If an unconscious person is sexually molested by a psychopath who does not evaluate his actions as harmful, and the unconscious person has no physical injury or evidence or memory of it later, did anything unethical occur? I think by your ethics you would have to answer no. No harm was consciously experienced by anyone.
It would be unethical. You're wrongly assuming that harm-based ethics means harm must be caused
directly for it to matter. My conception of ethics does not negate the harmful significance of psychologies, or the importance of having rules.
I understand that harm could be indirect and still experienced. The point of my example is, if there is no one who is ever even aware of harm, how could it be considered harmful? Harmful
to whom? If your harm-based ethics is actually a deontological ethics, the norms of which pertain to harms, that wasn't clear from your previous posts, in which judgments of harm seemed always to inhere in conscious experience.
I'm not sure why you mention the "harmful significance of psychologies," unless you are distinguishing this from conscious experience. If this is your meaning, I would agree that the notion of experienced harm should not be limited to
consciously-experienced harm. The impact of the unconscious mind shouldn't be overlooked.
With technologies that are near fruition or already here, acts that most would now consider horrible could occur on a large scale without being judged unethical by your criteria. Conscious experience could be manipulated by electrical stimulation of the brain and by virtual reality technology. People could be completely controlled while having no awareness that they are being controlled (rendering lack of choice unharmful in your terms), and they could feel nothing but delight the whole time. All of this could be administered, and even originally set up, by computers. Is this unethical?
I'm not sure that there could be positive experiences without there first being deprivation, but if I assume for the sake of argument that there could be, and if I assume that the scenario of how the people got into the virtual reality was not experientially negative, then I'd see no reason to think the virtual reality scenario would be bad, though the virtual reality could be better than just producing a feeling of delight.
I think you should see the electrical brain stimulation/VR scenario as bad, even if, in your words, "the scenario of how the people got into the virtual reality was not experientially negative." I would not choose to be controlled by stimulation/VR myself, but I could conceivably be put into that circumstance while unaware of what was happening or without any negative experience involved (say, while under anesthetic). Your ethic seems utterly immersed in felt qualities of experience again. If you think there should be rules, wouldn't there be a rule against doing something so drastic to someone without his permission, even if he never feels harm at any time in the process? My suspicion that harm-centered ethics could be misused in monstrous ways is confirmed.
If ethics only applies to matters of conscious experience, then what objection could there be to seeing ethics and rationality themselves as simply matters of conscious experience, experience that can be manipulated? If redescribing ethics and rationality in this way is an inaccurate description of judgment and thought, who cares? If no one cares in his conscious experience that ethics and rationality have been reduced to seeming, it doesn't matter.
For some individuals, being deluded about some things might make those individuals happy, but people's ignorance or denial of facts is a cause of a lot of harm in societies and the world, and the psychological willingness to lie or deny what is true is in most instances a harmful quality of the character of a person, even if some particular instance of it doesn't cause harm
directly (it could still be a step in the development of a harmful personality). But there can be instances where discovering what is true is bad. For example, I don't want humans to discover how to make feeling, sentient AI, because I don't have certainty that there wouldn't be a risk of an AI experiencing unimaginably horrific suffering.
Here you seem to me to be on firmer ground again. I think you should be clearer as to whether your ethical judgments inhere in qualities of experience or whether other considerations should be brought to bear. But if you're going to allow for considerations outside of particular individuals' experiences, then I think you should recognize that possible criteria for ethics other than suffering have to be argued for or against rather than simply being dismissed by an utter focus on qualities of conscious experience.
I don't think you intend to subjectivize ethics and rationality, but you have left yourself no ethical ground to object if ethics and rationality are manipulated into subjective seeming, or even if the very ideas of ethics and rationality are lost entirely, as long as no one feels harm.
Rationality could not be manipulated to be "subjective seeming". If someone used the word to refer to "subjective seeming", they would not be talking about the same concept.
