It also doesn't follow TPF Guidelines for 'Starting New Discussions' and writing an OP. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/480/site-guidelines/p1

Despite engaging so far, it seems he is unwilling to do much more. This is ' not the best place to ask questions'. Relying on the email he has set up.

I am offering a prize of $10,000
— Dan

Yeah, that is bait to get people to do free work on your theory. — Lionino

You think he’s counting on reaping the rewards in terms of career advancement? Or maybe he’s a trust fund baby with nothing better to do with his cash.

I doubt it. He has a pet theory that he has found (or someone pointed to him) a problem in. ChatGPT was of no help, so now he is setting up to have tens of amateur and professional philosophers work on his theory for free.

The problem of how to weigh freedom over different things within the normative theory of freedom consequentialism. — Dan

. I could boil the problem down to "how do we resolve conflicts between the freedom of different persons over things choices that belong to them?" — Dan

Hey Dan.

Honestly, I don’t know what the problem precisely is. I’d have to make it up based on some assumptions. Can you state the issue more clearly?

You said:

“freedom over different things”
“”how to weigh”
“within the normative theory of freedom consequentialism”

You restated this saying:

“how do we resolve conflicts”
“freedom of different persons over things choices”
“that belong to them”

I feel unable to really get started without filling in blanks.

I would think it should take you a paragraph or two to clarify precisely what the objects are on this playing field, what the conflict is these objects in relation to each other pose, and what, in your own words you would think the answer must include.

I'm really glad people are interested, but I will remind you that there is an email address set up for questions and potential solutions because I sent this to a couple of forums and fifty philosophy departments, so trying to keep up with communication in every avenue is going to be difficult — Dan

This is a discussion forum, not a bulletin board. If you are not prepared to have a discussion, you should not post here.

By the way, what is your current affiliation to University of Canterbury? They don't seem to know about you, though it appears that you were once a grad student there.

I agree that it needs more clarifying than that, which is why I provided a document doing just that. That document also had deeper thought put into word choice. If you've already checked that out, then could you elaborate on what needs clarifying?

There is a link in the first post to a detailed write up. It's on the word "here."

I would suggest you may be making some moral assumptions unknowingly.

I'm making them knowingly. I would tend to sum up the vision of freedom common in Western philosophy before the early-modern period as "the self-determining ability to actualize the good," (act over potency). This leaves open the problem of "what is goodness?" but avoids the collapse into emotivism that seems to plague modern ethics.

But, to answer your question, a rational agent may not care about others freedom. There's a longer discussion to be had there, but suffice to say that I wouldn't assume that moral facts are motivating to others, and if people fail to care about what is moral, then so much the worse for them.

Seems so much the worse for an "objective theory of goodness," if people can look at it, understand it, and reasonably say "but that goodness isn't good for me."

Anyhow, it seems like a serious issue to me if goodness is defined in terms of freedom but then freedom is left vague. Perhaps you have addressed this elsewhere. You allow that coercion limits freedom but there is a lot of coercion that falls short of pointing a gun in someone's face. When a family holds an intervention for an alcoholic they are being coercive, but it's unclear to me that they are limiting freedom. When someone reminds us to do our duties and fulfill our obligations it is a sort of coercion, but it seems that can be good. Children and spouses have a lot of leverage when it comes to softer forms of coercion, but it has always seemed strange to me when theories of freedom would have it that our careers and families—what makes us who we are—is a limit of freedom.

The trade off thing seems like it could lead to some unpleasant conclusions too. If a man has a chance to save a girl from a fire, then he is better off doing that than "vanishing as a moral agent." But this seems true even if he saves her from a fire only so he can rape her afterwards. On the mathematics of "maximizing freedom," his act still ends up at a net positive, but calling this "good" seems absurd to me.

My solution would be that the problem is best solved by abandoning the idea of a "mathematics of morality." I imagine that's not prize material though :rofl:

I mean, I have been making a sincere effort to reply to people, I'm simply pointing out that things are likely to slip through the cracks and that checking back here, and several other places, isn't practical in the long term.

I work there doing a combination of tutoring, marking, and some lecturing. If anyone is interested in taking some distance courses, I can say that environmental ethics and ethics today are both just great. Heh.

I object to "for free". Ditto with "bait". I would say instead that I'm incentizing.

