In this episode, David ponders whether or not people "deserve" to be happy. Contents:
- Mare of Easttown
- does someone deserve to be happy even when they've done something wrong?
- what is deserving? What is it not?
- just desert
- universal laws, karma, morality
- moral realism/anti-realism
- moral relativism
- who decides what is deserved?
- free will and causal determinism
- moral responsibility/instrumental responsibility
- what about "bad people"?
- parasitism, tumours, insanity
- punishment & justice
Links:
Pragmatic ethics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_ethics
Mare of Easttown:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mare_of_Easttown
Just desert:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(philosophy)
The Moral Landscape:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Landscape
Sean Carroll:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_M._Carroll
Moral realism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism
Moral anti-realism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-realism
Moral relativism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
Causal determinism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism#Causal_determinism
Toxoplasmosis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis
In this episode, David ponders whether or not people "deserve" to be happy. Contents:
- Mare of Easttown
- does someone deserve to be happy even when they've done something wrong?
- what is deserving? What is it not?
- just desert
- universal laws, karma, morality
- moral realism/anti-realism
- moral relativism
- who decides what is deserved?
- free will and causal determinism
- moral responsibility/instrumental responsibility
- what about "bad people"?
- parasitism, tumours, insanity
- punishment & justice
Links:
Pragmatic ethics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_ethics
Mare of Easttown:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mare_of_Easttown
Just desert:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(philosophy)
The Moral Landscape:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Landscape
Sean Carroll:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_M._Carroll
Moral realism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism
Moral anti-realism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-realism
Moral relativism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
Causal determinism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism#Causal_determinism
Toxoplasmosis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis
Do People Deserve to Be Happy?
Welcome to the Reasoned Intuitions podcast. My name is David Tonner, and I discuss personal ideas on moral issues in modern society and try to come up with improved ways of thinking and behaving, in the hopes of becoming a better person and causing the least amount of harm. As a disclaimer, I'd like to state that I am not an expert in either philosophy, psychology, or anything else, for that matter.
My opinions and positions are provisional and open to change with new information or an improved understanding of the issues I discuss. My intent is not to provide definitive rules or to tell anyone how they should live their life. I merely want to share my ideas and insights, in the hopes that they can be inspirational or in some way helpful.
I employ pragmatic ethics and try to reason from as broad and objective a perspective as possible. Some of my basic assumptions are that unchosen suffering is bad, and we should strive to minimize it. Joy is the most pleasurable sensation, and thus we should strive to maximize it. Empathy is universal, with some exceptions, and it should be the starting point of any good ethical system.
If you would like to support my podcast, the best way to do that is by either giving it a rating or reviewing it, and you can do that on Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Apple Podcasts.
Welcome to Reasoned Intuitions. I'm your host, David Tonner, and today I want to explore the question of whether or not people deserve to be happy.
I recently finished watching the 2021 television series Mare of Easttown. This show would normally not have been on my radar, but I had seen a review of it in the Economist, and the writer praised Kate Winslet's performance effusively, so I felt it deserved a chance; I wasn't disappointed. While it's certainly not a happy story, the show does a good job of developing the main characters, and it highlights, among other things, the various relationships that exist between people in small communities and how these not only overlap, but often change over time, sometimes very rapidly. If you enjoy drama and top-notch acting, I definitely recommend the show, if only for the sake of seeing Kate Winslet take on a challenging role and do an extraordinary job with it.
In the very first episode, a young girl named Erin gets beaten up by a romantic rival and in the scene, she slinks off, bruised and dejected. A friend of hers, who witnesses the incident, tries to console her, unsuccessfully. When I watched that scene, a thought popped into my head: does Erin, who has, at least nominally, transgressed against her assailant by hitting on her boyfriend, deserve compassion? The answer to that question, for me, is an obvious “yes”, but subsequently, I asked myself, does she also deserve to be happy in this very moment? In a classical sense, Erin is not deserving of charity or compassion. She has earned her punishment and must be made to suffer the consequences of her actions, before eventually being redeemed, after which things can return to normal. Until her redemption takes place, according to this narrative, Erin is undeserving of joy; she has temporarily lost the privilege to experience pleasure.
Think of a child who has been punished and isn't allowed to play until he or she apologizes. In today's podcast, I'm going to try to convince you that on the contrary, Erin does deserve to be happy even while bearing the responsibility for her actions. In fact, I will try to make the case that everybody deserves to be happy at any particular point in time.
