after countless exasperated pleas for a simpler and nicer world where people don’t play games with each other, i realize i may have autistically failed to account for the fact that many people enjoy playing games — @hyperdiscogirl

Here’s the thing about humans: most of the time, the things they’re optimising for are not the things they will ‘on reflection’ and when asked to verbalise claim that they’re optimising for. Anyone who optimises coherently and legibly — even a little bit — reliably stands out, is strange, is scary. (See also the Empty World Hypothesis.)

You write,

that any non-utilitarian intervention into the field of moral duty will create (utilitarian) winners and losers, and that perversion of the established order will warp the people involved. Possibly for the better, of course, but under pressure, their metal will warp any which way unless it’s a tight mould. To actually improve things, the intervention has to follow its call to the good with stopgaps for the chill draft of perverse consequences, and then follow all that with some kind of sticky coating against the effect of time and moral slippage.

It’s true that all kinds — subjects & objects; people & their norms — do strange things under pressure. But perhaps our terminology is getting in the way of our introspective access, here, to our detriment.

In my last, I promised to eventually 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’.

Seen in outline form, I admit that this project is monstrous and unwieldy. Even in my head, it feels unmanageable. (The implied reading lists feel even moreso.) However, I think your points about the Hippocratic Oath give me a good way in. A bite-sized place to start.

As you say,

It’s no wonder the original Hippocratic oath spends so much time stipulating the ways in which the maker is allowed to benefit from their knowledge — given how inconvenient it can be to the bearer, the wonder is that every doctor isn’t a self-aggrandising, profit-seeking monster.

Frankly, you’re asking a fucking good question: why isn’t self-aggrandising profit-seeking what we universally see? Why aren’t doctors literally always “Pharisaic fame-hunters and degenerate players”?

By way of answer, you point to a broader regime of social/cultural persuasion, in which ‘lose now, win later’ or semi-secret ‘metaphysical winner’ is the name of the game. We motivate our Doctors to follow their special oaths to their own detriments by (credibly) promising advantage and boon. Specialisation and trade are entangled concepts, even and perhaps especially in the moral domain.

My answer, though, today, comes as a gesture towards one component of my first (outlined) point above. I claim that there exist “coherent strategies for compromise”. While it’s true that the most common such mechanisms aren’t the most coherent, they point in the direction of more & maximally coherent versions. We don’t talk about them in these terms because the most widespread instances are so ‘natural’ that we rarely think of them as strategies or compromises at all. In their degenerate form, terms like “getting by” or “living as an adult” seem far more natural. Moreover, even when instantiated in deeply imperfect ways, such compromise strategies don’t necessarily involve what I think you’d call “warp”. They’re still somewhat positive sum and mostly non-self-coercing. Not all tight moulds and sticky coatings.

As we all at this point hopefully know, modern psychology is mostly unimportant hogwash. The same goes for pretty much anything with ‘behavioural’ in its name. So let’s stick to a felt sense that we’ve both (a) previously discussed, and (b) can easily introspect about: our selves ‘against’ our selves. This is the easiest place to identify ‘natural compromise’ strategies which are of the sort that explain our Doctors. [I’ll leave generalisation of such coordination & compromise ‘strategies’ to the level of interpersonal/cultural phenomena for another day.]

Seeing the results of a lil twitter poll thread, Sarah Constantin writes

Solid majorities say that they’re usually not doing “what they think they should”… and wouldn’t opt to self-modify to always do what they think they should. Ethics & self-improvement enthusiasts, what would you say to such people?

Let’s assume that there’s no “monkey paw” fear substantially interfering with these results. That is, let’s assume that most of the 50.9% of people who said “no” to this question — “If you push the button, you are guaranteed to spend every second of the rest of your life doing exactly and only what you think you should be doing at that moment. Do you push the button?” — had in mind a hypothetical situation in which their actions were altered, rather than their desires or preferences or ought-generating mechanisms or whatever.

What’s going on here? The degree to which you are divided is the degree to which you are conquered. Are 50.9% of people saying that they’re happy being conquered? Are they saying that they’re happy — or, if not happy, somehow ‘satisfied’ — with a status quo in which they feel guilty for not doing what they themselves think that they ought to do?

