Brian Besong, associate professor at Saint Francis University, has written a reply to me on natural law theory. The piece is peppered with asides and insults—a slightly ironic addition to his extreme reaction to ’s vicious “unprofessional…reputational harm,” which came about when Amos included this jovial Tweet in his article reviewing their debate.
I find it odd to treat that light poking as such a vicious personal slight that it demands derailing a debate about natural law theory into a several minute long grievance-fest about the vicious “reputational harm” you suffered, while having your response to a relatively neutral post be densely layered with insults.1 It is also odd to take offense at someone using your first name but to claim that the other person is ignorant, very online, hasn’t read much about natural law theory, unoriginal, etc. One senses a lack of consistency. But anyways, I will avoid getting into a mudslinging contest with Besong and just respond to his arguments.
Besong claims that my piece with “the sort of enthusiasm typical of the Very Online, concluded that [natural law] theory is ‘obviously false.’” This judgment is not mine alone, of course. It is shared by virtually every philosopher in the world. I will also note that it isn’t as if I don’t go around saying every view I disagree with is obviously false; that is a judgment I make rarely, only in cases where views are really truly implausible. NLT fits the bill.
Besong then complains that I engage no natural law scholarship and that my objections are not particularly original. That is true. Sometimes, if you are explaining the core reasons to reject a view, you will primarily cite standard pre-existing arguments rather than cite cutting edge scholarship. When wrote his piece on utilitarianism, he did not cite much utilitarian scholarship and his objections were not original. Nonetheless, it was a serious piece—so serious that back in the day, I wrote a ten part reply to it.
One gets the sense that his knowledge of natural law comes almost exclusively from watching my debate with Dustin Crummett, and a few odd things picked up elsewhere on the internet. The impression he gives, by leaving out literally any argument natural lawyers have given for their views, is that this is a quirky view held uniquely by Catholics, incapable of even the slightest philosophical scrutiny.
Perhaps this is the sense that Besong has gotten, but it isn’t accurate. I have spent a reasonable amount of time engaging with natural law (for example, as Besong is aware, I *participated *in at least one debate on the subject). It isn’t true that I left “out literally any argument natural lawyers have given for their views.” I am puzzled that Besong thinks that because he spends a considerable portion of his essay criticizing my reply to his argument for natural law theory. I do agree, however, that NLT does not survive even the slightest philosophical scrutiny.
No doubt that is what Adelstein thinks, which is why his blog post is so philosophically sloppy. While this is no place to rehash all of those arguments, I would point to the last chapter of my recent
as comprising a strong argument for natural law as yet unchallenged: namely, it is the only extant moral theory capable of explaining Moorean truths about the bedroom. While Adelstein takes issue with how natural law explains those truths—points I will address below—the omission of a genuine rival explanation is telling.[Sex in Theory]
Again, this isn’t true. I discussed two different explanations: one involved biting the bullet and rejecting these supposed “Moorean” truths and the other about the wrong kinds of relationships. I am also puzzled that Besong thinks that I left his argument “as yet unchallenged” while also complaining about the responses I gave to it. I also have no idea how a person could have read my post and come away thinking that I did not give a genuine rival explanation; Besong *discusses *the rival explanation. What did he think he was doing?
Adelstein’s objections have the twin defects of being bad and unoriginal. Were it not for the fact that I’m named outright—even by first name, as though we were old pals—I’d ignore them. As it is, I’ll deal with them swiftly.
I agree that they are by and large unoriginal. No need to reinvent the wheel! As for Besong taking offense to my using his first name, I was not aware that this is the sort of thing he’d take offense to. I also referred to Dustin Crummett as Dustin. I think it’s a pretty normal thing for a Ph.D. student to refer to a professor by their first name.
Besong discusses my egoism objection to NLT: NLT is egoistic. It says your reasons to help others is for the sake of your own happiness. Others’ happiness is only the source of reasons because it improves your own. Besong admits that the view is egoistic, however, he thinks that this is not a bad result. He writes:
Adelstein appeals to an intuition I don’t share: “this gets the order of explanation wrong.” And worse, he makes a claim that favors my view in its defense: “Part of why you should help other people is for their sake.”
