How should we attribute blame?

There are two ways to assign blame: blame individuals, or blame the system they act within. People seem to choose one or the other on the basis of their ideology, not on the basis of facts. Those who support capitalism will blame abuses on the individuals, while those who oppose it will blame abuses on the system. The same is true of democracy, religion, parenting, and all other hierarchies. In all cases, one can argue that the individuals are solely to blame, or that the system and its structures are to blame.

So how do we make the difference? Instead of using your bias to arrive at some knee-jerk conclusion, confront the facts about the system itself. What are its explicit rules? What are its guiding principles? Are there power relations within it? What incentives does it offer, that is to say, what is its impact on human behaviour?

Answering all these questions, and looking at the act, gives us the answer. If the unethical act is something that is perpetuated by the system, then blame the system (while not, of course, excluding the responsibility for the decision to the person). If it is not, then blame the person.

For example, if we look at the act of a CEO who fired thousands of people and gets a hefty multi-million dollar bonus for it at the end of the year, we’d rightly say that it is a heinous act. But that’s how capitalism works: the role of a corporation is to generate profits by all means necessary, and thus the CEO’s act, and the shareholders’ reaction, was perfectly in line with that. We can therefore absolutely blame the system in this case.

The act of a sweatshop overseer in Taiwan who sexually harasses his female wage slaves, on the other hand, does not prove anything about capitalism specifically (although it proves something about heteronormativity, or hierarchies as a whole), because his actions have nothing to do with any of the principles or incentives of capitalism.

Or another way of saying this: capitalism can exist without sexual harassment, but not without firing people or without profits. Or to think about it in a slightly different way: even if every single person in the system was completely well-intentioned, those latter things would still exist. They wouldn’t be sexually harassing people, but they still would be firing people and giving each other bonuses for doing so.

Let me use parenting now. I know that one annoys people a lot, but there’s a great example that can be used here. People will sometimes argue that using coercion against children is justifiable because children need to be saved from their own foibles; they will generally use the example of a toddler that walks into a busy street, and is saved by his mother, as an action which is both coercive and justifiable. But this is not a particular trait of parenting: people may save, or hinder, each other regardless of their parental relation (in fact, strangers sometimes save children from their parents). Of course, parents generally love their children and will try to save them from life-threatening situations.

On the other hand, the millions of baby genital mutilations, sexual child abuse (most widespread in the form of spanking, but millions of children are still being raped by parents and family members), verbal child abuse, attacks on children’s rights, and so on, which take place in our society can be squarely blamed on parenting, since we know only parents have the power to do these things. It’s built in the system. They are in near-full control of a vulnerable human being who can’t defend himself: it’s not rocket science to expect them to exploit that control, and you can’t have a parenting system without that control being there.

A teacher who forces his students to repeatedly perform meaningless exercises all year and gets rewarded because said students successfully pass a meaningless standardized exam is doing so because that’s his job. A teacher who is sadistic towards his students and insults them is doing it on a personal impulse. The schooling system can persist with or without his sadism and insults, but it cannot persist without the meaningless exercises.

There are cases where the difference is more ambiguous. Catholic priests have raped little children since virtually the beginning of Catholicism, so it seems natural to attribute it to the religion itself. To a certain extent this is true, but only insofar as Catholicism is a faggot religion. It is not a coincidence that the earliest records of priests’ crimes included sexually molesting young boys, in the fourth century, around the time when priests were generally required to be celibate. So here it is not necessarily religion as an institution which is to blame, but the specific sexual requirements of the religions where the sexual abuse is taking place.

Now, beyond these examples, I want to make this clear, because I know I’m going to get comments saying that I am trying to remove personal responsibility from the people committing these actions. As I’ve said before, understanding does not preclude judgment. My point here is not that the actors in an unethical system are not responsible for their actions. If anything, the fact that they willingly participate to an unethical system compounds their guilt.

