Agnes Callard's Slavery Poll

In defence of doing philosophy

About a week ago, I wrote an article about a silly Twitter pile-on, in which an army of Concerned Citizens mistook philosophy for racism. The piece spawned a comment section, which spawned a Twitter poll, which spawned another Twitter poll, which led to Agnes Callard being online mobbed—again—by an army of Concerned Citizens mistaking philosophy for racism.

Here’s what Callard asked:

The poll has nearly 4 million views and climbing, and, as you’d expect, people were very reasonable about it.

You might wonder, fairly enough, why Callard asked the question. Well, for context: last week I wrote an article on the backlash to Perry Hendricks’s article, “Why Abortion Restrictions are Good for Black Women”. I won’t get into it here, but Hendricks’s argument relied on the claim that, in general, if you prevent someone from committing a moral atrocity, you benefit them—even if they resent you stopping them and suffer greatly for the fact that you did. If your friend was about to commit a murder, for example, or not subscribe to Going Awol, you’d be doing them a favour by forcibly stopping them.

In the comments, Richard Chappell questioned Hendricks’s principle, a principle I’d endorsed:

While the moralizing critics are silly, I don't think "the intuition behind Hendricks’s principle is ironclad." Whether it benefits you to prevent you from doing something wrong might depend upon whether you would (expectably) regret your wrongdoing. Examples like drunk driving, murder, etc., all seem like pretty typically-regretted acts. But plenty of other acts of wrongdoing aren't so often regretted, and don't seem to make the agent worse-off.

I doubt that the civil war benefitted white slaveowners, for example, even though it stopped them from doing something awful. More prosaically, I don't think that banning meat would benefit most burger-loving Americans, even though most of their meat purchases are wrong. Abortion seems like eating meat: something that, even if it is wrong, isn't widely *considered* to be wrong, and so isn't obviously "beneficial" to the agent to remove it from their option set.

Matthew Adelstein—whose blog is almost as bloggy as mine—clapped back, saying:

I agree but I think this is one of those intuitions that utilitarians mostly have and others don't. To see this, imagine it turned out that you ran someone over and never found out about it. I think most people would think this was bad for you.

Richard replied, Matthew replied back, and the debate hummed pleasantly on. At the end of the thread, Richard linked a Twitter poll he’d posted to try an gage other people’s intuitions about the slavery example:

Callard quote-tweeted, saying:

By Callard’s lights, one shouldn’t prefer the life of a slave-owner to the life of a slave. It’s better to suffer blamelessly than to live a nice life doing something morally horrifying. Callard then posted her own poll, whereafter Reason slipped down the drainpipe.

By my lights, Callard’s poll was obviously fine. It was a perfectly kosher exercise. To give Callard’s critics a fair shake, though, here are three criticisms people had.

I. “during black history month? really bitch?”

I think some people thought Callard targeted Black History Month to post something incendiary. (Maybe these people pictured Callard tapping out the tweet last year, saving it in her drafts, smiling, and thinking: “I’ll bide my time until February. We all know what month February is in the US and Canada. Mwahahaha. Now let me move in on another grad student.”)

But, of course, the timing was incidental. Callard saw an interesting Discourse unfolding about wellbeing, weighed in, and asked people for their take.

But maybe that wasn’t the thought people had. Maybe the thought was that, in general, you shouldn’t publicly discuss probative hypotheticals about slavery during Black History Month

But if that’s the rule, the rule is facially ridiculous. Should philosophers jointly refuse to discuss Robert Nozick’s tale of the slave for the month of February, a canonical thought-experiment used to motivate Nozick’s argument for libertarianism? Should they refuse to mention—from the end of January to the first day of March—Philip Pettit’s example of the benevolent slaveowner, an example frequently cited in works of anti-racist political philosophy?

The ‘rule’ against discussing slavery hypotheticals in Black History Month is a made up rule with silly implications—exactly what you’d expect from a rule no one had thought of till five seconds ago

II. “Bitch I don’t gotta “must” anything”

Some people complained that Callard’s set up a choice between {the life of a slave} and {the life of a slaveowner}, and said people “must” choose one of the other. Apparently, this is a bad thing.

Now, it goes without saying that whenever someone gives you a “Would you rather…” hypothetical, you’re free to not answer, switch off, and mow the grass, or else dream up a different hypothetical with different options.

But all “Would you rather…” questions come with an implicit convention attached: if you’re going to play the game, play it by the rules. In Callard’s “Would you rather…”, the rules were crystal clear: when you go back in time, you have to be either a slaveowner or a slave.

Again, as with any hypothetical, you can always switch off and ignore it or make up a different one and answer that. But that doesn’t mean the original “Would you rather…” wasn’t a game worth playing.

III. Ayn Rand Answers

Confession time. I’m a long-time Ayn Rand consumer. Not in the sense that I boogie with Objectivism. That’s not my bag at all. But despite thinking Rand is seriously confused on every philosophical topic I’ve thought about, I’ve always found the Objectivist intellectual movement obsessively fascinating. (As in, I once published an essay in the peer-reviewed Journal of Ayn Rand Studies about the history of the 1999 Ayn Rand Commemorative Stamp.)

So it was cool to see Gregory Salmieri—my favourite Ayn Rand Institute academic—weigh in on Callard’s question. His take was basically this: Callard’s hypothetical isn’t probative, because “it’s disconnected from any action anyone could take (in any situation). It’s not, for example, about how to act if one finds oneself in any particular role in a slave-holding society.”

When I pointed that the question was about theories of wellbeing, Salmieri elaborated his point:

In reply: since the question was meant to be about “whether it’s better to suffer than to commit an injustice”, as Salmieri noted, we can adjust the hypothetical a bit to get to the core of the issue. Consider:

You must go back in time: would you prefer to live the life of a slave, or the life of a slave owner? If you chose the life of the slave, you’ll have your memories wiped/your character augmented, such that you can predict that future-you won’t free any slaves, but will act as typical antebellum slave owners did.

Put this way, the question really is about which life is preferable on the whole. So specified, one can’t fight the hypothetical by supposing one would become a slave owner, but use one’s power for good. Salmieri’s worry is sidestepped.

(Some might object that if you have your memory wiped or character augmented, you’d cease to exist, and the slave or slave owner you chose to become would no longer be numerically identical to you. Fair dinkum if you accept a psychological continuity theory of personal identity, but the psychological continuity theory of personal identity is false.)

Anyway, do you have a take on the question? I’d love to hear your thoughts.