Part. Yeah, I agree. As a social being, caring for others “for their sake” is part of my nature, a nature I should not ignore. It’s a part of the explanation.
I’m not sure that there’s that much I can say if you just don’t share the intuition. But let me give it a try. Imagine a view says that helping others is only right because it is good for you to help others—a kind of objective list theory egoism on which helping others is on the list. Even though this would give you reason to help others, it would incorrectly explain *why *you should help others. It would say that you should do it only because doing so is good for you, rather than for their sake.
On Besong’s view, helping someone else is only good because it contributes to your happiness. If something else contributed equally to your happiness, construed broadly, it would be just as good for you to do. This doesn’t seem right and I expect most people to share my intuition here.
Besong then suggests that there is a very powerful argument for egoism that I didn’t respond to. It is true that I did not respond to it, just as I didn’t respond to a lot of arguments given by NLTists—one cannot respond to every objection in a single blog post.
Here is the challenge: egoism is supposed to explain why morality has genuinely binding and authoritative force. An amoralist might wonder: why should I be moral? The egoist has an answer: because doing so is good for you. He complains that others have to “develop a notion of reasons that, to reapply a phrase from J.L. Mackie, are ‘queer.’”
I don’t see this as much of a challenge. Why should you do what’s right? This is analytic. The word “right” just refers to what you should do! The realist thinks there are facts about what you should do. I’m not sure why these facts are supposed to be any more queer than the modal, mathematical, or logical facts.
But it’s also not clear how NLT is supposed to help. Suppose I don’t care about my good. I only care about, say, my present good or my good on Tuesdays. How does NLT explain why I should do what’s right? Besong suggests that “moral reasons are always deeply connected to what each individual necessarily cares about,” but I don’t see how this can be right. I certainly don’t care about my proper functioning. If I learned that something impeded my proper function, I just wouldn’t care in the slightest.
Or suppose that, like most people, I care intrinsically about other people’s happiness rather than just my own. Why should I do what’s good for my happiness, rather than the happiness of others? What answer does the egoist have for the person who cares about more than their own happiness?
Adelstein quickly moves to safe territory: highlighting a counterintuitive implication of natural law, hoping that it supplies force to his second premise. For he’s right to say that, on natural law, one should not lie to save one’s family from torture. The problem here is that the argument should be an obvious sleight of hand. Ethical egoism is a matter of explaining ultimate (moral) reasons. It does not tell us anything about what the moral norms are. Here Adelstein’s real objection is to the moral norm, not the explanation of reasons.
I think Besong misunderstands my point. The reason I suggested this was an objection to NLT’s egoism was that NLT implies that the reason you shouldn’t lie to prevent your family from being tortured to death is that it would be bad for your happiness. But intuitively, even if somehow that is bad for your happiness, it seems you should do it anyways. You should take a small hit to your happiness so that your family isn’t tortured to death.
Besong then objects to utilitarianism on grounds that it implies that you should torture a young girl in order to prevent a sufficiently large number of people from undergoing intense suffering. I agree with this judgment. I think the main reason it’s counterintuitive is that we naturally think preventing lots of mild harms isn’t as good as preventing a big harm. It isn’t extremely intuitive that torturing one person to stop everyone from being tortured would be wrong. In fact, I think there are pretty decisive arguments that doing so would be right.
So then the strangeness of the judgment comes down to whether preventing a lot of little harms is as good as preventing one big harm. I think it is and I’ve defended that here and here. I agree that this is counterintuitive but I don’t think our intuitions about big numbers are very trustworthy and, in addition, there are very strong arguments for thinking that some number of mild harms are worse than one very grave harm.
But if you reject that judgment, fine, don’t be an aggregationist. Still, that would supply little reason to be an NLTist.
