So I had the flu. Then, a different flu. As to that thing Belle is down with now? I dunno. Something new has been added. But we got to the Joanna Newsom concert, between sneezes. That was great! My brother-in-law asked what she’s like, because he hadn’t heard of her. I said she’s a cross between Bob Dylan and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Do you think that was strictly accurate? Maybe just: a cross between Kate Bush and Arcade Fire, plus harp? (What, you’ve never heard of her? Well, check it out. And this. I was hoping she’d do a live version of that last one, as she does here. No dice. But she did a great version of “Have One On Me”, which is otherwise not one of my favorites.)
The world is so messed up these days that I feel I should be publicly expressing my opinion about that. But instead I’m escaping into an old, wonky-academic philosophy-literary criticism essay that I’ve never managed to get published anywhere. It’s been out of, then back into, the ‘reject’ pile for years. Title: “Ways of World-Breaking and Ethical Escapism”. The question: is there morality fiction? That is, fiction about morality itself being different than we take it to be. No, no, not whether people can disagree about morality, or write about immoral people, or seek to shock, or any of that obviousness. Does anyone write fiction in which they imagine that the world works, morally, a different way than they (author and anticipated audience) take it to work? Or is it rather the case that when we find a ‘deviant’ moral perspective in fiction we either reject it or accept it. And if we do the latter, we export it to the actual world, as part of an expanded moral horizon? So our actual moral horizon and our fictional moral horizon never mutually deviate? Or they sometimes go their separate ways? That’s the question. I say they go their separate ways all the time, so it’s interesting that some folks have denied it. I am responding to some analytic-type philosophers – Kendall Walton, Tamar Gendler, and our own Brian Weatherson – who have taken various positions on this question, the so-called ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’.
I’ve got the latest draft posted here, for the edification of the interested. I’ll just post one bit from it. I call it “Morality Tale”. I guess I just missed the Hugo Awards nomination deadline. But you can tell me whether you like it. Certainly it goes a long way towards explaining why I can’t publish the whole essay. (Who do I think I am?)
The 22nd Century was the Age of Time Travel, as the 21st Century had been the Age of FTL Drive. In the 24th Century travel to possible worlds opened up; in the 26th, commerce with physically—then logically—impossible worlds became physically possible (not advisable.)
By this point, dear reader, the human race had changed in its essentials, past the point of recognition by the likes of you. But, for purposes of my story, go right on imagining I am speaking of strong-jawed men in ships like long, silver cigars.
By the 27th Century, thanatonauts reported back from the afterlife, which proved less interesting than had been hoped. Of greater—some say greatest—consequence was the fall, in the 30th Century, of what had long proved the most stubborn barrier.
What ushered in the so-called Age of Ethical Perfectionism was the prospect of travel, by deontonauts, to possible worlds whose moral fabric differs from that of the actual world. Worlds in which right and wrong, good and bad, are different than in ours.
I hear your sigh of disappointment. You think I am referring to some mundane, anthropological consideration about pluralism or relativism. You see me winding up to some terrifying report of how these ‘deontonauts’ entered finally into a world so strange that there it was considered socially acceptable not to wear pants. I assure you: if you keep thinking like that, you will not understand my story.In the light of the dawn of the Age of Ethical Perfectionism it became apparent that the wisdom of, say, Romans 3:10—’there is none that is righteous, not even one’—was impaired by lack of technical ambition. Another ancient thought came to be regarded as more prophetic: he who would improve himself, must first change his world. This is why, in the central atrium of the offices of the Deontonautics Division of the Modal Avionics Corporation, above the sound fixture and flower arrangement, there hangs a tremendous illuminated board. (At this writing I look up to see it reads: ‘there are 1,132,206 that are righteous, not even 1,132,207.’)
The typical occupant of a berth on a standard ‘Goody Two-Shoes’ class, twin-drive deontonautic freighter—such as MA Corp’s Indulgence, Dispensation, Practice, or Damned Spot—is a wealthy, fare-paying, elderly private citizen. Pilots are another matter. It is an unfortunate fact that travel to deontically possible worlds can only transpire via ‘Nietzsche Space’—beneath good and evil, as the mathematicians say. Only a human mind can navigate; the abyss does stare back. Deontonauts are drawn from the ranks of the worst of the worst: criminals, consigned to AV Corp. by the Rehabilitation and Compulsory Moral Uplift Department.
Every human being has a deontic ‘signature’, a set of moral stains, smears and smudges, as a unique function of the actions and events of a lifetime. (This signature is not merely verifiable and reproducible but—since Patel v. State of Mississippi—legally admissible as evidence of personal identity.) To every possible signature there corresponds a possible moral world in which the commission of just that unique range of actions, in which involvement in just that set of events, constitutes the pinnacle of moral perfection. Worlds like our own in all respects save that there—Oh, it is just plain good to kill female infants. For example.
In the words of John Henry Newman: “A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.” This line appears in MA Corp. promotional brochures. For, indeed, the passengers do nothing—are suspended, unconscious, in a state of moral indefinition, insulated from the abysses of Nietzsche-space—as they wait for their pilot to find for each a perfect world on which, due to its ‘uniquely you-fitting deontic contours’, no one will be able to find fault with them.
They stride forth, testaments to our age’s fanatical devotion to rigorous moral self-improvement.
No reputable offer of academic publication opportunities will be refused.
{ 87 comments }
Shen-yi Liao 03.25.11 at 6:08 am
Hi John,
Very interesting! The view that genre partly explains both the fictionality and imaginative puzzles seems very plausible and is, I think, rightly gaining traction. Jonathan Weinberg’s paper in 2008 paper in **New Waves in Aesthetics** and Bence Nanay’s “Imaginative Resistance and Conversational Implicature” (2010) in **Philosophical Quarterly** both mention genre, though I don’t think it’s the central part of their accounts. (Indeed, the original Gendler 2000 mentions genre too, but it’s not the central part of her account either.) I also push for a version of the genre view in a paper available on my website, though I think in a way quite different from your paper.
John Holbo 03.25.11 at 6:38 am
Hi Shen-yi, thanks. I have corresponded quite a bit with Tamar over the years. She has read my thing and likes it, although we have our differences. Thanks for the heads up to the Nanay piece, which I didn’t know. I was just quoting a different Nanay essay in a different thing I just submitted somewhere else. So: small world.
Tim Silverman 03.25.11 at 10:33 am
If you found yourself in a world where morality works differently, how could you tell? If you were reading about a world where morality works differently, how could you tell? If you can’t work out what the moral system is either by looking at the behaviour and attitudes of the inhabitants (mere ‘anthropology’) or the narrative voice (mere ‘disagreement’) how can you work it out?
We also don’t have fiction about worlds in which chalk has all the properties, behaviour and uses that cheese does in our world, and cheese has all the properties, behaviour and uses that chalk does in our world—or do we? How could we tell?
David Kolb 03.25.11 at 10:38 am
Science fiction writers often try to show different moralities, but usually end up with standard good or bad humans in funny costumes, or sheer passion without any communication. One author who comes closer is C. J. Cherryh, who in her early novel Hunter of Worlds has a human learn to deal with a race with different instincts and moral judgments and priorities. They are willing to destroy a planet to uphold a particular kind of honor, for instance, and don’t understand humans. There’s a scene where the aliens discuss among themselves, trying to understand what they take to be human irrational behavior. In her ongoing Foreigner series (named after the first novel, Foreigner), she explores at length the instincts and morality of a society that routinely uses assassinations yet doesn’t fight wars, and is based on loyalty but with no notion of friendship. The societies Cherryh creates are well-crafted, yet at a suitable level of abstraction these societies can still be seen to follow standard moralities, but with different definitions of who/what counts as morally relevant. Perhaps for Davidsonian reasons that is necessary if there is to be any communication or mutual understanding. Cherryh’s characters can understand the others but can’t “live” or feel their lives, lacking the instincts and motivations. She shows aliens struggling to understand humans, and vice versa, but she doesn’t show the aliens or humans struggling to judge or transcend their basic motivations, which would bring a stronger “moral” issue. (There is one possible exception, a young alien in the later volumes of the Foreigner series, who has had an alien/human upbringing and is trying to meld the two.)
LizardBreath 03.25.11 at 11:12 am
I’m not sure I understand the question. Livy, say, is writing in a world with a different morality than ours — when Lucretia kills herself for having been raped, she’s doing a morally good thing, and readers are supposed to recognize that and admire it. And there are thousands of similar examples (the ones that spring to mind are on gender issues, but racial issues are probably similarly fruitful) where a writer is writing on the basis of a morality that differs greatly from that of the average reader.
Obviously, that’s not what you’re talking about, because it’s too easy. But what makes Livy not qualify?
alph 03.25.11 at 11:54 am
I take it that that the ultra-criminal pilots have to be careful not to transport any passenger whose immorality-profile overlaps too extensively with their own. Otherwise, when they arrived at the passenger’s absolving-world, they might find themselves largely absolved as well, and thus insufficiently wicked to navigate back again.
