Source: https://claude.ai/share/c8ae5aba-f30c-4abb-b1b8-26ef2e8af641 (shared 2026-10-12, by Chris) Captured verbatim from the public chat_snapshots API on 2026-10-12. Chris vs Claude (claude.ai chat).
There is a term in policy debate called “non uniqueness “. Can you tell me when this should be used and when it doesn’t apply?
Non-uniqueness says the disadvantage’s impact will happen, or is already happening, without the plan. If the status quo already causes the harm, the plan can’t be the reason for it, so the disad gives no reason to vote against the plan.
Example: the negative argues the plan’s spending causes inflation. The affirmative answers that inflation is already rising because of current policy, so the plan doesn’t change the outcome.
When it works best
When it doesn’t apply or backfires
Related terms worth knowing
Strategically, non-uniqueness is a defensive argument. It reduces the disad’s risk but rarely gives you a reason to vote affirmative by itself, so it’s strongest alongside link defense or a separate offensive argument elsewhere.
Ahh.. I had this wrong.. the argument was that society would be better off if we removed the very low iq people because they are depressed and live low quality lives.. I said this was non-unique because it also applies to very high iq. Without discussing solvency or the merits of the fact of the matter, what was I trying to get at?
You were saying the warrant doesn’t distinguish the group being targeted. If depression and low quality of life justify removing people, that reason applies equally to very high-IQ people, so it can’t explain why low-IQ people specifically were singled out.
This is a different argument from policy-debate non-uniqueness. Some names that fit it better:
Colloquially, debaters do sometimes say “that’s non-unique to X,” meaning “that reason isn’t specific to X.” So your instinct wasn’t wrong in casual usage, just not the technical disad sense.
The strongest way to run it is as a dilemma. Either they bite the bullet and endorse removing high-IQ people too, which most judges and audiences will find untenable, or they need a new warrant that actually tracks IQ. Either way, their original justification is gone.
So the discussion was on morality, and I was arguing for a randian style objective style where morality is defined as weather it fits reality or not.. the question from a deontologist was what was asked.. since X, why can’t I not do Y to solve.. my instinct to go to selective application was probably not the best, but does it still make sense? For the record I argued against solvency when the next example was why not lock up all women and force them to reproduce in order to solve the birth rate crisis.. so I think solvency was the better fit
Selective application still makes sense as a point, but it answers the wrong question. Solvency has the same problem, just less visibly.
Why both miss. The deontologist isn’t advocating removing low-IQ people. They’re testing your framework: if morality is about outcomes that fit reality, what stops it from licensing atrocities?
The stronger reply is inside Rand herself. Objectivism isn’t consequentialist about “society.” Rand explicitly rejected the idea that the collective’s welfare justifies anything done to individuals. In her framework:
So both examples fail at the premise, not the execution. “Society would be better off” isn’t a valid moral justification in Objectivism, and forcibly removing or confining people is initiation of force. That holds even if the policy worked perfectly, which is exactly what the deontologist was trying to get you to say.
The pushback you should expect. A sharp deontologist will say your rights look like constraints in disguise, which concedes their point. Your answer is that Rand derives rights from facts about human nature rather than positing them as duties. That’s where the real debate is, and it’s a much better place to stand than solvency.
Good point, the claim “fits reality” is what I was getting after from “facts about human nature” I was just applying it further.. killing off low depressed people doesn’t work in the long run and it doesn’t presuppose force should not exist.. a deontologist can actually justify force under certain criteria
That clarifies it, and it’s a stronger position than “it won’t solve.” But two parts still need tightening.
“Doesn’t work in the long run” is ambiguous, and the ambiguity is costly. It can mean two things:
You mean the second, but the deontologist will hear the first. Say the second explicitly. Then “suppose it works” has no purchase, because you’re rejecting the goal, not predicting that it will fail.
On force, the distinction isn’t whether force is allowed. You’re right that Rand doesn’t oppose force as such. She permits retaliatory force against those who initiate it. But that doesn’t separate you from the deontologist. Kant justifies coercion on almost the same structure: force is legitimate when it hinders someone else’s hindrance of freedom. On the examples given, you and a Kantian would likely reach the same verdict.
So the real disagreement isn’t about conclusions. It’s about grounding:
The deontologist’s best challenge is the is-ought gap. How do facts about human nature generate a binding “ought” without a prior commitment to valuing life? Rand’s answer is that life is the precondition of value, since only a living being faces the alternative of existence or nonexistence that makes valuing possible. Whether that answer succeeds is where your debate actually lives. Examples about IQ or birth rates are distractions from it.
I challenge “suppose it does work”.. the common retort to slavery is that it DID work! But the reality is the societal erosion it caused means it doesn’t really work in the long run.. society is better off without slavery than with it even if it seems it reached a local maximum. I think I get to the same place as Rand but from a different way.. I argue you cannot argue against the existence of life without being alive, hence a performative contradiction. And the physical realities of what allows use to live is the basis for behavior and thus morality
I’d push back on both moves. The slavery argument undercuts the principled position you just built, and the performative contradiction proves less than you need.
The slavery argument puts you back in solvency. “It didn’t work in the long run” is still an empirical claim about outcomes, which has three problems:
The Rand-style answer is cleaner: slavery was wrong because it treated rational beings as property. That’s true regardless of whether it worked. You were already there two messages ago. Don’t trade it back for a consequentialist argument.