In general, I think defining ethics in terms of freedom can work, since free beings—unconstrained by ignorance or circumstance—will chose what is good, what causes them to flourish, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why do you say this? Can it be demonstrated?

Why do you say this? Can it be demonstrated? — Tom Storm

Not sure where you find someone who is unconstrained by ignorance.

the saving and the raping are two separate actions though. One is good, the other bad.

Those examples don't coerce with a threat to reduce one's morally relevant freedom though, so don't put the agent in the position to choose between doing the thing or having their freedom reduced, so don't pose a problem.

You don't think that someone can understand what's good or right and choose against it? That someone can intentionally do what they know is wrong?

Yes. Is it Aristotle? For some the philosophical project is presumably to dispel ignorance.

My issue is not just this notion of 'ignorance', but also flourishing and good? Can we demonstrate that these are any more than abstracts used to loosely describe contingent matters of social practice , etc.

Flourishing strikes me as an enormously nebulous category.

You don't think that someone can understand what's good or right and choose against it? That someone can intentionally do what they know is wrong? — Dan

To some extent, yes. But how do they understand 'wrong'? It will be in the context of some aspect of culture. One they might not care for much. Something may be 'wrong' as far as mainstream culture and the legal system is concerned, but how does this ultimately matter? I've worked a lot with hard core criminals and they have a very strong principles. They are just (as far as the mainstream is concerned) the 'wrong' principles.

that's more an example of not knowing that not caring though, don't you think?

the saving and the raping are two separate actions though. One is good, the other bad

This still seems to have it that a marauding soldier who rescues a girl for the sole purpose of raping her would have performed a good act. And supposing he gets killed by a stray artillery shell as soon as he is done pulling her out of the building he has only been "good."

And if coercion is only problematic if it involves violence and threats against property that seems to allow a whole host of troubling manipulative behaviors to be morally neutral. Yet if the goal is something like a mathematical equation the edge cases seem troubling.

Let me ask, would Aldous Huxley's "A Brave New World" be a utopia on this view? What if we ignore intentionally cognitively impairing the Gammas?

You don't think that someone can understand what's good or right and choose against it? That someone can intentionally do what they know is wrong?

No, weakness of will and incontinence exist. Also relative gradations of ignorance about what is truly good.

Suppose no weakness of will, a person is able to make themselves so whatever they deem to be choiceworthy (e.g., no "I really shouldn't eat that donut, but it looks too tempting," type situation).

Suppose no ignorance about what is truly best.

Why does the rational person choose the worse over the better in this situation? Imagine their internal monologue: "yes, this is most choiceworthy. I know this and am confident of that knowledge. I will now go choose something worse when I could choose something better."

Of course these conditions are never met, but we can come more or less close to them.

Why does the rational person choose the worse over the better in this situation? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have no idea. I'm not sure if I have met any rational persons. Or even what this means. I have met people who use reasoning and have post hoc justifications for their choices. I suspect most people's choices are informed by emotion.

that's more an example of not knowing that not caring though, don't you think? — Dan

No. I wonder what it means to know a moral truth?

Or maybe he’s a trust fund baby with nothing better to do with his cash. — Joshs

I'd be very interested in your general view of this project? To me it seems to be built around a series of old school foundationalist assumptions. Thoughts?

I mean, it is consequentialism, so people's motivations for their actions don't really come into it, just the consequences.

I'm afraid I haven't read it, so I can't comment with certainty.

Yes, manipulation, so long as no one is deceived about about morally relevant choices they are making or threatened with having their morally relevant choices taken away, would probably be permissible. Feature not a bug.

Putting weakness of will to one side, do you think it's possible for people to choose evil over good intentionally? It seems at least possible to me.

how to weigh freedom over different things within the normative theory of freedom consequentialism — Dan

Assumptions from Dan’s paper:

“Likelihood of truth (including internal consistency and not relying on propositions that we have good reason to believe are false)
Universality
Objectivity
Applicability to all free, rational agents
Action-guidingness
Achievableness (possible to live up to)
Consequentialism
Simplicity (in the sense of not postulating entities beyond necessity)
Extent to which the theory is in line with commonly held moral intuitions.”

That’s a ton. In the interest of simplicity, how about three:

1. Objective, universal (applicable to all), truth.
2. Achievable consequences guiding action
3. Extent it is already normative (compare against the prevailing wisdom).

(I agree as well we should seek simplicity, not for simplicity’s sake, but for clarity’s sake. Why complicate assumptions you are not going to question anyway?)