(Or to put this differently: when flitting from moral system to moral system, what stable sense can “worst of the worst” have any longer? Why not draw the deontonauts from the best of the best, given that for any world-bound standard of perfection, there will be some other set of worlds in which that type is an utter rotter? Surely there are no trans-world standards of perfection in this picture?)
Randolph 03.25.11 at 12:45 pm
Hee. Have you considered tor.com for publication?
Have you considered the possibility that people write fiction to find out how they imagine the world “works,” morally?
John Holbo 03.25.11 at 1:28 pm
Yes, maybe I should try just publishing the short story. Tor would be glory enough, after all.
“Have you considered the possibility that people write fiction to find out how they imagine the world “works,†morally?”
Indeed, that would tend to be my working assumption. And this actually tends to support the thought that there are no ‘morally deviant’ fictional worlds (even though it may, at first sight, appear to contradict it). What you learn about how morality ‘works’, in fiction, teaches you how morality ‘works’. Period. It does not deviant from how morality works in the actual world, so it tends to be ported back to your view of the actual world in the form of an expanded moral horizon.Whereas what you learn about how warp drive works is not made, as it were, an extra chapter in your physics textbook.
Re: the Livy case. Yes, it would be a problem if the mere existence of literature – not fiction, maybe, but any writings – by people with different ethical outlooks constituted a decisive counterexample to the view that there is some special difficulty producing ‘morally deviant’ fiction. The short answer would be this: it’s a bit puzzling why we are so sympathetic to Roman standards that seem at odds with our own standards. Are we pluralists, relativists? Grading on a curve? Just confused? But it’s precisely the fact that our tolerance for a Livy-like outlook, in fiction about ancient Rome, matches up to an actual sympathy on our part for a Livy-like outlook by Livy, in the real world, shows that there is no deviance here. Part of the problem is the word ‘deviance’, which makes it sound like I’m saying no one can write fiction about something we now think is bad. No, the puzzle is about deviation in fiction – departure from – our actual moral outlook. Suppose someone wrote an alternative history of W.W II, for example. Get in line, you say. People do it all the time. No. An alternative history in which only one fact is changed: it’s actually morally noble to kill Jews! It’s fictional, you see, so it’s not actually anti-semitic. In writing it you aren’t saying it’s good to kill Jews in the actual world – no more so than you would be saying that faster than light travel is possible, just because you wrote a story about warp drive. If this sounds like some strange sort of nonsense, you are starting to get a sense for what the puzzle is supposed to be.
John Holbo 03.25.11 at 1:35 pm
“One author who comes closer is C. J. Cherryh, who in her early novel Hunter of Worlds has a human learn to deal with a race with different instincts and moral judgments and priorities. They are willing to destroy a planet to uphold a particular kind of honor, for instance, and don’t understand humans. There’s a scene where the aliens discuss among themselves, trying to understand what they take to be human irrational behavior. In her ongoing Foreigner series (named after the first novel, Foreigner), she explores at length the instincts and morality of a society that routinely uses assassinations yet doesn’t fight wars, and is based on loyalty but with no notion of friendship.”
These are more good examples of something that is obviously possible: fiction about alternative moral outlooks. That’s not an example of what I’m talking about in the paper, however. The way to see this is as follows: Cherryh has (let me agree for the sake of argument) shown that a certain moral outlook is intelligible, sensible, has a certain authenticity for those who hold it – strange though it initially seems to us. It’s speculative anthropology. What follows is that if we meet these aliens in the real world, we should be at least somewhat sympathetic to them, as we are in the story. The moral structure of the real world, in which there is something to be said for this outlook, matches the outlook of the fiction. No deviation.
“If you found yourself in a world where morality works differently, how could you tell?”
Indeed! For that matter, you can you tell that it doesn’t work differently in a world in which morality works the same as ours. For example, in our world? (Puzzling stuff, this morality stuff.)
John Holbo 03.25.11 at 1:45 pm
“I take it that that the ultra-criminal pilots have to be careful not to transport any passenger whose immorality-profile overlaps too extensively with their own.”
Good point.
a.y. mous 03.25.11 at 1:45 pm
Status: Rejected
Cause: Prior Art
References: Ayn Rand
dsquared 03.25.11 at 1:46 pm
An alternative history in which only one fact is changed: it’s actually morally noble to kill Jews!
The Bible itself has plenty of stories in which genocide is kind of laughed off; the story of Noah and the Flood is about a being who murders practically every living creature on the planet because they weren’t paying him enough attention, and the lesson you are meant to take away from it is that God loves us all. Because of fucking rainbows.
John Holbo 03.25.11 at 1:59 pm
“Status: Rejected
Cause: Prior Art
References: Ayn Rand”
Ah, but the people who like Ayn Rand export her morality to the actual world. As to the rest: why don’t people who don’t like Rand because they think it is nonsense just enjoy imagining an alternative world in which Randian philosophy is, fictionally, true? They often enjoy reading about hobbits, after all. That is at least as unlikely, after all.
“The Bible itself has plenty of stories in which genocide is kind of laughed off; the story of Noah and the Flood is about a being who murders practically every living creature on the planet because they weren’t paying him enough attention, and the lesson you are meant to take away from it is that God loves us all. Because of fucking rainbows.”
Admittedly, it’s puzzling. Some have argued that somehow it all makes perfect moral sense. Or else that if it doesn’t make sense, that just goes to show that morality itself is as mysterious as Gods’ ways. Others have rejected it as repugnant. Interestingly, no one to my knowledge has argued that we should read the Bible as a fiction about a world in which morality just plain works differently than it does in our world. This suggests that this is not a very normal or usual way to read or write fiction. (This is the argument for the puzzle. Which I think is ultimately not convincing. But just waving the Bible at it won’t do, I think.)
And if you doubt the morality-bending potencies of rainbows, then I think you weren’t reading the internet enough this week:
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/03/16/jack-kirby-my-little-pony/
Tim O'Keefe 03.25.11 at 2:00 pm
Hi John. This is interesting, but I’m still a bit foggy on what your proposal is supposed to be. I should note that the Cherryh-type examples of alien mores need not be merely illustrations of speculative anthropology (although they could be viewed this way). If you’re a (i) contractarian, (ii) Aristotelian, or (iii) Humean about morality, you should be open to the suggestion that differences in things like (i) social structures and expectations, (ii) biological facts and what counts as a flourishing life for a member of a species, or (iii) resources of empathy/fellow-feeling can be morally salient. But I presume you’re not talking about that sort of thing, since (as you note) those sorts of differences could be found within this world and need not involve ‘travel’ to some other ‘morally deviant’ possible world.
But then, what are you talking about? Best I can tell, it would be a world in which all of the ‘natural facts,’ about things like the consequences of our actions, the set-ups of our societies, our feelings and reactive attitudes, etc. etc., are all exactly the same, but morality is different. I.e., you’re denying (or toying with denying) the supervenience of moral properties on natural properties. But as noted above, given some plausible theses about causation, the ‘difference’ in morality between our world and the morally deviant world would be totally undetectable. I don’t think that there are any such possible worlds, ones that differ only morally.
dsquared 03.25.11 at 2:03 pm
Actually thinking about it, most of your lantern-jawed heroes of Golden Age Space Opera are actually basically on missions of genocide, and the background political exposition of why it is that a) we can be sure that mankind isn’t guilty of the war crime of aggression and b) we can be sure that no peaceful political solution is possible is often desperately unconvincing.
Another example might be the work of Robert Smith Surtees, author of endless reams of Victorian-era short stories about Mr Jorrocks, and the jolly fun he has chasing small animals on horseback and then killing them for the pleasure of doing so.
Sam Clark 03.25.11 at 2:06 pm
I’m sorry that I haven’t actually read your draft before replying, only the post here. But at the risk of saying something very obvious: isn’t the issue here moral supervenience? The reason why your morality tale sounds so strange is that the moral appears to supervene on the non-moral, i.e. there is no (even logically) possible world in which everything is exactly the same as in our world, except that the Nazis were the good guys. I mention this mostly from the point of view of publication ideas: possible-world fiction is an interesting way of getting at the question of supervenience and the (non-)conceivability of good Nazis, so you might have more joy pitching it like that…
LizardBreath 03.25.11 at 2:11 pm
But it’s precisely the fact that our tolerance for a Livy-like outlook, in fiction about ancient Rome, matches up to an actual sympathy on our part for a Livy-like outlook by Livy, in the real world, shows that there is no deviance here.
What if I don’t believe I have an actual sympathy for a Livy-like outlook in the real world?
Relaxing in my easy chair with the History of Ancient Rome, I can enter into Livy’s moral world, and admire Lucretia’s nobility in killing herself to provide an example to other women morally weak enough to allow themselves to be raped. Thinking historically, though, about whether Titus Livius, the man born in the first century BC, who wrote that history, was a good person, I can consider him despicable for having such a ghastly concept of what morality requires (or, possibly, cut him some slack and consider his moral error forgivable given that he is immersed in a society inculcating that ghastly concept of morality, but still not sympathize with his morality at all).
