This book is about happiness. It’s based in psychology, and draws on both ancient philosophies and modern empirical findings to discuss what makes people happy. Most of what the author comes up with are things I already do, which might explain why I’m happy. It’s a very interesting book, with a couple of things that were new to me.

The evidence currently suggests that everyone has a happiness range, and that this varies considerably from person to person. Events and circumstances move you up and down in the range, but how happy a particular event makes you depends on your natural range. There are two ways to make people happier within this. The first is to move them up in their natural range. This is what meditation, cognitive therapy, and changes to lifestyle do. The second is to move the range up. This is what Prozac does.

If this is right, then Prozac isn’t a crutch, it’s a treatment for a disability. My range seems to be fairly high, so I don’t need it, but that makes it very easy for me to say that no-one does. That’s wrong, of course. If you have perfect eyesight you don’t need glasses, but that doesn’t mean that, if I just tried harder, I could function without them. On the other hand, Prozac isn’t the whole solution, either. It might move the range up, but if you’re still functioning at the bottom of the range, that might not make you terribly happy. (Of course, if you had a very low range and functioned near the top of it, Prozac would make you very happy all of a sudden.)

The things you should do to be happy are fairly easy to explain. Relationships with other people are important, as is having something that you really enjoy doing, something that involves a good amount of skill and concentration. Involvement in something larger than yourself is also a major positive factor; religious belief tends to make people happy (and that’s the bit I hadn’t come across before).

Money is a bit more complex. Broadly, money doesn’t make you happy, but lack of money does make you miserable. The level at which increasing income stops making you happier varies from one society to another; as I recall it was about $40,000/year in the USA. On the other hand, if you use money to buy experiences, particularly with friends or family, then that can make you happier. Spending money on a holiday probably will make you happier, assuming that you have fairly good relationships with the people you go with. What’s more, the happiness tends to last, unlike money spent on things.

That raises an obvious question: is a book a thing or an experience? (It’s obvious to me.) Obviously, it is a thing, but the physical object is not what you buy. Rather, you buy the experience of reading it. In these terms, books might be experiences, but only if you read them. Similar considerations presumably apply to DVDs and CDs, and they should apply to RPGs in spades.

These results suggest that contemporary Western society is set up badly wrong. People try to get things, rather than building relationships or skills, and are surprised when it doesn’t make them happy. Japanese society may be slightly better off; Japanese consumerism is rather more focused on experiences, such as holidays and trips to famous hot springs, which are, apparently, better at making you happy. Still, the tendency towards individualism is visible here, and bad from a general perspective.

However, the nice thing about the results is that they suggest that making people happy could be good for society. If most people were involved in several deep, positive relationships with others, involved in a skillful activity and some projects aiming at larger things than personal goals, and were not constantly trying to get new toys, I think you’d have a fairly pleasant place to live. A bit of conscious design would be needed, but you should be able to be completely upfront about that. In short, I think that there may be the makings of a political program here, in addition to the recommendations for personal life. Definitely an interesting and useful read.

Books, Philosophy | Comments Off

This is the book about consciousness that I noted a little while ago, and I’ve just got around to reading it. It’s very good.

In the first section, Rosenberg raises most of the problems about consciousness that had occurred to me. In short, no matter how good a physical description you have, there is nothing in there about where consciousness comes from, so something has to be added to physical theories to say “and this gives rise to conscious experiences”. It seems very likely that that is the way to go, since even if global waves of electrical activity across the brain are the physical correlates of consciousness, current theory does not say that they would be conscious, so something must be missing. However, if we add consciousness properties to electrons and the like, it is deeply obscure how they could give rise to the unified conscious experience that we have.

While these problems are not accepted by everyone, they are fairly generally known. However, the fact that Rosenberg was promising to address the problems I see head-on was very promising. The meat of the book, then, is his solution to the problems.

The basic outline of the solution is very simple. He creates a new theory of causation, in which there are both effective and receptive properties, which combine to make individuals. Effective properties are conscious experiences, and a receptive property is a field of conscious experience. These receptive properties exist at different levels, so there is no reason why there cannot be a single receptive property for human minds, which would explain why we have a single unified experience.