Let's first talk about what it means to deserve something. For the longest time, I had strong feelings about this word and its accompanying concept. As an atheist, it doesn't make sense for me to believe in deserving. After all, where does deserving come from, if not some kind of god, or in the very least, a purposeful entity or force that, in the sense of a designer, ordains what should and should not happen to people, or to anything, anywhere in the universe.
Alternatively, is the notion of just desert, as it's called—and I'm not talking about tiramisu—is it some kind of law of nature, of physics, or perhaps simply an emergent feature of human interactions and relationships that exists objectively, outside the sphere of human decision-making?
I don't believe in any universal laws pertaining to deserving, including karma, and as I've said before, morality is a subjective concept, so it is humans who decide what is deserved and what isn't, depending on each context. We can certainly create moral frameworks around that, which is what we have historically done, and this provides us with traditional benchmarks of who deserves what, and under what circumstances. The belief in just desert is a tool or heuristic that we employ in order to make sense of situations, to help us determine how to allocate benevolence or charity, establish fairness, and treat other people.
The basic idea is that if you perform good deeds, then you are entitled to, or deserve, good things in return. On the flip side, if you've been a bad boy or girl, you don't deserve nice things, but rather, punishment or deprivation is due. These are societal norms, however, and as such, they are less interesting to me as an area of exploration than trying to establish as close to an objective guideline about what we should want for ourselves and for others. If we can establish these guidelines, for the sake of our personal, but also social moral compass, then they can inform not only how we treat other people individually, but the types of social policies we implement.
An important concept to bring up here is an idea that Sam Harris talks about in his 2010 book, The Moral Landscape. Harris, a moral realist, believes that objective morals can be established scientifically, and he presents his arguments in a rather convincing way. When I first read the book, I tentatively agreed with it, though not strongly. I couldn't quite grasp how science could establish objective moral rules, since they aren't something that can be measured in an empirical way. At this point in time, I don't consider myself a moral realist, but rather, like the physicist Sean Carroll, a moral anti-realist. What this means is that I don't believe that moral values exist objectively, or in other words, outside the sphere of human cognition. This means that if there were no human beings on earth, notions of morality would disappear along with us; they do not exist separately in the universe.
I should clarify that I'm also not a moral relativist. Moral relativism is the belief that morals are contingent upon individual circumstances, and this is most often used in the context of different cultures holding different values and engaging in practices that are considered immoral in other cultures, such as in the West. Examples include female genital mutilation, spanking children, killing gay people, or bleeding out an animal before it is slaughtered. I suppose you could say that I find myself somewhere in between the two positions: I don't think it's okay for somebody to assault or kill an innocent person just because their culture condones this practice. On the other hand, the fact that this is not okay in my opinion doesn't mean that it's not okay objectively, or that there exists a code somewhere in the universe that decrees what is and isn't permissible, separate from human decisions and conventions.
Anyway, my entire degression about moral realism and anti-realism serves the purpose of illustrating my take on how we establish what is and isn't deserved. It is, by definition, subjective, but as someone whose morals are primarily consequentialist, I would want my criteria for deserving to adhere to a consequentialist framework as well. My basic premise, as I outline in my podcast introduction, is that unchosen suffering is the worst thing humans can experience and the opposite, joy, or contentment, if you prefer, is the most pleasurable experience. I believe that both individually and as a society, we should hold the goal of increasing joy and reducing suffering.
So now the question is, how do we get from wishing others to be happy to claiming that they deserve it? How can I justify this leap?
This is where I return to my belief about causal determinism and what's called libertarian free will. I've briefly touched on this in previous episodes, but essentially, what it means is that I believe that everything in the universe, including every thought and action that I experience and perform, is completely determined by prior events, going all the way back to the beginning of time, so to speak. What this means of course, is that I don't have a choice to do anything differently than what has been determined by this causal chain.
A simple way of putting it is that because a certain set of atoms behaved in a specific manner when the universe was formed, I, David Tonner, am exactly the person I am today. I suppose it's similar to the idea of destiny or fate, except nobody has consciously written the way things turn out in the universe. Just like destiny though, there's nothing I can do to change the way my life unfolds.
The reason I bring this up is because it also means that when people behave badly, or even when they behave well, it's not because they ever had a choice in the matter. Our personalities, actions, and circumstances are all determined by the neurochemistry taking place inside our bodies, and therefore, I don't believe in moral responsibility. To be clear, I do believe in instrumental responsibility, meaning that for practical purposes, people should be held accountable for their actions in an appropriate and commensurate way, for the sake of restitution, deterrence, precedent-setting, and fairness, but I don't believe someone is morally culpable if they perform harmful deeds, and neither do I believe that a person can take moral credit for being an altruist.