With that said, I like (my) assumptions 1 and 2. As for consequentialism, I’m not an expert. I prefer the more immanent “telos” to the more distant “consequence” as a term for what is action guiding, but that may be quibbling over assumptions.

“It is only the freedom over things that already belong to a person that matters, so getting more stuff over which a person can have freedom is not morally valuable. Things are bad, on this measure of value, when they prevent a person from being able to understand and make their own choices. Doing good—which I will discuss more in the following section—using this measure of value, is just a matter of preventing or reducing bad things from happening.”

“…there is sometimes a distinction drawn between positive and negative freedom, where positive freedom is freedom to do, have, or be something, whereas negative freedom is freedom from some external constraint. I do not think this distinction is particularly helpful...”

“While I have now explained the measure of value that freedom consequentialism uses.”

More feeedom good; less freedom bad? Is that the measurement we are taking? Freedom itself is the value we measure?

“An action is bad if scenario one has worse consequences than scenario two. An action is good if scenario one has better consequences than scenario two. And….is good …to the extent … causes no bad…”

Are we saying anything when using “better” and “worse” to define good and bad? Seems “better” sits on a scale between good and bad; so we need to define “good” and “bad” without using “better” and “worse,” because “better” and “worse” are tautologous with good and bad. Scenario 1 and scenario 2 may bring “good and better” and so “bad and worse” with them, but if we are trying to bring the measuring stick with us to the table and measure Scenario 1 against Scenario 2, using our “good better - bad worse” measuring stick, we may need to define them in themselves a bit, absent all scenarios.

This sounds like consequentialism. I’m not yet seeing what “freedom” consequentialism is. Im not seeing the need for universal applicability or objective truth yet either.

(10,000 prize? -I hope I don’t get fined for not understanding the premise! :yum:)

“[Freedom consequentiialism] is a form of satisficing consequentialism that treats the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices as the measure of consequences’ moral value.”

The “ability to make choices” is the measure of the consequences’ value”. Sounds like freedom IS the value.

“When faced with a decision between funding a drug that saves one life every ten years and a drug that restores eyesight to five blind people within the same timeframe, how do we know which to fund? The obvious answer is “whichever protects the most freedom,” but how do we know which that is?”

You say “whichever protects the most freedom.” This is interesting to me. We assume agency and freedom exist; and then we are faced with a decision. The “good” choice is the choice we must make if we are to be moral. But I just said “must” which sounds like a limitation on freedom. (If there is something I “must” do it can be said that I have no choice.). So admittedly, morality (the objectively good choice) limits freedom. BUT, when that morality bases the “good” on “whichever protects the most freedom,” it can be said by doing what I “must” do, what I have no choice in doing, if I am to be good, if what I must do is good, my freedom is saved in the fact that what I have determined is most good is the most protective of freedom that existed in the first place.

Interesting.

“I think is most promising, that of determining the relative importance of freedom over different things by reference to a preferred order of wrongs.”

“Preferences need not be valuable in order to use them…”

“this does not tell us what to do when preferences conflict.”

I think your question here can be simply stated as “what are the objectively good rules?”

Conflicting preferences, how to weigh freedom over different things within the normative theory of freedom consequentialism… what I see as missing are the objective rules.

We assumed universal, objectivity, but then did not identify it or use it as part of the movement of comparing scenario 1 to scenario 2 on the scale of valued freedom, applied to conflicting preferences. These applications do not get beyond the subject-agent to the objective community of agents who conflict. Meaning, the consequentialism you’ve described starts to show the process of acting free, but cannot apply that process any further where the free act is directed against the freedom of another agent. So basically, we have two free agents in conflict with no objective measure to settle the dispute (possibly limiting both of their freedoms) - so you are basically asking “what are the rules?”

If there were rules carved in stone, then we could really pay no attention to preferences. But since there are no rules, the preferences (which ”prefer” incorporates a “good-better bad-worse” measuring stick to even say “prefer”, so is tautologous) are still vital in the measurement of “good” and “bad.”

This is why I don’t find utilitarianism satisfactory in general. It’s a method to solve disputes, that requires rules to employ, but has no rules (using synonyms and tautologies for “good” and “bad” to beg the presence of rules). Utilitarian theories can’t tell you what to do - they tell you how to determine what to do, but leave it up to your preferences and pain and pleasures and betters and worses to make your own temporary rule and fight through what to actually do.