Obviously, I’ve cut all the arguments and details from the above. However, it’s a very clever move. There are definitely problems in the theory of causation, and this theory does answer some of them. His argument that Humean theories have no way to define the universe was particularly interesting; I suspect that he may be right. Humean theories say that there are just individual events, with no links between them, and causation is simply the patterns that occur. However, in strict Humeanism you construct space, time, and causation from the events, which means that you can’t define the universe as “causally linked events” or “events in the same space” or “events in the same time”. You need the set of events first. That means that Humeans need a reason to exclude Tolkien’s Middle Earth from the universe. “It’s made up” isn’t enough, because they have no obvious way to pick out the set of “real events”, other than arbitrary stipulation. And the fact that Middle Earth does not exist is not an arbitrary stipulation; it reflects a deep truth about the universe.

So, back to the main argument of the book. The claim that metaphysics needs “real” causation is quite convincing, and Rosenberg’s split between symmetric and asymmetric constraints has the potential to do a lot of useful work. Similarly, the argument that the relational properties of physics (negative charge is just different from positive charge, there is nothing inherent about them) need some sort of categorical basis is prima facie convincing. Using conscious experiences to fill the role is, frankly, a brilliant idea. They are categorical properties that we know exist, and so it is metaphysically parsimonious to do things this way.

This is by far the best attempt to grapple with the hard problem of consciousness that I’ve ever seen, and I’d say it’s essential reading for anyone interested in the issue.

I’m not, however, fully convinced. One problem is that I’m not quite sure how the causal theory will work out in detail. This is simply due to the fact that I haven’t gone through it with a fine tooth comb yet; it’s possible that, when I do so, everything will be fine, or that there will be small changes that solve the problems. (The theory is unlikely to be perfect at this point, even if it is fundamentally right.)

I do have a more philosophical worry, however. The experiential basis of a particular physical property could be anything. There might be good reasons for all the visual experiences being based on the same sort of thing, but none were canvassed in the book. The unity of the physical process is not, by itself, enough; that does not feed down to the level of the experiences. Thus, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why red isn’t a sound rather than a colour.

More fundamentally, it seems entirely possible that pleasure could feel like pain, and vice versa. That is, something could be exactly the experience that pain is, and not be aversive. It is, on this theory, pure good luck that we have evolved to seek out things that feel good. We were bound to evolve to seek out things that feel, since an experiential basis was needed for those causal properties, but the experiential basis could have been agony. If it had, we would seek out agony, say we liked it, and call it “pleasure”, but it would still feel horrible.

I’m not entirely sure that this is even coherent as a thought experiment, but since failure of imagination is a poor philosophical argument I’ll let that pass. The other problem is that it means that the theory means that there is no possible investigation that can tell us anything about conscious experiences. We might be able to determine whether something has them or not, but even that is a bit tricky. We certainly wouldn’t be able to determine what they were like. (Parsimony would let us say that other people had similar ones to ours.) Now, this might be the way the world is; there is no reason why everything should be accessible to investigation. However, given that we are only just starting to investigate consciousness, I think I’d like to try a more optimistic approach first.

Of course, that means coming up with an alternative theory of consciousness, and given how thin on the ground they are, that’s far from a trivial proposition.

So, this book is great. But I think I hope it’s completely wrong.

Books, Philosophy | Comments Off

This morning I received an email from one of my friends from my Master’s course at Cambridge, informing me that Peter Lipton, my Ph.D. supervisor, had died. This was a great shock; he was only in his fifties. There are good general obituaries in the Guardian and on the Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science website, but I want to write a bit about his impact on me, because it was substantial.

I first met Peter (and it was “Peter” from very early on) in November 1992. Six weeks into the final year of my Physics undergraduate degree, I had suddenly come to the realisation that I didn’t want to study physics, and certainly didn’t want to spend my life doing it. I thought about changing to HPS for graduate work, but looking at the past exam papers made me think that I’d really rather be doing that subject now. So, I asked about changing subjects. Fortunately, at Cambridge Physics and HPS are, administratively, the same subject, both being part of the Natural Sciences Tripos, so the change was not impossible. My tutor dispatched me to talk to Trinity’s Director of Studies in HPS, Peter Lipton.

