Accepting Deception

Or, Why Every Deontologist Has an Oedipus Complex

1.

Act utilitarianism, and consequentialism more broadly, has a lot going for it. Its primary descriptive claim is that “good things happening to people is good” and so it very logically prescribes that we act in ways that increase the total amount of good things that happen.

Of course, you might complain that I’ve shifted a lot of explanatory power onto the word “good.” Every moral theory wants to maximize good! It’s just that deontology defines “good” as duty-fulfillment and natural law theory defines it as purpose-fulfillment, and so on.

There are a few different ways utilitarians define “good”—but the important thing is that they’re all aimed at welfare. Some say welfare refers to desire-fulfillment, others think it’s about satisfying an objective list of preferences, and only the most based ones admit it’s simply about pleasure-maximizing and suffering-minimizing.

For the purposes of this post, it doesn’t really matter which I’m talking about. The key distinction between utilitarianism and its opponents is whether an act is judged only on its impact on people, or also (or exclusively) on its adherence to some external and essential principle—duty, integrity, purpose, virtue, etc.

Simply given this distinction, it seems reasonable to put pretty high priors on utilitarianism being right. Proving the existence of anything outside our own minds is difficult to do—but we necessarily have much better reason to believe that other minds have qualitative existence than we do to believe that other minds exist and also that essential constructs of morality are floating around externally to those minds and the quality of their experiences.¹

And some very simple thought experiments waggle their eyebrows suggestively at utilitarianism too. Hopefully you’ve heard of the trolley problem—the basic conclusion that most people’s intuitions reach (~90%!) is that one should switch a runaway trolley from a track where it’ll kill five people to a track where it’ll kill only one. Even if this appears to violate various duties or purposes—things like “don’t act to kill people” or “God made you a trolley-operator to get people to work on time, not to interfere with His apparent plan to murder five innocent people tied to the tracks”—everybody basically agrees that you should do it anyway.

But lots of very smart people have still found reason to deny utilitarianism to one degree or another. So what gives?

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2.

Extremely Unprofessional And Reputationally Harmful Substacker

Amos Wollen

writes compellingly about his fundamental break with utilitarianism. Working in a Turkish restaurant, his boss told him that the meat they were serving to Muslim customers wasn’t actually halal, even though they advertised it as such.

I tried suggesting that we shouldn’t trick Muslims into violating what they take to be an important religious precept, but he laughed it off, telling me to give the ‘Is this halal?’ questions to him if I wasn’t comfortable lying.

As he straightened chairs in the back half of the restaurant, I did the same in the front half, thinking about what to do. It struck me that I was in a moral dilemma that divided consequentialism from deontology.

The issue, as Amos saw it, was with deception in itself. An act utilitarian wouldn’t really care in a situation like this—“there was no feasible way that Muslim customers would find out, and no feasible story on which this low-profile restaurant would come under fire if they did.”

Instead, Amos took issue simply “with the obvious wrongness of tricking devout religious people into unintentionally violating their religious commitments.”

There’s certainly something to be said for the intuitive ickiness of Amos’ predicament. We all have a certain basic impulse that says “don’t lie,” and it feels like we should take that impulse about as seriously as the ones that inform utilitarianism.

But on reflection, it becomes pretty obvious that these two intuitions aren’t really comparable at all. The simplest thing to do is up the stakes and see which intuition wins out—don’t lie, or act in favor of welfare. I’m fairly uncreative, so here’s the classic thought experiment:

Say your brother arrives at your house and knocks rapidly on your door. You open it, and he tells you, sweaty and out of breath, “there’s a crazy axe murderer after me. Can I hide out in your basement?” You tell him yes, of course, and let him in. A few minutes later, you hear another person knocking on the door and open it. A deranged, but credulous-looking man covered in blood and wielding an axe asks if your brother is there. Do you lie to him?

Probably! It seems like the ickiness of cleaning chopped-up brother bits out of your basement should massively supersede the ickiness of lying to the murderer. Welfare wins out in extreme cases. Why shouldn’t that conclusion generalize?

In Amos’ case, the option is between an ickier lie—one that causes other people to violate their own strongly-held commitments—and a consequence involving much less disutility—the loss of “£2,000 in forfeited wages.” And it seems much less obvious that lying is permissible.

So where’d the calculus change? How much lying and how little utility does it take?

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3.

Amos has a different, older post that discusses an attempt to answer this question:

The Integrity Objection to Utilitarianism

Bernard Williams—a philosopher famous mostly for making Derek Parfit cry by not having the concept of a normative reason—proposed that utilitarianism misses a fundamental part of what it is to be a good person: integrity.