So I don’t see how to solve your problem. It’s an age old problem of “now that I know how to make a decision, what am I supposed to do now?”

But I liked the idea that “whichever protects freedom” is itself a measure of good. I just still don’t know what specifically truly is good in the end.

I mean, it is consequentialism, so people's motivations for their actions don't really come into it, just the consequences.

IDK, it seems like some consequentialists consider the intended consequences of acts. To totally ignore them makes our marauding soldier a hero so long as he is killed before carrying out his assault, while a doctor offering to treat the poor for free becomes equivalent with a murderer if he accidentally kills a patient.

I'm afraid I haven't read it, so I can't comment with certainty.

You might be interested. It's quite short and not very dense, so it would probably make for a good audio book for driving too. I bring it up because its society is a stunning success if it is judged by the common metrics of public policy studies, economics, medicine, or many contemporary ethical theories. There is no crime or poverty, people are largely allowed to "do what they want." But it's intended to be entirely abhorrent, devoid of substantial freedom or beauty, and most readers agree that it's very successful in this respect.

Putting weakness of will to one side, do you think it's possible for people to choose evil over good intentionally?

It depends on how evil is defined, but generally I would say no, at least in as much as the person is a "rational agent," is not ignorant of what is good, and is confident in their knowledge vis-á-vis the good. Why would someone knowingly choose the worse over the better?

I have no idea. I'm not sure if I have met any rational persons

Well, the question of people's rationality is a different issue. I don't know if I've ever come across "the rational agent"—homo economicus—in the wild. That said, people aren't entirely irrational either, so the limit case is instructive.

There's a difference between being praiseworthy and being good though. A consequentialist might consistently say that an action is morally bad but we should praise the person who performed it, and that an action is an action was morally good, but we should condemn, even punish, the person who performed it. The reaction to the initial action is also an action, and also ought to aim at the best consequences.

It seems to me someone might care about something more than what is morally good, or perhaps not care about it at all. That seems imaginable.

"Better" in the context of a scenario being better or worse than another can be taken to mean less freedom is violated/more is protected. "Worse" in that context can be taken to mean more freedom is violated/less is protected.

Yes, freedom itself is the measure of value, though by "freedom" I mean specifically the ability of free, rational agents to understand and make those choices that belong to them.

Hi Dan,
I believe there's a very simple answer to this problem. Because you contextualize "value" in relation to freedom, freedom must be your highest value. And the choice which gives one the most freedom is the decision not to choose. This is because each judgement which a person makes acts as an intentional restriction on one's capacity to choose, by having already chosen in relation to that judgement. This choice, not to choose is what enables deliberation, and Aristotle's highest virtue, contemplation.

Consequentialism however, is a judgement of one's actions from the perspective of an observer, and the observer cannot see one's contemplations or deliberations as actions. This excludes the action which has the highest value in relation to freedom, from the possibility of even being considered as having any virtue in the consequentialist's value structure.

Therefore the "freedom" perspective and the "consequentialist" perspective of moral virtue are inherently incompatible. The freedom perspective has as its highest act, something which is not even an act, from the consequentialist perspective, because it is an act with no observable effect. Deliberation, or contemplation, is an act without a decision or choice, therefore without the manifestations of moral consequences, yet it provides one with the highest degree of freedom. However, as Aristotle indicated, contemplation must be considered to be "an act" with causal capacity, because of its temporal nature, and the effect which it has on one's choices. Therefore it must be given the highest position, denying the truth of the incompatible consequentialism.

I've always thought of consequentialism as a future conditional. After all, moral choice occurs before its anticipated consequences.

Yes, this is the problem I mentioned vis-á-vis defining freedom purely in terms of potency.

Negative Freedom - Hegel begins his analysis of freedom in the Philosophy of Right where many modern theorists have ended, with a conception of freedom as defined in purely negative terms—freedom as lack of constraint or unrestricted potency. In its absolute form, such freedom must become “pure indeterminacy,” since all determination is ultimately a form of constraint. To illustrate this, let us imagine an infinite blank canvas before us. We can draw upon it anything we’d like; we have absolute freedom within this two dimensional space. Yet if we draw a triangle, we are not free to have drawn a square. If we erase our triangle, we are not free to have kept it. Any choice must bring with it some limiting form of determinacy.