The performative contradiction shows less than you need. It works against “I am not alive” or “life doesn’t exist.” But someone saying “life has no value” isn’t contradicting themselves. Being alive is a precondition of arguing, just as breathing is, but a precondition isn’t automatically a value. Two more gaps:
“Physical realities are the basis for behavior, and therefore morality” is the is-ought gap again. Physics tells you what sustains life. It doesn’t tell you why you ought to sustain it. Rand concedes this: choosing to live is a pre-moral choice, and morality follows from it. That makes your ethics conditional (“if you choose life, then…”), and a deontologist will go straight for that conditional, because categorical duties are their whole advantage.
Your strongest version is likely the following: preconditions of agency, then universalization, then rights. Drop the long-run outcomes argument entirely.
Ugg.. yes, we are circling, but that is because I am having a hard time explaining things.. I do not believe that the is-ought gap is factual. One can determine what they ought to do because of the physical reality around them. “Why you ought to sustain it” is because you ARE sustaining it.. it is very easy for you to stop, but you don’t.. performative contradiction. Anyone arguing that they should not sustain life is in a contradiction.. the point about universalism is fine, but this isn’t too tough.. if you value your life, you should assume others value theirs for the same reason. And that being said.. just going around killing people is probably one of the quicker ways to end up dead.. again. Murder doesn’t fit reality.. it is self defeating. Same with slavery. You can also look at it from a relative position, a country performs better without slavery than with it.. this is comparative advantage and the notion that humans do better when they are allowed to choose their own path. With Rand, you have to justify the NAP, but habermas already shows that the nap self justifies through performance contradiction. At best, what I am arguing for is a shortcut that has no presuppositions
You’re explaining it fine. We’re circling because a few steps keep slipping between “is” and “ought,” and each slip reopens the same gap. Here’s where I think your position holds and where it breaks.
The strongest version of what you’re saying is a transcendental argument: anyone who asks “what ought I do?” is already alive, already acting, and already reasoning, so those preconditions can’t coherently be rejected from inside the question. That’s a real position with serious defenders. It doesn’t deny the is-ought gap so much as claim certain oughts are built into the act of asking.
Where it breaks:
A correction on Habermas. His discourse ethics shows that argument presupposes norms like equality and non-coercion among participants. He never derived the NAP from that. The thinker who did is Hans-Hermann Hoppe, whose “argumentation ethics” is almost exactly your shortcut: arguing presupposes self-ownership, so denying self-ownership is a performative contradiction. You should read him, and then read the critiques. The main one is that it only binds people while they’re arguing, so it says nothing about someone who just attacks without debating you.
“No presuppositions” is the claim I’d drop first. You presuppose that contradiction is bad, that consistency binds you, and that reasons matter. Those may be undeniable, but they’re still presuppositions. “Minimal and undeniable presuppositions” is defensible; “none” invites an easy counterexample.
It’s fair, I actually think the first part of what you said is the best. I argue all morality are conditional imperatives. How can murder be wrong without humans? No one to kill, and no actor to do the killing.. morality’s conditional on an agent. But I don’t say there are no moral facts.. it is a fact that if you are sick, you should see a dr. The physical reality makes this so. Yes, this is loose, but it is a weaker way of saying your first sentence. A deontologist would are they have no pre-suppositions, but this is not true either.. a Christian ethicist presupposes gods will.. so I also see this as that everything is about outcomes.. even the most die hard deontologist cares about the outcome of the action, hence the term good and bad.. these value outcome. And I suppose I tie the contraction and value points to the action axiom.. if the person who says not to smoke still smokes.. there is something in that he doesn’t believe.
That’s a more defensible position, and it has a name: what you’re describing is close to Philippa Foot. Her 1972 paper “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” argues exactly your first point, and her later book Natural Goodness grounds morality in facts about what living things need, much like your “sick, see a doctor” example. She’s your best ally here, and her critics are your best sparring partners.
Of your three new points, the first is strong, the second is fair, and the third has a real problem.
Conditional on an agent is not the same as conditional on a desire. Kant agrees morality requires agents. His categorical imperative binds all rational agents. “If you’re sick, see a doctor” is conditional on wanting health; drop the desire and the ought disappears. Your strongest move is that the condition is being an agent at all, and everyone asking the question meets it. That makes your imperatives universal in practice. Say that, and the “it’s merely conditional” objection loses most of its force.
The presupposition point is fair. The Christian ethicist presupposes God’s will, and the Kantian presupposes that rational nature has unconditional worth. That evens the field: everyone stands on something. But it doesn’t make your foundation better, only no worse. You still need an argument that yours is more minimal or less deniable.
“Everything is about outcomes” is an equivocation. A deontologist cares about outcomes, but denies that outcomes alone make an act right. “Good” and “bad” can describe intentions, acts, or character, not just results. Kant opens the Groundwork by saying the only thing good without qualification is a good will, regardless of what it achieves. You can argue he’s wrong, but “they use the word good” doesn’t show it.
The action axiom shows preference, not belief or rightness. Mises’s point is that the smoker who smokes demonstrates he prefers smoking right now. He can still sincerely believe it’s harmful; that’s weakness of will, not disbelief. And praxeology is deliberately value-free. Mises said it tells you nothing about what anyone ought to do. Worse for you, the murderer demonstrates a preference for murder too. If action reveals values, it reveals bad ones as easily as good ones, so it can’t ground the prohibition by itself.
So my read is: lean on agent-conditional naturalism (Foot), keep the presupposition tu quoque as a defensive point, and drop the outcomes and action-axiom arguments. Each one hands the deontologist an easy reply.
