Today: a zeroth draft; a few parts; the beginning of a series.

§ 1. We Set Fire To Things

“How many decisions of meaning do we actually make,” you ask, “in our lives?”

It’s true; we’re watery bundles. Sinew, nerve, reflex, habit. Even when we play at being cautious and careful, as you say,

It’s just we’re a mess. We set fire to things simply out of curiosity. Every generation in living memory has been at risk of running off the end of the S-curve, and we’re just the latest to spend our twenties flirting with it.

And, as you said months ago, in a different context,

If we’re not aiming at enlightenment (i.e. the renunciation of the world is not in play) then perhaps emotion is good. The Good, even. It’s hard to find a utilitarian who doesn’t make use of it for a moral backbone these days. Absent god, it’s pretty hard to know where else to look.

Here’s one space where that “a moral backbone” — emotion — intersects with our attempts to re[s]train our own reflexive fire-starting tendencies:

§ 2. Law and Manners

Recently, The Econtalk Podcast turned its attention old essay by a man who was an archetype of Upper Class Britishness in name, title, and orientation: the Right Honourable Lord John Fletcher Moulton, Baron Moulton, GBE, KCB, PC, FRS, FRAS. In 1918 — or perhaps 1919; we’re not sure — Old Mate Moulton gave an after-dinner speech titled ‘Law and Manners’. He opened his speech — forgive the length! — as follows:

In order to explain this extraordinary title I must ask you to follow me in examining the three great domains of Human Action. First comes the domain of Positive Law, where our actions are prescribed by laws binding upon us which must be obeyed. Next comes the domain of Free Choice, which includes all those actions as to which we claim and enjoy complete freedom. But between these two there is a third large and important domain in which there rules neither Positive Law nor Absolute Freedom. In that domain there is no law which inexorably determines our course of action, and yet we feel that we are not free to choose as we would. The degree of this sense of a lack of complete freedom in this domain varies in every case. It grades from a consciousness of a Duty nearly as strong as Positive Law, to a feeling that the matter is all but a question of personal choice. Some might wish to parcel out this domain into separate countries, calling one, for instance, the domain of Duty, another the domain of Public Spirit, another the domain of Good Form; but I prefer to look at it as all one domain, for it has one and the same characteristic throughout — it is the domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable. The obedience is the obedience of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey. He is the enforcer of the law upon himself.

One of the reasons why I have chosen this as the subject on which to speak is that I have spent my life as a commissioner for delimiting the frontier line which divides this domain from the realm of Positive Law. I have had to decide so frequently whether Law could say, ‘You must,’ or regretfully to say, ‘I must leave it to you.’ This is the land in which all those whom the Law cannot reach take refuge. It might be thought from such a description that I wished to annex that country and bring it under the rule of Positive Law. That is not the case. The infinite variety of circumstances surrounding the individual and rightly influencing his action make it impossible to subject him in all things to rules rigidly prescribed and duly enforced. Thus there was wisely left the intermediate domain which, so far as Positive Law is concerned, is a land of freedom of action, but in which the individual should feel that he was not wholly free. This country which lies between Law and Free Choice I always think of as the domain of Manners. To me, Manners in this broad sense signifies the doing that which you should do although you are not obliged to do it. I do not wish to call it Duty, for that is too narrow to describe it, nor would I call it Morals for the same reason. It might include both, but it extends beyond them. It covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself.

For Moulton — and for Russ Roberts & Michael Munger commenting on Moulton — we ought to attend to the so-called “domain of manners” for the following reason: while we all have a set of reflexes, we can partly cultivate and re-form those impulses. Such ‘cultivation’ happens through effort, habit, and self-enforced obedience to (arbitrary) rules. We can, says Moulton (& Roberts & Munger), train ourselves to feel different emotions about different (potential) actions. This is true — says M(&R&M) — even though it’s implausible that we’ll become more deliberatively-Good-Maximising in each individual moment. The thoughts and actions that we inscribe on our hearts — consciously at first — become, with time, habit, and then reflex. From Marcus Aurelius: “such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts” (Meditations 5.16).

For our purposes, let’s take a version of this as given. We watery, rubbery, mostly-monkey humans can — with effort — partly change our dispositions. Doing so is easier than ‘magically becoming more deliberative’ in every moment.