At the level of the individual, Hegel identifies the move towards this sort of negative freedom in the religious pursuit of “pure contemplation,” a retreat into wholly contentless thought., At the social level, the desire to recoil from all definiteness manifested itself in the destructive anarchism of the French Revolution’s sans-culottes. For these revolutionaries, any definite form of government became an intolerable retreat from the liberty offered by the pure indeterminate potency of revolutionary spirit.


Such freedom is ultimately contradictory. One can never choose anything without compromising one’s freedom. The ascetic can think of nothing without giving up on “pure contemplation.” The revolutionary cannot advance any concrete policy without abandoning absolute liberty. Thus, negative freedom collapses into a total lack of freedom, the “inability to choose anything.” At the same time, any action proceeding from pure potency would appear to be wholly arbitrary, a choice “made for no reason at all.” Yet if our choices are wholly undetermined then they can hardly be said to be ours.

Reflexive Freedom - As we have seen, negative freedom collapses into its opposite. Thus, freedom must sublate its own negation, resulting in a modified conception of freedom where agents positively and determinately "choose between” known options., For such choices to be ours, they must emerge from a process of self-conscious self-determination. Thus, reflexive freedom is defined by subjects’ freedom relative to themselves. “Individuals are [reflexively] free if their actions are solely guided by their own intentions.” Thus, “man is a free being [when he] is in a position not to let himself be determined by natural drives,” or circumstance; i.e., when his actions are not subject to “contingency,” but instead arise from rational, self-conscious decision-making.

Self-control alone is not enough here. We often need self-control to get what we desire, but we also sometimes desire things that we do not want to desire. Someone who shows tremendous self control in covering up an adulterous relationship they do not want to have begun is not fully free. To be perfected, reflexive freedom requires something like Harry Frankfurt's concept of "second order volitions," the ability to successfully align our desires towards what reason has determined to be “truly good.”, However, it is the issue of what is “truly good” that brings us to the consideration of authenticity as a form of freedom.

Etc. The contradictions continue up to a level of social freedom, because someone who possesses the lower sorts of freedom can always choose to deprive others of their freedom. This is where, for Hegel, institutions come in to shape people's identities and incentives such that they want to promote the freedom of their fellow citizens.

This lies in contrast to this theory, which doesn't seem to offer any reason for why people should be good or why they might decide to be good under various differing conditions.

Right. It's conditioned on expectations about the future in many forms.

If I press an elevator button not knowing someone is stuck in the shaft (and having no good reason to think this is the case), and this kills someone, I have hardly committed murder. I have performed a trivial act that couldn't possibly have been known to result in someone's death; it's a mistake a saint could make.

Now as suggests, we might divorce goodness and praiseworthyness and solve this problem, although this seems somewhat counterintuitive to the extent that we tend to praise people precisely for attempting to do good, and even more for actually achieving it. We praise the virtues because they help to achieve good, not because they involve intending good for instance.

I don't think you are using "freedom" in quite the same way. Also FC doesn't seek to produce the "most freedom" in the way you describe. Also, consequentialism does not require the perspective of an observer, nor is it really connected with such a perspective.

Dan, I am not a professional philosopher, but here are my thoughts on the document you posted:

As I read, I asked myself, how do you define "good?" It seemed to me that you went on to answer this question. It is as if you had said, "the good is when someone is maximally free, and free of any constraints on their choices; the freedom to make choices is good." But then you asked a question about weighing freedoms and about the "importance" of choices. And I found myself very much with the same question I had started with. The "freedom is good" paradigm seems to require further criteria that make the consequence good that is quite separate from the freedom derived as a consequence, an independent standard for the rightness or wrongness of a consequence. But isn't that antithetical to the freedom consequentialist project? If freedom does not make a consequence good, what does?

That being said, it is easy to be a critic of another's writing and there may be nuances to your view that I didn't catch.

Anyways, thanks for sharing the idea.

P.S. This comment is from someone who is skeptical that a comprehensive moral theory is ever forthcoming.

I object to "for free". — Dan

You may object to the sky being blue. Instead of paying philosophers for their work, you want them to do work on you theory for the slim chance that they may get some mysterious 10 grand. Who unilaterally decides if they get the money? The person paying, of course.
Even if you do actually give that money away, all the philosophers who provided meaningful, qualified input spent their time for your exclusive benefit.
It is not even a lottery, just deception. This thread should be closed.
:down: