The Big Questions: Ethics by Julian Baggini

Part of a series of books looking at issues of our time: this one a series of essays looking at various sides of ethical arguments.  In the end it doesn't come out with nice clean answers - more of 'it depends' but then life isn't made of nice clean answers.

this reflects a deeper truth about ethics: values often conflict, not because one is wrong and one is right, but simply because sometimes having more of one good means we cannot have as much of another.Read more at location 83

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movements around the Western world are claiming to stand for the 99 per cent against the 1 per cent, the wealthy minority in our countries who together own between a fifth and a third of each nation’s wealth. But, as Ord points out, this indignation is somewhat selective, since if we look at the world as a whole, many of those protesters are in the top 1 per cent and almost all are in the top 5 per cent. ‘When I was earning £14,000 as a student, I found I was in the richest 4 per cent in the world, even adjusting for how much further money goes in developing countries,’ Ord told the BBC in 2010. ‘Giving away 10 per cent of that, I found that I would still be in the top 5 per cent.’17 ‘It’s not particularly heroic or anything,’ he told another reporter. ‘At least half the people in Britain could probably think much more seriously about how much they could give.’Read more at location 604

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Given that nearly 50 per cent of people worldwide survive on less than $2.50 a day, almost all of us are among the richest people in the world and the majority of us could give away much more than we do and still be relatively wealthy, enjoying a very comfortable quality of life. Still, if we don’t want to do that, why should we?Read more at location 611

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Nonetheless, the argument that most of us do not do nearly as much as we should to help the world’s poor seems strong and compelling. It is no doubt unsettling to conclude this. But why should we expect moral philosophy to provide comfort? It’s role is not to justify everything we do, but to point us to how we might do better. In the case of global inequality, it points the way all too clearly.Read more at location 708

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Equasy is not an obscure drug. ‘It is used by many millions of people in the UK including children and young people,’ wrote Nutt. About ten people a year die of it, serious damage is caused once every 350 exposures and it is associated with over 100 road traffic accidents per year. Nutt concluded that, bearing in mind all its harms, ‘it seems likely that the ACMD would recommend control under the Misuse of Drugs Act, perhaps as a class A drug given it appears more harmful than ecstasy.’ So why does the law allow equasy but ban ecstasy? Because equasy stands for Equine Addiction Syndrome, ‘a condition characterized by gaining pleasure from horses and being prepared to countenance the consequences especially the harms from falling off/under the horse’. No government is going to ban horse-riding, but most do ban drugs that are arguably less harmful.Read more at location 722

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People are often reluctant to accept that rights are not natural because they think that if rights were just cultural artefacts they would be less binding. But perhaps this ‘just’ is misplaced. A non-natural right that is globally endorsed and upheld is surely worth more than a natural right that most people trample over. What matters for upholding rights is that laws and institutions recognize and value them, not whether they are natural or not.Read more at location 876

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Nonetheless, some do argue that life is of such value that it is always worth prolonging, no matter how horrible. But why would one think that? Does anyone seriously believe that it would be better if a person died at midday rather than was tortured for twelve hours from noon onwards and died at midnight? Surely everyone would prefer to die sooner than later in this situation. Although extreme, this example demonstrates the point that simply having more life does not mean having a better life overall. Quality matters as well as quantity.Read more at location 1143

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why is it OK if changes are natural and not if they are human-made? Cause seems irrelevant. What matters is whether changes are good or bad, and there is just no way to make sense of things being good or bad for the planet. The planet just is. For billions of years before humans came along it existed with no life, and will probably exist for billions more years after we’ve died out too. Far from making us humble, the idea that we have the power to hurt the earth is hubristic. From the hypothetical perspective of the earth (since, lacking consciousness, it has no perspective) we are at worst a temporary itch on something bigger and incomprehensibly longer-lived than ourselves. Nature doesn’t care what we do because it doesn’t have any thoughts or feelings, but it would not care even if it did.Read more at location 1681