As I remember the meeting, Peter listened, told me that it would be difficult but possible, and then walked down to the corridor with me to the much bigger office of the then-Head of Department, Professor Redhead, to make sure that it would be permissible for me to transfer.

It is entirely characteristic of Peter that, when Professor Redhead retired, he did not move to the bigger office, instead converting it for use by graduate students as a computer room, and as an office for junior members of the Department; I had a desk in there for a few months while working on Starry Messenger.

As both obituaries note, Peter was a brilliant teacher. My late transfer deprived me of the pleasure of attending many of his lectures as an undergraduate, but when I later became a supervisor I had a good excuse to attend the courses my students were taking. His lectures were always clear, amusing, and memorable. Indeed, they were so memorable that the “transcribed Lipton lecture” was a persistent problem among submitted essays. In many years, the students produced a spoof exam paper, and for several years one of the questions was “Produce a transcription of your favourite Peter Lipton lecture. Remember to include stage directions for all visual jokes”. I have never attended any other undergraduate lectures of that quality, and, despite taking them as a model, my own efforts fell far, far short.

However, his teaching was not limited to his lectures. He also founded and ran the Epistemology Reading Group, a seminar that focused on a single text over the course of a term, whether a book or a collection of papers. At those seminars, and at others he chaired, he was skilled at drawing people into the discussion, and at giving people at all levels the opportunity to make the initial presentation. One of my contemporaries remarked that he also had a talent for “clarifying” student questions in a way that made them vastly more intelligent than the initial questioner had managed, all the while giving all the credit to the student. That group appears to have inspired many other similar groups; the HPS seminar page lists over half a dozen groups, with others on hiatus this term. The only group I know it inspired is the Medieval Science and Philosophy Reading Group that I organised, but the other groups all followed it in time while being contiguous in space, and thus a good Humean would conclude that Peter’s example caused them to come into existence.

And then there are his talents as a Ph.D. supervisor. My thesis was immeasurably better as a result of his comments and the discussions we had. Quite a common situation was for us to spend twenty minutes or so discussing a single sentence, leading me inexorably to the conclusion that, perhaps, I needed to devote a little more space to unpacking that idea. He would never start by saying that an idea was poor, but would, instead, raise objections to it, and let you work out for yourself that it was a non-starter.

Of course, if you could overcome the objections, so much the better. A chapter of my dissertation was devoted to his book, Inference to the Best Explanation. More specifically, it was devoted to why it was fundamentally wrong. Despite that, he supported me in my attempts to make the arguments as strong as possible. In 1994, during my M.Phil studies, Peter gave me a copy of the book, with the inscription “To David, Who may come up with a better explanation”. That encapsulates his attitude to his students; the desire to see them do well, rather than to preserve some sort of intellectual superiority.

As well as this attitude, he mastered all the basic skills needed in a good supervisor, but so often lacking. He read all the drafts I gave him, no matter how many, making comments all over. Appointments could be made for a couple of days later, just long enough to give him time to read, and during the meetings he would always give me his full attention. I thought at the time, and still think now, that I could not have had a better supervisor.

As if this were not enough, Peter also gave me my first opportunity to teach, recruiting me to supervise the final year undergraduate course during my MPhil year. This was provoked by an established supervisor getting a job and suddenly vanishing, and it took me a little while to get into the swing of supervising. I know that I tried to model much of my teaching on Peter, and that, in many respects, I fell short.

Both obituaries mention Peter’s sense of humour, which was good and never cruel. Students and colleagues could always laugh at his jokes, because they were never the butt. Characteristic was his response when I sent him the (Japanese) invitation to my wedding: “Thank you for the invitation, which is very pretty if entirely lacking in accessible semantic content”. It is an in-joke, but one that we could share.

The last time I was in Cambridge, with my (then) wife-to-be, we almost literally bumped into him in the HPS Department, and he immediately invited us for coffee. I was very pleased that we’d had the chance then, but I never imagined that it would be the last time I would see him, or the only time that my wife would. Even though my life has moved a long way from Cambridge, I feel a profound sense of loss that he is no longer there, explaining to undergraduates why it is difficult to demonstrate that it is a better idea to leave the third-floor lecture room by the door than the window. He was always part of Cambridge HPS for me, and I had naturally assumed that he always would be.