Amos summarizes the argument like this:

Utilitarianism affords no value to the pursuit of one’s fundamental projects and the maintenance of one’s moral integrity besides hedonic value. And it demands that we abandon our deepest aspirations and give up our attempts to live in tandem with our core values [in certain cases] … The correct moral theory would not imply such things.

This idea feels intuitive! Surely it’s unreasonable to obligate people to desert their convictions and dreams in pursuit of minor total increases in welfare.

And it seems like “not lying” is a strongly-held conviction for lots of people. By Williams’ logic, people who consider themselves fundamentally honest should be given some leeway to uphold their honesty, even at the cost of a little utility.

This seems like a nice, calm middle path. It has the force of a (somewhat) well-defined concept—integrity—behind it, and the intellectual patronage of a real luminary. It also, sort of hand-wavingly, lets Amos object to lying in the Turkish restaurant while still endorsing lying to the axe murderer. He can simply claim that honesty is a fundamental project for him, but not so fundamental that he’d stake his brother’s life on it.²

What Williams really wants is for utilitarians to admit that cases which involve the violation of an agent’s strongly-held values are non-obvious and difficult. Amos seems to really care about honesty—so even lying to the axe murderer probably takes some psychological labor, and utilitarians shouldn’t pretend that the deception has no significance.

But this is all reliant on the idea that there’s actually any reason for deception to be fundamentally off-putting!

If a fundamental project didn’t need some kind of legitimate justification, we could hack Williams’ integrity argument pretty easily—imagine an axe-murderer whose sense of self-worth is tightly and innately tied to chopping brothers into bits. Is he justified, then, to go around doing that? We external observers can’t really cap the value of someone’s integrity without appraising their justification for what contributes to it.

So, is Amos justified in his opposition to deception?

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4.

We’re reading a modern retelling of Oedipus Rex in my literature class right now.³

My understanding of the story, having been raised, accursedly, on the internet, was that Oedipus really wanted to have sex with his mom, and killed his dad so he could do it.

Apparently, this is not the case!

The whole thing was just a big awful understanding. Oedipus’ dad, Laius, received a prophecy that his son would kill him and take his wife and kingdom. So he tried to kill Oedipus and cut the bottoms of his feet (Oedipus = oedi [swollen] + pus [foot]) so that he wouldn’t be chased in the afterlife.

Long story short, Oedipus eventually kills Laius in a fairly straightforward case of self-defense, becomes the King of Thebes, gets with his mom, Jocasta, and has a bunch of kids with her.

Oedipus is a pretty good king and everybody mostly likes him more than they liked Laius, but still, Thebes is going to shit. They keep having bad luck and they just got hit with a plague, and good king that he is, Oedipus goes off to investigate what’s causing all this.

He soon learns his true history, and is understandably very grossed out. He gouges out his eyes, Jocasta kills herself, his two sons eventually kill each other, and his daughter kills herself too. Really all just a terrible shame.

Freud decided that the big lesson to take away from this was that every boy is secretly super attracted to his mother and really wants to get his father out of the picture. Which, you know, okay.

The true Oedipus complex, however, is the idea that deception is extremely moral relevant. Forget the bit where everybody starts killing and mutilating themselves. Right before then, before anyone has any idea that anything gross or wrong is happening, what’s going on in Thebes?

Everything’s a mess! A plague is ravaging the land, and it’s very clearly related to the idea that Oedipus killed his father and took his kingdom and wife without knowing it.

In other words, the simple fact that Oedipus has been deceived is enough to create lots of very real problems. To me, this is telling of a certain motivating uncomfortability with the idea that deception might not actually matter so much.

Ancient Greek theater had a real unfortunate tendency to rely on the deus ex machina to bail themselves out of otherwise unresolvable plots. Whenever all seemed hopeless for the protagonist, a god would pop down to protect them, or even bring them back to life.

Oedipus Rex doesn’t have a god popping down to resolve the problem. But it does have one creating it.

Sophocles starts the play with both Oedipus and the audience in the dark. All we know—and all he knows—is that he’s a successful, happy, and powerful king. Thebes should be thriving, and has been for much of his rule.

There never was any good reason to punish Oedipus, was there? Sophocles must have realized this—must have seen that all he’d written so far was a virtuous and beneficent man undeserving of a terrible fate.

And so he had the god descend—a mysterious and divine plague, punishing the kingdom simply because its king is deceived about something entirely unrelated to the task of governing. Sophocles couldn’t come up with a convincing reason for why deception is wrong in its own right, so he sent an Obviously Bad Plague that he hoped people would just buy as a stand-in for the deception itself.

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5.