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In that sense, what we need to protect is not the environment but our environment. What matters is keeping the planet hospitable to human life. It may seem as though respect for nature for nature’s sake is a worthy value which can only do us good. But it can in fact lead us badly astray.Read more at location 1693

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And so murder, infidelity, theft and so on are almost always wrong. But that doesn’t establish rules like ‘murder is wrong’ and it certainly doesn’t mean such actions are wrong because they break a moral rule. In that sense moral rules are more like laws of nature than laws of courts: they describe regularities found in nature, they do not prescribe regularities we ought to follow.Read more at location 2062

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We can identify many things that matter for morality: happiness, respect, equality and so on. But it is impossible to say that one principle is the master principle, from which all other moral rules are derived. In different times, at different places, for different people, moral priorities change. Just as babies, children, adults and the elderly need to be treated differently, so other variations in the human condition require different moral responses. That, I suspect, is the truth that makes some kind of relativism inevitable.Read more at location 2302

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Let’s say, for example, that you are a Christian. In the Book of Leviticus, there are all sorts of bizarre-sounding rules, laid down by God, which Christians no longer feel themselves obliged to follow. These include the death penalty for homosexuals and children who do not respect their parents, bans on eating hares and calamari, prohibitions on men trimming their beards, and approval of slavery. Most Christians believe, however, that the New Testament supersedes the Old and that these rules no longer apply. What this adds up to is the belief that what was wrong for the ancient Israelites is not wrong for modern Christians, on God’s command. That seems to me like a clear combination of relativism and the belief that God’s will underpins ethics.Read more at location 2326

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In many ways this should not be surprising, since many have argued that the trouble with divine command theory – the idea that what is right or wrong is what God commands – is that it leaves open the possibility that God could command what is currently wrong to be right and vice versa. (See the next chapter for more on this.) Christian texts seem to provide evidence that this is precisely what their God has done.Read more at location 2332

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If you put all these things together, you can see quite readily how something like morality emerges. Given brute facts and our desires, feelings and needs, we have good reason to uphold justice, to be fair and honest in our dealings with people, to show compassion, not to kill the innocent, and so on. These four factors together add up to a rationale for morality that is more than just enlightened self-interest, although that too is part of the mix and more often than not doing the right thing is better for us than not doing the right thing, in the long run at least.Read more at location 2426

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Without an effective police force, it’s not that everything is permitted but nothing is enforced.Read more at location 2463

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In morality, as in many other difficult areas of life, we want answers, so much so that we’ll often prefer a clear answer with a weak justification than accept a good justification for why there is no clear answer. Accepting a lack of answers in ethics is particularly difficult, since it seems to most of us that surely there must be some way of knowing what the right thing to do is. But is there?Read more at location 2472

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ethics. If we are looking for clear answers, strict objective rules, then I think we’ll look in vain. If we think that all moral dilemmas can be resolved, we will be disappointed. But if we accept that we can make better moral choices, ones with genuinely better outcomes, by thinking clearly and attending carefully to what we really value, then there is a point to philosophical ethics. The final choice is always your own, and only you can bear responsibility for it. And to take that responsibility requires, I think, giving ethics the serious time and thought it deserves.Read more at location 2587

Everything is Obvious by Duncan J. Watts

A great book about our delusions of understanding the real causes or explanations of events and instead settling for the simpler or easier to recall ones.

When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious, then, as Lazarsfeld put it, “something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness.’Read more at location 105

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whether it’s learning to fit in at a new school, or learning the ropes in a new job, or learning to live in a foreign country, we’ve all had to learn to negotiate new environments that at first seem strange and intimidating and filled with rules that we don’t understand but eventually become familiar. Very often the formal rules—the ones that are written down—are less important than the informal rules, which just like the rule about subway seats may not even be articulated until we break them. Conversely, rules that we do know about may not be enforced, or may be enforced only sometimes depending on some other rule that we don’t know about. When you think about how complex these games of life can be, it seems kind of amazing that we’re capable of playing them at all. Yet in the way that young children learn a new language seemingly by osmosis, we learn to navigate even the most novel social environments more or less without even knowing that we’re doing it.Read more at location 219