I think there’s a clear division between morality-in-Livy’s-world and there-being-something-to-be-said-for-Livy’s-moral-positions-in-the-real-world.
John Holbo 03.25.11 at 2:11 pm
“If you’re a (i) contractarian, (ii) Aristotelian, or (iii) Humean about morality, you should be open to the suggestion that differences in things like (i) social structures and expectations, (ii) biological facts and what counts as a flourishing life for a member of a species, or (iii) resources of empathy/fellow-feeling can be morally salient.”
I’m not sure I understand, Tim, but I think you are saying this: some people think morality is a function of other things, like society and culture and circumstance and so forth. Since those things can deviate, relative to us, morality can deviate. And so obviously you can write fiction about it. So you can write morally deviant fiction. But that’s not the kind of deviation we are talking about. A cube moves down an inclined plane differently than a sphere. But we wouldn’t say that spheres have an alternative or ‘deviant’ physics. There’s just one physics, and it predicts that different bodies will behave differently under different circumstances.
“I don’t think that there are any such possible worlds, ones that differ only morally.”
Yes, but presumably you don’t think there are any hobbits and wizards either, or even that there could be. But you might still read The Hobbit. Why baulk at morally deviant fiction, just because you happen to have a view of morality according to which it’s total nonsense? The idea is supposed to be that we treat morality differently than hobbits.
Jared 03.25.11 at 2:13 pm
Interesting idea — though this kind of fiction seems more about our capacity for imagination than about the (to me more interesting) question of how morality works. After all, if there were universes where a particular pastiche of what we would call good and bad morality was in fact Good, what would that tell us about the moral contours of the universe we live in? I’m not sure it would tell us a lot. Though it is interesting that we have the capacity to think of such a thing.
I like the essay snippet, though. Thanks for sharing it.
bob mcmanus 03.25.11 at 2:17 pm
What if “cats” were “dogs?” Now of course I am not talking about a fictional world in which the mere names of “cats” and “dogs” were reversed, nor about a fictional world in which the various attributes of the animals we call “cats” and “dogs” were exchanged. No, something more puzzling, more difficult, much more interesting: can we imagine a world where “cats” were “dogs?” What would such a world mean?
You say you are having difficulty grasping my intention? That is exactly the point, that is what is so fascinating about this thought experiment.
John Holbo 03.25.11 at 2:23 pm
“What if I don’t believe I have an actual sympathy for a Livy-like outlook in the real world?”
But how can you have great sympathy for Livy and his outlook, as expressed in his writings, without having any sympathy for Livy-like outlooks in the actual world. Livy was actual, and wrote about the actual world, and he was, like, the most Livy-like guy ever. This seems to me like saying I sympathize with David Brooks. I enter into the outlook he expresses in his columns about politics and culture. But I despise his actual views of politics and culture. I guess you can split the difference by saying that he seems charming and you like the way he writes. (Yes, yes, purely hypothetical.) But that’s different. You say there’s a clear division between something about Livy and something else about him. But I’m not really seeing what you are getting at.
(I’m in a funny position here in comments because I’m playing devil’s advocate on behalf of a position I argue is wrong. Mostly I’m trying to argue that it isn’t as obviously wrong as everyone thinks, or not quite for the reasons people will first reach for.)
chris 03.25.11 at 2:24 pm
@12: Also, the story where it’s morally noble to kill *your own child* if God asks you to.
But, sadly, people import that one into their own moral universe, too.
If you found yourself in a world where morality works differently, how could you tell? If you were reading about a world where morality works differently, how could you tell?
If you’re *already* in a world where morality works differently than you think it works, how can you tell? Whip out your evilometer and take a reading? Morality isn’t a science for the same reason theology isn’t a science — in spite of generations of effort, its putative subject matter has never been observed or detected. (On the other hand, it’s relatively easy to imagine a world where theology *does* have a subject matter and *is* a science. Ditto thaumaturgy.)
I think, ultimately, this question is in some sense empty — it can only be made to look like a question by projecting the shadows in our own minds onto external reality and mistaking them for objects. Because morality is a creation of mind, it doesn’t exist in the world at all; therefore, a world where it “exists” differently is just a world perceived through the eyes of someone with different moral concepts.
Maybe you ought to start with a world where morality *does* exist in a real sense, and people discover new moral truths by observation and hypothesis testing rather than inventing moral principles by introspection or pronouncement from authority. Presumably, the founder of this new branch of science would be the first person who discovered how to observe good and evil directly, rather than just guessing which actions are which, and researchers in observational morality would discover which traditional beliefs about morality are confirmed by rigorous scientific observation and which are as misguided as geocentrism or creationism. (It might be difficult to write this without authorially coming down on one side or another of issues that are morally controversial in the author’s own world, though.)
John Holbo 03.25.11 at 2:26 pm
“You say you are having difficulty grasping my intention? That is exactly the point, that is what is so fascinating about this thought experiment.”
I think I grasp your intention just fine, bob. But I still don’t find the thought-experiment fascinating. Yet the opposite was supposed to be the case. So I conclude that the thought-experiment actually isn’t as fascinating as you think.
Tim O'Keefe 03.25.11 at 2:33 pm
“Yes, but presumably you don’t think there are any hobbits and wizards either, or even that there could be. But you might still read The Hobbit. Why baulk at morally deviant fiction, just because you happen to have a view of morality according to which it’s total nonsense? The idea is supposed to be that we treat morality differently than hobbits.”
John, I think that there could be hobbits, just that there aren’t any. So I don’t think that the notion of hobbits is total nonsense or impossible. If you say, “Imagine a world in which genocide is morally obligatory,” (and not just one in which some people believe it is or whatever), the obvious response is, “Uh, I’ll try, but what is it about that world that makes genocide morally obligatory in that world?” And if your answer is, “No, no–it’s a world exactly like ours in every other respect, but in which genocide is morally obligatory,” I just gotta say that I can’t imagine anything like that. I have no idea at all what such a world would be like. (Whereas I can imagine worlds in which differences in morally salient natural facts make a moral difference–but as you note, that’s not what you’re after.)
That’s why I was bringing up the examples of social, biological
John Holbo 03.25.11 at 2:35 pm
“I think, ultimately, this question is in some sense empty—it can only be made to look like a question by projecting the shadows in our own minds onto external reality and mistaking them for objects. Because morality is a creation of mind, it doesn’t exist in the world at all; therefore, a world where it “exists†differently is just a world perceived through the eyes of someone with different moral concepts.”
But minds are in the world. So if morality is a creation of mind, it exists in the world. So this is another way of confirming the ‘no deviant moral fictions’ hypothesis. To put it another way, saying the only alternate morality that we can imagine is a world with different sorts of minds is like saying the only alternate physics we can imagine is a world with a contingently different collection of physical objects in it. That is, not an alternate physics at all.
LizardBreath 03.25.11 at 2:42 pm
But how can you have great sympathy for Livy and his outlook, as expressed in his writings, without having any sympathy for Livy-like outlooks in the actual world.
I don’t really have sympathy for Livy’s outlook even when I’m reading his history. I have admiration for Lucretia’s nobility, in the imaginary world Livy wrote about in which her suicide is noble rather in the real world in which it would be demented service to a misguided and immoral ideal. Sort of like I can have empathy for and imaginatively enter into Frodo’s fear of the Nazgul without either believing that they’re something that a sane person could believe in or fear in the real world. I don’t actually care if Tolkein was a crazy person who thought he was writing factual history, or a sane writer of fiction while I’m reading the book — Tolkein isn’t present inside the Lord of the Rings.
dsquared 03.25.11 at 2:42 pm
Thinking about it, there are plenty of Western novels in which genocidally massacring Native Americans is considered to be a more or less morally obligatory thing to do – or at the very least, in which the heroes are actively engaged in a programme of genocidal extermination.
John Holbo 03.25.11 at 2:54 pm
“John, I think that there could be hobbits, just that there aren’t any.”
What about wizards?
Or Lewis Carroll-type nonsense stuff? This is discussed in the paper: the idea that we have a rather high tolerance for certain sorts of logical and conceptual nonsense, but somehow we baulk at making morality a party to it. (And, after all, it’s not so hard to reason, in a limited sort of way, about a world in which genocide is morally obligatory. You can suppose that, for reductio purposes, in the actual world. Why not imagine it, for fictional purposes?)
And on that note: I’m going to do something else, then going to bed, so I probably won’t contribute to the thread again for 10 hours or so. I am gratified at getting so much discussion so far. I feel that all the things I’ve said in comments I already said in the paper itself. (That’s ok. I don’t mind.) So if you are really bothered by what I’m saying, and think I’m missing something, you should probably read the paper. It’s about all the things that have come up in comments, anyway.
bob mcmanus 03.25.11 at 2:56 pm
21:It was an attempt at sarcasm and parody.