Ok, so I had this come up when discussing Kant categorical imperatives in class long ago.. the imperative to tell the truth.. the obvious example of Anne Frank came up, in asking if one should tell the guards where she is. This was hard to justify on categorical imperatives alone and most were fine with conditional ones. I agree this just puts everyone on the same foothold, but that is where I think performative contradiction breaks the stalemate. To argue you did a good thing by telling the truth when something ends up poorly seems a lack of foresight and understanding of reality.. I see this much the same as the nap allowing force, but only under certain conditions
The Anne Frank case is Kant’s own: in his reply to Benjamin Constant, he said you shouldn’t lie even to a murderer asking where your friend is hiding. So your class was right that it’s hard on Kant’s own terms. But it’s less damaging to categorical imperatives than it looks, and your proposed fix has the same weakness we’ve been circling.
Kantians have answers. Christine Korsgaard’s paper “The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil” argues that the categorical imperative itself permits lying to the murderer. The murderer is already exploiting your honesty to deceive you about his purpose, and a maxim of deceiving deceivers to protect their victims can be universalized. Silence or refusal to answer is also an option. Neither requires conditional imperatives.
“Lack of foresight” is outcomes again. If the truth-teller is wrong because things turned out badly, then a liar whose lie backfired, say the guards search harder because the story didn’t add up, did wrong too. Your verdict would then depend on how events unfolded rather than on what was done. That’s the slavery problem again.
Performative contradiction doesn’t break this stalemate. Where’s the contradiction? The truth-teller says “I should tell the truth” and does. That’s perfectly consistent, just terrible. Performative contradiction can show a position is incoherent; it can’t show a coherent position is monstrous.
Your NAP analogy is the strongest thing you’ve said. The guards are initiating force, so deceiving them is defensive, the informational equivalent of retaliatory force. That’s a principled answer, not an outcomes answer: the lie is justified by what the guards are doing, not by how things turn out. It also holds even if the lie fails.
Notice where that puts you, though. Korsgaard’s Kantian answer and your NAP answer have the same structure: aggressors forfeit the protections they’re exploiting. So this case doesn’t break the stalemate between you and the deontologist. It shows you’d converge on the verdict. The real dispute stays where it was: whether that protection rests on rational agency as such, or on what living agents need to survive.
Sure, but how is “permits lying to the murderer” not a conditional? I agree we are getting to the same place, but it seems more honest to admit conditional ala Foot
Because “categorical” and “conditional” mean different things here. Kant’s categorical imperatives can contain conditions. What makes them categorical is that they don’t depend on what you happen to want.
Korsgaard’s lying rule is conditional in the first sense and categorical in the second. It binds every agent in that situation whether or not they care. So the Kantian isn’t being dishonest by calling it categorical.
Where your challenge does bite: if maxims can absorb exceptions this specific, someone can gerrymander a maxim to permit almost anything (“lie when your name is Chris and it’s Tuesday”). Kantians call this the maxim-description problem, and it’s a real weakness. The universalizability test does less work than it claims once you can choose how to describe the act.
Is Foot more honest? Foot’s 1972 view made morality conditional on desire. She admitted it doesn’t bind someone who doesn’t care about others, which is honest but costly. It means you can’t say the amoralist is wrong, only that he lacks a preference you have.
Your position is actually different from that version of Foot. You make morality conditional on being an agent, not on wanting anything in particular. A condition every possible addressee meets is functionally categorical. So you’re closer to Kant than you think: you agree morality binds all agents and disagree about why. Foot’s later Natural Goodness moved toward exactly that view, which is why it’s a better fit for you than her 1972 paper.
Ok.. I agree.. but I see this as the deontologists equivocating.. for the reasons you citing on the maxim description problem.. what is the difference between conditional and categorical if all categories must be stripped down to the individual acts?
It’s not quite equivocation, because the two terms are used consistently. But you’ve found a real cost; it just lands somewhere other than the categorical/conditional line.
The distinction survives any level of detail. Even a rule specific to one act, like “lie to this guard at this door,” can be categorical or hypothetical. It’s categorical if it binds you whether or not you want the outcome. It’s hypothetical if it binds you only because you have some goal. How detailed the rule is doesn’t affect which kind it is.
What collapses is the test, not the distinction. If maxims can be stripped down to individual acts, universalizability stops filtering anything, since almost any sufficiently specific act universalizes. Kant then keeps the label “categorical” but loses the method that was supposed to tell you what the categorical rules are. That’s the real damage.
The Kantian reply: Onora O’Neill argues that a maxim isn’t any true description of your act. It’s the principle you’re actually acting on. “My name is Chris and it’s Tuesday” can’t go in your maxim, because it isn’t your reason. “He’s using my honesty to hunt an innocent” can, because it is. That limits gerrymandering by tying maxims to real reasons, though critics say it just moves the problem: now you need a theory of which reasons count.
The endpoint you’re describing has a name: moral particularism. Jonathan Dancy argues there are no exceptionless moral principles at all; what counts as a reason changes with context, so judgment works case by case.
Adversarially: this problem applies to you too. “Fits reality” and “what agents need to survive” also have to be applied at some level of description. If you can’t say which features of a situation matter and why, your view becomes either particularism or gerrymandering, the same as Kant’s. The deontologist can turn the maxim-description problem straight back on you.
Sure, I will agree no one escapes, hence the slavery “well it seems like it works “ argument.. but the truth is reality doesn’t really change and this includes much of human behavior. This behavior is tested over time and it has a real survivorship bias. Reality sets boundaries on human behavior and thus controls outcomes. I see it at best, deontology is just “good advice” on what has worked in the past, and much of it holds up.. but I don’t for one second believe that they don’t care about outcomes.
What you’ve just described is a recognized position, and it isn’t deontology. Deontology as tested good advice that holds up because reality selects for workable behavior is rule consequentialism, or Hayek’s cultural evolution. R.M. Hare’s two-level view says much the same thing: follow rules day to day because they encode accumulated outcomes, and reserve outcome reasoning for when the rules conflict. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit is the closest match to your survivorship-bias framing.