My wording there failed to articulate what I was trying to say. I meant to suggest that, with sophisticated electrical stimuation and VR, a person could be led to experience a kind of as-if rationality or ethics, in which thoughts seemed to him to be rational or ethical even though they weren't. A spoofing of rationality or ethics, so to speak. Feeling is not just a matter of sensation; feelings of rightness can attach to thoughts. There is a cognitive psych book titled
On Being Certain that talks about "the feeling of knowing." My point was, if all that matters in your ethics is qualities of conscious experience, how can ethical thinking itself escape being seen as just another instance of conscious experience, which could not be judged bad even if it were a manipulated, false semblance of ethical thinking, as long as no one cares or feels any harm?
You don't seem to make a distinction between the question of why one should try to discover a truth, and the question of through what means it's possible to discover a truth (that is why I said you were conflating a means with a reason).
I'm not conflating rationality with ethical success. I'm saying that rationality can be applied to ethics, because there are truths about what ought to be done. And I'm saying that the reality of there being qualitative experiences gives us all our reasons to act, including our reasons to discover what is true. Even if I were only to talk about motivation, rather than prescription, our trying to discover what is true is still dependent on qualitative experiences. Feelings are the fundamental drive that gives humans and all other sentient animals a motivation to act. A drive for behavior appears to be the evolutionary function of feelings.
I understand that distinction. But from your wording it seems that you are judging reasons to act, reasons to discover the truth as being rational or not rational depending on whether they are in line with
your ethical understanding of the situation that gave rise to the reasons to act. In an earlier post, you wrote, "The capacity of sentient beings to have qualitative experiences gives us reason to act. An action is rational if it is in accordance with that reality." (I.e., an action is "rational" if it is an accordance with the way that your ethics assesses that reality.) In this usage, "rational" is a term of approval that assumes your ethical depiction of human situations (as being simply a matter of good or bad experiences), and this seems tendentious rather than descriptive to me.
Ethics could not possibly be a comprehensible concept if no one was capable of having qualitative experiences. You've argued against ethics being rational. The view that ethics should be about whatever people think it should be about subjectivizes ethics. My view is a moral realist view in opposition to that. I think nonexistence would be at the highest peaks of Sam Harris' moral landscape concept, and I doubt he would agree with that, but otherwise I mostly agree with his arguments for moral realism.
I agree that "ethics could not possibly be a comprehensible concept if no one was capable of having qualitative experiences."
I'm in favor of a rational approach to ethics, but think we should be wary of using "rational" as a term to indicate consonance with polemical claims, however rational those claims are thought to be by the one making them. The question of what is rational for particular agents in particular situations is often surprisingly complicated, often involves trade-offs, and can be looked at in a variety of ways.
In the "Antinatalists, Attack!" thread a couple of years ago, I said this about Sam Harris:
"In his moral philosophy, Sam Harris shares this emphasis on alleviation of suffering, except Harris is more optimistic: He envisions a future society in which suffering is minimized by means of a scientific utilitarianism. Because Harris has this overriding concern with suffering, the movement of his moral thinking can be simple and axiomatic. Similarly, antinatalist argument tends to be simple and axiomatic, based on an overriding concern with suffering. If Harris ever loses faith in his scientific utilitarian vision and becomes pessimistic, I believe he could very easily become an antinatalist, without changing anything else in this thought. He already has the moral focus on suffering, and the tendency toward axiomatic moralizing derived therefrom."
Finally, something I wanted to go back to from previous posts: the contention that being correct or incorrect about a particular thing is supportive or unsupportive of the overall philosophical world-view. I don't think one should make this assumption too easily. It depends on how particular conclusions relate (or don't relate: philosophies aren't always consistent) to larger views, and it often depends on contexts that have little or no connection with larger views. And it is easier to be sound about small matters than comprehensive portrayals. Many of the systematic, world-building philosophers of the past still seem insightful and perspicacious about immediate, everyday matters, while their overall world-views are bizarre museum-pieces (though still entertaining and sometimes worth re-considering in some of their aspects).
