Darwin's Dangerous Idea (96 page)

"Aye me lad, always do your duty—and chance the consequences!" Neither slogan is derivation of Tit for Tat, but, as he himself points out, the rule's provable virtues assume
quite
vacuous.

conditions that are only intermittently—and controversially—realized. In particular, the 6.A Kantian who presses the charge of practical imponderability against utilitarianism

"shadow of the future" must be "sufficiently great," a condition about which reasonable with particular vigor and clarity is Onora O'Neill (1980 ). She shows how two utilitarians, people might disagree indefinitely, it seems.

Garrett Hardin and Peter Singer, armed with the same information, arrive at opposite 4. How could Three Mile Island have been a good thing? By being the near-catastrophe counsels on the pressing moral dilemma of famine relief: we should take drastic steps to that sounded the alarm that led us away from paths that would encounter much worse prevent shortsighted efforts to feed famine victims (Hardin), or we should take drastic misadventures—Chemobyls, for instance. Surely many people were fervently
hoping
for steps to provide food for today's famine victims (Singer). For a more detailed consider-just such an event to happen, and might well have taken steps to ensure it, had they been ation, see O'Neill 1986. An independent critic is Bernard Williams, who claims (1973, p.

in a position to act. The same moral reasoning that led Jane Fonda to create the film
The
137) that utilitarianism makes enormous demands on supposed empirical information,
China Syndrome
(a fictional near-catastrophe at a nuclear plant) might lead someone about peoples' preferences, and that information is not only largely unavailable, but rather differently situated to create Three Mile Island.

shrouded in conceptual difficulty; but that is seen in the light of a technical or practical difficulty, and utilitari-500 REDESIGNING MORALITY

2. Judging the Competition
501

Kantians put in the place of the unworkable consequential calculations?

2. JUDGING THE COMPETITION

Maxim-following (often derided as rule worship) of one sort or another, such as that invoked in one of Kant's (1785 ) formulations of the Categorical Your Philosophy Department has been chosen to administer a munificent Imperative: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time bequest: a twelve-year fellowship to be awarded in open competition to the will that it should become a universal law. Kantian decision-making typically most promising graduate student in philosophy in the country. You duly reveals rather different idealizations—departures from reality in other announce the award and its conditions in
the Journal of Philosophy,
and directions— doing all the work. For instance, unless some
deus ex machina
then, to your dismay, you receive, by the deadline, 250,000 legal entries, is standing by, a handy master of ceremonies to whisper suggestions in your complete with lengthy dossiers, samples of written work, and testimonials.

ear, it is far from clear just how you are supposed to figure out how to limit A quick calculation convinces you that living up to your obligation to the scope of the "maxims" of your contemplated actions before putting them evaluate all the material of all the candidates by the deadline for announcing to the litmus test of the Categorical Imperative. There seems to be an the award would not only prevent the department from performing its inexhaustible supply of candidate maxims.

primary teaching mission, but— given the costs of administration and hiring Certainly the quaint Benthamite hope of a fill-in-the-blanks decision pro-additional qualified evaluators—bankrupt the award fund itself, so that all cedure for ethical problems is as foreign to the spirit of modern Kantians as it the labor of evaluation would be wasted; no one would gain.

is to sophisticated utilitarians. All philosophers can agree, it seems, that real What
to
do? If only you had anticipated the demand, you could have moral thinking takes insight and imagination, and is not to be achieved by imposed tighter eligibility conditions, but it is too late for that: every one of any mindless application of formulae. As Mill himself puts it (1871, p. 31), the 250,000 candidates has, we will suppose, a right to equal consideration, still in high dudgeon, "There is no difficulty in proving any ethical standard and in agreeing to administer the competition you have undertaken the whatever to work ill if we suppose universal idiocy conjoined with it." This obligation to select the best candidate. (I don't mean to beg any questions bit of rhetoric is somewhat at war with his earlier analogy, however, since one with this formulation in terms of rights and obligations. If it makes a differ-of the legitimate claims of the systems of practical navigation was that just ence to you, recast the setting of the problem in terms of the overall disutility about any idiot could master them.

of violating the conditions set forth in your announcement of the competition.