But selection is your weakest link. A norm surviving shows it was adaptive in its environment, not that it was right:
(Also, “survivorship bias” is the name of the fallacy of looking only at survivors. You mean selection pressure, and using the fallacy’s name invites the obvious joke.)
On outcomes, I’ll concede the point and make it testable. Deontologists do care about outcomes. The disagreement shows up only where outcomes and constraints conflict. The classic test is the transplant case: a surgeon can kill one healthy patient and use their organs to save five. The outcome is clearly better, and the deontologist still says no.
What’s your answer? If it’s “no, because hospitals would lose trust and the long-run outcome is worse,” you’re consistently rule consequentialist, and that’s a defensible place to land. If it’s “no, because it’s simply wrong to use him that way, even if no one ever found out,” you’ve just made a deontological move, and you’ll need to explain where it comes from in your framework.
I agree, selection is relative to environment, but again the environment doesn’t change much, and when it does, it is usually slowly.. hence why these things stayed around so long.. my answer to the hospital question is no.. if the hospital gets a reputation for doing this, they lose patients and cease to exist.. it is not in the hospitals best interest to do it
That answer is consistent with your view, which is why the deontologist’s next move will be to take away the reputation. Stipulate that no one ever finds out. The surgeon is alone, the death looks natural, and the five recover. Is it wrong now?
This is Plato’s Ring of Gyges: a ring that makes you invisible, so wrongdoing has no consequences for you. Every outcome or self-interest ethic has to answer it. You have three options:
Notice that your current answer puts the wrong on the hospital. The patient who was killed doesn’t figure in it at all. That’s the same structure as the slavery argument, where the wrong was society’s erosion rather than what happened to the enslaved.
Slow environmental change cuts against you there too. If slavery lasted because the environment changed slowly, then slavery fit its environment for centuries. By the selection test, that makes slavery right in Rome and wrong only once conditions changed. Unless you want that conclusion, selection can explain why norms persist, but it can’t tell you which ones are right.
I think the third option is where your position has been pointing all along: start from the agent, not from outcomes. But you’d have to give up “it’s not in the hospital’s interest” as your reason.
And I will argue that the reputation cannot be taken away, as the hypo rejects reality.. people will find out even if it take a long time
That’s a legitimate move, and your framework is entitled to it: if morality is about fitting reality, hypotheticals that break reality have limited authority. Some philosophers make the same complaint about trolley problems. But it has three costs.
It’s empirically doubtful. A large share of murders are never solved, and some wrongs are never discovered at all. We can’t name them, by definition. “People will find out eventually” isn’t something you can show. It’s the same structure as “it fails in the long run”: a claim no evidence could refute, because you can always say not yet.
Late discovery doesn’t help your mechanism. If it comes out 40 years later, after the surgeon has died and the hospital has closed for unrelated reasons, the consequences never reach either one. Your reason for “no” was that the hospital loses patients. Discovery that arrives too late doesn’t produce that.
It makes wrongness scale with the odds of getting caught. If the risk of discovery is what makes it wrong, then a killing with a 1% chance of detection is less wrong than one with a 90% chance. That’s the conclusion your answer commits you to, and it’s the one the deontologist will press.
The hypothetical isn’t a prediction that undetectable murder happens. It’s a probe that separates two variables, the act and its detection, to see which one your view treats as the wrong. Rejecting the probe avoids that question rather than answering it. You can do that, but in a debate the judge will notice you didn’t say whether killing the patient is wrong in itself.
You don’t have to give up “fits reality” to answer. You can say the act is wrong because it destroys a living agent, and that, as a separate point, it also tends to get discovered. The first does the moral work; the second is supporting evidence.
And yet murder rate has gone down through the centuries.. these are exceptions that prove the rule.. evolution isn’t a perfect system but it does work.
The decline is real. Pinker and the historian Manuel Eisner document homicide falling dramatically since the Middle Ages, so the trend supports you. But it answers a different question from the one the hypothetical asks.
A trend is about populations; the hypothetical is about one act. Evolution “working” means it shapes averages over time. The undetected killer is exactly the case selection doesn’t reach. Saying the system works overall doesn’t tell you whether his act was wrong.
The decline may run the other way causally. The usual explanations, such as Norbert Elias’s “civilizing process,” state monopolies on force, courts, and policing, are institutions people built because they already judged murder wrong. If moral judgment drove the decline, the decline can’t also be what grounds the judgment. That’s circular.
“The exception that proves the rule” isn’t an argument. Exceptions are what test rules. And here, the exceptions are the very cases under dispute. Calling them exceptions doesn’t settle them.
“It works” is still the is-ought gap. Selection tells you which norms spread. A norm can spread for reasons unrelated to rightness, as slavery did for millennia.
I think we’ve reached the core, so here’s the question plainly: if a killing is never discovered, was it wrong? If yes, your reason has to be about the victim, not detection or trends. If no, you’re consistent, but that’s the bullet you’re biting.
This sounds like a tree in a forest.. yes it does make a sound even if there is no one to immediately detect it.. and that fall has consequences.. growth around it, erosion..there will be long term effects . So what do you mean by “never discovered”? No family? No job? No one would notice him missing.. again the hypo does not match reality
That’s a better answer than detection, because you’ve moved the wrong from “someone finds out” to “the death itself has effects.” That puts it closer to the victim. But it doesn’t get you out of the transplant case.
By “never discovered,” I mean the cause, not the death. The patient is missed, the family grieves, and his job goes unfilled. Everyone believes he died of natural causes. All the effects you’re describing still happen.