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But as a number of management scholars have shown in recent years, corporate plans—whether strategic bets, mergers and acquisitions, or marketing campaigns—also fail frequently, and for much the same reasons that government plans do.22 In all these cases, that is, a small number of people sitting in conference rooms are using their own commonsense intuition to predict, manage, or manipulate the behavior of thousands or millions of distant and diverse people whose motivations and circumstances are very different from their own.23Read more at location 435

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Continuing this litany of irrationality, psychologists have found that human judgments are often affected by the ease with which different kinds of information can be accessed or recalled. People generally overestimate the likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack on a plane relative to dying on a plane from any cause, even though the former is strictly less likely than the latter, simply because terrorist attacks are such vivid events. Paradoxically, people rate themselves as less assertive when they are asked to recall instances where they have acted assertively—not because the information contradicts their beliefs, but rather because of the effort required to recall it. They also systematically remember their own past behavior and beliefs to be more similar to their current behavior and beliefs than they really were. And they are more likely to believe a written statement if the font is easy to read, or if they have read it before—even if the last time they read it, it was explicitly labeled as false.14Read more at location 683

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All our participants were recruited from a website called Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which Amazon launched in 2005 as a way to identify duplicate listings among its own inventory. Nowadays, Mechanical Turk is used by hundreds of businesses looking to “crowd-source” a wide range of tasks, from labeling objects in an image to characterizing the sentiment of a newspaper article or deciding which of two explanations is clearer. However, it is also an extremely effective way to recruit subjects for psychology experiments—muchRead more at location 788

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We also found that for any given pay rate, workers who were assigned “easy” tasks—like sorting sets of two images—completed more tasks than workers assigned medium or hard tasks (three and four images per set respectively). All of this, in other words, is consistent with common sense. But then the kicker: in spite of these differences, we found that the quality of their work—meaning the accuracy with which they sorted images—did not change with pay level at all,Read more at location 798

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In other words, no matter what they were actually paid—and remember that some of them were getting paid ten times as much as others—everyone thought they had been underpaid. What this finding suggested to us is that even for very simple tasks, the extra motivation to perform that we intuitively expect workers to experience with increased financial incentives is largely undermined by their increased sense of entitlement.Read more at location 807

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cumulative advantage models have disruptive implications for the kinds of explanations that we give of success and failure in cultural markets. Commonsense explanations, remember, focus on the thing itself—the song, the book, or the company—and account for its success solely in terms of its intrinsic attributes. If we were to imagine history being somehow “rerun” many times, therefore, explanations in which intrinsic attributes were the only things that mattered would predict that the same outcome would pertain every time. By contrast, cumulative advantage would predict that even identical universes, starting out with the same set of people and objects and tastes, would nevertheless generate different cultural or marketplace winners. TheRead more at location 1126

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Employees, for example, may well influence their bosses as much as their bosses influence them, but they are not equally likely to name each other as sources of influence—simply because bosses are supposed to be influential, whereas employees are not. In other words, our perceptions of who influences us may say more about social and hierarchical relations than influence per se.Read more at location 1383

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as it turned out, the most important condition had nothing to do with a few highly influential individuals at all. Rather, it depended on the existence of a critical mass of easily influenced people who influence other easy-to-influence people.Read more at location 1453

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What we concluded, therefore, is that the kind of influential person whose energy and connections can turn your book into a bestseller or your product into a hit is most likely an accident of timing and circumstances. An “accidental influential” as it were.22Read more at location 1465

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Of 74 million events in our data, only a few dozen generated even a thousand retweets, and only one or two got to ten thousand. In a network of tens of millions of users, ten thousand retweets doesn’t seem like that big a number, but what our data showed is that even that is almost impossible to achieve. For practical purposes, therefore, it may be better to forget about the large cascades altogether and instead try to generate lots of small ones. And for that purpose, ordinary influencers may work just fine. They don’t accomplish anything dramatic, so you may need a lot of them, but in harnessing many such individuals, you can also average out much of the randomness, generating a consistently positive effect.Read more at location 1568

