitions are also common: John Stuart Mill argued that the appeal of agent-neutrality is seen in the ethics of Jesus of Nazareth, who advocated “love your neighbor as yourself.” Mill interpreted this advice “as between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.” Later Henry Sidgwick claimed it is self-evident that “the good of any one person is no more important from the point of view (if I may put it like this) of the universe than the good of any other… each person is morally obliged to regard the good of anyone else as much as his own good.” For Mill and Sidgwick, you and yours count, but they don’t count extra.

The evolution of moral intuitions

How can we resolve this conflict between agent-neutral and agent-relative theories? There’s a good reason to think that in fact we can’t, and that the dispute is irresolvable. We have fundamentally competing instincts to (1) treat everyone equally and impartially, and (2) treat our family and tribe preferentially. These instincts arise from distinct evolutionary forces.

Kin selection is behind agent-relative intuitions. From a gene’s eye point of view, it is likelier to replicate and persist over time if the large meat robots that it helped build act in a cooperative and altruistic way with each other. The more they do, the more likely the gene will continue into the future through reproduction. There’s no incentive from the gene perspective for cooperation with unrelated meat robots—they aren’t carrying the same gene. Underlying this idea of inclusive fitness is Hamilton’s Rule: we can expect natural selection to favor a trait of helping others at some cost to the individual if rB > C, where r is the degree of genetic relatedness to the individual, B is the benefit to the recipient, and C is the cost to the individual. The more closely we are related, the more we’ll sacrifice for each other. Again, from the gene’s eye point of view it doesn’t care who propagates it, just so long as someone does.

We don’t run around using DNA sequencing to determine our relatives, so how is it done? Some species use scent or phenotypic markers to pick out kin from non-kin. The innate human kin-recognition system seems to be this: kin are those with whom you are familiar from childhood. This explains why even unrelated children reared together feel no sexual attraction to each other when they mature. The subconscious incest taboo still flags the other as an out-of-bounds relative. The helping mechanism generated by kin selection is something like “provide help to those conspecifics with whom you interact frequently.” Once that instinct is in place, agent-relative moral theories like deontology are not far behind.

So what’s responsible for agent-neutral intuitions? Kin selection might be driving us to help friends and relatives, but we often interact with creatures who are neither. In these cases, applying game-theoretic models to evolutionary design illustrates how natural selection would plump for organisms that are motivated to risk certain sacrifices to aid others, even when there is no guarantee of reciprocal help, and even when their interlocutors are unfamiliar non-kin.

In his Histories (2.68.1), Herodotus talks about the symbiosis between trochilus birds and crocodiles. While “all other birds and beasts” are very reasonably afraid of being eaten by the crocodile, the two have made a pact, despite not being kin. In exchange for cleaning the leeches out of the crocodile’s mouth, the crocodile refrains from eating the trochilus. The croc gets his teeth cleaned and the trochilus gets a nice leechy meal. Win-win!

Defection is still tempting

How come the crocodiles don’t defect from this arrangement and munch on the dental hygienist at the end of the cleaning? This is where the technical literature on strategic approaches to the prisoners’ dilemma comes in. The short answer is because their interaction is iterated, and repeated on-going relationships promote cooperative behavior and give rise to reciprocal altruism. Frequent defections from their agreement will make both crocodiles and trochilus birds worse off, leading to selection pressure in favor of cooperation. Again, once those instincts for helping and mutual support are wired in, the foundations for agent-neutral moral theories are laid.

Pragmatic relativism

Where do we go from here? We have incompatible classes of moral theories, prescribing very different duties and obligations, and their intuitive appeal is built by irreconcilably different evolutionary strategies. J. L. Mackie’s response is moral skepticism: morality is nothing more than a story we make up as a result of the evolutionary encoding of certain instincts and has nothing to do with truth or reality. He was an error-theorist about ethics; there are no moral properties in the world or objectively correct moral principles. An alternative approach is pragmatic relativism. The relativist idea is that not only are there distinct ethical theories incommensurable with each other, but these theories are true ones, relative to the foundational intuitions that motivate them. Mackie would hold that both agent-neutral and agent-relative moral theories are mistaken, as both are grounded in erroneous metaphysics. Relativism turns that on its head, insisting that in fact both are true, simply true from different points of view.

Even if morality is relatively true in the sense just described and multiple ethical theories are equally justifiable by reason, it may be that some theories are nevertheless more pragmatically useful. An analogy is to languages. English and Chinese may have the same semantic power, but English is way better for typing on a keyboard. Mathematics using Arabic numerals is not technically superior to using Roman numerals, but it sure is more practical (quick, what’s MMMMCCCLVI÷CXXIX?).

What would make a moral theory practical? Morality exists specifically to be action-guiding; it’s hard to see why we should care about a moral theory so abstruse that it gives no guidance. If we have one theory that’s byzantine, cumbersome, or hard to use, let’s toss it in favor of one equally plausible, but simpler, more elegant, or more comprehensive. To be clear, “simpler” does not mean simple-minded. We still need sophisticated and careful moral deliberation.

Insofar as Vance vs. the Pope represents the debate between agent-relative moral theories and agent-neutral ones, there is no theoretical solution. It is up to us to decide whether to broaden our conception of kin to encompass all human beings or to narrow it even more to just our tribe, race, or immediate family. Likewise, nations must decide to what extent their interests and those of other nations stand in a prisoners’ dilemma with each other, and evaluate their interactions on that basis. Here is the vision that Abraham Lincoln stirringly laid out in his Second Inaugural Address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on… to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” That is an admirable goal, whichever theoretical approach we choose to get there. Both J.D. Vance and Pope Francis might benefit from the relativist perspective—the true dispute is not over the one true morality, but over which moral approach is the best pragmatic fit for our world, in the humble recognition that no one has a monopoly on truth.