Ethical decision-making and life patterns

Hi everyone,

Today I’d like to talk to you about ethics, and why you can’t reduce ethical behaviour to a series of individual ethical decisions.

Ethical lessons from mediocre science fiction

There is an extremely mediocre¹ science fiction short story called “The Cold Equations”. In it, a girl named Marilyn stows away on a spaceship that is carrying emergency medical supplies to a planet. Unfortunately, the fuel margins on the trip are so tight that her presence dooms the entire mission, and Barton, the pilot of the ship, has no choice but to jettison her into space, lest they both die and also doom the people who need the medical supplies.

Barton did nothing wrong in this scenario. It’s not even a moral dilemma. He’s not sacrificing Marilyn to save other people, because Marilyn would also die in the crash. This is the only viable option.

What’s interesting is not the morality of the decision that Barton finds himself faced with, but just how much work had to go in to get Barton to the point where this was the decision that Barton is faced with:

The story was shaped by Astounding editor John W. Campbell, who sent "Cold Equations" back to Godwin three times before he got the version he wanted, because "Godwin kept coming up with ingenious ways to save the girl!"

There’s a useful distinction that comes from Sherlock Holmes fandom of “Watsonian” and “Doylist” explanations for a thing. The Watsonian explanation if the explanation from the point of view of Watson, the in-universe explanation, the Doylist explanation is the explanation from the point of view of Doyle, the “real” explanation. The Watsonian explanation is the explanation from the logic of the story, the Doylist explanation is the explanation of why the logic of the story is the way it is.

The Watsonian explanation of the Cold Equations is that Marilyn died because the people involved in planning this entire flight were idiots who should never work in the field again until they have read “How Complex Systems Fail” so many times they can recite it from memory.

The Doylist explanation is that Marilyn died because John Campbell wanted a story in which Barton was morally justified in murdering her.²

Marilyn isn’t real and as such didn’t get murdered, so Campbell’s sin is at worst a minor transgression, but in-universe the organisation responsible for the flight have done much the same thing: They have set up a situation in which the “ethical” thing to do is to murder someone.

Their crime is closer to manslaughter through negligence than it is to murder - it’s not that they’ve set out to create the scenario with the specific intention of it resulting in murder, they’ve just carelessly failed to safeguard against it - but I think it is nevertheless clear that they have failed in their ethical duties.

How life happens

There is a quote attributed to Jung that he almost certainly never said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Usually this quote is cited by people who are about to tell you about the weird magical practice that will solve all your problems

I’ve been through multiple iterations of how I feel about it. I started by rolling my eyes at it, because it’s obviously pseudo-profound bullshit, and then increasingly I started to feel that it was annoyingly accurate, and now I think I can more or less explain what’s going on.

Your “unconscious” in this case is essentially just a collection of poorly understood implicit beliefs and emotional reactions, which you naturally act on. People seek out life events that they can handle, and disrupt life events that they can’t handle, and over time you tend to shape your life to implicitly match your comfort zone as best as possible, with a well established set of habits and emotional reactions maintaining it.

This isn’t to say that everything that happens to you is “your fault” of course, but more of what happens to us seems to be under our control than we consciously recognise, and that there are many unconscious habits and reactions that drive that control.

A relatively trivial example of this is something I’ve pointed out before in Cleaning up the fnords in your environment: Often our environment is messy because there are things we’ve learned not to look at. There is an unconscious flinch reaction that pushes us away from the actions that would fix the problem. Recognising that flinch reaction allows us to make a conscious decision to do it anyway (or, if it turns out to genuinely be too unpleasant, to not do it and accept that!), but as long as it’s unconscious we just act on it automatically.

This, unfortunately, has ethical implications.

We seem to be good at constructing the sort of lives that we can handle, and one of the things we’re very bad at handling is feeling like we’re a bad person. I suggest that this often puts us in the role of both Barton and the faceless organisation behind him: We carefully construct situations so that our decisions are fully ethically defensible, while carefully avoiding acknowledging that we are also at least in part responsible for having created the situations in which those were the ethical decisions in front of us.

The most common example of this is in interpersonal relationships. Often we find the same patterns reoccur over and over again in our friendships, romantic relationships, etc. It’s very easy - and often correct! - to paint a story where we are in the right in any given incident, but at some point we have to ask the question “OK but why exactly is it that these are the incidents that keep reoccurring?”, and admit that the common factor is us.

This is part of why I keep returning to virtue ethics, and more classical ethical questions like “What is a good life?” - trying to understand ethics from the point of view of individual decisions is far too late in most situations, and starting from the life you are trying to live seems the only way out of that.

Postscript

The image for this piece is the head of Aristotle, taken by Sergey Sosnovskiy and made available under a creative commons CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.

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