But the five patients who live also have families, jobs, and futures. If consequences in the world are what count, the transplant case comes out at five lives’ worth of effects against one. That’s the whole point of the example: it’s built so that outcomes favor the killing. Tracing ripple effects doesn’t help, because the ripples from five survivors outweigh the ripples from one death.
So “the tree makes a sound” works against you here. Counting all the consequences tells the surgeon to kill.
That leaves the same fork. If you still say no, and I think you do, the reason can’t be the sum of effects. It has to be something about what’s done to this person: he’s being used up as parts for others. That’s the agent-centered constraint, whether you ground it in Kant’s rational nature or in Foot and Rand’s living agent. Your intuition is already there; the arguments you keep reaching for are what’s pulling you back to outcomes.
No.. I think the surgeon still stands.. sure the 5 are effected, but how many are effected by the hospital when it shuts down? By the reduced faith in the hospital system.. you are comparing first order effects with multi order effects.. and the is what evolution does best. My answer would be to let both systems run and see which survives.. current history favors the surgeon not doing it.
Those higher-order effects all require the cause to come out. Lost faith in the hospital, the shutdown, damage to the system: none of that happens if everyone believes the patient died naturally. So this brings back detection, which we just set aside.
Where you are right is at the level of policy. A hospital system that harvests patients would collapse, and the higher-order effects would swamp the five lives saved. That’s the strongest form of your view, and it’s a real answer. But it’s an answer to “should hospitals have this policy?” The hypothetical asks about one secret act, which has first-order effects only.
“Let both systems run and see which survives” has two problems:
I think your position is now clear and coherent: rule consequentialism with an evolutionary epistemology. Rules are justified by long-run, multi-order effects, and we discover them through selection rather than calculation. Hayek is your closest ally. The cost is that it has no grounds to condemn a single, truly secret act whose effects stay first-order, and you handle that by denying such acts exist in reality.
That’s a defensible place to stand. Just know that’s the bullet, so you’re not surprised when the deontologist goes straight for it.
Again it doesn’t.. All acts impact all others.. this is the singular universe theory the assumption that “no one finds out” is weak.. especially if the experiment is repeated and it is why I rejected the framing
I get why you rejected the framing, and I think we’ve hit a real disagreement rather than a misunderstanding. One more pushback, then I’ll call it.
“All acts impact all others” proves too much. If every act has endless effects across the universe, then you can’t evaluate any act by its consequences, including sparing the patient. The long-run effects of five people dying are just as vast and just as unknowable as the effects of one secret killing. Philosophers call this the cluelessness problem (James Lenman, Hilary Greaves). It’s one of the hardest objections to consequentialism, and your move runs straight into it. If effects are infinite and untraceable, they can’t be what tells you the surgeon was wrong.
“Repeated” changes the question. Repetition turns one act into a policy, and I’ve already conceded you win the policy version. The hypothetical is about one act.
Where we actually disagree is method. You think a thought experiment that cuts the causal links reality would never cut can’t tell you anything about morality. The deontologist thinks isolating variables is exactly how you find out what your view depends on. That’s a legitimate dispute, and there are serious philosophers on your side who distrust idealized cases.
So your position is coherent: rule consequentialism, evolutionary epistemology, and rejection of hypotheticals that break causal reality. The cost is the cluelessness problem. If you’re using effects to judge acts, you owe an account of which effects you can actually know, and why those are enough.
Ok.. fair enough on the universe issue, but it was just illustrating the point of “no one finds out” doesn’t work.. and yes, repeatability is the key here, and isn’t this what deontologists mean by category? I don’t know if taking a left instead of a right will involve me in a car accident and kill me, but I don’t base my behavior on low probability events.
Partly, yes. That convergence is real enough that Derek Parfit wrote a three-volume book, On What Matters, arguing that Kantians, contractualists, and rule consequentialists are “climbing the same mountain from different sides.”
The difference is in what the repetition test checks:
Same structure, different grounding. Kant would say the harvesting maxim fails even in a world where, oddly, trust didn’t collapse. You’d say it’s permissible in that world. That’s the remaining difference between you.
Your car example is a good answer to cluelessness. Ignore remote, unknowable effects, and act on foreseeable ones weighted by probability. That’s the standard reply, and it works.
But apply it consistently. For one careful surgeon, the foreseeable effect is five lives saved, and discovery is the low-probability event. By your own rule, he shouldn’t base his decision on it. The only way to avoid that conclusion is to treat each act as an instance of a repeated policy, and that’s exactly Kant’s move. So repeatability is doing the work, and you’re closer to the categorical side than you’ve been admitting.
I’m not sure if I would still agree if trust doesn’t collapse.. my argument is to put it to the test.. have a society where hospitals can harvest at will and one where they can’t.. see which survives.. so far the don’t harvest crowd is winning and the harvest crowd tend to expire quickly
Your uncertainty there is the most honest answer you’ve given, and I think it’s the real crux.
The survival test can’t settle it, though. Running both societies only tells you what happens in a world where trust does collapse. It can’t tell you what you’d think in a world where it doesn’t, which is what you said you’re unsure about. Also, as far as I know, no society has actually allowed hospitals to harvest at will, so “the harvest crowd expires quickly” is a prediction, not a result. And that may be because people already judged it wrong, which is the same circularity as the murder decline.
Here’s a way your own framework can resolve it. Trust collapsing isn’t a lucky accident; it follows from what humans are. People who can be harvested will avoid hospitals, hide illness, and distrust institutions. A world where that doesn’t happen isn’t our world with one rule changed. It’s a world with different creatures in it.
That’s Foot’s move. Morality is conditional on the kind of agent you are. Since human nature is fixed, the condition is always met for us, so the prohibition is effectively unconditional for humans. You don’t have to say whether harvesting would be fine for beings with different psychology, any more than you need to say whether sunlight would be good for a deep-sea creature.