I do not at all intend this to be a shocking indictment, just a reminder of My point is that you would find yourself in a bind, whatever your ethical something quite obvious: no remotely compelling system of ethics has ever persuasion.) Before reading on, please spend a little time, as much as you been made
computationally tractable,
even indirectly, for real-world moral think it takes, to plot your own solution to the problem (no fantasies about problems. So, even though there has been no dearth of utilitarian (and technological fixes, please).

Kantian, and contractarian, etc.)
arguments
in favor of particular policies, When I have put this problem to colleagues and students, I find that, after institutions, practices, and acts, these have all been heavily hedged with a brief exploratory period, they tend to home in on one version or another
ceteris paribus
clauses and plausibility claims about their idealizing assump-of a mixed strategy, such as:

tions. These hedges are designed to overcome the combinatorial explosion of calculation that threatens if one actually attempts—as theory says one must—to
consider all things.
And as arguments—not derivations—they have (1) choose a small number of easily checked and not entirely unsymp-all been controversial (which is not to say that none of them could be sound tomatic criteria of excellence—such as Grade Point Average, in the last analysis).

number of philosophy courses completed, weight of the dossier (

To get a better sense of the difficulties that contribute to
actual
moral eliminating the too-light and the too-heavy)—and use this to make a reasoning, let us give ourselves a smallish moral problem and see what we first cut;

do with it. Though a few of its details are exotic, the problem I am setting (2) conduct a lottery with the remaining candidates, cutting the pool exemplifies a familiar structure.

down randomly to some manageably small number of finalists—say fifty or a hundred—

(3) whose dossiers will be carefully screened by a committee, which will anism appeals to a frame of mind in which technical difficulty, even insuperable then vote on the winner.

technical difficulty, is preferable to moral unclarity, no doubt because it is less alarm-ing. (That frame of mind is in fact deeply foolish— ) There is no doubt that this procedure is very unlikely to find the best candidate. Odds are, in fact, that more than a few of the losers, if given a day

^

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in court, could convince a jury that they were obviously superior to the a vote is taken. After the meeting, (e) there are those who still think that elected winner. But, you might want to retort, that's just tough; you did the better cut rules could have been chosen, that the department could have best you could. It is quite possible, of course, that you would lose the afforded the time to evaluate two hundred finalists (or should have restricted lawsuit, but you might still feel, rightly, that you could have arrived at no the number to twenty), etc., but done is done. They have learned the better decisions at the time.

important lesson of how to live with the suboptimal decision-making of their My example is meant to illustrate, enlarged and in slow motion, the colleagues, so, after a few minutes or hours of luxuriating in clever hindsight, ubiquitous features of real-time decision-making. First, there is the simple they drop it.

physical impossibility of "considering all things" in the allotted time. Note

"But
should I
drop it?" you ask yourself, just as you asked yourself the that "all things" doesn't have to mean
everything
or even
everybody in the
same question in the midst of the free-for-all when the chairman wouldn't
world,
but just
everything in 250,000 readily available dossiers.
You have all call on you. Your head was teeming at that moment (a) with reasons why you the information you need "at your fingertips"; there need be no talk of should insist on being heard, competing with reasons why you should go conducting further investigations. Second, there is the ruthless and peremp-along with your colleagues quietly, and all this was competing with your tory use of some distinctly second-rate cut rules. No one thinks Grade Point attempts to follow what others were saying, and so forth—more information Average is a remotely foolproof indicator of promise, though it is probably at your fingertips than you could handle, so (b) you swiftly, arbitrarily, and somewhat superior to
weight of dossier,
and clearly superior to
number of
unthinkingly blocked off some of it—running the risk of ignoring the most
letters in surname.
There is something of a trade-off between ease of ap-important considerations—and then (c) you gave up trying to
control
your plication and reliability, and if no one can
quickly
think of any easily applied thoughts; you relinquished meta-control and let your thoughts lead wherever criteria that one can have
some
faith in, it would be better to eliminate step they might for a while. After a bit, you somehow (d) resumed control, (1) and proceed straight to the lottery for all candidates. Third, the lottery attempted some ordering and improving of the materials spewed up by the illustrates a partial abdication of control, giving up on a part of the task and free-for-all, and made the decision to drop it—suffering (e) instant pangs of letting something else—nature or chance—take over for a while, yet still dubiety and toying with regret, but, because you are wise, you shrugged these assuming responsibility for the result. (That is the scary part.) Fourth, there is off as well.