“No, no—it’s a world exactly like ours in every other respect, but in which genocide is morally obligatory,â€
The problem (?) lies in our definition of morality as practical reason. Given a set of differing contingencies and traditions, we can “understand” even Carthaginians tossing their firstborns into flames. Or Livy, in Livy’s world. Our world is not Livy’s, and is considered larger than the Nazi’s. The Nazis “thought wrongly,” were not fully rational. And that which is not rational is not moral.
Therefore what we attempting here is to find a different kind of reason, a people/world that thinks differently than us, yet is still somehow comprehensible to us. This, for obvious reasons, will be difficult.
“What hidden wisdom it is to wear long ears, and only to say Yea and never Nay! Hath he not created the world in his own image, namely, as stupid as possible?
—The ass, however, here brayed YE-A. “
William Timberman 03.25.11 at 3:04 pm
Like many people who wind up immersed in fascinating threads like this one, I read an awful lot as a young teenager. My parents had a large library, and I learned fairly early to go poaching in it, trying to understand how adults thought, and why even their most benevolent aspects filled me with dread.
When I was 13, I read Brave New World, which technically doesn’t qualify as a novel in which an alternate morality holds sway, I suppose, but it does pretend to be such a novel. How successfully it does so is arguable — but not if you happen to be 13 at the time you’re reading it. I recognized it immediately as a different moral universe, different from the moral universe I was being instructed in, anyway, but not the one I was actually living in, where the Ministry of Truth, in the form of that same adult instruction, was omnipresent. It was, if anything, slightly less implacable, or at least it seemed so to me. When Julia loosened the red sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League, I was almost painfully aware of the possibility of redemption.
The moral of this story, it seems to me, is that you don’t have to go anywhere to live in an alternate moral universe. Many of us dip in and out of one all the time, whether we’re aware of it or not. It has something to do, I believe, with the human capacity for self deception.
John Holbo 03.25.11 at 3:07 pm
OK, one last comment before heading off.
dsquared writes: “Thinking about it, there are plenty of Western novels in which genocidally massacring Native Americans is considered to be a more or less morally obligatory thing to do – or at the very least, in which the heroes are actively engaged in a programme of genocidal extermination.”
This ends up being pretty much my point in the paper. Close to it anyway. I use the example of Superman and how, mysteriously, it’s ‘good’ when he tosses cars full of crooks around.
Lizardbreath: “I don’t really have sympathy for Livy’s outlook even when I’m reading his history. I have admiration for Lucretia’s nobility, in the imaginary world Livy wrote about.”
This is complicated because Livy didn’t take the work to be fiction. It’s not an imaginary world to him. Of course you can take it as such. But then we are back to the David Brooks case. You could take all his columns to be about an imaginary world in which his brand of conservatism is peculiarly noble, even though in the actual world it’s kind of nuts (let’s suppose we agree that, in the actual world, it’s kind of nuts.) But this would be a weird way to read David Brooks, obviously. I’m not trying to be dismissive, it’s just that the analogy is a bit hard to work out. Suppose the case were this: you are reading an panegyric to Pinochet (the sort of thing his defenders might have written) and you might say: the Pinochet I’m reading about here is very noble and did only what was necessary. I admire him. Of course, the real Pinochet is quite different. Now, what is it that makes the difference? I don’t think it’s that we are imagining an alternative possible world in which, unlike in our world, it was good to do what Pinochet did. The explanation is rather different.
This is sort of related to stuff I get on to in the second half of the paper. Where I quote Landy on Richardson’s Pamela. You might consider skipping to that point and seeing if it makes any sense to you, if you don’t care to slog through to that point.
Anyway, that’s (probably) it from me until tomorrow.
dsquared 03.25.11 at 3:16 pm
further to that, I am pretty sure that Chris doesn’t completely endorse the version of political and social morality exemplified by Jack Reacher.
John Holbo 03.25.11 at 3:18 pm
ok, ONE more.
Bob McManus: “21:It was an attempt at sarcasm and parody.”
I know, I know. I said I understood your intention, didn’t I? (Didn’t you believe me?)
Also, Sam Clark’s comment, and a couple others, only just got turned on. Sorry about that.
chris 03.25.11 at 3:30 pm
But minds are in the world. So if morality is a creation of mind, it exists in the world.
Wait, what? Minds, *plural*, exist in the world and they have *different* concepts of morality. When you say morality “exists in the world” in a sense that you need to go to a different world to have a different morality, I thought you were talking about the idea that one particular moral outlook is privileged in a particular world (i.e. what people ordinarily mean by “moral realism”). That makes what you said a complete non sequitur. The fact that several (actually, lots of) moral systems “exist” in a world, in the sense that someone in that world believes in them, doesn’t make any of them real in that world in the moral realism sense.
You might as well say that because hobbits exist in Tolkien’s mind, and Tolkien existed in the world, hobbits exist in the world. It’s just a funny way of playing with the word “exist”. (Or if you object that Tolkien knew hobbits were fictional, just substitute “witches” and “witch hunters”, or “Zeus” and “a bunch of ancient Greeks”, etc.) People who think that morality exists want it to have a thicker form of existence than “has been imagined by someone”.
That’s the reason for my previous point that before you can imagine crossing from one moral-realism universe to a different moral-realism universe with a different real morality, you have to first cross from our existing everyone-invent-your-own-morality universe to *some* kind of moral-realism universe and *that’s* the part that’s really hard to imagine.
Kaveh 03.25.11 at 3:30 pm
@13 Interestingly, no one to my knowledge has argued that we should read the Bible as a fiction about a world in which morality just plain works differently than it does in our world. This suggests that this is not a very normal or usual way to read or write fiction.
Isn’t that the whole medieval fantasy genre in a nutshell? Or even The Lion King? [1]
I think this is actually how most people read action movies, gangster movies, westerns, Golden Age Space Opera, as #15 says, and medieval fantasy. One of the main conceits of this kind of fiction is that a certain kind of badassery is justified. Different works and genres have their own ways of establishing this conceit. Heroic “white hat” action heroes are always in improbable situations where reckless violence is justified by extraordinary circumstances. Gangster movies ask us to accept an alternate moral code. Even when the writer tries to put gangster morality into contact with real morality (to contextualize and thus repudiate the former) like apparently was the case with Scarface, it doesn’t always work–supposedly, a lot of actual gangsters love Scarface.
Lord of the Rings takes things a step further, so it’s more ambitious as morality fiction. While there’s nothing really controversial about the alternate morality of gangster movies, LOTR takes on the issue of race: Middle Earth is a world in which there really are distinct races, and biology/racial heritage determines your character. The goodguys’ armies are racially-segregated, unlike those of the badguys. And LOTR was written during WWII, and it seems like Tolkien developed the main ideas behind his fictional universe in the 1910-20s (when the stories included in the Silmarilion & Book of Lost Tales were written).
What’s interesting to me, and what may make these examples unsatisfying to JH as morality fiction, is that they tend to refer to long-ago history. Even space opera seems to be essentially the Early Modern Indian Ocean with different “furniture”.
fn1: Cracked.com: 9 Famous Movie Villains Who Were Right All Along It may not be obvious to non-USA readers how much the movie is invested in American race politics, which makes the point about the hyenas especially interesting.
LizardBreath 03.25.11 at 3:35 pm
This is complicated because Livy didn’t take the work to be fiction. It’s not an imaginary world to him.
Do we know that it wasn’t fiction to Livy? Or, rather, that the moral outlook wasn’t fiction? It’s perfectly plausible to me that a friend of Livy’s might have walked up to him and said, “Titus, great history, but that Lucretia bit — do you really think that’s how a noble woman should behave if she’s raped? Kind of harsh.”
And that Livy might have responded, “Golly, no, she’d have to be demented to do that sort of thing. Really, it’s wrong of me to implicitly put pressure on women who have been raped to commit suicide. But the public eats it up — I put in someone acting like that, and it makes them think the whole thing’s uplifting.” That is to say, he could have been cynically representing a world in which morality was different from the morality he himself accepted. I don’t have any information suggesting that this is actually true about Livy, but it’s clearly not implausible about a hypothetical fiction-writer generally.
Zamfir 03.25.11 at 3:41 pm
I just finished a book by EE Smith, in which the the hero (who is literally described as being virtuous and having a strong jaw) eventually escapes from the aliens by putting a lethal gas in the oxygen supply of the entire city. He is rather proud of it too, and says something like “When you gave me that laboratory to play with, you didn’t think I could do this!”
After this, the aliens respect humans as a mature and capable race, and are willing to make treaty and start trade relations. Now that everyone is friends, the aliens are described as cold and evil in many ways, but that they also have virtues that humans lack, such as the ability to rationally accept that murdering a city was the reasonable thing to do.
dsquared 03.25.11 at 3:57 pm
Gangster movies ask us to accept an alternate moral code
and how! Guy Ritchie has made an entire career out of films where the lovable, upright good-guy heroes are by any sensible definition scum.