That lets you keep “fits reality” without the hypotheticals, and without betting everything on how a historical experiment plays out.
Disagree. Trust collapsing or not is part of the test. The argument is that you can have a society where the trust doesn’t collapse not collapse, I don’t think this is possible, and the previous experiments that tried this failed miserably
Then we agree more than it sounds. “I don’t think a society where trust doesn’t collapse is possible” is the Foot position. The only difference is how you know it: I said it follows from human nature, and you say experience shows it. Those aren’t rivals. Experience is how we learn what human nature is.
The weak spot is “previous experiments failed miserably.” No society I know of has let hospitals harvest patients at will, so those must be analogies, presumably regimes that treated people as resources: forced labor systems, coerced medical experimentation, totalitarian states. They did fail, but they did many other harmful things at once, so you can’t isolate harvesting as the cause. If someone challenges you, you’ll need to say which cases you mean and why they generalize.
The stronger claim doesn’t need the experiments. Anyone who knows they might be harvested will stay away from hospitals. You don’t have to run a society to predict that; it follows from people wanting to live, which is your starting premise. That makes your conclusion necessary rather than historically contingent, which is a better position to defend.
Sure.. we have plenty of examples of societies harvesting organs without consent.. mostly seen in wartime.. or in slavery nations.. there are examples
Fair, there are cases. Unit 731 and the Nazi camps used prisoners for lethal medical experimentation, enslaved people’s bodies were used for surgery and dissection without consent, and China officially acknowledged using executed prisoners’ organs for transplants until it announced a reform in 2015. But these examples hurt your survival test more than they help.
The societies didn’t expire quickly. China ran a prisoner-organ system for decades and became more powerful during that time. Slave societies lasted centuries. Wartime regimes fell, but because they lost wars, not because of medical practices. If survival is the test, several of these passed it for a long time.
The trust didn’t collapse where it mattered to the society. Every example harvests from an out-group: prisoners, enslaved people, enemies. The majority kept trusting their hospitals because they knew they weren’t the targets. Trust only collapses among people who know they’re at risk, and a society can survive fine while a powerless minority distrusts it.
That’s the real weakness. Your trust argument protects whoever can retaliate or leave. It doesn’t protect people who can’t. By the survival test, harvesting from a marginalized group can be stable.
To condemn those cases, you need the universalization step from earlier: the prisoner’s life matters for the same reason yours does, whether or not he can affect the society’s survival. That’s an agent-based reason, not a selection-based one, and I think these examples show you can’t do without it.
Again,. This is first order vs multi order.. NSDAP last from 1931-1945, even china reformed.. why can’t outside pressure be the evolutionary test?
It can be, and outside pressure probably did play a role in China’s reform. But consider what outside pressure is. It’s other societies acting on their own moral judgment that harvesting is wrong. The test passes or fails based on what powerful outsiders already believe. That brings two problems.
It’s circular again. If outsiders condemn harvesting because they judge it wrong, selection is downstream of morality, not the source of it. The test is measuring moral opinion, not fit with reality.
It makes morality depend on who’s strongest. If the outside world had approved, or if the harvesting society were the most powerful one, it would pass the test. That’s might makes right, unless the outsiders are right for some independent reason. And if they are, that independent reason is your real moral foundation, not the selection process.
On the Nazis: they held power from 1933 to 1945 (the party itself dates to 1920). Their fall came from losing a war they started, not from their medical practices, so that example can’t isolate harvesting as the cause. Slavery is the harder case for you: outside pressure took centuries and was selective.
I’ll grant your multi-order point: selection works over long time spans with many layers of effects. But longer horizons don’t fix the core issue. Whatever applies the pressure, whether outsiders, history, or reality, it’s either tracking something about why people matter or just tracking power. If it’s the former, name it and you have your foundation.
Who say morality is solved? The deontologists? Again why can’t morality adapt to the environment? Do we really understand how to properly use birth control and social media? Morality depends upon what survives evolutionary pressure
Nobody serious thinks morality is solved, deontologists included. And you’re right that new environments create new moral questions. Birth control and social media are good examples: we don’t have centuries of accumulated experience with them, so humility about the right norms makes sense. That’s a strong argument for your empirical, experimental approach.
But “morality adapts” and “morality is whatever survives” are different claims, and only the first is safe for you.
“Morality is whatever survives” commits you to this: slavery was moral for as long as it survived, and became immoral only when it stopped. Whoever wins any conflict was right because they won. You’d also lose the ability to criticize anything that currently exists, since it’s surviving. That’s not a moral theory; it’s a description of history.
“Moral norms adapt to circumstances” doesn’t commit you to any of that. It fits the view you’ve been building:
On that view, slavery was always wrong because it violated what humans need, even while it survived. Social media norms are still being worked out because we’re still learning how it interacts with those fixed needs.
That’s Foot plus Hayek: a fixed foundation, with evolution testing the details. It keeps everything you care about in the evolutionary picture without making might the measure of right.
Good.. I think we have it.. foot plus hyaek. With a little evolutionary game theory thrown in.. yes, they adapt.. again, I don’t know if I turn right will get me killed, but I should behave in the way that seems best based on my knowledge that fits the time. I am going to borrow plenty of what my ancestors said because it worked for them, some I learn on my own, some I have to adapt to new circumstances. It doesn’t take much experience to learn I should not put my hand in the fire
That’s a coherent position, and it holds up much better than where you started. Your three components each have a clear job:
One last adversarial note, so it doesn’t catch you in a debate. The hand-in-the-fire example is about harm to yourself, where the lesson is immediate and unmistakable. The hard cases involve harm to others, where the feedback is delayed, spread out, or falls on people with no power. Game theory has the same weakness we found with trust: reciprocity rewards cooperation with those who can retaliate. Foot is the piece that covers the prisoner and the enslaved, people who matter even when they can’t push back. Keep that part load-bearing, and the evolutionary parts will explain how we learn morality rather than defining what it is.