The Department has established a Peter Lipton Memorial Fund, to support undergraduate, post-graduate, and post-doctoral research. I cannot think of a more fitting way to remember the best teacher and nurturer of new researchers it has been my privilege to know.

Philosophy | Comments Off

Another fairly self-explanatory title… The series of Cambridge Companions aim to provide a range of scholarly essays on a topic or philosopher, to help advanced students to get to grips with them. Thus, they are introductory from one perspective, but very far from superficial, which makes them an interesting read.

One interesting thing about this book was the number of important medieval Jewish philosophers I’d never heard of. Given that I’ve studied medieval philosophy in some detail, that was a little surprising; not even the names had come up with any frequency. Of course, there were some, Maimonides and Gersonides, most notably, of whom I had heard; I’ve even read Maimonides. One question running through the book is the degree to which Jewish philosophers engaged with Christian and Islamic philosophers in the period, and vice versa, and in many cases the evidence for engagement seems fairly slender. Maimonides and Gersonides are exceptions, which might well be why they were the two I’d heard of; I’ve tended to approach medieval philosophy from the Christian direction.

Another interesting point was the discussion of Judah Halevi, an early twelfth century philosopher who wrote a book known as the Kuzari, dramatising the conversion of the Kazars to Judaism. In this text, he apparently argued that the Jews were racially superior to all other people, and that only Jews could ever be truly virtuous. Conversion was not an option; you had to be a genuine blood descendant of Israel. It’s the first time I’ve come across clear ideas of racial supremacy in a medieval context; the Christians were big on ideological and religious supremacy, but don’t seem to have cared very much about races. Jews (or Muslims) who converted to Christianity were just as good as those who were born that way. Of course, Halevi may have been isolated; certainly, Maimonides seems to have been much less racist. But it was still something of a shock to come across such a pure form of racial supremacy in a medieval text. It’s also something of a shock to come across Jews being racist; they are normally the victims of prejudice in the period. (Not just in the medieval period, either, of course.)

The book also discusses the origins of Kabbalah, albeit somewhat indirectly. Kabbalah tended to be mystical rather than philosophical, and some of its practitioners were opposed to philosophy. Similarly, there was a strong current of medieval Jewish philosophy that thought Kabbalah was a load of rubbish. However, there was also a group, quite important in some areas, that combined Kabbalah and philosophy, generally in a Platonic way. They influenced some Christians who were important in the Renaissance, such as Pico della Mirandola, and that seems to be how Kabbalah broke out of the Judaism and found its way into the mainstream of European occultism.

The book covered far more than I’ve mentioned here, and I now feel like I have a much better grip on what was happening in Jewish philosophy in the period, which should help when it comes to studying Christian philosophy from the same era. It’s rather specialist, but I think it’s a good book.

Books, History, Philosophy | 1 Comment »

Recently, atheism has become a a major topic of discussion. One of the most notable proponents is Richard Dawkins, professor of zoology and originally author of The Selfish Gene (which is, incidentally, a very good book). The debate has even made it into the Guardian with some frequency. All this attention to the topic makes me want to write my own blog article about where I stand, because my position is a little complex.

I’m only going to attempt to explain my position, not convince anyone else; I won’t be providing all of the evidence for my assertions. Since I suspect it will get quite long, I’ll also hide most of it from the front page.
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Philosophy, Religion | 3 Comments »

A little while ago I wrote a post about problems for the idea that it would be good if everyone were equal. That is an easy target for me, because I don’t think that it would be good if everyone were equal, in part because of those problems. Today, then, I want to look at something that’s a bit harder for me. I think that tolerance is a good idea, and I would like to see more of it. There are, however, some problems for the concept.

Let’s start with a rough characterisation of tolerance. A tolerant person allows people to live according to ethical and aspirational systems with which he does not agree. It is a central aspect of tolerance that you allow people to actually put the ethical and aspirational systems into practice; it is not tolerant to pretend to allow them to do something, but to take everything away afterwards, or undo all their work. Someone who removes graffiti as soon as it goes up is not tolerating graffiti.