Moulton’s description of “obedience to the unenforceable” is, I think, most naturally read as a call to live as if bound by laws that we set for ourselves. What Moulton is making is a seemingly paradoxical suggestion: we can end up making more & better “decisions of meaning” in our lives by accepting that most of the time, we don’t really make decisions at all. We improve our collective impact by each, as individuals, spending most of our effort on making marginal alterations to what you call “the rubbery contours of the self”. Constant conscious calculation is a doomed project; becoming a person whose reflexes tend more towards The Good is not.

The trouble, as I see it, is that Moulton’s account — in isolation — gives us basically no way to decide on what ‘manners’ we ought to cultivate. If we are to bind ourselves to laws that we set for ourselves, how do we go about generating the unenforceable-but-obeyed? What’s the framework for evaluating a potential ‘manner’?

More importantly, if we take metaphors of cultivation as ‘ha ha only serious’ talk, evaluating potential ‘manners’ must take account of an ecology of agents. It’s not just a question of ‘should I bind myself to this rule?’; it’s also a question of ‘should I bind myself to this rule, given that I’m a member of overlapping communities of agents, each — to greater and lesser degrees — also binding themselves to rules?’.

So. We look around. It’s obvious. We take stupid risks. We’re not okay. We don’t trust each other, or ourselves. You hope

that as this generation ages we’ll do what our parents and grandparents and all the rest did, and compromise just enough to stretch out the curve and pass it on.

Eventually (in ascending order of strangeness) I want to convince you that:

1. There are coherent strategies for compromise;
2. The not-totally-insane strategies are all necessary consequences of contemporary work on decision theory (especially functional decision theory, acausal normalcy, and some bargaining notions);
3. The most coherent strategies are all, in some sense, ‘utilitarian in the seminar room; deontologist in the streets’ accounts of practical ethics;
4. Most such strategies suggest ‘manners’ which do not look like current Majority Middle Class Culture; and,
5. Most such strategies do closely resemble (and justify) something like an anarchist ‘praxis’ — albeit one which most closely resonates with what Audrey Tang has called ‘conservative anarchism’.

As you’ll see, I’m mostly interested in articulating all of this in terms of inter-temporal, intra-personal, and inter-cultural interactions. (And I think this also connects to some work on communication.)

(btw, as jargon: let your ‘culture’ be, at least in part, the egregore which suggests your ambient ‘manners’; the things that — by upbringing and context, not deliberation — you feel you ‘ought’ to do, even though “there is no one to make you do it but yourself”.)

In what remains of this letter, as foundation for points 1-5 above, I want to sketch a case study in ‘manners’. More importantly, I want to tease out — from the case study — a recognition that there are spaces in which we (as a society) seem to demand deep commitment to non-utilitarian ‘manners’ from some specific people, even when those manners would be harmful if universally adopted. And then, I want you to think about how we might go about justifying such ‘manners’ on utilitarian grounds (via coördination).

§ 3. The Case Study: ‘Professional’ ‘Ethics’

There’s a traditional view of ‘Professional Ethics’, stylised as follows:

1. When you enter into a profession, there’s a set of standards that you have to uphold.
2. The set of standards — the set of rules that you, when acting in your profession, are required to uphold — are different to the standards you’re required to uphold in other circumstances.
3. The professional standards are more stringent than Normal Life in some respects.
4. Some of the standards are legally enforced. Others are socially maintained.
5. Not every professional standard is equally legible. Some are little more than vibe.
6. All of this is good, and sensible, and justified.

Take the concrete archetype: a medical doctor. Doctors have a relatively well-defined set of professional ethics. There are legal standards that doctors have to uphold, but which non-doctors don’t have to uphold. There’s a set of licensing standards, too; an overlapping legal magisterium in which the profession governs itself. There’s a set of legible-to-other-doctors (but not legally enshrined) norms. A set of more broadly-socially-legible norms also. And then there’s an ancient oath. In most juristictions today, the Hippocratic Oath cuts across all of the above. You can be criminally liable for medical malpractice, sure, but you can also be symbolically liable; you can be shamed, be spiritually in the breach. And as anyone who’s had experience with doctors knows, the effect of this is sometimes weird.

(This is not just true of doctors, but let’s focus on the doctor case for now.)

Last year, I got mild pericarditis from a covid vaccine. (It was worth it; the vax is great.) Because chest pain is stressful for everyone, I went to the emergency room three times. Twice, I was admitted. In both instances, once I was admitted, the standard for me leaving the hospital was in practice higher than the standard it was to admit me. You walk in, complain of chest pain. Quite quickly, everyone involved knows that the case is (a) moderate, (b) explained, and (c) absolutely fine. But now the doctor has seen you. You’re their patient. You can’t just leave, because they have a duty of care — legal, but also moral & professional-ethical — which they’ve internalised as having ‘naturally’ come into being in the moment of their interaction with you. They’re not just A Doctor, now, but Your Doctor; you’re not just a person, but A Patient.

