Against Paternalistic Claims of "Degradation"

And other purely metaphysical harms

One of the trickier questions in ethics is when (if ever) we’re justified in paternalistic judgments that another person has misidentified their own best interests. As an objective list theorist about well-being, I do think that people can be mistaken about what’s intrinsically good or bad for them: “Some things (such as love and happiness) are inherently more worth caring about than others (such as counting blades of grass), and it makes your life go better if you attain more of the things that are truly good or worth pursuing.” We have reason to encourage our children to appreciate genuine goods—and there are many legitimate options for them to choose from; many ways to live a valuable life. We may reasonably hope to encourage our children and others to appreciate important goods that they seem to be overlooking. Too much time spent on less-valuable activities has an opportunity cost that may be worth noting too. But—aside from rare cases of outright malice or the like—I think we should be extremely wary of condemning anyone’s positive interests as intrinsically bad (as opposed to simply less good than something even better).

Even given objectivism, I think that true claims about well-being or welfare value must connect to the subject’s perspective in the following sense: any failure to care about an objective good or harm must reveal some degree of irrationality or unreasonableness on the part of the subject. It would be incoherent to say, “X is bad for you, but it damages nothing you have reason to care about—it’s perfectly reasonable for you to remain indifferent to it.” This conceptual constraint may sound trivial, but insofar as we have an independent grip on what’s worth caring about, it can actually help to ground some pretty substantive limits on paternalistic judgments.

In particular, we can appeal to the (disputable, but I think substantively very plausible) datum that we shouldn’t care about metaphysics to block the entire class of excessively “metaphysical” putative harms. As I previously wrote about “moralized” harms:

Conservative sexual morality posits arbitrary rules that we’ve no obvious reason to care about. They might try to add that it is in some sense “for the sake of” the affected individuals: if masturbation is a stain on your soul, then caring about someone might entail caring that they refrain from masturbation, for example. But such claims remain normatively dubious. There’s no independent reason why caring about someone should lead you to care in this way about what they do in private. It’s a made up, “moralized” harm, not an independently recognizable real harm. And we should be skeptics about this sort of made-up morality.

More intellectual conservatives appeal to “natural law” metaphysics to ground their incomprehensible paternalism. They posit natural “functions” for reproductive organs, and claim that it is bad for us to use our organs in a way that is “contrary to” their true metaphysical purpose. Similarly, in ‘What is Marriage’ (a notorious anti-gay marriage paper from 2010), the authors argue (badly) for what they call the Conjugal View of marriage, and assume that marriage law ought to reflect this putative metaphysical fact about what marriage is.

As I responded at the time:

Methodologically speaking, I find the “metaphysics first” approach to public policy rather bizarre. For example, when instituting an intellectual property regime, the core question is not “what is intellectual property?” (as if there were some pre-legal fact of the matter), but something more like, what values are at stake here and what policies/laws would best serve these values? [Ed. note: see here for more on IP.]

I don’t here intend to engage further with natural law theorists (you can read my linked response if you’re interested in that). Rather, I mention them in the hope that their example will help more of my readers to intuitively appreciate how deeply misguided the “metaphysics-first” approach to ethics is. It’s not just that they got some details wrong about the true purposes of our organs. Rather, they’re talking about stuff that we clearly have no reason to care about. It’s transparent nonsense, and I’d go so far as to say there’s something fundamentally wrong with your grasp of what ethics is all about if you take anything like natural law theory to be a credible candidate view.¹

A more progressive example: LLM pseudo-friendship

While her conclusions are much less offensive than theirs, I was reminded of these conservative arguments when I read Grace Helton’s metaphysics-first argument for the intrinsic badness of human-LLM pseudo-friendships.² Helton argues that (1) people are objectively harmed by the thwarted exercise of a valuable human capacity—this constitutes a form of “degradation”—and (2) engaging in pseudo-friendship interactions with an LLM essentially involves attempting, unsuccessfully, to exercise the valuable human capacity for friendship.

The ethics committee apparently does not consent to what she’s doing on there…

I’m not sure that (2) is true. But my main concern is with (1): a principle that seems straight out of natural law theory. Consider that reproduction is a valuable human capacity, and non-procreative sex or masturbation “thwarts” it in almost exactly the same way that pseudo-friendship with LLMs “thwarts” our social capacities. Anyone who grants Helton’s theoretical premise faces the challenge of how they avoid the implication that masturbation and non-procreative sex are similarly “degrading” intrinsic harms. (Deliberately engaging in pseudo-friendship activities with an LLM is effectively masturbating your social capacities, after all.)