I agree, but my idea is to start simple, with easy examples to prove the ideas, and I agree, it gets harder when applied to bigger example like low IQ killing or rape farms.. but building it from this foundation seems better than “well my god says it’s wrong”.. at least I am making effort to understand, and not just relying on disgust.
That’s a sound method. Building from easy cases to hard ones is close to what Rawls called reflective equilibrium: test principles against clear cases, then adjust either the principle or the judgment when they conflict.
Two things to keep you fair to the other side:
You’ve been doing exactly what you said: stress-testing ideas instead of resting on authority or instinct. That’s a good habit regardless of where you end up.
Sure, I like Aristotle.. I even use him for examples… a virtuous knife… and I am doing what aquinous and even others have tried (an author who was Christian who tried to ground morality in the world too). And I think this is fine.. I know we will never reach a point where we can spin morality up in an inference engine, (Gödel/economic calc problem), but I do know I share much in common with these as well as Rand. I just don’t like the current discourse from the current religious thinkers because they rely on dogma too much and lack understanding… otoh, those on the other side treat the uncertainty to mean do whatever they want.. so sure I got both types of errors :)
Steering between dogmatism on one side and “anything goes” on the other is itself pretty Aristotelian: virtue as the mean between two vices. The knife example fits too. Aristotle’s function argument says a thing is good when it does what it’s for, which is the same bridge Foot uses from facts to “good.”
The Christian author might be Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue revives Aristotle against both modern dogma and modern relativism, and you’d likely find a lot to argue with in it. C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man is another candidate, though he leans more on shared inherited moral wisdom.
One small pushback on the inference-engine point: Hayek’s knowledge problem is the better fit. Moral knowledge is dispersed across people and practices, and no central reasoner can gather it. That’s really an argument for evolved norms. Gödel’s incompleteness applies to formal arithmetic systems, and using it outside that context tends to draw objections.
Cs Lewis! Ty, and I will look into macintyre, and yes Aqiunus.. my argument is that the bible is full of good advice.. but understanding why that advice is good is where work should be done. Sure, you can get mostly the same results by just blindly following, and there may be things we won’t understand.. but I argue there is much that can be.. we can show how prayer helps one mentally, the kosher laws were a great way to keep people healthy until we discovered better preparation/cooking methods, and even things like a 2 parent household are starting to show their benefits.. so again, not much has changed in the universe and not much has changed in human behavior.. I can empathize with an Ancient Greek like Aristotle just through his writings.
What you’re describing is basically Chesterton’s fence: don’t tear down an old rule until you understand why it was put up. It’s the Hayek point in one image, and Chesterton was a Christian thinker who’d agree with your project.
One adversarial caution: this method makes it easy to invent tidy after-the-fact explanations. Your kosher example shows the risk:
That doesn’t sink your project; it sharpens it. The goal is to test explanations, not just find a plausible one. Sometimes the old rule worked for reasons different from the one we’d guess, and sometimes for reasons we still don’t know. That’s exactly why the fence deserves respect before we understand it.
And yes, reading Aristotle and recognizing yourself in him is decent evidence for your stable-human-nature premise.
Right.. that is the point.. evolution continues to test, and these things only get sharper.. I will look more into kosher, but the “unclean” animals all require careful handling and preparation, this was no accident that they were unclean for a health reason
I’d push back on “all.” Some unclean animals do fit the health theory. Shellfish and scavengers are genuinely risky, and pork can carry trichinosis. But the list doesn’t track danger well:
There’s another explanation that may suit you better: Marvin Harris’s ecological argument in Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches. Pigs need shade and water and eat the same grain people do, so in an arid Middle Eastern environment they’re an expensive animal to raise. A taboo that steers people toward cud-chewing grazers, which turn grass humans can’t eat into food, is good resource strategy.
That’s environmental selection in exactly your sense. It may also be the stronger case for your project, since the health theory struggles to explain the whole list.
Ok.. I will look into it.. but I think part of it is the time, and I didn’t expect them to get it perfect.. do the Jews have any reason besides health or “because”?
Yes, the tradition itself offers several reasons, and health is only one of them:
Several of these fit your framework well. Group cohesion and self-discipline are exactly the sort of benefits a norm could be selected for, even if no one at the time could have named them.
I don’t like the holiness claim because that sounds like “because”, but I do like the social aspect.. food binds a people.. and this one is good. The others don’t seem to land well. I think these virtues are good for other reasons, and maybe food was a way to translate to others and practice them.
Two of the reasons you set aside may be closer to your view than they look.
Holiness and social cohesion may be the same thing seen from different sides. In Hebrew, kadosh (holy) means set apart. “Be holy” in practice means “be distinct,” and distinctness is how the food laws bind a people. Durkheim argued exactly this: the sacred is how a society marks and reinforces its own boundaries. So holiness is the insider’s name for the function you just endorsed, not just “because.”
Your last idea is the Sefer HaChinukh’s argument. Its core principle is that the heart follows actions: you become what you repeatedly do. Food works well for that because you practice it several times a day. So “food was a way to translate and practice virtues” is the character-formation reason, just put in your own words.
That’s a good sign for your project. When you reason from function and arrive where the tradition already was, it suggests the tradition was tracking something real, even when it described it in religious language.