While there is a kind of precautionary impulse in operation — no doctor wants to be reckless, or be seen to be reckless — the generating function for that impulse is what I want to focus on. It’s not only that doctors are worried about being sued. It’s that doctors are worried about being bad doctors. This latter concern is at least in part a consequence of a relational ethics that has been entangled with, embedded in, and constituted by an institution. Being a ‘Bad Doctor’ doesn’t ontologically reduce to ‘failing to maximise welfare’, or even ‘failing to maximise the welfare of the patients in your care’.

The two times I was admitted, there was shared-but-not-common knowledge that it was a combination of “optimal resource allocation be damned” and “the details of this case mean that we Really Must Do X”. In the ER, every doctor and nurse said the same two things, in two very different modes:

1. “We’ve seen a tonne of these cases, from young men who look exactly like you, and it’s totally fine” (this said casually, informally; like normal humans), and
2. “Because it’s one of these vaccine side effects, we do have to formally flag it in The System, and we Should Probably Not Let You Go” (this said in a role-based deference to an invisible).

The time that I wasn’t admitted, it felt like I was encouraging a conspiracy of reasonableness. Me, a doctor, and a nurse. Me explicitly saying “you guys have better things to do, right?” and “you seem so busy, I wouldn’t want to waste your time” while gesturing to the quietest ER room I’ve ever seen. Me pushing further, as if merely curious: “so what’s the process for a case getting added to the database?”. Them picking on my not-so-subtle hints that I would be super happy if they acted like less like Medical Professionals in that moment (and skipped the relational performances that they were in-theory obliged to enact).

It’s well established, I think, that we don’t want doctors to think ‘globally’. In virtue fiction, such as The West Wing, we also want them to make the earnest case for their non-utilitarian thinking to their patronising & sexist interlocutors:

President Bartlet: Alright, Eisenmenger’s Syndrome.

First Lady: It’s a cyanotic heart condition. There’s something called ventricular septal defect.

PB: The Ayatollah’s son has it.

FL: Am I dreaming, or are you talking to me about foreign policy? You’re not worried the sky’s gonna fall down?

PB: No, but I’m concerned about spousal abuse.

FL: What’s the problem Jed? Don’t tell me there’s a problem with State.

PB: The only doctor available won’t do it.

FL: He’s Jewish?

PB: Persian.

FL: He doesn’t have a choice.

PB: Abbey —

FL: He doesn’t. Doctors aren’t instruments of the State, and they’re not allowed to choose patients on spec.

PB: I can’t order him to do it.

FL: Yes you can.

PB: Through the power vested in me by you?

FL: Samuel Mudd set Booth’s leg after he shot Lincoln. Doctors are liable in this country [if] they don’t treat the patient right in front of them.

PB: Just for the record, this is why we don’t talk about foreign policy — which we do, and you don’t think we do it enough —

FL: Why?

PB: Because Samuel Mudd was tried and convicted of treason for setting that leg.

FL: So?

PB: What ‘so’?!

FL: So that’s the way it goes. You set the leg.

PB: ‘The patient right in front of them.’

FL: Yes.

PB: Alright. Go back to the sewing thing.

FL: It’s the Woman’s … never mind.

Notice the slide. A concern over global effects (and a human’s strongly-held convictions) transitions to a brief reminder of a profession’s special legal liability, and then almost immediately to reinforcement of a kind of relational, quasi-spiritual obligation.

Here in our virtue fiction, we don’t want to hear the (reasonable) argument that a doctor tried for treason would lose all future opportunities to help other patients, or that one who saves the life of a war criminal might cause more deaths than they save. We want to hear deference to professional ethics and special relation.

If everyone acted the way that doctors are supposed to act in the way that First Lady Abbey Bartlet is suggesting above, I think it’s pretty obvious that society would be worse off. And yet we want some people to do more than merely act this way when ‘at work’. We want them to naturalise a way of being this way in every moment of their lives. Just as a cop is never ‘not a cop’ (even when off-duty), and a priest doesn’t breach the seal of the confessional the moment they leave the church, doctors have the ethics of their profession inscribed on their souls.

The question is: what’s the coarse-grained steelman case for such a thing?