Both utilitarianism and NLT are counterintuitive sometimes. The difference is that we can give strong *arguments *for the utilitarian verdicts, strong debunkings of the non-utilitarian verdicts, and the judgments, while sounding bad, become less obviously wrong when you think about them. If you really imagine that your action prevents an infinite amount of badness—preventing infinite people from suffering mildly—it no longer seems so obvious that you shouldn’t do it.
Besong then responds to my argument that goodness and proper functioning can come apart. If a pill increased your happiness but didn’t positively contribute to your functioning, it would be good for you.
Gestures toward independent support of the premise supply the rest: a joy pill, say, which is supposed to be good for me (how? Experience machine, anyone?) despite being unrelated to proper function (why not?)
Taking the pill would do something in your brain that makes you feel more pleasant experiences but doesn’t enhance your proper functioning. This is not like the experience machine because it increases your joy without destroying all the non-hedonic value in your life.
He then responds to my argument that we can imagine a creature with a very bad proper function. For example, maybe a being would properly function by causing torment and misery. He suggests these are impossible because God would never make such creatures. It’s not clear that it actually is impossible. It might even be actual. There are some animals that lay eggs in the skin of other animals to reproduce. Their proper functioning involves doing very horrible things.
But anyways, even if God would never make it, it can still be a counterexample. I’ll just repeat what I said in the post:
Now, maybe the reply would be that God would never create such a creature. But still, a true ethical theory should get the right results in cases that God could choose to actualize if he wanted to, even if he would never choose to actualize it.
Imagine there was a theory that said that it would be okay to press a button that would cause everyone to be tortured for all of eternity. That example would obviously falsify the theory. Nobody would buy the reply “that’s an impossible scenario because God would never choose to actualize it.” There are some scenarios that are impossible but still serve as counterexamples. I don’t have a complete theory of which scenarios are like that. But certainly at the very least, a theory can be falsified by getting a wrong result in one of the scenarios that God could create if he wanted to but never would choose to create because they’re too bad.
Besong replies:
And if impossible worlds can serve as counterexamples to a normative theory, then my coherently conceiving of a world in which suffering is intrinsically good refutes his preferred consequentialism.
But I obviously don’t think that the fact that you can imagine an impossible world where a theory is false suffices to refute it. Working out the details of counterpossibles is tricky. Still, as the examples above show, there are clearly some cases where a counterpossible can be a genuine counterexample. I don’t have a complete theory of these, as I said, but I gave one class of possible conditions: if there is a world that is only impossible because God would never choose to create it, though he could if he wanted to, it still suffices as a genuine counterexample. I thought this was pretty clear in my essay. Besong doesn’t address it.
Besong also ignores the following example:
Then, lastly, it seems that there can be a giant group of creatures functioning improperly. Imagine that a plague swept through humans, causing all of our eyes to be destroyed. In a few generations, we had no eyes. Still, a properly functioning human would have eyes. Thus, it is possible for all members of a species not to be functioning properly.
But now imagine we learned that actual humans were this way. Our proper function was to be solitary animals who spend our days without clothes, rolling around in the mud. Still, that wouldn’t seem to be good for us. Thus, what’s good for a person isn’t the same as proper functioning.
Besong must agree that it’s possible for most people to engage in improper function. After all, he thinks this is what most people *do *with respect to sex and lying. Most people have sex outside the bounds of wedlock and sometimes lie. So then he cannot object to this example on grounds that it’s too horrific for God to actualize; it’s not particularly horrific. God has made solitary creatures. It’s not clear why it’s inconceivable that God makes creatures who are solitary by nature but enjoy the company of others, just like he makes creatures who are oriented towards procreation by nature but enjoy non-procreative intercourse.
My next argument is that it is obviously permissible to misuse faculties sometimes. If the only way to stop the holocaust was to lie about what you’d had for breakfast, that would obviously be permissible. Besong just bites the bullet here. The reader is free to consult their own intuitions to see if this seems plausible to them. To me, it seems vastly less plausible than almost anything I can imagine.
Adelstein later supports premise two independently, by talking about slight misuses for the sake of overall flourishin…