I think Amos is suffering from an Oedipus complex.

In his Turkish restaurant, there was some degree of deception going on. The truth underneath the deception felt icky—devout Muslims unknowingly eating non-halal meat—and so Amos decided something had gone wrong.

This seems analogous to Sophocles’ situation. Oedipus unknowingly sleeping with his mother is icky, and it feels like something’s gone wrong.

So Sophocles sent a plague, and Amos sent a deontology. They’d already decided the deception ought to be stopped, and more or less invented a pretense for that conclusion.

Maybe you think that deontology is a somewhat more sensible thing than divine plague. But, really, it’s not much better. Amos himself admits:

Deontology—even in its weakest forms—confronts a number of gnarly paradoxes, and I have no clue what to say about most of them.

This admission is admirable! It’s the sort of vital epistemic humility I’m apparently incapable of.

But Amos still concludes his post with such certainty! He won’t consider that this (admittedly very fundamental) intuition against deception might be misinformed, and instead announces that utilitarianism is clearly “the wrong way up the mountain.”

I think it’s good to reflect a little more on where that intuition comes from. Certainly, it’s pretty common—the average person dislikes lying. But I think it’s more a consequence of practical social norms than truly rational thought.

It seems much more likely that if you ask someone who’s voice they hear telling them not to lie, they’ll answer “my mom’s” or some equivalent. Whereas if you ask someone who’s voice tells them that two lives are more valuable than one, they’ll sort of give you a confused look and say, “I guess my own… but isn’t that just an obviously true thing?”

Probably it makes sense for most moms to tell most children not to lie. And certainly it makes sense for most Turkish restaurants not to lie about whether their meat is halal or not.

But we shouldn’t confuse those empirical conclusions for normative ones. Because then we start sending plagues after kings who’ve really done nothing wrong.

The ad-hoc revision of utilitarianism to fit situational vibes is so Oedipal.

Me when deontology

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Lukethoughts

(Lucas is feeling a blend of philosophical and psychological today too! As usual, he’s less literary, but way more coherent.)

• “I DID A CONCERTO TODAY AND I THINK IT WENT PRETTY DANG WELL. I realized it isn’t how accurate you play but how you play it.” (Ed. note: Um. Maybe never mind on the coherence thing. Wouldn’t you think accuracy is a big part of “how you play it?”)

• “Push Pull method: the idea that if you alternate between showing someone attention and then pulling that attention away will lead them to seek the attention which was given and lead them to seek you out.” (Ed. note: Intermittent reward is fucking addictive!)

• “I think that we all do this subconsciously on some plane even if not with someone that you may intend to do it with. Obviously if you are trying to attract someone that can be very effective for them, but in a relationship it differs drastically. I have a feeling that is what is happening a bit in all my relationships even though I don’t intend to. Regardless, it is a manipulation tactic so stay away from it 🙏” (Ed. note: I don’t know exactly what Luke means by “manipulation tactic.” My sense is that most aspects of most relationships can be construed as versions of manipulation—hell, flirtation and wooing and so on are full of it—and it’s not obviously a wrong thing in itself. But I think he’s right in the implication that it’s emotionally taxing for your partner, and that makes avoiding the behavior worthwhile.)

• “Showing up matters a lot and it really does mean plenty to those who want to share a joy with someone they love :)” (Ed. note: This is true! Quantity time > quality time > intermittent quality time.)

1. Please note: I’m not advocating moral anti-realism! The idea that the quality of human experience matters is relevant to any normative ethical theory, utilitarianism included. However, this is the only principle that utilitarianism needs to be universal and real, whereas theories like deontology and virtue ethics require additional and much less superficially plausible constructs on top of it.

2. Either since protecting his brother is a more fundamental project to him, or because he has some self-imposed limit on what his integrity could possibly be worth.

3. It’s called Oedipus El Rey, by Luis Alfaro, and it’s fucking awful. Even an outrageously friendly review in the New York Times has this to say:

The fight scenes, choreographed by UnkleDave’s Fight-House, are abundant and vicious. The lengthy, softly lit, all-nude sex scene between Oedipus and his mom is staged with such sensuality as to seem ridiculous.

The framing dialogue doesn’t help, as when Jocasta insists, “You’re a part of me. I don’t know why,” a line that had the audience giggling. (If most of the language is vibrant, some of Mr. Alfaro’s Spanglish chat is equally risible: “Gato got your tongue?”)

Some more of Alfaro’s Spanglish constructions:

• “Always looking for his chansa. His oportunidad.”

• “Naw, it's just that, con todo respeto, I can't have any problems right now.”

• “Narcotraficantes.”

It’s a bad play.