Day to day ethics

 Claude finished the response

Yesterday the post about abortion showed there is nothing immoral about a pregnant woman getting an abortion.  How can we know?  How do we know if anything is right or wrong?

The usual ways: how we feel about it, what we've been taught, the precepts of our religion, what is legal, what our conscience says, what is traditional.  While they all usually get it right and should therefore be thought about, in the end, consistently they goof or misdirect.  I don't know that it's necessary for me to go into all that; they just don't work.  We need to have a rational basis for saying something is wrong, immoral, but don't have one.

Of course anything that happens has both right and wrong about it.  A volcano killing people is wrong, a volcano letting off pressure and fertilizing the soil and building land is doing right.  A lion killing its prey brutally and causing it a suffering, fearful death is doing wrong, a lion culling the herd and keeping it from ruining the environment and so on is doing right.

We don't make moral judgments in such situations because we argue doing good or causing suffering are not at issue.  Conscious intent is needed.  Volcanoes and lions cannot make right and wrong assessments and hence are not held to account.
Actually the same applies to people.  We may think we make our own decisions, but this is rarely really the case.  Mostly we act automatically according to instincts and personality and other factors and never really make a moral decision, although we can, and in many cases, where the decision is truly difficult, we do.

Therefore, we can judge what others do no more than we can judge a volcano or a lion.  We don't know that they have actually made a conscious decision to be immoral, and, if we think about it, we know that is unlikely (although of course possible).  We don't know the whole story and therefore cannot judge.

But we can judge ourselves.

Most of the time, presented with a moral question (a real one, not a hypothetical), we can see pluses and minus and have to decide whether the good outweighs the bad.  It turns out that some things are more wrong than others, even though both are wrong.  It depends on the suffering and harm we cause.  Lying to the Gestapo strikes me as harming the Gestapo, almost certainly by making their job more difficult, and so is the thing to do, and rationally in that case telling the truth is morally wrong.

Of course this is a simple, if not simplistic, theory of ethics, but it has something to say for it that the traditional ethics don't have: it is rational.  Do the good aspects outweigh the bad?  Most of the hypothetical situations people use to object to this depend on our gut feeling or one of the traditional tests to raise questions.  I think that is the wrong way to proceed.  That we don't like an outcome is not a rational basis for a decision.

A couple of problems.  We can fool ourselves and rationalize the goods as exceeding the harms when in fact not.  Also, how do we know we have all the facts when in fact we know we almost certainly don't?  Ain't easy, but if one is serious about being an ethical person the effort must be made and a decision must be reached. 

 Then later we have a couple of good reasons to forgive ourselves if it turns out wrong.
6:25 AM

This is a fairly well-developed consequentialist framework, and it hangs together reasonably well. Let me engage with it seriously rather than just summarize it back.

What you've got right

The move from "we can't judge others" to "we can judge ourselves" is philosophically sound and underappreciated. Most ethical discourse assumes the judging posture — evaluating what others did — when the only domain where we have genuine access to the relevant facts (intentions, deliberation, alternatives considered) is our own decision-making. You've essentially rediscovered the Kantian insight that moral agency requires freedom, but applied it more empirically: we simply don't know whether others were actually exercising agency in the relevant sense.

The point about automaticity is well-taken and has substantial empirical support. Most human behavior is post-hoc rationalized rather than prospectively deliberated. Genuine moral decision points — where we actually pause, weigh, and choose — are rarer than we like to think.

Where it gets harder

Your framework is consequentialist in structure: weigh goods against harms, proceed accordingly. The honest difficulty is that consequentialism requires a metric — some way to compare harms and goods that aren't naturally commensurable. Whose suffering counts more? How much? Over what time horizon?

You've acknowledged the self-deception problem, which is the real Achilles heel. The framework says "calculate correctly" but provides no reliable method for knowing when you're calculating versus rationalizing. History's worst actors generally believed — often sincerely — that their harm calculus came out positive.