The distinction also applies, albeit in a more tenuous way, to our views on our own actions or outcomes, and other people’s actions or outcomes. The actor-observer bias, which I’ve referred before, shows that we explain our actions in response to stimuli as being driven by the stimuli, while we explain other people’s actions in response to stimuli as being driven by their personality. What this means, in clear, is that when we look at other people’s behaviour in a hierarchy, we’ll tend to attribute it to their personality rather than to the stimuli they receive within that hierarchy. When we do bad things, we attribute it to the situation, but when other people do bad things, it’s their personal fault.

People also apply this to outcomes. They believe that poor people are poor because they are lazy or stupid, while they believe they are rich because of their good upbringing, their choice of careers, and so on. Poor people believe that rich people are rich because they are greedy and corrupt, while they believe they are poor because of their life circumstances. And so on and so forth.

Buddhism & Autonomy

Americans and Canadians lie about church attendance

Surveys in the US and Canada, amongst other countries, are flawed because Americans and Canadians lie about church attendance, as demonstrated by time use studies.

We’re used to hearing that America is an exceptional nation when it comes to religion. Certainly, the hold that religion has over public life is unparalleled among wealthy nations, and most Americans readily tell pollsters that they are dutifully religious.

But it seems that American religiosity might also be exceptional for quite another reason. It turns out that the gap between what they tell pollsters and what they actually do is bigger than for any other nation.
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He found that Americans say they go to Church about twice as often as they actually do. That’s pretty similar to what has been found in other studies.

In other countries, however, the gap was much smaller – in fact, for many of them, it was non-existent (the bar chart only shows the worst offenders). It’s not a recent phenomenon either.

Kissinger: Obama Will Create A New World Orde

Against Psychological Egoism

Psychological egoism (hereby abbreviated “psychego”) is the view that all human action is done in the agent’s self-interest, that is to say, that a cost-benefit analysis will reveal that all actions were done in the agent’s perceived benefit.

There is absolutely no theoretical argument supporting this view. Psychego proponents demonstrate the truth of their position by using “just so” stories, similar to those used by Creationists to explain away various features of natural organisms (and they, in return, claim that the evolutionary paths proposed by scientists are “just so” stories as well). The method they used to make up these “just so” stories is simple: first, they think of any justification whatsoever that a person might have to commit the action, and then, without ever quantifying that justification, they apply it to the problem and declare the case closed.

Here is a simple example of this method, as applied to the case of a soldier who jumped on a grenade to save his comrades:

The benefits that he reaped was knowing that his friends would survive, and that he would die for his country. That’s what made him happy. He did it because the success of something else made him happy. Unselfish. Yet still, ultimately but indirectly, self-interest.

This is perhaps an extreme example of the nonsense generated by the ideology of psychego. Indeed the soldier may very well have been “happy” and “knowing that his friends would survive”- for a few milliseconds before he died. For the psychego standpoint to be valid, we have to accept that the loss of his life was entirely counterbalanced by a few milliseconds of happiness. Of course this is absolute nonsense (aside from the fact that soldiers deserve to die).

In general, the way psychego proponents have of rationalizing altruism is through some psychological benefit. Their belief that there is some psychological benefit that outweighs the loss is absolute; if the person reports no such benefits, then they must be “subconscious” or “instinctual,” which is where evolutionary psychology comes into play and piles up its own “just so” stories on top of the ones already existing.

If we adopt this method, then nothing can disprove psychego. Some justification can always be made up to justify any action, as long as it doesn’t have to be quantified. Therefore, like all positions which cannot be falsified, it is essentially meaningless.

Here is a counter-example from Matt Simpson at The Distributed Republic:

Imagine a man who is on the verge of suicide. He literally has a cocked and loaded gun in his mouth with his finger on the trigger. As he begins to squeeze the trigger, he realizes that he has no life insurance policy, has racked up $20,000 in debt, and would leave the entire mess to his wife if he killed himself. Out of concern for his wife, he takes the gun out of his mouth and decides to continue living.