Now, there is an obvious problem for tolerance, and one that everyone grapples with. This is the person who wants to go around killing people. You can’t tolerate that behaviour, the argument goes, because it infringes on the rights of others. I agree. Tolerance should not extend to tolerance of murder, and the problem of where to draw the line is a difficult one. Here, I want to suggest that it is even more difficult than most people are inclined to think.

It is common for tolerant people to believe that the line over what you should tolerate should be drawn in general terms. It should not deal with the specific details of any actions, such as whether they happen on a Sunday. Rather, it should deal with broad ideas, such as “any action that does not harm anyone who is not a voluntary participant in the action”. This is harder than you might think, but I want to suggest that it may be a complete non-starter. I will consider a couple of very minimally tolerant standards, and argue that accepting either has difficult consequences.
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Ethics, Philosophy, Political Philosophy | 6 Comments »

The Confessions of St Augustine is, of course, one of the great classics of western literature. It’s also one of the earlier classics of African literature, although it doesn’t seem to get put into that category very often; Augustine was born in North Africa, spent his youth there, effectively went to university in Italy, and then returned home. Of course, one could legitimately argue that if you are trying to broaden the literary canon, Augustine doesn’t count. It’s not like he hasn’t been in the canon for about 1600 years.

Having now read the book, I can see why it seized and held on to such a place. It is really very good. Apparently his Latin style is also excellent, but as I read it in translation (I’m such a lazy person), I can’t comment on that. The content, however, is very interesting. Some of the scenes are very famous, such as the “take and read” scene in the garden, or Augustine’s prayer: “Lord, grant me chastity… but not yet”.

It’s clear from Augustine’s account that he was a Christian, and a religious one, from birth. Even when he was a Manichee, he thought that he was a Christian, and arguably he was right, no matter how much he came to disagree later. However, he did a lot of anguished soul-searching, before finally deciding on celibacy and a particular version of Christian doctrine. It is tempting to label that version “orthodox Catholicism”, but a large part of the reason that position is orthodox is because Augustine held it. Within limits, there’s a pretty good chance that any position Augustine had taken would have ended up orthodox.

While the earlier sections of the book are largely autobiographical, there are philosophical and theological elements throughout, and the final sections are dominated by such discussions.

One notable feature is that Augustine was wrong on most of the important factual points he made. In his discussion of time, for example, he argues that only the present exists; that the past and the future do not. That position seems now to be untenable. Special and General Relativity mean that “the present” is not uniquely defined, so both the past and future must exist if the present does, because the present for some observers is part of the past and future for others. In his discussion of Biblical exegesis, he argues that Moses wrote so that everyone could understand, and interpret him in all the ways possible, consistently with truth. We now know, of course, that the opening of Genesis is, at the very least, highly misleading. It misled everyone who read it before the mid-nineteenth century, and continues to mislead a significant number of people now. It is possible to interpret it metaphorically so that it isn’t inconsistent with the known facts, but, basically, in any other context there would be no question about saying that it is simply false.

And that raises possibly the most important problem with his position. Augustine never questioned the authority of the Bible, in part because he believed that it was believed throughout the world. He appears to have been completely ignorant of the states of affairs in India, China, and sub-Saharan Africa. That may be forgivable, as the late Roman Empire had few contacts with those places, but there is a more serious point.

In Book Six (6.5.7), he says “Thus you [God] persuaded me … that I should not listen to any who said to me, “How do you know that these books were given to mankind by the Spirit of the one true and truthful God?” That fact was to be believed above all[.]” I have no problem forgiving his ignorance of relativity and evolutionary theory; Augustine was brilliant, but it’s asking a bit much to expect him to manage several centuries of science all by himself. I’ll even forgive his ignorance of the state of most of the world he lived in, because communications were difficult. However, his response to this question is unforgivable. Once that problem has occurred to you, it is deeply intellectually dishonest not to try to come up with an answer, and “I’m not listening! Not listening! La-la-la-la” is not an answer.

I find it very difficult to believe that someone of Augustine’s intellectual acumen and personality was not profoundly bothered by this issue. I know it used to bother me, back when I was a Christian, and I ceased to be a Christian when I decided that there was no good answer to that question. Some people are not inclined to worry about such things, but Augustine was the sort of person who writes a whole chapter on the nature of time, and the problems of trying to pin down what it could possibly be. He has discussions of epistemology in some of his other works.