SusanC 03.25.11 at 4:18 pm
Superhero comics may be “the exception that proves the rule”. For sure, their fictional universe has a different morality from ours. But those kind of comics are widely seen as bad: sometimes in the moral sense of bad (e.g. the Comics Code Authority and the moral panic over horror comics) but more often as aesthetically bad. This would tend to support the ideal you can’t have a fictional morality: an attempt to do so either produces a work that is seen as morally bad in the real world, or an artistic failure (because it attempts something that can’t be made to work), or both.
The alternative morality of the typical superhero comic doesn’t stand close inspection; if you try to add too much psychological realism and go into the inner lives of the characters, it tends to fall apart.
Notable exceptions:
1. When I was watching Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight, I was thinking “I know some of these people. Hell, I’m probably one of those people myself.” But The Dark Knight is distinctly ambivalent about Batman–it’s morality is not so deviant.
2. Watchmen plays on our expectation that there will be an alternative morality in the fiction. But instead, it portrays the superheros as fascists and perverts. i.e. Watchmen’s fictional morality is no so far different from that of the real world (and part of the gag is that we expect it to be different).
SusanC 03.25.11 at 4:23 pm
There’s a related idea that often comes up in discussions of Ezra Pound, or Martin Heidegger: is a work of poetry (or philosophy) necessarily bad as poetry/philosophy if we think it’s author’s political ideas are suspect.
Randolph 03.25.11 at 4:27 pm
Suppose someone wrote an alternative history of W.W II, for example. Get in line, you say. People do it all the time. No. An alternative history in which only one fact is changed: it’s actually morally noble to kill Jews!
Randolph 03.25.11 at 4:28 pm
oops! The quotes and links in that one got mangled. sorry, folks.
Aulus Gellius 03.25.11 at 5:04 pm
I think the Western and gangster novel ideas are right, and more generally, historical fiction, rather than sf, is the place to look for this stuff. “The Three Musketeers” is pretty explicit on this point: the main characters are very much devoted to a moral code that routinely involves killing people who have done nothing wrong, and whom they like and respect, over absurd misunderstandings or disagreements. And Dumas has occasional asides, not to defend the characters, but just to remind you that they operate on different moral premises which seem bizarre or barbaric to us. He doesn’t (as far as I remember) seem at all interested in exploring the reasons for the difference, or trying to find some more basic set of principles that could prove one set of morals right and the other wrong; he just wants to make sure you don’t miss the point by thinking that a character who tries to murder his best friend over an idiotic misunderstanding must be evil.
SusanC 03.25.11 at 5:06 pm
To me, at least, this seems entirely plausible as an opening for a fantasy/SF novel. That is, there’s nothing about it that clearly can’t occur in a work of fiction (or indeed, a work of fiction in the SF genre). It’s rather reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin’s speculative anthropology (e.g. The Left Hand of Darkness or Always Coming Home).
As I said above, I don’t find superhero comics to be a convincing counterexample because they’re widely thought to be bad. Ideally, you’ld want a work of fiction that’s generally well-regarded, but still manages to include a counter-factual morality.
P.S. One time, I was looking up something in online version of The Catholic Encyclopedia and got banner ads for role-playing games. A quick survey of my RPG-playing friends revealed that many of them use the Catholic Encyclopedia as a reference for role-playing games; they’re reading it as fantasy fiction, even if this was not the writers’ intent.
chris 03.25.11 at 5:57 pm
“In killing her baby Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girlâ€.
To me, at least, this seems entirely plausible as an opening for a fantasy/SF novel.
True, but I don’t think the author would expect the reader to seriously enter into the idea that it *was* the right thing, only that it was the accepted thing in the society Giselda came from. (Under certain conditions, one must presume, otherwise how does the society continue existing?) Contrast “As Giselda reached the top of the hill, she saw a dragon by the river below”, in which the reader probably *would* accept that there was an actual dragon (notwithstanding the absence of dragons in the reader’s own world). The existence of dragons is “slippable” (I believe the technical term is “contingent”)[1] in the same way that the morality of selective infanticide generally isn’t.
There’s something somehow arrogant about assuming that one’s own (or one’s own society’s) moral code must apply everywhere, not only in this world but in all possible worlds, isn’t there? But ISTM that if you already apply such an analysis to everywhere in this world, it’s not that much of a stretch to apply it to everywhere in every world. (Aside from questions like “is it cannibalism to eat a hobbit, or a Narnian talking animal”, which just explore the not-quite-completely-defined areas of existing moral codes. Presumably if one were to genetically engineer a hobbit or a talking animal in this world, the same result, whatever it is, would apply here too.)
[1] Moral reasoning is one already-developed area of modal logic, but this seems to call for doubly-modal logic: you need one set of modal operators for permissive vs. mandatory, and another for variable vs. inevitable. Is it inevitably true that it is morally forbidden to sacrifice children to Baal, or only contingently true (in this universe)?
Jerry Vinokurov 03.25.11 at 5:58 pm
I am surprised that no one has yet mentioned how reminiscent this story is of Stanislaw Lem’s Star Diaries. Is there a Lem influence at work here, John?
LizardBreath 03.25.11 at 6:17 pm
43: I like the Three Musketeers as a counter-example. Really, I find myself wanting to deny that the imaginative resistance to alternate moralities that’s being assumed as a premise exists in any really meaningful sense.
a.y. mous 03.25.11 at 6:48 pm
Pride killeth. JH, you have no idea what you cost me at the 19th hole. But, you quoting me, if only to dismiss it, was worth it.
I’m currently reading a pop-sci book by Stephen Hawking. An observation he makes (on the subject of the strong anthropomorphic principle), paraphrasing, “It is like saying the Pope is Chinese because there are a billion plus Chinese on earth and the probability of a Chinese Pope is highest. The fact is, the Pope is German, however small the probability of a German Pope is.”
A deviant fiction would by definition not be deviant because that fiction will be the output of the same judgemental authority of both fiction and deviance
One of Eco’s books, “The Name of the Rose” has as its protagonist Aristotle’s Second Book of Poetics (My referencing Eco, who refers a Medieval monk, who refers a fictitious book. Is that a jolt or a plain old jerk?). Would that be what you are looking for in terms of deviant fiction? Theories and values non applicable to current social structure but comprehensible within the same structure?
a.y. mous 03.25.11 at 7:18 pm
And lets bring a pathological result of such a fiction. “Bebi stei ye push yo oh” could construed as infanticide
Prisencolinensinainciusol
In de col men seivuan
Prisencolinensinainciusol ol rait
Uis de seim cius nau op de seim
Ol uait men in de colobos dai
Trrr – ciak is e maind beghin de col
Bebi stei ye push yo oh
Uis de seim cius nau op de seim
Ol uoit men in de colobos dai
Not s de seim laikiu de promisdin
Iu nau in trabol lovgiai ciu gen
In do camo not cius no bai for lov so
Op op giast cam lau ue cam lov ai
Oping tu stei laik cius go mo men
Iu bicos tue men cold dobrei goris
Oh sandei
Ai ai smai sesler
Eni els so co uil piso ai
In de col men seivuan
Prisencolinensinainciusol ol rait
Ai ai smai senflecs
Eni go for doing peso ai
Prisencolinensinainciusol ol rait
Uel ai sint no ai giv de sint
Laik de cius nobodi oh gud taim lev feis go
Uis de seim et seim cius go no ben
Let de cius end kai for not de gai giast stei
Ai ai smai senflecs
Eni go for doing peso ai
In de col mein seivuan
Prisencolinensinainciusol ol rait
Lu nei si not sicidor
Ah es la bebi la dai big iour
Ai aismai senflecs
Eni go for doing peso ai
In de col mein seivuan
Prisencolinensinainciusol ol rait
Lu nei si not sicodor
Ah es la bebi la dai big iour
a.y. mous 03.25.11 at 7:22 pm
Proof that deviation as required in this discussion, has to come forth from nonsense. Would you agree with the right and the wrong, for not even wrong reasons?
SusanC 03.25.11 at 7:24 pm
@chris: In modal logic, it’s pretty common to have operators for possible/necessary and permitted/forbidden in the same logic. Then you can ask questions about whether these operators commute with each other (the answer may be different depending on which kind of modal logic you’re working in).
@Jerry: John’s story remined me of Lem, too. I thought it was a deliberate pastiche.
SusanC 03.25.11 at 7:27 pm
As more examples of moral counterfactuals:
Gene Wolf, The Book of the New Sun. (Severian’s attitude to torture is different from ours, among other things).
Grand Theft Auto.
bianca steele 03.25.11 at 7:37 pm
Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five?
Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street?
These two do involve a character’s entering into a moral outlook she at first rejected.
I have a post about to go on The Killer Angels, which might qualify, and it might not be a coincidence that the author was first a science fiction writer.