The psychological egoist has a major problem with this thought experiment because it doesn’t seem as if the man could possibly be acting out of his own self interest. His wife’s predicament should play no role in his decision if he is an egoist. Even if he would feel guilty for hurting his wife or acting immorally, he can’t feel these feelings if he is dead. If death is better than living before the realization, then death must be better after the realization.
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The man is still alive and a friend of my adviser, who told me the story earlier today (minor details have been changed), which means that psychological egoism must be false.

This didn’t stop commentators (who claim not to be psychego proponents) from constructing a concept of commitment that may, if you squint hard enough, justify the subject’s action, without even considering if the subject held to such a concept or trying to quantify it. There is no way any cost-benefit analysis along those lines can counterbalance suicide.

I want to make clear that I do not condone the method of cost-benefit analysis to evaluate moral or ethical issues. I am talking about the method in order to demonstrate that psychego is self-contradictory, not in order to validate the method. In real life, bean-counting in this fashion is extremely unwieldy and ultimately impossible (since it requires us to know everything there is to know about the outcome of the action). More generally, the problem is that psychego tries to reduce the wild variety of human action to one narrow concept. This is delusional at best, and can only lead to cutting off a gigantic portion of human experience in the name of fitting it within that narrow concept.

Why is psychego proposed as a serious theory? This may be puzzling until you realize the implications of psychego for human behaviour and society in general. If we accept the premise that man really has no choice but to act selfishly, then we can easily buy into the premise that there can be no real cooperation between free people, that we must be controlled in order to ensure the survival of social and global objectives. This leads us directly into the category of belief I label “man is innately evil.” It should come as no surprise that Thomas Hobbes, the most famous proponent of the view that man is innately evil, is also one of the most well-known proponents of psychological egoism.

We must reject the simplistic notion that man is always “selfish” or “altruistic.” These terms are narrow and ultimately useless. Rather, we must start by looking at the multiplicity of ethical beliefs and behaviour by looking at the wide range of social forms and social conditioning that create the individual’s incentives and beliefs.

Six secret monopolies you don’t know about…

This is not really relevant to anything, but I guess as another point about anti-capitalism, this list of six secret monopolies from Cracked.com is pretty interesting.

How could so many brands (about 150) happen to get contaminated at the same time? Well, because most of them were made by the same company. If you buy wet pet food labeled Eukanuba, Iams, Nutro, Hy-Vee, Triumph or Priority, it all comes from the same factory. One Canadian company, Menu Foods, makes all those brands. They just slap different labels on it because they know that we as a breed like the illusion of choice. When they’re tapped out of weird syllable combinations to slap on the outside of the food, they presumably send the rest off to be turned into fast food and school lunch.

Even worse, Menu Foods and other companies, like Purina, all get one particular pet food ingredient (wheat gluten) from the same place — a tiny Nevada company called Chemnutra or as they’re known to neighbors, some white guy and his Chinese wife. This couple shipped in 800 tons of suspiciously cheap wheat gluten from China and doled it out to every big pet food maker you’ve ever heard of. They didn’t bother to check whether it was poisonous or not, figuring they’d find out sooner or later when, you know, someone’s cat ate it and died. Or a few hundred cats.

So that’s how one sloppily run mom-and-pop importer managed to put poisoned pet food into every supermarket in America. But don’t worry, at least Menu Foods isn’t around anymore. They were bought out by Simmons Pet Food, another huge behind-the-scenes pet food maker, a couple months ago, creating an even bigger company making food for an even larger portion of the pet food section at your local grocery store. That means more product passing through the same factory, and less competition, which means less of a reason for them to care if one of the ingredients that gets used in all of their products happens to be made out of poison.

And ChemNutra? They paid a $35K fine, saw no jail time and changed their name to EOS Direct which continues to import nutritional ingredients, including stuff that gets put in energy drinks. If Red Bull starts to literally give you wings, you’ll know who to blame.