I suppose the elephant in the room, or what you might be thinking as you listen to this, is “what about bad people? Do bad people deserve to be happy?” My simple answer is yes; I believe everyone deserves to be happy, no matter what they are doing.
The reason for this is that if someone is not morally responsible for their actions, as if they were being controlled by external forces that they can't free themselves from, then they aren't truly a perpetrator but rather a victim of their circumstances. As such, is it fair to punish somebody who acts at the mercy of an uncontrollable force? I think not.
A useful analogy here might be something called parasitism. This is relatively common among animals, and it usually takes the form of one organism living on or inside another and deriving a benefit at the expense of its host. Often this means that the parasite directly causes its unwitting victim to perform actions that place its life at risk, but since this benefits the parasite, whether its host lives or dies is irrelevant, as long as the parasite lives long enough to achieve its aim, which is either to propagate or to provide a source of food for its offspring.
A relevant example that you might be familiar with is toxoplasmosis. This is a condition caused by a parasite that infects various animals, including humans, but it can only reproduce in the stomach of a cat. Mice are an animal that often ingests this parasite and once it infects them, it reduces the fear or inhibition they normally feel towards cats, so they are more likely to approach felines and be eaten by them. Through this crafty and convoluted process, by hijacking and controlling parts of the mouse's brain, the parasite achieves its goal: to reproduce.
Now, imagine that you have a parasite in your brain that makes you behave in ways that you normally wouldn't. If you go out and hurt someone while infected with such a parasite—and by the way, this can be established medically—presumably, you wouldn't be held morally responsible, especially if you could be cured of this parasite and return to normal.
There are also numerous instances of people whose personality is completely transformed due to a brain tumour, to the extent of becoming aggressive and murderous. As soon as the tumour is removed, the person goes back to being their usual, gentle self.
Or what about the insanity defense in a court of law! If a medical professional deems a criminal to have committed a crime while not in their right mind, the individual gets a lighter sentence and is treated differently, based on the claim of insanity. In a way, every immoral act requires some degree of suspension of our internal moral compass—some stimulus that leads us to do something we know is harmful, but which we deem to be our best option in that moment.
Clearly, in such circumstances, our ability to think critically is severely impaired. When the moment of crisis is over, most people who acted violently or immorally are able to realize the mistake that they made, and they usually feel remorse. I would say that just like in cases of insanity, these are situations where the individual did not have sufficient control over their impulses to make the right decision. By definition, can someone be held morally accountable for something which they cannot control?
My point here is that there are myriad forces at play that influence and even control our behaviour, but which we are not aware of. If we can establish that every one of us is exactly the way we are today because of all these various factors that are outside our grasp, where is the space left for moral responsibility? I don't think there is any.
Okay, so far we've established that morals are subjective, there is no free will, and we want everyone to be as happy as possible, right? If we agree on these three points, does it not make sense that even someone who is behaving badly, due to the fact that they are not truly in control of their behaviour, should deserve to be happy, just as much as someone who is being good?
“But wait”, I hear you ask, “what about punishment and justice?” I have strong feelings about punishment, and I promise to do a full episode on the topic soon. In the meantime, I'll just leave that here and say that I don't believe in punishment. Justice is a human concept, not a universal law, so again, we are the ones who determine what justice means in each individual context and how we restore it when it has been violated.
When dealing with problematic behaviour or a breach of what we consider to be just and ethical, we have at our disposal a number of tools that can be applied, but which do not involve the infliction of proportional suffering—also known as punishment—as a means of achieving optimal outcomes. One of these is called restorative justice. Again, I'll talk more about that in a future episode.
Obviously, there are some individuals who, due to an unfortunate quirk of their personality, such as some psychopaths, derive joy from the suffering of others. I don't mean to suggest that people of this type should be encouraged to seek out joy, wherever it lies for them, if it involves the suffering of others. This type of personality is aberrant and rare, however, so as a fringe case, I don't think I need to spend too much time discussing it. Suffice to say that, while I believe everyone is entitled to achieve happiness, this is never acceptable at the expense of someone else's joy.
Ultimately, and in conclusion, the question of deserving has nothing to do with supernatural or spiritual causes or with universal laws; it has everything to do with what humans decide is permissible and appropriate. In my opinion, as long as it doesn't harm anyone else, we should not withhold joy or happiness from anyone. In fact, we should strive to bring joy to others, as a matter of principle.
Thank you again for listening, and I look forward to your feedback.