In short, if he was preaching as he did while as unsure about the Bible as he should have been, he was intellectually dishonest. If he did not harbour the doubts, despite confronting the questions head on and having no answers to give (because I am fairly sure that he would have given them had he had them), he was culpably negligent, and probably lying to himself. It is somewhat disappointing to find that even Augustine falls in this way.

Books, History, Philosophy, Religion | Comments Off

I bought this book about four years ago, because it was cheap in Galloway and Porter in Cambridge. It then sat in my pile of “things I will get around to reading” for quite a long time, partly because it got left in England when I came out to Japan. Anyway, I finally got around to reading it. It’s a technical work of academic philosophy, primarily concerned with the philosophy of language. I thought quite a lot of it was very interesting, so this post is also likely to get a bit technical.

Hartry Field, the author, is (or, at least, was in 2001 when this book was published) a proponent of the disquotational theory of truth. This holds that there is nothing more to truth than sentences of the form “”Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white”. It’s called “disquotational” because all you really do is remove the quotation marks.

One of the odd things is that he, and other proponents of this theory, occasionally talk as if proponents of other theories of truth are committed to sometimes violating the disquotational formula. They can’t really mean this, because it’s obvious that no theory of truth can actually violate the formula; the terms “snow” and “white” means the same both inside and outside the quotes (if they don’t, disquotation is wrong), which means that the equivalence must hold no matter what makes the statements true.

Disquotationalism is also applied to reference, the theory of how words refer to things in the world. The worry raised for other theories is “how do we know that “snow” refers to all the snow, and only to snow?”. However, this is also obviously an empty worry. Snow is the stuff that “snow” refers to, no matter what the theory of reference. If there are cases of small, agglomerated ice crystals falling as precipitation that are not referred to by “snow”, then they are not snow. I’m not quite sure what they would be; some variety of sleet or hail, perhaps.

There are genuine problems quite close to this one, however. The example that Field uses is the pre-relativity use of “mass”. According to relativity theory, there are two quantities, rest mass and relativistic mass, each of which has some of the properties attributed to “mass”, but neither of which has all of them. There is a real problem as to what we should say about mass when we discover this. There are several options. We can say that there is no such thing as mass, and adopt different terms for the relativistic quantities. Or we can say that we had false beliefs about mass, and there are several choices for which beliefs were false. Finally, we can say that our usage of mass was fundamentally ambiguous, with indeterminate reference.

I’m not sure that there is a right answer to these questions. I think we can choose, to a great extent, because language is something that we create. (Of course, we can’t normally choose as individuals; language is socially created, so we have to go along with other speakers of the language if we want to communicate.)

One thing I am sure of, however, is that disquotationalism doesn’t advance the discussion. It is remarkable how much you can do without worrying about the deeper issues, but I still think the deeper issues are real issues, and that philosophers should be trying to solve them.

Books, Philosophy, Philosophy of Language | Comments Off

There’s an interesting article in this week’s Nature (well, strictly last week’s now, but still the most recent one I have here), on research into the neural basis of disgust, and its links to ethical judgements. (Nature 447 (2007), 768-771) It would seem that, when people judge things to be ethically disgusting, they are using the same parts of the brain, and in much the same way, as when they judge faeces to be disgusting. There’s also a lot of interesting work on the human tendency to punish undesirable behaviour, and on the origins of compassion and cooperation, although that doesn’t appear in this week’s issue. It all appears to be perfectly natural.

This is a problem for ethics, because instincts hardwired into us by evolution in order to promote the spread of our genes in future generations are not generally considered to be the right sorts of things on which to found a system of ethics. Ethics should be grounded on universal truths, not a set of feelings cobbled together by the essentially random process of evolution because they were helpful when it came to surviving on the prehistoric African steppes.
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Today, I read an article in an ethics journal (called Ethics, simply enough) that defended egalitarianism. This is the view that it is, in general, a good thing to make a society more equal. It’s quite a popular view; it gets defended a lot. I, however, find it very unpleasant; its defenses almost always feel malicious. Specifically, they seem to be based on a dislike for the rich.