No. I think what’s going on, here, is actually pretty intuitive and paradoxically coherent:

When someone asks you whether you’re currently doing what you think you should be doing, they’re asking you to play along with a linguistic & social game which is premised on the existence and operation of a singular, identifiable, legible ‘You’.

For a human, there is no such unified self. ‘You’ is a lossy compression.

Most of language and social life works this way. We tell stories to ourselves and each other about our selves and each other, and these stories usually involve protagonist characters with legible goals and motivations.

Yet almost everyone telling those stories can also, privately, acknowledge that they are often surprised or disappointed my their own actions and motivations. They know that they can waver and be uncertain; that one feels ‘mixed’ feelings almost all of the time. And almost everyone feels some amount of conflict with (and distance from) their intertemporal ‘self’: shame at past actions, confusion as they examine past decisions, a sense of ‘growth’ and ‘change’ — of being alienated from one’s past self — which is only sometimes positive.

Most people handle the conflict between “narrative of coherent protagonist” and “phenomenological access to incoherence”, on some level, by doing a mixture of two things:

1. they flinch away from any kind of introspection which would reveal the incoherence too starkly; and,
2. they make deals, trades, and promises within themselves until a coarse-grained/higher-level ‘coherence’ can be reestablished.

We all know the latter phenomenon. “I’ll let myself watch TV once I’ve sent these emails,” for example, or “I won’t eat any more chocolate today, but I’ll let myself have some tomorrow”. We give ourselves treats. We give ourselves punishments.

Most people (sometimes) defect on the promises they make to themselves, and feel bad about their defections. Most people have adopted some kind of a system for Mostly Getting By in the world despite the existence of conflicting desires, motivations, goals, and worldviews “within themselves”. For most people, that system is one with limits on intrapersonal violence.

In Sarah Constantin’s poll, 50.9% of people are signalling — with varying degrees of ‘self’-consciousness — that whatever system they’ve adopted for dealing with the lack of unification involves some amount of pre-commitment to not do things similar to pressing this hypothetical button. It’s a kind of ‘self’-‘acceptance’ rule, for weird & mutually-assured-destruction senses of the words ‘acceptance’ and ‘self’. Something like, no part of me will engage in an action which would completely destroy some other part of me, because that way lies annihilation. It would, perhaps, be ‘rational’ to press the button in the hypothetical, because it’s a decisive move. A pivotal act. Most people, though, are not so good at decoupling from context and answering the hypothetical as stated. They signal, even in the hypothetical, their commitment to a personal, private pact.

In most cases, a tacit self-agreement of this form involves broader intrapersonal cooperations. One generates feelings of resistance in one’s viscera. One erects half-conscious defences against practices which look (to your parliament of subagents) as if they might lead to bleaching all the corals of your inner world and calling it perfection.

In the modern world, most people — including myself — do a bad job of keeping their internal ‘rule of law but not by men’ cooperation system going in a reliable way. A lot of the time, the concept of personal integrity is entangled with promises & debts; external forces do substantial and often deliberate damage to our ability to keep promises to ourselves. And so (at least in self-report) most end up deferring to those external forces: “people report feeling most authentic when they are doing what external society values, not when they are acting in accord with their actual personalities” (Baumeister 56). Yet none of this should be taken as evidence that the system is fully absent, or could not be better if circumstances were different or details were re-engineered.

If things can be worse, they can also be better. The direction towards self-consistency and self-cooperation is one in which

1. “You” can make non-coercive, positive-sum deals ‘with yourself’; and,
2. “You” can trust yourself to keep the bargain made.

And so the idealised Doctor is one who, in taking an oath, has verbalised and socialised an always-already internal compact. A compact from which ‘they’ would have no desire to defect. They’ve made a deal with themselves, in that place deep within their soul where their subagents argue, debate, listen to one another, and eventually agree that it’s in everyone’s collective interest to do X. In such a case, the ‘motivation’ to follow special moral rules isn’t entangled with self-destruction, or self-abnegation. It is, instead, a natural consequence. Stopping for the drunk young man slumped in the archway is merely a positive externality.

As Eric Cantona once said,

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for the sport. Soon the science will not only be able to slow down the ageing of the cells, soon the science will fix the to the state. And so, we become eternal. Only accidents, crimes, wars will still kill us. But unfortunately crimes and wars will multiply. I love football.