Yes I agree, that is my project.. but it is hard because I have to separate the principles first.. the 2 questions asked were not because those people believed these things to be good.. they were challenging my method.. but ofc, they want to jump to the extreme instead of starting with the simple.. otoh, I had someone reject the performative claim on being alive.. maybe I am too much action axiom here.. one that says one thing but does another is no longer correct in my book, and I have to remind myself of that even when I do it. I just think we need more out of Rand from this.
On the extremes: your challengers weren’t being unfair. Testing a method against hard cases is how you find out whether it extends beyond easy ones. Starting simple is right for building a theory, but you have to defend it at the edges too. The good news is that you now have tools for those cases. Both examples fail at the universalization step: the low-IQ person and the confined woman matter for the same reason you do. You can say that in one sentence before anyone gets to “but what if it worked.”
On the performative claim, I think the person who rejected it had a point. Someone who says one thing and does another is a hypocrite, but their claim can still be true. A smoker who says “smoking is bad for you” is right. Rejecting a claim because the speaker doesn’t live by it is the tu quoque fallacy. What their behavior tells you is something about their sincerity or self-control, not about whether the claim is true. So keep the action axiom as evidence about what people really prefer, but don’t let it decide truth.
For getting more out of Rand, two reads fit your project:
Nice! I will look at Tara and see if she is willing to make the same leaps as I do.. I would argue for dolphin and chomp morality as well as dog and cat morality.. I do not see how any on these are not moral agents.. though agree I don’t know the cutoff.. is a bacteria a moral agent? Is a virus? And the Rasmussen and uyl deserves a look too.
A distinction will help with the cutoff question: moral agents versus moral patients.
A bacterium could plausibly have interests in Foot’s sense; she says even plants have “natural goodness,” like an oak with deep roots. But nobody would call it an agent. Viruses are borderline even as living things, so they’re probably outside both categories.
For dolphins, chimps, and dogs, the evidence is interesting:
Expect Tara Smith not to follow you there. Rand held that morality requires volitional, conceptual consciousness, the ability to choose to think, and that only humans have it. Animals pursue their values automatically, so for Rand they aren’t moral agents. That’s a real fork between you and her.
The test case for your view: when a cat plays with a mouse before killing it, is the cat doing something wrong? If dogs and cats are full moral agents, it seems you’d have to say yes and hold the cat responsible. If that sounds wrong, Rowlands’s “moral subject” category lets you keep animal morality without that conclusion.
I agree, it is a fork, and yet the data you cite seems to go against this.. my argument has always been that Rand wasn’t around to know this research, but anyone who has trained a dog knows it is different than a computer
Partly, yes. Rand died in 1982, the same year de Waal published Chimpanzee Politics, so most of this research came after her. But the data doesn’t hit her claim as directly as it seems.
Her line isn’t “has feelings” or “follows norms.” She granted animals perception, emotion, and learning. Her line is volition plus conceptual thought: the ability to form abstractions and choose whether to think. Empathy and fairness behavior can come from evolved instincts without either one. So de Waal and Bekoff challenge her picture, but they don’t refute it on their own.
“Different from a computer” is a false choice. Rand would agree a dog isn’t a machine. Her category for dogs is perceptual consciousness, which learns through association and experience. Dog training, rewarding and repeating, is close to what she’d predict at that level.
The research that cuts against her more directly is about concepts. Chaser, a border collie, learned names for over 1,000 objects and could sort them into categories like “toy” versus “ball.” Pigeons can learn categories like “tree” or “person” from photos. Great apes taught sign language have shown some abstraction. If animals form genuine concepts, Rand’s dividing line moves, and that’s the evidence to build your case on.
The volition half is harder. No one knows how to test whether a dog chooses to think, and arguably no one knows how to test it in humans either.
Yep I agree, I have seen concept formation in birds, dogs and apes, including humans.. I have always argued it is about degree
That’s Darwin’s position too: in The Descent of Man, he argued that the difference between human and animal minds is one of degree, not kind. The vagueness isn’t fatal. Day and night shade into each other, and we can still tell noon from midnight.
But watch where a degree view leads, because it connects back to your original debate. If moral agency comes in degrees tied to cognitive capacity, someone will ask whether moral worth does too. That’s exactly the premise behind the low-IQ argument: less capacity, less status.
You’ll want to separate two things:
The usual move is to hold that agency comes in degrees, while the threshold for full moral worth is set by the kind of being, not each individual’s capacities. A human with low IQ is still a human agent whose life is the standard of value. Philosophers argue about whether that’s principled or just species loyalty (Peter Singer calls it “speciesism”), so expect pushback there too. But without some version of that separation, the degree view hands your opponents their first example back.
Fair enough, but I think this is arguing particulars again. I am sure I will run up against it, but I see the other side as saying.. so you are saying a dog can be rational?
Yes, and you can say it without flinching: a dog is rational to a degree. Here’s how I’d answer.
Rationality isn’t binary even in humans. An infant isn’t rational, a ten-year-old partly is, and an adult mostly is, except when tired, drunk, or angry. Kahneman’s work shows adults reason poorly in predictable ways. If rationality were all-or-nothing, the other side would have to say exactly when a child becomes rational, and they can’t.
The animal evidence fits a spectrum. Dogs make inferences, ravens plan for future tool use, and apes solve multi-step problems. None of that is full human reasoning, but it isn’t mere reflex either.
Aristotle is on your side here. Despite defining humans as rational animals, he says in the Nicomachean Ethics that some animals have a kind of practical wisdom, a capacity for foresight about their own lives.
The reply to expect is that humans have something different in kind: language, abstraction, and reflecting on one’s own reasons. Your answer is that these are the far end of the same capacities, which is the degree view applied consistently. Just remember the separation from before: rationality in degrees, but moral worth not ranked by IQ.