So, here are some problems for egalitarianism.

Throwing Acid At Supermodels

Supermodels are more attractive than the average person, by a substantial margin, and beauty is generally regarded as a good thing, even if only skin deep. Therefore, throwing acid at supermodels, which would reduce their beauty due to the scarring, is, in certain respects, good, if you are an egalitarian. I find this conclusion utterly implausible.

Of course, the pain caused by the acid is an extraneous factor. However, I do not find the idea that supermodels should be subjected to compulsory cosmetic surgery to reduce their beauty any more attractive, no matter how much this reduces inequality. This situation seems to be an almost exact parallel to subjecting the rich to compulsory taxes, in order to reduce their wealth.

Wrecking Marriages

One might object that disfiguring the supermodels should be ruled out because it doesn’t make anyone more beautiful. Indeed, most sophisticated egalitarians do adopt rules on which a change that benefits no-one is not good. (This is not universal; there do seem to be some egalitarians who are committed to compulsory cosmetic surgery for supermodels.)

So, consider another case. Ann and Andrew are a very happily married couple. Brenda is miserable because she is in love with Ann, and Bill is miserable because he is in love with Andrew. If Ann and Andrew were separated, and forced to pair up with Brenda and Bill, respectively, then Brenda and Bill would be less miserable, and Ann and Andrew would also be miserable, so there would be much less inequality in the world.

As you might imagine, I do not find the egalitarian intuition to be even remotely plausible in this case. I don’t think I’m alone in that, either.

Protecting Children from Good Parents

A common egalitarian claim is that it is unjust for children to have benefits just because their parents are rich. So, it should also be unjust for them to have benefits just because their parents are good parents, engaging with their children, being loving and supporting, and assisting them through their education. Indeed, the evidence I’ve seen suggests that this has a significantly larger effect on both the happiness and prospects for prosperity of the children than wealth does.

Therefore, a just state should not only take children away from excessively bad parents, it should also take them away from excessively good ones. A kind state would monitor parents and warn them when they were getting close to the line, and should neglect their children a bit or lose them, just as it would warn failing parents.

Now, I find this suggestion positively morally repellent, and I suspect most egalitarians would agree. So they owe us an account of which benefits it is unjust for parents to confer on their children, and which are allowable, and why the large inequalities that result are not something that should be remedied by an egalitarian.

Money is not Everything

I am not aware of any egalitarians who actually claim that the important thing is to equalise money. Instead, they talk about happiness, or opportunity. However, the intuitions and recommended policies all seem to be based on money.

For example, work on the causes of happiness suggest that it is largely independent of income, once income exceeds a certain threshold. The threshold varies by society, but being in a society with a higher threshold doesn’t make you happier, even if you meet the threshold. This means that there are almost certainly some poor people who are happier than some rich people. If you take money away from the poor people, enough to drop them beneath the threshold, you will make them less happy. Giving that money to the rich people will not make them any happier. Thus, taxing the poor (provided you get the right poor) and giving the money to the rich will reduce the inequality in society.

This is not what egalitarians generally seem to have in mind. It arguably should be, however.

So, We Let Them Starve?

Obviously, I don’t think that we should let people starve. Actually, I think that imposing fairly high taxes on the rich and distributing the money to the poor is almost certainly morally justifiable. This is because it is important to deal with the serious poverty in the world, and the resources to do so have to come from somewhere. The poverty is too urgent a problem to wait for economic growth to remove it, so redistribution is the only option. While the total wealth of the world is not fixed in the long term, it is over the timescale of this problem.

But this has nothing to do with equality. Actually, I strongly suspect that inequality is good, because it allows some people the leisure to develop goods that will substantially improve the lot of very many people. Medicine exists because small numbers of people were maintained in a much more comfortable situation than most of the population at that time. However, this is a different issue, and one I’m not yet completely confident about.

A final note for people who know the literature on this topic. I have a suspicion that a reasonable interpretation of Rawls’s theory of justice might well have all the consequences I think are right. It is a consequence of this that I suspect that it doesn’t have any of the consequences it is customarily taken to have.

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