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In other words, although it is tempting to attribute the outcome to a single special person, we should remember that the temptation arises simply because this is how we’d like the world to work, not because that is how it actually works.Read more at location 1761

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common sense and history conspire to generate the illusion of cause and effect where none exists. On the one hand, common sense excels in generating plausible causes, whether special people, or special attributes, or special circumstances. And on the other hand, history obligingly discards most of the evidence, leaving only a single thread of events to explain. Commonsense explanations therefore seem to tell us why something happened when in fact all they’re doing is describing what happened.Read more at location 1763

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at no point in time is the story ever really “over.” Something always happens afterward, and what happens afterward is liable to change our perception of the current outcome, as well as our perception of the outcomes that we have already explained.Read more at location 1881

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psychologists have found that simpler explanations are judged more likely to be true than complex explanations, not because simpler explanations actually explain more, but rather just because they are simpler.Read more at location 1897

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The real problem of prediction, in other words, is not that we are universally good or bad at it, but rather that we are bad at distinguishing predictions that we can make reliably from those that we can’t.Read more at location 1993

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Whenever people get together—in social gatherings, sports crowds, business firms, volunteer organizations, markets, political parties, or even entire societies—they affect one another’s thinking and behavior.Read more at location 2046

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another way, there is a difference between being uncertain about the future and the future itself being uncertain. The former is really just a lack of information—something we don’t know—whereas the latter implies that the information is, in principle, unknowable. The former is the orderly universe of Laplace’s demon, where if we just try hard enough, if we’re just smart enough, we can predict the future. The latter is an essentially random world, where the best we can ever hope for is to express our predictions of various outcomes as probabilities.Read more at location 2108

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As I mentioned at the beginning of the previous chapter, keeping track of our predictions is not something that comes naturally to us: We make lots of predictions, but rarely check back to see how often we got them right. But keeping track of performance is possibly the most important activity of all—because only then can you learn how accurately it is possible to predict, and therefore how much weight you should put on the predictions you make.12Read more at location 2441

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This is the strategy paradox. The main cause of strategic failure, Raynor argues, is not bad strategy, but great strategy that just happens to be wrong. Bad strategy is characterized by lack of vision, muddled leadership, and inept execution—not the stuff of success for sure, but more likely to lead to persistent mediocrity than colossal failure. Great strategy, by contrast, is marked by clarity of vision, bold leadership, and laser-focused execution. When applied to just the right set of commitments, great strategy can lead to resounding success—as it did for Apple with the iPod—but it can also lead to resounding failure. Whether great strategy succeeds or fails therefore depends entirely on whether the initial vision happens to be right or not. And that is not just difficult to know in advance, but impossible.Read more at location 2521

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errors—Mintzberg recommended that planners should rely less on making predictions about long-term strategic trends and more on reacting quickly to changes on the ground. Rather than attempting to anticipate correctly what will work in the future, that is, they should instead improve their ability to learn about what is working right now. Then, like Zara, they should react to it as rapidly as possible, dropping alternatives that are not working—no matter how promising they might have seemed in advance—and diverting resources to those that are succeeding,Read more at location 2621

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Plans fail, in other words, not because planners ignore common sense, but rather because they rely on their own common sense to reason about the behavior of people who are different from them.Read more at location 2958

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The Halo Effect, in other words, turns conventional wisdom about performance on its head. Rather than the evaluation of the outcome being determined by the quality of the process that led to it, it is the observed nature of the outcome that determines how we evaluate the process.Read more at location 3077

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whenever we find ourselves describing someone’s ability in terms of societal measures of success—prizes, wealth, fancy titles—rather than in terms of what they are capable of doing, we ought to worry that we are deceiving ourselves.Read more at location 3213