The deeper issue you've implicitly raised

You've said traditional tests don't work and we need something rational. But notice that your framework still bottoms out in something non-rational: the badness of suffering. Why is suffering bad? You can't derive that from logic — it's either a brute intuition or an assumption. Which means you haven't escaped foundational intuitions, you've just selected one (suffering matters) and discarded others (tradition, religion, gut feeling).

That's not necessarily wrong — it might be the best foundation available. But it's worth being clear that you're choosing a starting intuition rather than finding bedrock.

One thing worth adding

You mention forgiving yourself if it turns out wrong — which is generous and probably psychologically necessary. But there's a companion obligation: updating the framework when outcomes reveal the calculation was bad. The willingness to revise, not just forgive, is what distinguishes genuine ethical reasoning from sophisticated self-justification.

Yes such an update is part of self-forgiveness: "I won't do that again."  That suffering is a bad thing is a given that I doubt will get argument.  That there is no logical basis for it is because it is its own logical basis.
6:29 AM

Both points taken.

On self-forgiveness including the update — yes, that's the right structure. Forgiveness without revision is just permission. The "I won't do that again" is what makes it genuine rather than self-indulgent.

On suffering as its own logical basis — this is a philosophically respectable position. It's essentially what G.E. Moore was gesturing at with "good" as a non-natural simple property, and what the intuitionists argued: some things are self-evident in the sense that they require no further justification because any attempt to justify them would have to appeal to something less certain. The badness of suffering is arguably in that category. If someone genuinely claimed not to understand why suffering is bad, you wouldn't reach for an argument — you'd suspect either bad faith or a failure of basic moral perception.

What's interesting about your framework is that it doesn't actually need more foundation than that. It takes one near-universal intuition — suffering is bad, its reduction or prevention is good — and builds upward from there rather than downward toward metaphysics. That's a kind of philosophical economy. You're not claiming to have derived ethics from pure reason; you're claiming to have identified the minimal credible starting point and proceeded rationally from it.

The remaining question — and it's genuinely hard — is whether "suffering and harm" fully captures what we care about morally, or whether there are cases where something seems wrong that can't be fully cashed out in those terms. Dignity violations that cause no measurable harm, for instance. Your framework would either have to show the harm is there but hidden, or acknowledge a second primitive alongside suffering. That's not a refutation, just where the pressure is.

Well dignity violations do cause harm.  They may pass unnoticed but otherwise no.
6:32 AM

That's a clean answer, and probably right in most cases. A dignity violation that is genuinely unfelt and has no downstream effects — no internalized shame, no altered behavior, no effect on how others treat the person — is hard to point to as harmful in any concrete sense. The harm just isn't there.

The harder case is where the violation is noticed but the person doesn't experience it as harmful — or even welcomes it. Certain consensual humiliation, for instance, or people who genuinely don't feel diminished by treatment that others would find degrading. Your framework handles this naturally: if there's no suffering and no harm, there's no wrong. Which is consistent, even if it offends the intuitions of people who want to say the wrong is in the act itself regardless of effect.

This is actually where your framework does better than Kantian approaches, which have to tie themselves in knots over consent and autonomy to reach the same conclusion, and often fail to reach it cleanly.

The one residual pressure point: future harm that neither party can foresee at the time. The dignitary wrong that leaves no apparent mark but subtly shifts how a person sees themselves or how others see them, with effects that only emerge later and can't be traced back. Your framework would count that as harm when it materializes — but it creates a practical problem for real-time moral calculation, since you're deciding with necessarily incomplete information. Which you already acknowledged. So it's not a new problem, just another instance of the one you named.

You appear to be speaking of the sexual variation known as masochism, which I take as a mixing of two instincts, that of sexual drive and that of submission/dominance that facilitates social existence.  Nothing wrong there that I can see.  The reality of such behavior is in fact far more controlled and fantasized than the novels would have us think.
6:35 AM

Agreed on all counts. The safeword culture that actually characterizes that community is in some ways more ethically rigorous about consent than vanilla sexuality tends to be — explicit negotiation of limits, active monitoring, agreed exit mechanisms. Whatever mixing of drives underlies it, the practice as actually conducted is largely a counterexample to the idea that it involves harm.