There are any number of ethnic novels that might also qualify in confronting the reader with an alternative morality.
phosphorious 03.25.11 at 8:57 pm
“is there morality fiction? ”
I’m not entirely sure that sides in this debate are entirely well defined, but I won’t let that stop me from answering in the negative, for the following reason:
Judging the morality of an action involves understanding the motives for that action. In a case where an actor’s morality is completely alien from our own, this would mean that their actions would simply appear to us to be unmotivated or random. We couldn’t say why these people were doing the things they were doing. And a story about characters who act at random would simply fail to engage the reader; such a character could not be rooted for, or even against.
(I will stand by these remarks, only until they are challenged)
Adam Roberts 03.25.11 at 10:32 pm
I’m thinking about Star Trek’s The Borg.
It seems to me that questions as to whether it is morally acceptable (or noble) to sacrifice your son to your God, or kill yourself if you’ve been raped, do achieve a measure of consensus on a meta level. Which is to say, Tribe A feel obliged to make war on Tribe B for their appalling habit of sacrificing their children to the gods, where Tribe B feel equally compelled to make war on Tribe A for their appalling habit of refusing to sacrifice their children to their gods: but the conflict happens within a framework we can describe as moral — in the sense that both tribes, whilst disagreeing with the specific moral beliefs of the other, agree that moral beliefs themselves are terribly important. But what’s so splendid about the Borg is that they step entirely outside that framework. My favourite bit is this exchange from ep. 1 of ‘Best of Both Worlds’:
PICARD: I will resist you with my last ounce of strength.
THE BORG: Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile…Your culture will adapt to service ours.
PICARD: Impossible! My culture is based on freedom and self-determination.
THE BORG: Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant. You must comply.
PICARD: We would rather die.
THE BORG: Death is irrelevant.
Is this the kind of moral fiction you’re talking about, I wonder?
john c. halasz 03.26.11 at 12:10 am
I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at here, (though I’ve read just the post and comments and not the whole pdf.) And I’m not really sure that we know how (and if) morality “works”, and I don’t think a systematic formal-rational moral theory has proven possible, such that we are left prey to conflicting moral intuitions and possibly incommensurable values, (which is not to give up on the issue, but to recognize it’s tragic potentials). However, is what you’re trying to get at something like Kant’s “radical evil”, in which immoral acts are not simply the result of weakness, inclination, or self-interest, but are engaged in and motivated by the same formal universality and disinterestedness as he takes to define moral acts. Of course, Kant doesn’t think such “radical evil” is really possible, at least for us, but, since he is addressing all possible rational beings and not just finite, sense-bound rational beings, presumably he’s thinking of the demonic, such as Mephistopheles. But it does seem to me that principled opposition to morality is possible, insofar as there is a recognition that prevailing morality is immoral. Of course, that involves some implicit appeal to a “higher” morality. But that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the new morality is thereby “universal” or straightforwardly supersedes and somehow incorporates the old morality. Rather moral change involves an element of moral inversion, of which Kant effectively denies the historical possibility. But isn’t moral change one of the main topics that much classic fiction is “about”? And in ways that chart not just the scope and limits of moral recognitions, but the losses and gains that they entail for our “humanity”.
William Timberman 03.26.11 at 12:50 am
Myself @ 30
Gawd, is my face red. I meant, of course, 1984. Utopia, dystopia, what’s the difference, right? And to think it’s taken me this long to realize what I did. I’m having the bottoms of my trousers rolled forthwith.
Martin 03.26.11 at 1:33 am
What about Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream. Of course it is intended to be ironic. But I think the point of the book is that the typical science fiction/fantasy reader, carried along by the usual plot etc. elements that carry one along in much of this (and other) literature, finds himself (maybe in some cases herself, but him seems more likely given the genre being parodied) fictionally identifying with the pseudo-Nazisim of the book’s “author” even while simultaneously recognizing the book’s critique of what one is identifying with.
Matt McIrvin 03.26.11 at 2:06 am
I did once write a little story similar to John’s, in which the Good is discovered, in the manner of Manicheanism, to be a physical substance with constituent particles. This results in the construction of, first, a ray that will transform any crime into a positive good (without changing its physical circumstances), and, later, a bomb that will destroy the Earth by converting its mass into a sphere of pure moral goodness. Nobody can come up with a valid reason not to detonate the bomb!
The thing is, though, it came across as, and was intended as, more a reductio ad absurdum than a serious suggestion that such a thing might be possible. And since Augustine was railing against the Manicheans long, long ago, it probably wasn’t necessary.
Lee A. Arnold 03.26.11 at 2:30 am
I’m not sure you can write serious deviant morality fiction, if successful = reader enjoyment + sales. This is because the thrill of serious fiction is when the reader emotionally identifies with the protagonist’s self-revelation in the plot climax (to be mechanical about it). If your reader is unable to follow that emotionally, then the whole thing will feel like a bad joke.
So the writer’s possible way out is to do it as comedy or farce, because in comedy, the ONLY rule is, “Is it funny?” If it is funny, you can break a lot of plot and character rules, and nobody cares. There is a film genre of “contract killers as nice people” that comes close to it, and for my taste they all illustrate the basic problem for realism and lasting artistic value, but they are crowd-pleasers: e.g., Grosse Pointe Blank, Pulp Fiction. Some common attributes appear to be: they use black-comedy (i.e., cynicism and skepticism); the deviant protagonist(s) have ancillary normal virtues; and of course, they must battle even WORSE villains.
BlaiseP 03.26.11 at 3:23 am
Within the 7 + 5 problem lies an interesting conjecture: what constitutes the sum of two primes? To invalidate Goldbach’s Conjecture, let us stipulate, provisionally to this observation: either 7 or 5 would no longer be prime, perhaps neither.
We are not talking about a Loaves and Fishes problem. In Matthew 14, two fishes and fives loaves (both primes) are converted into food for 5,000, not counting women and children: this everyone calls a Miracle. In Gendler’s little experiment, (which I have not read, only the Way of Worlds draft pace we are told 7 + 5 no longer sum to a value congruent with Goldbach’s Conjecture.
Is this a sort of Miracle, too? Do all sums of primes fail Goldbach’s Conjecture, or merely this particular sum? Does the Commutative Property still work, wherein 5 + 7 might sum to 12? And why might God be annoyed by such a conjecture? If the sum of two arbitrary numbers is even, how would God affect the outcome to make an even one-for-me and one-for-thee division of 12 balls result in an unequal distribution?
That’s my problem with sci-fi, and why I have completely abandoned the genre after four decades of steady reading. I paid my dues. I paid for the books. I respect the authors, as far as it’s possible. I haven’t declared the genre beyond salvation, but my increasing distaste for homiletic outgrew my yearning imagination. It’s like reading sermons preached by Kafka. The genre is exhausted. Tell me a story. William Vollmann tells me a story. He doesn’t preach a sermon.
bread and roses 03.26.11 at 7:09 am
It seems like the Left Behind series would fulfill your qualifications.
Kenny Easwaran 03.26.11 at 7:26 am
Given the fact that at any meta-ethics talk I always ask a question about how this theory of normativity applies to the norms of epistemology, I’m surprised I didn’t have the same thought when looking at some of this imaginative resistance stuff. Sure, they’ve considered fictions with deviant logic, metaphysics, mathematics, etc, but have they considered deviant epistemology? Say, a fiction in which beliefs are justified iff they are witty rather than on the basis of evidence? Or a fiction in which E being less likely given H than given H’ means that E is evidence in favor of H over H’? The logical fictions touch on some of the epistemology, but perhaps not on the normative aspect of it.
John Holbo 03.26.11 at 8:30 am
“Say, a fiction in which beliefs are justified iff they are witty rather than on the basis of evidence?”
Interestingly, I’ve already written that epistemically deviant fiction. (I must have a knack for pushing the boundaries!)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jholbo/3551452000/in/set-72157616711801050/
“Squid says no belief is valid/Until you sing it as a ballad.”
John Holbo 03.26.11 at 8:32 am
Except technically this is just a case of someone – namely, Squid – having an epistemically eccentric view. I guess I need to go back and show how, in the world of that fiction, he’s actually right. But since he’s right slightly more often than Owl, there is a good chance of it.
Frank ashe 03.26.11 at 1:43 pm
“In killing her baby Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girlâ€.
For anybody who reads science fiction, how could you not assume you were in a world where this was morally right? Maybe SF also includes MF as a sub-genre.
x.trapnel 03.26.11 at 5:06 pm
I really will read the paper, but based only on the post & comments, it strikes me that the reason for the impossibility–absent something like morality particles (I do love Dworkin’s dubbing them ‘morons’ a la neutrons & protons)–is a version of the Aumann Agreement Theorem. If we take morality to be fundamentally about rationality or reasonableness, about doing what you have reason to do, then there’s really no room for truly ‘deviant’ morality. You can have an agent located at a point in the space of reasons that you, the reader, could never get to, but insofar as the agent is still subject to acting-for-reasons, you’re both in the same dimensional space.
If that’s so, then any counterexamples would also, at least implicitly, challenge this view of morality. Which perhaps is why the Old Testament & Westerns/old-style Space Opera seem plausible–the former (perhaps) embodies a divine-command morality, the latter a curious sort of ‘whatever would need to be good for the protagonist to be Good, is’ view.
SusanC 03.26.11 at 5:12 pm
It’s kind of hard to determine if a moral rule is “objectively true” in the real world (though you can tell when a particular person says that they believe it). Maybe there is no fact of the matter. If there isn’t a fact of the matter in the real world, then there may well be no fact of the matter in a fictional world either. This would make “moral counterfactuals” impossible: the fictional world just can’t disagree with the real world’s morality, because the real world doesn’t have a morality to disagree with.
If you think moral rules are objectively true (e.g. because God says so, and God is in position of authority to say that), then this opens up the possibility that they might only be contingently true (God might have decreed something else).
In some alternate reality, this Easter time I am sitting down with my family to eat the traditional desert with nutmeg, in memory of Eli the nutmeg merchant and his wife Rebekah, who courageously led the Jewish people out of Egypt and brought down the eleven Commandments from the mountain… This seems only contingently false, rather than necessarily false (and clearly viable as SF, along the lines of Keith Robert’s Pavane).
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The idea that morality is a property of a place, so that morality changes when you go somewhere (travelling via Nietzsche-space) seems implausible (necessarily false rather than contingently false?), but no worse than the dodgy physics often seen in SF. Event Horizon might be a example. But also “Heaven hath a noble Lady, who doth take \\ Ruth of this man thou goest to disensnare \\ Such that high doom is cancelled for her sake”—Beatrice cannot name the Blessed Virgin Mary while she is in Hell.
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In Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, it is hinted that the aliens (if they exist) do not consider harm to humans to be morally relevant (or possibly, don’t consider it at all). Our own morality tends to put humans centre-stage, so it would be a bit shocking to encouter an intelligent creature that doesn’t think we have rights. You’ld need an alien equivalent of Peter Singer to argue for us.
SusanC 03.26.11 at 6:00 pm
As further evidence that the morality fiction genre exists…
Sturgeon, Theodore. If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister? In <i<Dangerous Visions, 1967.
Lee A. Arnold 03.26.11 at 7:16 pm
Change space, time, and death, and still have a sentimental education:
Story premise: Suppose death merely inverts our dimensional abilities. In life we have four dimensions, three of space that we move around in, and one of time where we are stuck, moving along with it.
What if death reverses this? We lose spatial extension, body no longer needed, but then we are able to move back and forth in time?
But the engineers at 27th-Century ThanatoTravel don’t know this. Worse still, they are driven by a ruthless megalomaniac who wants to rule the world. And he has a plan. He figures you’ll pay big bucks to visit your ancestors and be back with granny’s lost recipes by dinnertime. Step one. Then he will have enough money to buy up all the beachfront property, and you will have to rent the umbrellas, too. Step two. He’ll kill anybody to get there. Steps three, four, five. It’s a twelve-step plan, though several are repeaters.
So, as per the business prospectus, the first test team of thanatonauts is suited up (or coffined down), they drink the potion and get zapped by the machine — but suddenly they are in the inverted dimensions!
All the physics equations are upside down. They find themselves to be everywhere. “They’re built like light.” Indeed they interpenetrate with all who passed before, which turns out to be a little less icky than it might sound. And they can visit different times. That way, they can discover everything, before it happens. They can find out who did what before, and all the harm that will come.
But the engineers at ThanatoTravel are oblivious to these effects. When the time is up, they try to bring them back, checking their pulses. But something’s not working! Is death to remain a one-way ticket?
From their end, the thanatonauts try to communicate. Unfortunately, the communication comes throughout Lifeside’s regular spacetime continuum.
Indeed: back in the engineering department of ThanatoTravel, the epistemetric dials are waggling like mad! Ethereal reports of space-filling omniscience are popping out all over history and in current dreams; more hazy, crazy reports of ghosts and spirits in the night; and all the way back from the 21st Century, there are suddenly 7 more Harry Potter books.
The megalomaniac comes storming down to engineering. He is having remorseful daydreams about candy he stole from the grocer when he was 10, his wife just called because her astrologist verified that he is cheating with the secretary, he lost his voice in the middle of trying to fire more employees, and exactly what the hell is going on?
A good deal of commotion in the room — “hmm, this sounds a bit like that old idea of ‘God’, people” — and they scurry to ancient copies of the Bible and A Canticle for Leibowitz. They search for clues, but in vain. In the middle of the scene a little film geek runs in, breathlessly clutching an old disc of Quatermass and the Pit, and says, “I don’t think this one really pertains, but it’s still a good movie!”
Suddenly a perky little blonde engineer brightens and pipes up, “THEY are everywhere — and they are going to know EVERYTHING!” The rest of them turn to stare at her, you know she’ll be gorgeous later when she takes off those horn-rimmed glasses, and then, they all turn slowly, to the lifeless thanatonauts in the neocoffins…
Oh my God, the megalomaniac thinks, I want to rule the world! I can’t have omniscience getting in the way!… He looks down on the bodies, and thinks, I can’t kill them, they are already dead! I am finished! The sun will never set on these brattish vampires!
He accepts his terrible defeat, but no one Lifeside knows…
bianca steele 03.26.11 at 9:28 pm
I actually think the problem is very difficult. Here’s an example. Near the end of Infinite Jest (written by a one-time philosophy student), there is a section that is, clearly, a talk given by a member/speaker at an AA meeting (pp. 958-960 of the 1996 paperback edition): a sort of confession, generally of past wrongs and attempts to overcome them, most of these exhibiting contrition and attempts to conform to ordinary morality. In this case, the speaker takes great delight in justifying his anger at his sister, by explaining why for example he would actually have been justified to punch her in the mouth, with intermittent, apparently approving, laughter from the audience. He does gesture at things he might be supposed to have learned in AA, but in a backhanded way: saying, for example, that he was really totally justified in wanting to hit her, but has learned that he isn’t supposed to; and that he has really really improved, and knows he really screwed up in the past, and that is why he knows his sister is such a bitch, etc. etc., for not trusting him more and saying yes to all his demands.
Are we in the presence of an alternate morality in which sisters-in-law are required not to talk back to their brothers-in-law, and to hand over small nephews immediately upon request (or in which for some other reason this man merits such extreme deference), or does the novel reinforce the author’s and reader’s preexisting belief that his actions are wrong, permitting discussion of the passage in terms of those preexisting value judgments? My discussions with readers (of the type Wayne Booth would recommend we make) seemed to suggest that this question is more difficult than it appears. Though of course they may have been lying.
Andrew 03.27.11 at 12:04 am
The issue itself may be without real controversy for a reason best illustrated by an analogy:
Is there such a thing as repulsively deviant fiction – fiction in which things we find repulsive in our world simply are not in a fictional world?
Of course. Can we really read about something we truly find repulsive with a force of imagination sufficient to quell all sense of repulsion? No.
Does this mean we fail to understand, intellectually, the fictional world? No.
Ultimately this boils down either to an empirical question about how most readers of fiction react to morally deviant fiction, or to a metaethical question about whether it makes sense (or whether it is accurate) to talk of a world in which just moral facts are different.
The intuition seized upon, I’m guessing, by those opposed to the idea of morally deviant fiction is that we have trouble fully adopting a different moral perspective in a way we do not with other perspectives.
That’s an empirical question, and the intuition would likely be borne out in studies. But one need not fully adopt, to the point of completely suppressing one’s own perspective, that of a fictional world to understand it.
Aulus Gellius 03.27.11 at 12:32 am
Maybe this question is sort of unimportant; maybe the “morality” of a fictional world is less central than you might think. A lot of action movies allow the hero to kill a horrifying number of his enemies. Many of those movies do a bit of perfunctory hand-waving to justify this: each bad guy is always charging at Schwarzenegger with a gun so he has no choice, and they’re all fanatics who never surrender, etc, etc. But other movies don’t even bother with the hand-waving: everyone found on Bad Guy Island is just assumed to be fair game. It doesn’t seem to me that that’s a particularly important distinction — movies that bother to justify all that killing don’t seem significantly different, for that reason, from movies that don’t. In both cases, the audience is asked to cheer on a level of slaughter that would never realistically be justified in the real world: they can get around this either by implausible circumstances or just by switching to an alternate morality, with more or less the same results.
Josh G. 03.27.11 at 2:48 am
Morality is an emergent property, like consciousness. It’s the inevitable result of the kind of creatures we are – members of H. sapiens sapiens, a race of sentient and social beings. Given what we are, some forms of behavior will allow large numbers of people to live together and prosper – these behaviors we call moral – and some forms of behavior inhibit or prevent this – these behaviors we call immoral. Thus it is not possible to have a world where everything else is the same but morality is different. People can read and understand a story where the laws of physics are different or where magic exists, because that only entails a *physical* impossibility. But to have a different morality while everything else remains the same would entail a *logical* impossibility, just as it would be logically impossible for human beings in some alternative universe to have the exact same morphology, physiology, brain chemistry, etc. and yet not be sentient and social.