the phase where you try to salvage something presentable from the output of And how, precisely, did you go about dismissing that evanescent and un-that wild process; having oversimplified your task, you count on a meta-level articulated micro wonder ( "Should I have dropped it?" )? Here the processes process of self-monitoring to correct or renormalize or improve your final become invisible to the naked eye of introspection, but if we look at product to some degree. Fifth, there is the endless vulnerability to second-cognitive-science models of "decision-making" and "problem-solving"
within
guessing and hindsight wisdom about what you should have done—but done such swift, unconscious processes as perception and language comis done. You let the result stand, and go on to other things. Life is short.

prehension, we see further tempting analogues of our phases in the various The decision process just described is an instance of the fundamental models of heuristic search and problem-solving.7

pattern first explicitly analyzed by Herbert Simon (1957,1959 ), who named As we have seen again and again in this book, time-pressured decision-it "satisficing." Notice how the pattern repeats itself, rather like a fractal making is like that
all the way down.
Satisficing extends even back behind the curve, as we trace down through the subdecisions, the sub-subdecisions, and fixed biological design of the decision-making agent, to the design "deci-so forth until the process becomes invisible. At the department meeting sions" that Mother Nature settled for when designing us and other organisms.

called to consider how to deal with this dilemma, (a) everyone is bursting There may be somewhat nonarbitrary dividing lines to be drawn between with suggestions—more than can be sensibly discussed in the two hours biological, psychological, and cultural manifestations of this structure, but allotted, so (b) the chairman becomes somewhat peremptory, deciding not to not only are the structures—and their powers and vulnerabilities—basically recognize several members who might well, of course, have some very good ideas, and then, (c) after a brief free-for-all "discussion" in which—for all anyone can tell—timing, volume, and timbre may count for more than 7. The suggestion of temporal ordering in the five phases is not essential, of course.

The arbitrary pruning of randomly explored search trees, the triggering of decision by content, (d) the chairman attempts to summarize by picking a few highlights a partial and nonoptimal evaluation of results, and the suppression of second-guessing that somehow strike him as the operative points, and the strengths and need not follow the sequence in time I outline in the initial example. The process at this weaknesses of these are debated in a rather more orderly way, and then level What I have described in the Multiple Drafts Model of human consciousness in Dennett 1991a.

504 REDESIGNING MORALITY

The Moral First Aid Manual
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the same; the particular contents of "deliberation" are probably not locked could come up with, given our limitations. The mistake that is sometimes into any one level in the overall process but can migrate. Under suitable prov-made is to suppose that there is or must be a single (best or highest) ocation, for instance, one can dredge up some virtually subliminal consid-perspective from which to assess ideal rationality. Does the ideally rational eration and elevate it for self-conscious formulation and appreciation—it agent have the all-too-human problem of not being able to remember certain becomes an "intuition"—and then express it so that others can consider it as crucial considerations when they would be most telling, most effective in well. Moving in the other direction, a reason for action perennially men-resolving a quandary? If we stipulate, as a theoretical simplification, that our tioned and debated in committee can eventually "go without saying"—at imagined ideal agent is immune to such disorders, then we don't get to ask least out loud—but continue to shape the thinking, both of the group and the the question of what the ideal way might be to cope with them.