The instinct-mixing observation is interesting and probably correct. Submission and dominance are deeply wired social regulatory mechanisms — they structure hierarchies, reduce conflict, enable cooperation. That they can become eroticized isn't surprising given how thoroughly sexuality recruits other drive systems. Appetite, nurturing, aggression, play — all show up in sexual behavior. The submission/dominance axis is just one more.

What the novels and popular imagination consistently get wrong is the element of control. The fantasy version is ungoverned, spiraling, dangerous. The reality — where people are negotiating carefully and maintaining the ability to stop — is almost the opposite. The theatrical appearance of loss of control is itself a controlled artifact. Which makes it an odd candidate for moral concern under your framework: consenting adults, explicit agreements, minimal actual harm, significant apparent satisfaction. The suffering-and-harm meter barely moves.

Where it would register under your framework is the cases where the theater becomes real — coercion disguised as roleplay, or psychological dynamics that aren't as consensual as they appear. But that's a failure of the consent structure, not something inherent to the practice.

Actual sadistic behavior from a position of power, whether physical or mental, is harmful and falls under the wrong category easily enough, not that people don't try to rationalize it, but all offenses get rationalized.
6:39 AM

Yes, and the rationalization point applies universally — which is why your earlier caveat about self-deception is the most important practical warning in the whole framework. The capacity to construct a goods-outweigh-harms narrative is apparently unlimited in human psychology. People who torture, exploit, and coerce have generally convinced themselves, often elaborately, that it's justified or even beneficial.

What distinguishes genuine calculation from rationalization is probably not accessible from the inside in real time. It's more visible in retrospect, or to others, or when you ask whether you'd apply the same reasoning if the power positions were reversed. That last test — a version of the golden rule restated consequentially — has some diagnostic value. The sadist with institutional power rarely imagines the calculus looks the same from the other side.

The position-of-power element is worth noting separately. Power asymmetry doesn't just enable harm, it systematically corrupts the calculation. The more power you have over someone, the easier it is to discount their suffering, to redefine it as acceptable or deserved or even good for them. Which is why the worst abuses tend to come not from obviously evil actors but from people who've convinced themselves they're doing right. The rationalizations in those cases are often sincere, which makes them more dangerous than cynical ones.

So your framework, honestly applied, requires something like active suspicion of your own reasoning whenever you hold significant power over those your decision affects. The stronger your position, the harder you should be working to actually see the harm rather than explain it away.

It can get complicated: is torture allowed in order to save lives?  This sort of dilemma is so rare that for the most part we are better off not dwelling on it.  It's the sort of scenario ethicists like to play with, but real ethics is much more day to day.
6:45 AM

Exactly right, and the ticking-bomb scenario is almost a pathology of academic ethics — a contrived extreme designed to stress-test theories rather than illuminate actual moral life. In practice the scenario's stipulations (the information is reliable, torture will extract it, there's no other way, the clock is actually running) are never jointly satisfied, so the dilemma as posed doesn't really exist in the world. It's a philosopher's thought experiment dressed up as a policy argument, and it has done real damage when treated as the latter.

Day to day ethics is considerably more mundane and considerably more important: did I tell the truth when a small lie would have been easier? Did I do my share? Did I take advantage of an information asymmetry? Did I treat someone's time or dignity carelessly because I could get away with it? These are the actual decision points where character is built or eroded, and they don't require elaborate frameworks to recognize — they mainly require honesty with yourself about what you're doing and why.

Which connects back to your core framework in a practical way. The suffering-and-harm calculus is most useful not at the dramatic extremes but precisely in the ordinary cases, where the temptation is to not bother calculating at all because the stakes seem low. The small dishonesties, the minor exploitations, the casual cruelties — these are where most actual ethical failure occurs, and where the discipline of asking "does the good outweigh the harm, and am I being straight with myself about that" does its real work.


Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.