Some people have pointed to certain comic books or action movies as examples of alternative-universe moralities, but these forms of entertainment only hold up if you don’t think about them too hard. You watch them with your gut, not your brain. If you start looking too closely, the logical errors start to burst out at the seams. (There are, of course, movies and comic books that *do* take morality seriously as part of their storylines, but for this to work, the morality in question must be reasonably close to that which exists in the real world.)
john c. halasz 03.27.11 at 4:58 am
Oh, dear. Josh G. @74 just exemplified my worries about this formal modal logic/possible worlds approach to questions about morality. He has it exactly backwards in terms of “logical” and “physical” impossibility. What’s the “modal” confusion here? Since it seems obvious to me that morality doesn’t derive from any physical/causal necessity, but rather its “logic” is completely different. That’s the sort of “moral inversion” that I wasn’t addressing above, but rather one that abolishes the moral question entirely. Rather the question was how “good” and “evil”, -(or, more weakly, permissible and impermissible),- can change “places” in the course of moral change. Which I think is the really interesting question. And which can’t be derived from physical or, correspondingly, logical, “necessity”, within any given “economy”, but rather always exceeds such.
Jacob Hartog 03.27.11 at 11:41 am
What about violent video games? Don’t they create a fiction in which objectively immoral acts are not only licensed but normatively good?
Robert the Red 03.27.11 at 12:34 pm
Never Let Me Go
Kaveh 03.28.11 at 3:17 am
@74
That’s why I think Classic Westerns aren’t as good a test case as Tolkienian Medieval fantasy and any related things in scifi, and gangster movies. Classic Westerns weren’t positing a world in which genocide should be cheered on, they were made for audiences that didn’t really have the concept of genocide. Now that we (or many of us, at least) know “Cowboys & Indians” to be about genocide, those Westerns make us uncomfortable, and more recent Westerns are either reconstructed ones, like Dances With Wolves, or else they are more “Cowboys vs Outlaws”. Tolkienian fantasy, on the other hand, asks us to accept the possibility of races of creatures, which are apparently sentient, but inherently and irredeemably evil–sentient beings to whom the human condition doesn’t apply. In some settings with such badguys, including a lot of videogames and action movies, this is basically just a conceit that lets us (cheer for people who) shoot badguys without guilt (zombie fiction, anyone?) Some Medieval fantasy, like Tolkien, seems to have a bit more moral ambition, and certainly the inherent and irredeemable evilness of orcs wasn’t at all necessary to the plot of carrying the ring to Mordor, but it’s hard for me to fathom what LOTR would say if we read it as morality fiction.
A more recent thing in Medieval fantasy, closer to the spirit of gangster fiction, is George R R Martin’s novels, which, although there is magic and blah blah blah, are essentially putting us in a time and place in which enlightenment values haven’t been invented yet (or haven’t become widespread yet), and so goodness and badness exist, but don’t have the correspondingly good/bad consequences we want them to. “Good” (fair, honest) aristocrats are often not good for the rest of the world. Martin’s aristocrats haven’t figured out a sufficiently consequentialist moral code, whereas for gangsters, arguably they are deprived of moral grounding for other reasons–we might call them morally handicapped.
These are all cases of projecting or moral imagination backwards (Martin) or downwards (Puzo) or who the hell knows where (Tolkien), so I don’t see why we couldn’t also project it forward, but I don’t know scifi well enough to say who, if anybody, is doing that.
John Holbo 03.28.11 at 4:35 am
Josh G: “Morality is an emergent property, like consciousness.”
john c halasz: “It seems obvious to me that morality doesn’t derive from any physical/causal necessity, but rather its “logic†is completely different.”
I must say: I don’t see anything obvious here, on either side. Starting with Josh, it is certainly plausible that morality is an emergent property – as it is plausible that consciousness is, too. But it is hardly self-evident that either is. By this I mean, to a first approximation: I have read philosophers defending both sides, without instantly bursting out laughing. john c halasz evidently is surer that we should come down on the other side than Josh – i.e. the absolutist, non-constructivist side (I’m a bit surprised that he is landing here, but that’s up to him). I think most people can feel the tug in both directions, at least to some degree. On the one hand, ethics as some absolute standard, written in fire in the firmament, unchanging in the face of changing human circumstances. On the other hand, ethics as some sort of human thing, hence a function of human nature/character/culture (which, of course, is changeable). What’s interesting is that this schizophrenia – sort of wanting it both ways – doesn’t seem to make us MORE free, rather than less, to imagine morality ‘working’ a different way. Shouldn’t confusion about metaethics – about how it all really ‘works’ – soften us up to consider alternative possibilities?
bianca steele 03.28.11 at 3:13 pm
Shouldn’t confusion about metaethics – about how it all really ‘works’ – soften us up to consider alternative possibilities?
Doesn’t it? As soon as I say, “morality is absolute,” someone can answer me, “OK, that’s all well and good, but what are you going to do when a situation asks you to make a sacrifice?”–which I don’t think is especially paradoxical, even though usually morality does require sacrifice and seldom mandates refusing to make sacrifices. For example, one may have to sacrifice moral values, say, do something one isn’t sure is ethical, in order to keep a job that permits one to support one’s family.
John Holbo 03.28.11 at 11:35 pm
“Doesn’t it? As soon as I say, “morality is absolute,†someone can answer me, “OK, that’s all well and good, but what are you going to do when a situation asks you to make a sacrifice?—
But this isn’t imagining it fictionally, bianca. This is arguing about morality in the actual world.
bianca steele 03.29.11 at 12:18 am
John,
I had in mind your response to the other John H. (which I took to be about the real world), but I’m already tempted to say we’re arguing about the definitions of words: That is moral, no it isn’t–That is immoral, no it isn’t–and on and on and on. If morality is changeable, does that make it more or less likely that something else should override it? If morality can be deduced a priori, does that make it more or less likely? Are there characteristics that a priori moralities have that changeable moralities don’t, or vice versa, that we can substitute?
Pyre 04.01.11 at 1:07 am
To Mike and his nestmates in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, cannibalism of a deceased nestmate is perfectly moral, as is “sharing all things in common” including sex.
How far this has entered the real world varies, by time, place, and group. (The quoted portion is right out of the Book of Acts.)
John Holbo 04.01.11 at 1:13 am
“I’m already tempted to say we’re arguing about the definitions of words”
I don’t really think we are, bianca. What makes you think so? It might be that we are having a substantive dispute about the nature of morality itself, i.e. the very opposite of a merely semantic dispute about words. But I do not think it is that, either. After all, I don’t see that we actually disagree about the nature of morality itself. You are raising various moral possibilities, which are all things that I am fine with – pretty straightforward stuff, really: pluralism, moral change over time – and they all seem to me the sorts of considerations that are properly considerations that count in favor of the puzzle. But you seem to me to be raising them as though they tended to solve or dissolve the puzzle. But maybe I’m just mishearing you.
“If morality is changeable, does that make it more or less likely that something else should override it?”
Maybe the problem is that I don’t understand this sentence. What’s the something else? Temptation to behave badly? Kierkegaardian faith? I’m not sure where you are going here.
bianca steele 04.01.11 at 2:13 am
Members of the set of moral considerations that might be considered to override changeable, tribal, historically or economically conditioned considerations, or considerations idiosyncratic to a single, not fully rational individual might include: ethics derived in a purely rational manner, ethics derived from unchanging human nature, or ethics derived from the only true divine revelation. Why I think this has ended up being largely about the meaning of words–not necessarily “arguing” if you like, or don’t–is that the argument supposes that we all, already, agree on what “rational” means, what “tribal” means, etc., and we don’t.
For example, many people in the US today might contrast “tribal” with “Communistic.” I think it’s an intellectually incoherent position, but professor of philosophy John Holbo is not going to get anywhere telling them that, say, rational ethical principles require protection of widows and orphans, so they should support the extension of state unemployment benefits. And you wouldn’t get far, either, if you let them know you assumed that because they think the state shouldn’t support unemployed workers in that way, they are going against the Bible. Other people might contrast, simply, “undereducated” with “better educated and more experienced” (something along those lines), with exactly the same religious support. They would be unlikely to agree on much (except possibly the most obvious practical questions), and it doesn’t seem unlikely to me that they would use other words differently too, and most of the time they wouldn’t notice.
bianca steele 04.01.11 at 2:28 am
I don’t see that we actually disagree about the nature of morality itself.
If you are saying we can consider morality both historically conditioned, and also rationally supported, at the same time (and without saying the reasons it’s rationally supported is just because it’s historically conditioned), then we must disagree. Because I don’t think we can do both at the same time except within the kind of insulated bubble that must be very, very uncommon in actual human history (and what good is a morality that only holds within seldom-found insulated bubbles?)
bianca steele 04.01.11 at 12:18 pm
Thinking about it more, I think that if we shift ‘historically conditioned” and “rationally supported” both a little towards the center, I would agree morality should and can combine both. But (a) this can still be objected to from either side, and (b) I’m not sure what percentage of novel readers and novelists it covers.
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